As anti-China sentiments in India grow like never before, Chinese attempts at trying to carve an alternative pro-CCP narrative are falling flat almost on a daily basis. A multiplicity of factors are behind the abject failure of the Chinese state to build a narrative on social media sympathetic to their cause. A crucial one among them being the aggressive determination of Indians to expose the CCP and its minions for the crooks they are. In a post-Cold War world, it would not take a genius to guess the winner in a fight between nationalists and communists. Although China is economically more capitalistic than any other nation, its godfather is a man called Mao Zedong, who killed people indiscriminately.
In a first, China is faced now with the prospect of fighting a digital war against India’s nationalists. And we are definitely giving the stooges of CCP a run for their money. It is estimated that over 34 million Indians were active Twitter users as of 2019. Of course, not all among the quoted figure are people who identify themselves as ‘nationalists’ per se. We unfortunately have our own share of leftists and extreme-communists to handle, however, a humongous number of Indians from the said figure are those who love their country. It is this bunch of Indians which is taking the fight to the comments section of CCP media outlets and its other of its proxies.
The Chinese are not built for globalised and democratic social media. Twitter, like most of the other platforms otherwise used by people worldwide, is banned in China. A select group of CCP stooges, however, has been granted magical access to the microblogging site to carry out whatever little perception management and propaganda dissemination they can undertake in their limited capacity. Indians, however, are making life hell for such Twitter handles.
Take the case of CCP lapdog Global Times, which seems to have been given the task to specifically target India, and senselessly rant against Indian ‘nationalists’. On any given anti-India post of the Global Times, it is seen that the likes or retweets are disproportionately low when compared to the replies, which in some cases have also run into multiple thousands. Who are these thousands of people replying to the Global Times, and making their survival difficult on the platform, while also embarrassing them for their infantile rants and boastings of what is essentially a non-combative force called the PLA? Indians.
China should must be shown his place, & India will definetely do that pic.twitter.com/Yflmt1XGAc
— Sunny🦅 (@PratapSunny45) July 2, 2020
https://twitter.com/gauravsethi0310/status/1278701317515472896?s=20
#Tibet should be set free
— Arjun Singh (@Arjun_Singh27) July 2, 2020
https://twitter.com/MotherOfMoMo/status/1278398963498905600?s=20
https://twitter.com/bunnymazak/status/1278398727280001026?s=20
😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/8bm0kqLmYF
— The Indian Society (@thindiansociety) July 2, 2020
— Dinkar Dubey (@Dinkardub) July 2, 2020
China loses to India on social media every day. Why? Because India, unlike the CCP-ruled China, is a free country, where freedom of speech and expression are ideals which are cherished, and also duly practised. We have not banned any platforms (except the 59 Chinese apps) for public consumption. Indians do not fear being rounded up by agencies for speaking their mind. China, on the other hand, has insulated itself from the outside world. As a result, the Chinese do not know how they are to fight for their country online.
India’s supposed “IT cell” is formidable to combat even for Indian liberals and leftists who are well versed with the platform. As such, to expect China to win against such a machinery, and a combined force of millions of nationalistic Indians is a no brainer from the word go.
Such is the luck of the CCP that not even its bots were able to put up a decent global fight, and got almost immediately exposed, and subsequently thrown out of Twitter. The most recent campaign which China attempted to run was busted by Twitter last month, when almost 24,000 core content creators and 150,000 amplifiers were identified as bots working for the CCP. “This entire network was involved in a range of manipulative and coordinated activities,” Twitter said. “They were tweeting predominantly in Chinese languages and spreading geopolitical narratives favourable to the Communist Party of China, while continuing to push deceptive narratives about the political dynamics in Hong Kong.”
India has over 600 million active internet users currently. Further, India has the cheapest mobile data in the world, further helping the country digitise and also democratize itself. While China has to run from pillar to post and hire PR agencies for perception management campaigns, India has a patriotic populace doing the same in an almost intuitively impromptu fashion, and out of sheer love for their country. Information dissemination in the country is today taking place like never before, and hardly any Indian would be unaware of China’s repeated belligerence in Ladakh. Above all, we are a democracy. Against a tyrannical CCP regime, that is India’s most formidable weapon.
