Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Spokesperson Zhao Lijian is caught in yet another blunder on Twitter, after he was found to be following the accounts of Pornhub and Romanian porn star Lea Lexis earlier this month.

Known for his brash personality and active online presence, Zhao is under fire for his latest tweet, in which he claimed that “shared bicycles, high-speed rail, mobile payment and e-commerce are China’s four great new inventions.”

He retweeted a TikTok video, which claimed the total length of high-speed railway track across China has exceeded 30,000 km, much longer than that of developed countries such as Japan and France. The video also suggested that Chinese hawkers are more advanced with mobile payment technology than the elites in U.S. Silicon Valley.

The video also said China is the pioneer and an eager advocate of bike-sharing systems, as well as a world champion in e-commerce, citing the country’s online retail sales of US$900 billion recorded in 2017.

Netizens rebutted his remarks with a report by BBC in April 2018, which traced the origin of these claims back to a survey conducted by Beijing Foreign Studies University in May 2017. Respondents from 20 countries named the technology they “most wanted to bring back” to their country from China. The top answers were since then widely cited by Chinese politicians and media as proof of the country’s technological achievements.

“China did not invent any of these technologies - but it has led the way in their wide scale implementation,” the report wrote. “China has been putting strong emphasis on technological advancement as it seeks to become what it calls an ‘innovation nation’ by 2020.”

Many comments below the tweet mocked Zhao for the false claim. The tweet has since been removed.

In 2018, Pony Ma, the then chairperson of Tencent (0700), pointed out that China’s success in the four areas was merely superficial and could easily be toppled.

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