By ERIKA KINETZ
Associated Press
BRUSSELS (AP) â Chinaâs ruling Communist Party has opened a new front in its long, ambitious war to shape global public opinion: Western social media.
Liu Xiaoming, who recently stepped down as Chinaâs ambassador to the United Kingdom, is one of the partyâs most successful foot soldiers on this evolving online battlefield. He joined Twitter in October 2019, as scores of Chinese diplomats surged onto Twitter and Facebook, which are both banned in China.
Since then, Liu has deftly elevated his public profile, gaining a following of more than 119,000 as he transformed himself into an exemplar of Chinaâs new sharp-edged âwolf warriorâ diplomacy, a term borrowed from the title of a top-grossing Chinese action movie.
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CHINESE demographers have called on the government to accelerate family planning reform following census results.
The 2021 census records that senior citizens (aged 60 and over) outnumber children (14 and under) for the first time, by 264 million to 253 million.
China’s total population of 1.412 billion is still rising, but so slowly that India is now expected to overtake it as the world’s most populated country as soon as 2023-4.
Peking University sociology professor Lu Jiehua said: “Improving or lifting the family planning policy” should be a top priority to avoid further declines in the birth rate, which at 1.3 per couple is well below replacement level. Reforms to make raising children cheaper and incentives for larger families could be introduced, he suggested.
Rome, Italy, May 12, 2021 / 12:00 pm (CNA).
For Gulchehra Hoja, the Chinese government’s systematic repression of Uyghur Muslims is personal: her mother, father, brother, and more than 20 relatives are detained in “reeducation camps” in Xinjiang.
“Last week, I learned that one of my relatives … had died in Chinese prison. His body has not been returned to his family,” Hoja said May 11 at a virtual event hosted by the U.S. embassy to the Vatican.
He was a “59-year-old father of three children, taken to the camp in 2017, and later sentenced to 19 years in prison just for studying religion,” she said.
Hoja, originally from China’s northwest Xinjiang region, has been working as a journalist for Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service for nearly 20 years.
Erika Kinetz
FILE - In this Nov. 30, 2016 file photo, Chinese Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Liu Xiaoming, left, speaks with Britain s Prince William, Duke of Cambridge during the Tusk Conservation Awards at Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Much of the popular support Liu, who recently stepped down as Chinaâs ambassador to the U.K., and his colleagues seem to enjoy on Twitter has, in fact, been manufactured, an AP and Oxford Internet Institute investigation found. More than one in ten retweets of Chinese diplomats came from accounts Twitter suspended for breaking platform rules, which bar manipulation. (Stuart C. Wilson/Pool Photo via AP, File)