Situation in Afghanistan: How China’s public opinion is torn apart by anti-American sentiment after the Taliban regained control-BBC News

After the sudden “change of the sky” in Afghanistan, related topics about the Taliban and Afghanistan frequently landed on the hot search list of Weibo, and many related topics have more than 100 million hits, but most people in this area are atheists or non-profits. In countries with religious beliefs, many netizens expressed their support for the Taliban.

For example, under the news of the organization’s march into Kabul, many netizens believed that the Taliban’s victory was “due to the support of the Afghan people.”

“It is the people’s heart that decides the victory or defeat of the war. The current government stands on the opposite side of the Afghan people, and the Taliban has won the support of the working people at the bottom. Only this can win the country,” a netizen wrote.

Some netizens also commented that the Taliban “are not as unbearable as publicly publicized”, “rather than becoming a pawn in the Western world, managing their own country is the best choice.” “Kongzhi” is an abbreviation for “public intellectuals.” It was originally used to describe people with higher education and open-mindedness, but in recent years it has become a derogatory term on the Internet in China to describe people who are pro-Western and rebel against the Chinese system.

Under a news video allegedly showing Taliban soldiers playing bumper cars in an amusement park, some netizens expressed their sympathy for the Taliban soldiers.

“From birth to 20 years old, I have been experiencing wars, and I have only become a child now,” one of the highly praised comments wrote. The comment received 193 likes. Another comment said: “People with childlike innocence are generally not bad in nature.”

Russia Today (RT) released a video on August 18 showing some Afghan women walking on the streets of Kabul to protest against Taliban rule. According to the report, many women worry that they “will lose many of the freedoms granted to them in the past 20 years” and return to an era when most women were restricted to home, unable to work, go to school, and travel independently.

But under this post, netizens almost sneered at it. Some netizens asked, “What power do Afghan women have in the past 20 years?” Others suggested that the parade was organized by the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).

Some fanatical supporters of the Taliban in China also besieged dissidents. Jalal Bazwan (Jalal Bazwan) is an Afghan doctoral student studying in China. He continues to update the situation in Afghanistan in Chinese on social media and exposes the brutality of the Taliban. However, he was met by China, which supports the Taliban. Netizens blamed.

“The most interesting thing is that many Chinese netizens sent me messages saying, what qualifications do you have to use our Chinese Internet to post the situation in Afghanistan and your own views,” Baziwang wrote.

In 1996, the Taliban, who believed in Islamic fundamentalism, established a state-religious regime in Afghanistan for the first time, ruled Afghanistan under the strict Sharia law, and prohibited women from working, studying, and traveling independently.

After the “September 11” incident in 2001, the Taliban regime was overthrown by US-led forces, and the remaining forces fled deep into the mountains and rural areas. For 20 years, the organization has continued to carry out kidnappings, attacks and bombings in Afghanistan.

Song Zhibiao, a senior Chinese media person, believes that compared with ten years ago, the image of the Taliban in the Chinese public opinion field is changing, with an image of a victor as a nation builder. Some people are even “rewriting the Taliban’s story” in an attempt to offset its bloody history.

“The one hundred and eighty-degree shift in the image of the Taliban, and the applause and applause, firstly benefited from the stable anti-American sentiment in the domestic public opinion field,” Song Zhibiao wrote in a commentary. “Although the Taliban’s victory and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan are related and non-causal, many people understand it as a U.S. failure, and some people have used this to share the results of the Taliban’s victory.”

Anti-American voices in China are not new. At the time of the “9.11” attack, some Chinese people cheered the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York (this was partly due to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia several years ago). In recent years, after the two countries fought fiercely over issues such as trade, human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and the traceability of the new crown virus, the relationship between the two countries has dropped to a freezing point, and the anti-American sentiment among the people has reached a climax.

But the subversion of the Taliban’s image in China is not only at the civil level, but also with the government.

Although China has never listed the Afghan Taliban as a “terrorist” organization like Russia, but before this, the Taliban have been regarded by Beijing as a destructive force related to terrorism. The Chinese government even accused the Taliban of providing assistance to the Xinjiang independence organization “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” (East-Iraq Movement).

For example, in January 2002, the foreign ministers of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization issued a joint statement stating that the organization “welcomes the Afghan people to get rid of the Taliban system that is tied to international terrorism.”

In September of the same year, the State Council of China issued a communiqué stating that the East Iraqi Movement and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida organization “have a symbiotic relationship and have received strong support from the Afghan Taliban in training armed personnel and violent terrorists”.

But time has passed. In July this year, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi personally received high-level Taliban political committee leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Tianjin. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying praised the Taliban for being “more sober and rational than the last time they were in power.”

After the Taliban took over Kabul, Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, an official tabloid known for its nationalism, also wrote on Twitter, “Chinese netizens sarcastically say that the change of regime in Afghanistan is more stable than that of the US president.”

Nevertheless, not all netizens accept the Taliban.

On August 16, the state media CCTV released a film introducing the Taliban. The film claimed that the Taliban was supported by civilians and expanded rapidly. After being overthrown by the United States in 2001, Afghanistan started a 20-year war, thus ” The Afghan people are in dire straits.” The film did not mention any negative content about the Taliban.

This 60-second video was once ranked fifth in the Weibo hot search rankings, but it immediately aroused many doubts. Some people criticized the film for not mentioning terrorism; others asked the Taliban “Is it the one who bombed the Buddha of Bamiyan?”

In the face of criticism, CCTV removed the film from the shelves. The party media “People’s Daily” was also criticized by netizens after it was reprinted, and the post was deleted within a few hours.

Lu Kewen, a Chinese self-media author with millions of fans, was also slammed. He said on social media that he “was deeply shocked by bin Laden’s deep love for his own national culture and desire to save the nation and the nation when he finished writing the Taliban biography.”

Many netizens criticized him for “eating patriotic meals” and “washing the ground for terrorism”, and netizens asked him to apologize for the victims who died in the terrorist incidents in Xinjiang. He later stated that his words were “inappropriate” and “not clearly stated.”