School bus stabbing finally sparks crackdown on Chinese nationalism

• The stabbing of a Japanese mother and her son has gone viral in China after a local woman died protecting them.
• Her death sparked a conflict between praise for the 55-year-old and a resurgence of anti-Japanese messages.
• The tech giants eventually stepped in in a rare rebuke, deciding that nationalism had gone too far.

It's no secret that people on Chinese social media don't like Japan.

The list of perceived grievances continues to grow, from the Rape of Nanking during World War II to fears that Pacific Ocean seafood will be contaminated by radioactive water from the Fukushima disaster.

This rhetoric was fueled again on June 24 when a knife-wielding man attacked a Japanese woman and her son at a school bus stop in Suzhou, injuring the couple.

But it was the third victim who caught the country's attention. Hu Youping, a 55-year-old Chinese woman who was accompanying a school bus, rushed to protect the two foreigners, herself wounded by a stab wound.

The woman later died while receiving medical treatment, police said. The suspect was identified as a 52-year-old unemployed man surnamed Zhou, who had recently arrived in the city.

A whirlwind of emotion and debate ensued on social media. Hu was hailed as a heroine – with some calling for the bus stop to be named after her – while anti-Japanese hate speech proliferated in posts and comments implying that the attack was justified.

As the two narratives intertwine, Chinese social media is stepping in at the same time. It is clear that extremism has gone too far.

Tech giant Tencent issued a statement Saturday condemning hate speech and said it would crack down on posts related to the Suzhou stabbing that “provoke extreme nationalism.” Tencent runs WeChat, a super app that performs functions similar to WhatsApp and Facebook.

NetEase, a major video game company, issued a similar announcement, saying it had observed messages calling for “resisting Japan and exterminating traitors” and accusing Hu of being a Japanese spy.

Douyin and Weibo, the Chinese versions of TikTok and Twitter, have publicly lambasted accounts that they say “promote extreme xenophobia” and “encourage criminal behavior in the name of patriotism.”

The platforms said they removed thousands of posts and deleted dozens of accounts.

The Precarious Balance Between China and Japan

It is a rare rebuke of nationalism on these platforms, a hotbed of inflammatory messages like the 2022 calls to shoot down then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plane during her visit to Taiwan.

Although Chinese social media is heavily moderated, anti-Japanese rhetoric has been one of many popular nationalist sentiments allowed to flourish in recent years.

Since Wednesday, the main hashtag for posts about the Japanese victims of the June stabbing attack has been censored. However, discussions about Hu's death and his posthumous recognition for his courage are still allowed.

In recognition of Hu's actions, the Japanese embassy in China lowered its national flag to half-mast.

It is unclear whether China's central government has been directly involved in the crackdown. But the country's social media platforms respond sensitively to what the state considers acceptable, often issuing simultaneous announcements about unwanted posts.

The Cyberspace Administration of China is tasking social media platforms with self-regulating their content and on June 14 released a set of rules detailing how internet providers should censor violent content.

The anti-Japanese rhetoric also comes at an inopportune time for Chinese officials hoping to attract more customers from Tokyo as the local economy struggles.

Suzhou, in eastern China's Jiangsu province, is one of the country's largest centers of Japanese investment, with thousands of Japanese companies operating in the city.

On Tuesday, Chinese state media reported that Vice Premier He Lifeng met with a business delegation from Japan, saying his country welcomed Japanese companies and hoped they would grow.

Hu Jintao's death loomed over the meeting, and officials from both sides took time to pause for a moment to pay tribute to his passing, the South China Morning Post reported.