Beijing has faced criticism for its failure in not explicitly condemning Russia’s blatant use of force. The United States and its allies are also very concerned about the possibility that China may provide assistance to Russia in the war and help Moscow cope with the sanctions.

In addition, pundits in Western countries have also been critical of the role that the Chinese official media has played in helping promote the Russian narratives and even assisting Moscow’s disinformation campaigns.

Some of the leading Chinese media outlets have indeed parroted a significant amount of Russian propaganda in recent weeks. They have unambiguously relayed Moscow’s argument that it was the US and NATO’s security pressures on Russia that compelled the latter to initiate this military operation against Ukraine. Another notable example is the Chinese media’s transmission of Russia’s accusation that the US had been involved in using the biological labs in Ukraine for research on bio-chemical weapons.      

To what extent has the Chinese official media been successful in shaping people’s opinions in China with regard to the Ukraine crisis? This question is worth exploring because of two particular contexts: the much tighter control of media and public opinion and surging anti-US/anti-West socio-political atmosphere in China in recent years.

Under these circumstances, one would assume that official policy pronouncements and media’s propaganda would be very effective in framing social responses in China toward the ongoing conflict in Europe.

This assumption has turned out to be not entirely true. In the Chinese social media, we have seen very heated and very polarized debates on Russia’s military raid in Ukraine. While many Chinese people have demonstrated clear pro-Russia attitudes and echoed Beijing’s official position on the culpability of the US and NATO, numerous other Chinese netizens have unequivocally denounced Moscow’s aggression and showed their support to the Ukrainians. 

When the first wave of reports about the war arrived, most Chinese netizens were caught unprepared and surprised. The online discussion, however, exploded very quickly. Two competing views have emerged. The “hawkish” online activists basically supported Russia’s war effort and justified the attack as a defensive action on the part of Russia.  The “pacifists,” however, condemned Russia and marked the war as an invasion.

Those who were branded as the “hawkish” expressed their understanding of Russia’s action. Most of them referred to various Russian perspectives to support their arguments, ranging from the alleged NATO promise not to expand eastwards after the Soviet Union dissolved, to the more recent anti-Russian activities within Ukraine, which the hawkish opinion leaders claimed to be backed by the United States and the West.

Another basis of their arguments was geopolitics, in particular, the risks of forcing a major power into a corner, as had been warned by realist international relations theorists such as Henry Kissinger and John Mearsheimer. Under such circumstance, it is a reasonable choice for the cornered power to wage a preemptive strike for its own security, the hawkish justified.

Clearly, we can see much resemblance between the views of these hawkish netizens and the official policy statements and mainstream media messages in China. It cannot be denied that Chinese media has influenced the discussions in the Chinese cybersphere to some extent.

However, we should not ignore the perhaps equally vocal expression of views from many other Chinese netizens. Fiercely confronting the hawkish were the “pacifists”, who openly denounced the military actions of Russia as well as the hawks’ attempts to defend Russia. In the pacifists’ discourse, any action to infringe a country’s sovereignty by force should be classified as invasion and a flagrant breach of international law.

In addition to condemning the war from moral and legal perspectives, the pacifists also warned that the hawkish arguments may provide legitimacy for foreign intervention against China in a possible Taiwan contingency. In addition to their judgement on the nature of the Ukraine war, the pacifists have raised some other issues in the debate. Many of them were concerned about how the conflict will affect things that are related to their daily life such as energy prices and employment.

This divergence of views in China’s social media on the Ukraine conflict reveals many significant things in China’s external relations. For a long time, nationalist narratives have been very popular in Chinese public opinion towards many foreign affairs, according to which most Chinese are supposed to side with Russia in this ongoing crisis.

Yet what we see in the virtual world in China this time is quite different. With the rise of various social media platforms, the ways ordinary Chinese get to know what is happening in the world have become more diverse. Moreover, the better-educated generations born in the 1990s and 2000s are joining the internet population, and they tend to think more on their own instead of being completely influenced by the narratives of mainstream media.

If China’s state-controlled media cannot even be entirely successful in swinging public opinion in China, should the outside world be less worried about Chinese media’s facilitating role for Moscow’s information campaigns?

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Yao Bowen is a master’s graduate from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. Li Mingjiang is an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.