“Wang Jingyu: I am a police officer of Qinjiagang police station, you are given three days to surrender yourself to my office, otherwise your parents will not have a good ending.” This was the tweet posted by 19-year-old Wang Jingyu, who is currently in the U.S., saying it was a text message from the police in Chongqing, China.

The police even issued a “police blotter” and publicly announced that Wang is on their “cyber wanted list.” The police could not really “chase” him down to the U.S. but what they did do was to take Wang’s family as hostages, holding his parents in custody and forcing him to give himself in.

What crime did Wang Jingyu commit? The Chongqing police said he left a slanderous and derogatory comment on Sina Weibo about the heroes who defended the country’s borders, causing a negative impact on society. Eight months after the fatal clash between troops from India and China over a border dispute in June 2020, the Chinese side finally declared that four soldiers had died as a result of the conflict. Since India had previously analyzed the number of Chinese casualties to be between 30 and 40, there was no shortage of debate and suspicion among the local Chinese community over the authenticity of the death toll. These questions have not only been censored and removed from the internet, but a number of people have also been arrested by the police for these comments online. In Nanjing, Qinhuangdao of Hebei, Maoming of Guangdong, Guiyang, Beijing and Mianyang of Sichuan, at least six people, including a man with the online alias “Spicy Pen Tiny Ball,” have been detained by Chinese police for “defaming martyrs.”

Border conflicts between countries that cost the lives of soldiers are a sobering tragedy. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not satisfied with the tragedy of life and has turned it into an ode to patriotism. Moreover, patriotism is not just about love for the country, but also love for the Party, and those heroes who sacrificed their lives were “good sons and daughters of the Party.” But this is not what is unacceptable to the Chinese public, what many people cannot accept is fake propaganda. The authenticity of the stories of “martyrs” such as the “Five Heroes from Langya Mountain” and those of war heroes Huang Jiguang, Qiu Shaoyun and Lei Feng, has been called into question. For example, it was said that Lei Feng liked to do good deeds covertly, but he had left so many photos of himself doing good deeds. At that time, they did not have the convenience of cell phones to take pictures but required bulky professional equipment. Lei Feng, who did good deeds surreptitiously, always managed to run into the photographer “by chance.” People also wondered why Lei Feng would turn his flashlight on to read when it was clearly daytime in the photo.

While this kind of questioning is respect for common sense and a desire for people to understand the truth about history, it is also an awakening of the public. They have grown suspicious of the CCP’s propaganda and even rebellious against the CCP regime.

The war hero stories have also been spun into jokes. As in other societies under authoritarian rule, people tell and spread these jokes as a way to resist the regime’s brainwashing.

The CCP’s response was first to mobilize its official propaganda machine. One government scholar said that in order to “defend the image of heroes,” we must win the “Battle of Ganling over the internet.” As a result, ordinary netizens and the CCP officials and their supporters (the internet water army, volunteer five-cent, and the Maoist extremists) engaged in an alley war on the internet.

The government did not win the war in the alley, and has lost even more as a result. There was a time when “martyrs” enshrined in textbooks by the CCP were discussed or ridiculed in everything from historical studies by academics to casual conversations in restaurants. The National Tourism Administration once issued a notice to tour guides not to tell jokes, in fact dirty jokes, about leaders and revolutionary martyrs to tourists on tours.

In 2018, China promulgated the “Law on the Protection of Heroes and Martyrs.” This law “prohibits distorting, vilifying, desecrating, or denying the deeds and spirit of heroes and martyrs; and prohibits the use of martyrs’ portraits and names for commercial advertising.” According to this law, those recognized as heroes and martyrs shall have their names, portraits, reputations and honors protected by the law.

However, in any case, there is no provision in the law that “defames martyrs” for questioning the number of soldiers who were killed or injured. Behind the abuse of the law is the CCP’s anxiety about the image of the regime.

“Cyber fugitive” is alarming, but it is in essence the usual Chinese police tactic to drag families down. And as China grows stronger, its government becomes more reckless. What happened to Wang Jingyu is proof that the military protects the interests of the rulers, not the safety of ordinary people. As a netizen said, “When I was young, I thought that no one would dare to bully us if our country was strong. But now I realize that no one would dare to help us because our country is strong.”

Click here for Chinese version

(Chang Ping, commentator)

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