News Chinese IT giants curb hate speech after knife attack on Japanese

China's top social media companies have condemned online hate speech targeting Japanese, delivering a vigorous response to comments triggered by a knife attack last week that killed one person and injured a Japanese mother and child. Such waves of sentiment and a vocal nationalist element are not uncommon, but companies from WeChat-owner Tencent to TikTok's ByteDance-owned sister site Douyin, Weibo and NetEase condemned last week's remarks. "These comments have disrupted the positive and peaceful atmosphere of the platform and even incited unlawful behaviour," Douyin said in an online post on Sunday, citing "extreme and erroneous statements" that were "promoting xenophobia".

Chinese social media companies condemn hate speech against Japanese after knife attack



On 24 June, a Japanese woman and her son were injured, and a Chinese woman was seriously hurt in a knife attack at a bus stop and on a bus from a Japanese school in Suzhou, near Shanghai, according to a consulate general official. The suspect, a Chinese, did not appear to target Japanese nationals intentionally. The two Japanese victims were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, though the boy had a deep stab wound and cuts. The attacker was subdued at the scene. The Japanese woman and her son were waiting for another child to return from school in Jiangsu Province, which hosts many Japanese nationals and production facilities. The Chinese woman was a guide for the bus. She died later at the hospital.

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On Friday, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa told a regular press conference in Tokyo that she was "deeply saddened to learn" of Hu's death while expressing her "deep gratitude and respect for the courageous act" by the Chinese woman. The consulate general and Japan's embassy in Beijing flew their flags at half-mast Friday to mourn Hu. The embassy paid tribute to her "righteous act" in a post on Weibo, China's equivalent of the social media platform X.

Attacks against foreigners in China do not seem uncommon. The nationalist demons once unleashed...

Chinese social media platforms have shut down radical nationalist posts promoting hatred of Japan following a stabbing attack on 24 June in Suzhou, which injured a Japanese mother and child. A female bus attendant who tried to protect them was killed. The attacker, an unemployed Chinese man in his 50s, was influenced by ultranationalist online "influencers" who incited animosity toward Japanese and Americans. This was the second high-profile knife attack on foreigners in China in June, with four American college instructors stabbed in Jilin on 10 June. Recent knife attacks in China, mainly against Chinese, are attributed to economic stress and loss of income, leading to desperation among many Chinese men.

Writing on the Pekingnology Substack, founder and editor Xichen Wang, a veteran of China's state-run Xinhua News Agency, wrote: "Recently, a few users [of social media] have taken advantage of certain events to incite extreme nationalist sentiments by distorting, exaggerating, or even fabricating content to post inappropriate remarks. Examples include promoting 'anti-Japanese traitor eradication,' calling for the establishment of a 'modern-day Boxer Rebellion,' spreading defamatory claims that the school bus staff who died rescuing others in Suzhou were 'Japanese spies,' and fabricating extreme populist statements such as 'it would be best if all of Japan sank, leading to early racial extinction.'"

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