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China’s troll king: how a tabloid editor became the voice of Chinese nationalism
Hu Xijin is China’s most famous propagandist. At the Global Times, he helped establish a chest-thumping new tone for China on the world stage – but can he keep up with the forces he has unleashed?
by Han Zhang
Tue 14 Dec 2021 06.00 GMT
On 2 November, the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai posted a long message on the social media site Weibo, accusing China’s former vice-premier, Zhang Gaoli, of sexual assault. As soon as the post went live, it became the highest-profile #MeToo case in China, and one of the ruling Chinese Communist party’s largest public relations crises in recent history. Within about 20 minutes, the post had been removed. All mentions of the post were then scrubbed from the Chinese internet. No references to the story appeared in the Chinese media. In the days that followed, Peng made no further statements and did not appear in public. Outside China, however, as other tennis stars publicly expressed concerns for her safety, Peng’s apparent disappearance became one of the biggest news stories in the world.
It wasn’t long before Hu Xijin stepped into the story. Hu is the editor of the Global Times, a chest-thumpingly nationalistic tabloid sometimes described as “China’s Fox News”. In recent years, he has become the most influential Chinese propagandist in the west – a constant presence on Twitter and in the international media, always on hand to defend the Communist party line, no matter the topic. On 19 November, he tweeted to his 450,000 followers that he had confirmed through his own sources – he didn’t say who they were – that Peng was alive and well. Over the next two days, he posted videos of Peng at a restaurant and signing autographs in Beijing.
To many observers, this seemingly stage-managed footage, disseminated by organs of the Chinese state, was not reassuring. On 21 November, the International Olympic Committee spoke with Peng on a video call and declared that she was “doing fine”. When this intervention still failed to convince many that Peng was safe, Hu took the opportunity to hammer home one of the central themes of his three-decade career in journalism: when it comes to China, the western media sees only what it wants to see. “They only believe the story about China that they imagine,” he tweeted. “I’m surprised that they didn’t say the lady who showed up these two days is a fake Peng Shuai, a double.” Those who continued to question Peng’s safety, Hu wrote, were trying to “demonize China’s system”.
Hu’s eagerness to reframe a story about sexual assault and censorship as a story about clashing political ideologies and anti-China prejudice is part of a significant change in the way China presents itself to the world. From the late 1970s onwards, as China was opening up but had yet to assume a major role in international affairs, it struggled to handle criticism from abroad. The official response was usually some form of wounded denial, or a stilted demand that other countries stay out of its business. But over the past decade, as China’s global power has grown, President Xi Jinping has pushed the country into a more confident, aggressive posture, and Hu, more than any other Chinese journalist, has become the voice of this pugnacious nationalism. On China’s most popular social media platform, WeChat, the Global Times is reportedly the most read outlet.
“My English is almost all self-taught,” Hu once said in a video on Weibo, “and in English, I’m most skilful at picking a fight.” He has hyped up the prospects of military confrontation between the US and China over Taiwan. He has warned that if Britain infringes Chinese sovereignty in the South China Sea then it will be treated like “a bitch” who is “asking for a beating”. He has compared India to a “bandit” that has “barbarically robbed” Chinese companies. He has referred to Australia as nothing more than “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe”. He recently concluded an article with the question: “In the face of such an irrational Australia, shouldn’t China be prepared with an iron fist and to punch it hard when needed, teaching it a thorough lesson?”
When he picks a fight with foreign officials on Twitter, Hu likes to take screenshots of the tweets and post them on Weibo, just to show his 24 million followers – most of whom are blocked from Twitter by the great firewall – that he’s out there, defending China’s honour. “The most important thing about Hu is that he has constructed a whole style of authoritarian, nationalistic rhetoric,” Xiao Qiang, an expert in Chinese media at Berkeley’s School of Information, told me. “His readers go around repeating the same things and spreading the same sentiments.” Hu’s combative approach has been taken up by a number of Chinese diplomats and spokespeople – often called “Wolf Warriors”, in reference to a jingoistic Chinese blockbuster movie – who promote a “China first” philosophy and use social media to trash anyone they see as opposing Chinese interests. But where the Wolf Warrior diplomats are a recent phenomenon, people like Hu “have been propagating this idea for 10 years,” says Xiang Lanxin, a professor of international politics at Geneva’s Graduate Institute.
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Over the years, Hu has encouraged a kind of mystique around his connection with party leadership. “To be honest, I myself don’t know for sure to what degree I reflect the authority’s voice,” Hu told me when we spoke on the phone late last year. He likes to say that the Global Times’ success is a product of the market. But when I asked him if the paper is financially independent from the government, he eventually told me, after some back and forth, that the English edition receives government funding for providing overseas propaganda.
Where Hu once spoke for a hardline fringe of the Communist party, his newspaper’s aggressive China-first ideology is now ascendant. As one American author who stopped writing for the Global Times in 2011 put it: “With all those Wolf Warrior diplomats, it’s like the government has been Global Times-ified.”
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Hu is 61, and rumours about his imminent retirement surface periodically. Yet he remains as zealous and full of fight as he was three decades ago. “He really is the soul of the paper,” Wen told me. “It’s very hard to imagine a de-Huxijinised Global Times.” The audience he once dreamed of as a young reporter in Bosnia – readers who don’t unquestioningly admire western journalism and instead cheer on their Chinese counterparts – has materialised. Each of his Weibo posts are followed by thousands of comments and tens of thousands of likes.
Hu likes to call himself a shubianzhe, an antiquated term for a guard stationed on the nation’s frontiers, keeping it safe. In just the past week, fulfilling this duty has involved insulting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, comparing Hong Kong activist Nathan Law to a 6 January Capitol rioter, taunting the Australian prime minister, bickering with a Florida senator and posting numerous cartoons highlighting American hypocrisy. It is a ceaseless task. For now, Hu fights on.
Hu is 61, and rumours about his imminent retirement surface periodically. Yet he remains as zealous and full of fight as he was three decades ago. “He really is the soul of the paper,” Wen told me. “It’s very hard to imagine a de-Huxijinised Global Times.” The audience he once dreamed of as a young reporter in Bosnia – readers who don’t unquestioningly admire western journalism and instead cheer on their Chinese counterparts – has materialised. Each of his Weibo posts are followed by thousands of comments and tens of thousands of likes.
Hu likes to call himself a shubianzhe, an antiquated term for a guard stationed on the nation’s frontiers, keeping it safe. In just the past week, fulfilling this duty has involved insulting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, comparing Hong Kong activist Nathan Law to a 6 January Capitol rioter, taunting the Australian prime minister, bickering with a Florida senator and posting numerous cartoons highlighting American hypocrisy. It is a ceaseless task. For now, Hu fights on.
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