By Joe Cash
BEIJING (Reuters) -China is leveraging its propaganda machine to hit back at U.S. tariffs, rolling out videos using Cold War imagery to lambaste “imperialists” and send a simple message – capitulation to bullies is dangerous, and we won’t back down.
Beijing has made little effort to contain its anger at the tariffs, which it says are tantamount to bullying and will do nothing to address issues such as fentanyl abuse and cannot stop the rise of the world’s second-largest economy.
On Tuesday, China’s foreign ministry released a video, complete with a voice-over in American-accented English, on its social media feeds that likened yielding to U.S. President Donald Trump’s 145% tariffs to “drinking poison”.
“China won’t kneel down, because we know standing up for ourselves keeps the possibility of cooperation alive, while compromise snuffs it out,” the narration said, over footage of a Chinese MiG-15 fighter shooting down a U.S. jet in the Korean War.
“Imperialists are always arrogant. If they show a bit of reason it’s only because they are forced to do so,” it added, this time over footage of the signing of the armistice that ended the war.
China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on Monday likened Trump’s trade policy to “the open return of the law of the jungle,” during a meeting of foreign ministers from developing nations in Brazil.
“If we choose to stay silent or compromise, it will only embolden the bully further,” Wang told his BRICS bloc counterparts, according to a foreign ministry readout.
One Chinese official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said Beijing’s view is that yielding or compromising now would only weaken China in the future and allow Trump to change the terms later.
Messaging such as “Do Not Kneel” conveys this to a domestic and international audience, the person said.
On Chinese social media, where censors scrub anything sensitive, such as alleged human rights abuses, tariff memes abound.
“The King has come up with new tariffs! Peasants, peasants, listen up!” run the lyrics to an up-tempo, electro-beat song on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, referring to comments from Vice President J.D. Vance who used the term “peasants” to refer to Chinese people earlier this month.
“Tariffs for you even if you are not human!” the song continues, showing a picture of a penguin, after U.S. levies were applied to uninhabited Antarctic islands.
One AI-generated image on WeChat shows Trump, Vance and Tesla boss Elon Musk assembling sneakers and cheap flip-flops at a factory. Another shows a picture of Trump next to a pig’s snout.
Still, not all Chinese social media perspectives are positive for Beijing.
On Zhihu, China’s equivalent to Quora，many of the answers to a question about the foreign ministry’s video were negative.
“Our foreign propaganda department is really poor in terms of ability. If you don’t know how to do propaganda, then just don’t do it,” wrote one user.
(Reporting by Joe Cash and Beijing newsroom; Editing by Ben Blanchard and Saad Sayeed)
