China watchers appreciate German Embassy did at Beijing
On October 11, German Ambassador to China Patricia Flor took her Twitter page and said, “Starting from today, we will look back on 50 events from those 50 years” on the embassy’s official Weibo channel.
Beijing [China], November 12 (ANI): China watchers appreciated the German embassy in Beijing for its subtle dig on social media regarding Beijing’s strict control over political messaging, days before the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited the country, Voice of America (VoA) reported.
On October 11, German Ambassador to China Patricia Flor took to her Twitter handle to post, “Starting from today, we will look back on 50 events from those 50 years” on the embassy’s official Weibo channel.
In a series of tweets, on China’s micro-blogging platform Weibo, the embassy posted once a split-screen post where one side displayed a large crowd gathering at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with a caption that read: “In East Germany … more and more people are staging protests for democracy and citizens’ rights, which led to the peaceful revolution of November 1989 and prompted the fall of the Berlin Wall that separated the two Germanys.”
While the right side of the post was kept blank with a six-line caption, whosoever knows China’s politics must know that in 1989, there was a popular student protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which was brutally crushed with likely thousands of young people killed, said the VoA report.
This post has garnered 4,000 likes on Weibo, which is comparatively more than any other tweet.
Ambassador Flor, in an interview with Table, said, “As a diplomat, you have to weigh carefully how to deal with the instrument of language — because that is our strongest weapon.”
She vowed to increase the embassy’s presence on social media, communicate frankly to Chinese audiences about German policies toward their country and maintained that aside from meeting government officials, her job entailed meeting with, and voicing concerns for Chinese human rights defenders.
Janne Leino, who lived and worked in China from 2015-21 for a European think tank, reshared Flor’s post saying, “Posting Right before Chancellor #Scholz (SPD) visits #China , the German embassy in Beijing releases this trolling post on Chinese social media channel Weibo.”
“The German foreign office is led by Green Foreign Minister Baerbock, who openly opposes the business-friendly China-course of the Chancellor,” he added.
Leino, now an analyst at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, said in a phone interview from Brussels that most Europeans are unaware that Western social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, are blocked or subjected to strict regulation in China, although some Chinese manage to access these platforms using VPN, reported VoA.
He lamented the advantage that gives to China’s diplomatic “wolf warriors” who are free to use Western social media platforms such as Twitter to “pretty much post anything they want and spread information or false information or disinformation.”
“For more than 30 years, the Chinese government has worked hard to banish the state-ordered bloodshed of June 1989 from the population’s collective memory. To this end, it strictly censors direct and indirect references to the tragedy and punishes any form of commemoration,” an article published in China, VoA quoted Table as saying.
“With the post, the embassy holds a mirror up to the Chinese government just days before the visit of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz,” the article noted. Scholz’s visited Beijing with a group of businessmen on November 4 was criticized for favouring business relations at the expense of human rights and democracy. (ANI)
