Shijie Wang
On September 22, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced that this year’s “clean and bright” (清朗) campaign would focus on the theme of “rectifying the problem of maliciously inciting negative emotions” (整治恶意挑动负面情绪问题). [1] The campaign targets four categories of online speech: “inciting extreme group antagonism” (挑动群体极端对立), “promoting fear and anxiety” (宣扬恐慌焦虑), “stoking cyber violence and hostility” (挑起网络暴力戾气), and “excessively amplifying pessimism and negativity” (过度渲染消极悲观) (CAC, September 22). By cracking down on speech that falls under these categories, the Party’s discourse apparatus seeks to alleviate social antagonism and the “lying flat” (躺平) subculture, and more specifically fan culture, online fraud, and conspiracy theories.
The CAC announcement followed closely after the release of a Xinhua Institute report arguing that U.S. cognitive warfare was colonizing the minds of people around the world, as well as the CAC’s decision to penalize social media platform Xiaohongshu (known overseas as Rednote) on the grounds that it was “undermining the online ecosystem” (破坏网络生态) (Xinhua, September 7; CAC, September 11; China Brief Notes, September 12). The specific targets of the “clean and bright” campaign are not identical to those detailed in the “colonization of the mind” (思想殖民) report, but they are similar. Official media in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) often frame these phenomena along similar lines as manifestations of Western cultural infiltration.
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