In China, social media is shaping the public discourse on Doklam stand-off
A peek into the discussions on Weibo and WeChat.
The border stand-off in Doklam has predictably animated discussions in mainstream and social media in both India and China. For the most part, commentators and social media users are busy bolstering their respective side’s position even if it means being economical with the facts.
China’s English media is well known for whipping up hysteria over India, but the Chinese language media, though far less bellicose, is not immune to it either.
Take Huanqiu Shibao, the mothership of the pugnacious Global Times. After Sushma Swaraj asserted that the world community was with New Delhi on the Doklam dispute and that both India and China must withdraw from the region to ease the tension, the paper, in an editorial, accused the Indian foreign minister of lying to her country because it was India that had illegally entered Chinese territory.
The paper also reminded India that its “inferior military strength” was no match to the People’s Liberation Army.
On July 7, Xinhua News ran an article “demystifying the truth” about the stand-off. It maintained, among other claims, that India has illegally entered Chinese territory on the pretext of protecting Bhutan. It lamented that New Delhi has made Doklam a disputed territory even though it has always belonged to China, referring to Thirty Six Stratagems, a set of Chinese military directives that lists “creating something out of nothing” as a key strategy of warfare. Further, the contentious road that Beijing is building in Doklam is within its own territory, the article asserted, so it cannot be a threat to India’s security.
Such articles, of course, omit or distort facts. For one, the Chinese media has not cared to inform its readers that China and Bhutan have signed agreements, in 1988 and 1998, to keep peace on the border until the boundary is settled for good. The two countries have also agreed to maintain the status quo on the border, including the Doklam plateau, as it existed before March 1959. In essence, the Chinese media should acknowledge that the region is disputed and give space to the opposing views as well.
Amplified on social media – including Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter which has over 340 million users, and WeChat, a sort of a hybrid of WhatsApp, Facebook and Paytm with close to 889 million users – the distorted views might come to dominate the discourse about India.
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