Makes sense—but I can’t help but feel that the list of China’s “core issue” that requires an immediate response is growing by the day. I don’t recall the CCP responding as forcefully to international criticism regarding Tibet during the 2008 Olympics as the party is in 2021 regarding Hong Kong, Xinjiang, coronavirus, Taiwan (well this was always the case), and on and on.

Expanding core issues might appeal to a nationalist audience but it sure seems like CCP propagandists don’t understand the Streisand effect. The CCP didn’t sanction international criticism regarding Tibet or the Tiananmen Massacre and the rest of the world moved on after a while. But every single one of these inflammatory GT cartoons comparing Xinjiang to American slavery only makes people really pissed off and dig-in on the issue because now it’s a matter of national pride for the US to respond.

I don’t think it’s just wolf warrior diplomacy. CCP propaganda apparatus might lack an understanding on how the media works in a world with free press. The Russians have that understanding, because they compete for eyeballs domestically with non-state media (although less so nowadays) and internationally with RT Today. But CCP propagandists operate domestically in an environment where the goto response to criticism is to a) censor it and/or b) mobilize bunch of nationalist trolls to attack the author. That approach doesn’t work in the Western media system. Every time the Chinese embassy sends an angry letter to silence some obscure European publication for its coverage, the Streisand effect dictates that the censorship attempt gets international coverage. (For example, none of us would have cared about a German kids book on the coronavirus if the Chinese embassy didn’t send the publishers a cease-and-desist letter.) Mobilizing patriots to troll western critics also doesn’t work—chiefly because the Chinese trolls are vastly outnumbered by conservative Western trolls who love to spam the Taiwan flag under every China Daily post.