Memetic Warfare Weekly: The Chinese are Meming, The Chinese are Meming!

My name is Ari Ben Am, and I’m the founder of Telemetry Data Labs - a Telegram search engine and analytics platform available at Telemetryapp.io - and Glowstick Intelligence Enablement.

For those curious, I’m now merging my Glowstick activity under the auspices of Telemetry, so feel free to contact me via LinkedIn or ari@telemetryapp.io for any inquiries.

This week we’ll take a look at the broader Chinese ecosystem and how it can attempt to influence discourse in minimal time and apparently minimal quality.

The story begins with one Tom Cotton, an American senator known for his controversial takes on the use of military force against Americans as published in the New York Times.

Cotton asked some silly questions of Shou Zi Chew, the TikToker-in-Chief, some silly questions in which he either played dumb about not knowing the difference between Singapore and China (possible), or alternatively he did this to score political points by being hard on China (perhaps more possible):

A Twitter user of much refinement then posted, in response, a King of the Hill screenshot. KOTH is one of the best shows out there and I personally am a huge fan, so I had to share it. However, this post, which went viral, receiving hundreds of thousands of views, was then identified and (poorly) I might add, adapted by one Shen Shiwei.

Shiwei then posted this himself as a separate Tweet, receiving tens of thousands of views.

For those who don’t closely follow Chinese state media, Shen Shiwei is a contributor to CGTN who (gasp) doesn’t overtly affiliate himself with CGTN, with the exception of his LinkedIn profile.

Nor is he tagged as state media on Facebook and Twitter at least. Interestingly, his Facebook page formerly served as the page for the PRC mission to the African Union, so that’s a fun fact.

He could clearly use the added virality of a good meme - despite having over 140,000 followers on Facebook, he has just over 130 subscribers on YouTube and consistently gets 5-10 views per video.

From here, this meme blew up. Other covert Chinese influencers began to post it, and of course the broader CGTN/Chinese state media affiliates began to post it en-masse, often just reposting with minimal other effort:

I noticed essentially all of the leading pro-China discourse/propaganda/IO accounts promoting the same specific meme, and in a broader sense the general line. I’ll spare you the specifics, but search the keywords on your platform of choice and reverse-image search the meme and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I’ll spare everyone the harsher content, but there’s a fair amount of much more vitriolic content regarding Cotton online now from Chinese accounts.

Over the course of a few hours to half day, this meme went viral. Shen even took the time to create a video specifically on this topic in which he claims that Cotton’s behavior “reminds [him] of a famous clip - Hank Hill”. I can only imagine being the state media staffer now tasked with watching 12 seasons of KOTH to mine it for memes!

Shen should really give the original poster of the meme some credit here!

This affair of course made it to the Global Times, where they found a new way to confusingly merge two of the more common meme formats out there to make it simpler.

Frankly I doubt that the Global Times has the ability to fully grasp the American Chopper meme and utilize it on such short notice.

Over the span of less than a day, we saw one tweet blow up from one humble Twitter user, eventually reaching Chinese state media and beyond. This shows the capabilities that decentralized networks, that don’t necessarily need direct directions from above, can have when it comes to making the most of a specific opportunity.

That’s it for this week!