When the U.S. State Department criticized Beijing for subverting the rule of law in Hong Kong in 2020, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson gave a three-word response on Twitter, invoking George Floyd: “I can’t breathe.”
Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in Minneapolis was “perhaps the first time that Beijing messaged assertively on an issue that did not directly bear on China’s geopolitical interests,” Bret Schafer and Jessica Brandt argued in a piece for Brookings. Within a few months, Beijing’s diplomats had mentioned the killing over 250 times online, usually to underscore American hypocrisy and dysfunction.
On September 10, American right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at a university event in Utah. An archetypal case of violence sprung from political polarization, Kirk’s killing seemed like similarly good fodder for China’s billion-dollar propaganda apparatus. But China’s retreat from wolf-warriorism, coupled with the taboo of free speech at the heart of Kirk’s tragedy, has created limits around how China can narrate the event both at home and abroad.
“Most of China’s coverage was straightforward. When it was editorialized, it was pointing out, I mean, to be frank, very real problems in U.S. society,” said Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and the creator of Hamilton 2.0, an open-source dashboard tracking the official outputs of Russia, China and Iran.
For instance, People’s Daily wrote that the assasination highlights “a broader pattern of attacks and threats that have raised concerns about political violence in the United States.” The Global Times published an investigation looking into the surge of “radical right-wing influencers in the West.” And Xinhua criticized the preponderance of politically polarized responses in the aftermath of the killing: “few engage in serious discussions about gun violence; instead, the debate has descended into blame games.”
Schafer contrasted China’s responses to Kirk’s killing with those from Russian and Iranian official channels, which have leaned into conspiracy theories. Iran suggested that Kirk was assassinated by agents of Israel or Israel sympathizers. Russia said that Kirk was killed for his anti-Ukrainian messaging because the American left has been radicalized by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Schafer thinks China’s more muted approach is largely due to its retreat from wolf warrior diplomacy, the assertive and confrontational style of communicating that Chinese diplomats adopted around 2019. Schafer considers wolf warriorism to be an aberration for China — a momentary attempt at adopting the Russian model of public diplomacy.
Ultimately, China wants to be a global leader. And while stoking controversy and conspiracy is “good for Twitter engagement, it’s not exactly great for their image,” Shafer said. “External engagements that are controversial, that are conspiratorial, that are oftentimes quite grating on whatever audience that they’re targeting, I think they learned it’s not to their benefit.”
China’s messaging might be less fiery these days, but it still aims to reinforce long standing criticisms about the dysfunctions that China sees as endemic to the American system of governance. A professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University told the Global Times about the assasination, “These contradictions, such as unequal distribution, sluggish economic growth, relative impoverishment of the populace, and external turmoil, unfortunately, are hardly thoroughly resolved by current Western political systems.”
Even without making an explicit comparison to China, official channels “are subtly contrasting [the U.S. system] with a Chinese model that is less violent, less politically toxic,” said Schafer.
Chinese social media users are posting messages in a similar vein on Weibo, Zhihu and other platforms. What’s on Weibo, a site that analyzes trending topics on Chinese social media, organized these narratives into three groups. First, American dysfunction and division. “A huge country like this — without a dominant ethnic group, without shared values, only believing in fists and force — when it can no longer project power outward and begins to shrink inward, they will surely start slaughtering each other,” said a popular commentator on Weibo. Reflecting a tension that also exists in the U.S., some social media users said that Kirk “got what he wanted,” while others denounced the violence.
The scope of perspectives on Chinese social media shows that “the official state censor and propaganda is working,” said Xiao Qiang (萧强), a Research Scientist at Berkeley and an expert on censorship, propaganda and disinformation in China. Narratives that mock or criticize the U.S. are allowed to run, but the censors shut down any commentary that turns the criticism back on China within “no more than two seconds.”
While censors might “tolerate” various nuanced perspectives on some topics, Kirk’s killing is not one of those, Xiao said. When it comes to free speech issues, it’s too easy to hold the mirror up to China. This is a problem, even if the criticism is only implied. Most of the time, “free speech” can’t be typed out in a draft post. “That’s the one word they don’t want to appear on social media,” Xiao said. Xiao observed fewer restrictions on discussions about Floyd’s killing in 2020 because police violence and racism are not as politically sensitive as free speech in China.
When Jimmy Kimmel’s show was briefly suspended due to controversial comments he made about Kirk, Chinese censors allowed some discussion of the issue on social media. But there was only one narrative, Xiao said: The U.S. censors its citizens, too. “It’s turned into a story of why China should censor.”
This delicate balance of freedom and control fosters the amplification of propaganda in a way that could appear natural and spontaneous. When Chinese social media users show interest in Kirk’s killing, a familiar narrative follows: American democracy sows chaos and violence.
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