In troubled China, digital media outlets went big on the Virginia shooting

For the Chinese news media, violence and mayhem are subjects that are typically off-limits. The minions of government people who closely monitor online news outlets and social media sites are usually quick to scrub China’s closed Internet system of any reporting or commentary related to events that might suggest even a whiff of instability in the country. 

But events in the United States are another matter entirely. 

The shooting deaths in Virginia this week of two journalists during a live TV broadcast was picked up swiftly and widely by Chinese news sites, says Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Foreign Policy. 

“It’s well-known that the Chinese media is tightly controlled and they will often underreport or provide very strictly limited reports on domestic incidents of violence or instability,” Allen-Ebrahimian says. 

“But it’s the flip side of the coin if you’re talking about violence or instability that occurs abroad, particularly in the United States,” she says.  

Chinese state-run news agencies Xinhua and the Global Times, along with non-state media outlets, all jumped on the Virginia shooting story after it broke on Wednesday evening Beijing time. They ran headlines and posted screen shots from the video of the incident, says Allen-Ebrahimian. Some sites put up separate web pages for live updates or started posting developments on Chinese micro-blogging platforms. 

Other international news organizations covered the story, of course, including the BBC. This Iranian television channel ran a video clip of the shooting as it was captured live. 

But in China, the story of the Virginia shooting was about more than the shocking deaths of two Americans.

“It plays into a larger political debate in China,” Allen-Ebrahimian says. 

Like the debates on social media in the US between liberals and conservatives, the online fracas in China roughly breaks down into two groups. On one side are Chinese people who tend to be pro-western, supportive of democratic values, and critical of their own government. On the other, those who are nationalistic, anti-western and supportive of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Allen-Ebrahimian says social media comments from the pro-western camp sarcastically posed questions about why Chinese news outlets were so quick to report on the Virginia shooting and, by contrast, so slow to shed light on the recent chemical explosion in Tianjin that killed dozens of Chinese people. 

Some of the more nationalistic commenters, she adds, mocked those who would criticize the Chinese government and asked why democratic America continues to be such a violent place. 

“It was really these groups throwing potshots at each other,” Allen-Ebrahimian says. 

“One comment was, ‘We in China are always the first to learn of America’s bad news,’” she says. 

There does seem to be wide agreement in Chinese social media about America’s gun laws, Allen-Ebrahimian says. And that might have something to do with why the Virginia shooting got so much attention from Chinese news outlets. 

“I’ve heard people in China say to me, ‘The US is free to death. You have so much freedom [to purchase to guns], that it’s killing people.’” she says.