Beijing Decries ‘Bad-Faith Actors’ for Translating Ugly Chinese Internet Posts

China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday unleashed an editorial tirade against “badfaith [sic] actors fed by antagonistic Western media,” who have been running a “malicious smear campaign against China on Russia-Ukraine issues” by fiendishly translating the hideous things Chinese nationalist blowhards are saying on social media.

“The image of China and Chinese people in their depiction has been arrogant, populist, cruel and bloodthirsty, forcibly presented by them to the world through the use of various pejorative terms,” the Global Times howled in its condemnation of the “Great Translation Movement.”

Much of the Chinese Communist paper’s venom was focused upon a group of some 53,000 Reddit users who call themselves “ChongLangTV.” 

The editorial did not bother accusing ChongLangTV members of incorrectly translating or fabricating the outrageous comments they found on Chinese social media. Instead, their sin was supposedly “cherry-picking” online outbursts to embarrass China:

Starting from February, ChonglangTV began hyping up the topics reflecting “China’s ugly face” in Ukraine crisis, including amplifying statements such as the rumor “China will ‘import’ fleeing Ukrainian beauties,” and tone-deaf comments that were made by a very small number of netizens and were widely condemned by the large majority of Chinese netizens.

ChonglangTV members mainly looked for and translated some radical views on the Russia-Ukraine conflict from Chinese social media platforms into English, and reposted them in the form of pictures juxtaposing the “original text” and the English translation. These crude translations have been echoed by many anti-Chinese media outlets and NGOs, such as SupChina and Radio Free Asia.

As the compilation of sensational and eye-catching topics gained greater attention, members of the ChongLangTV even started to engage in personal data search activities, publicly spreading the personal information of people they dislike in private conversations on the internet.

Reddit moderators banned the ChongLangTV subreddit at the beginning of March, leading many users to suspect the social media outlet had succumbed to pressure from the Chinese government. The official reason given for the banning was “disclosure of personal information” about one of the Chinese ultra-nationalists, or “Little Pinks” as they are often called, whose social media posts were translated by the group.

Other sources continued raising the collective blood pressure at the Global Times by impudently translating what Chinese hotheads are saying on social media.

A Twitter account called @TGTM_Official, purportedly the mothership for “The Great Translation Movement,” angered the Global Times by translating posts that blamed Beijing for supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“By scanning through hundreds of Twitter posts under the hashtags #GreatTranslationMovement, the Global Times found that many of the users active in posting and forwarding tweets are Chinese immigrants who left China for Western countries in previous years,” the editorialists sneered.

The article rambled on for fifteen hundred words, naming and attacking individual contributors to the “Great Translation Movement” hashtags and Twitter accounts, spraying a great deal of spittle upon a Twitter handle that has 17,000 followers. The crescendo of lunacy was reached when the Global Times accused this modest collection of dissident tweeters of inspiring criminal attacks against Asians living in the United States.

The Global Times scoffed at ChongLangTV users for saying they should not be held responsible for hate crimes against Asians because “people in the civilized world are capable of logical thought and separate individuals from groups.” This is apparently a difficult concept for hive-minded Chinese Communist propagandists to grasp.

The editorial concluded by suggesting China’s response to “The Great Translation Movement” should involve “enhancing official communications with the external world, including diplomatic and civil exchanges, using data and facts and well-told Chinese stories to counter the movement” — as if there were not an over-abundance of Communist agencies and operatives doing that already. 

Thursday’s hysterical screed was not the first Global Times editorial attacking translation groups. A furious op-ed last week from a former military official named Wang Qiang, again running over a thousand overheated words, denounced the Great Translation Movement as a subversive attack organized by sinister foreign operatives to wage “psychological warfare against China” and spark a “color revolution” in Beijing — in other words, an attempt to overthrow the Chinese Communist government.

It is not entirely unreasonable to complain that cherry-picked comments from the loudest voices on social media can be used to make anyone and anything look bad. The problem is that translation groups are finding a lot of these comments from Chinese citizens, including a wave of particularly vile posts about Ukrainians after the Russian invasion. 

Also, the “Little Pinks” are not just noisy nobodies thumping their chests to impress each other — they have demonstrably affected the policies of the cruel and authoritarian Chinese state on several occasions, most recently including a successful campaign to ban the movies of actor Keanu Reeves because he participated in a long-running annual concert for Tibet.

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