China’s internet companies are cracking down on online hate speech, and specifically anti-Japanese speech, following the fatal stabbing of a Chinese woman trying to protect a Japanese mother and child last week.
An unemployed man attacked the mother and child at a bus stop outside a Japanese school in Suzhou. Hu Youping, a Chinese woman, stepped in to stop the attack and was stabbed multiple times.
Over the past few months, social media posts accused these Japanese schools of conducting spy training, according to the Global Times, a state-run media outlet.
Following the attack, multiple Chinese internet companies condemned anti-Japanese and xenophobic remarks on their platforms.
NetEase accused some users of trying to incite nationalist sentiment and cited one example that promoted “anti-Japanese traitor eradication.”
Tencent, which operates the WeChat messaging platform, said it would fight content related to “inciting confrontation between China and Japan.”
ByteDance said some accounts on Douyin, the company’s version of TikTok for the Chinese market, posted “extreme and wrong remarks” promoting extreme xenophobia.
Weibo, a microblogging platform similar to X, said it removed over 750 posts that it alleged incited hatred within days of the attack.
Last week’s incident follows a similar stabbing attack against four American instructors in the city of Jilin in early June.
China-Japan relations
Relations between China and Japan have been rocky in recent years. Last year, China arrested a Japanese employee of drugmaker Astellas Pharma on suspicion of violating the country’s anti-espionage legislation. Beijing also suspended seafood imports from Japan, following the latter’s release of treated wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant last August.
Official government statements called last week’s attack an “isolated incident.” On Monday, China vice premier He Lifeng told a Japanese delegation that Hu’s death in trying to stop the attack proved the “bilateral friendship” between the two countries.
Nationalist sentiment is common on Chinese social media. Earlier this year, social media users attacked both tech company Huawei and bottled water company Nongfu Spring for allegedly using Japanese references in their products. The rise in nationalist sentiment also tracks an increasing government push for greater patriotism.
But even Beijing may be wary of being too patriotic. Last week, the Chinese government reportedly withdrew plans to allow law enforcement to detain those wearing clothes deemed to hurt “the feelings of the Chinese nation.” The draft legislation, published last year, sparked concerns among many Chinese, who pointed to previous instances where law enforcement officials were believed to go too far in enforcing the rules.
One such instance? A 2022 case where a Chinese woman was briefly detained by a police officer for wearing a kimono, a traditional Japanese garment.