‘Wolf warriors’ on social media
In recent months, China experts have noticed dozens of new and highly active official social media accounts representing Chinese embassies and leading diplomats.
This has become known as “wolf warrior” diplomacy. The best-known account belongs to Zhao Lijian from the Chinese foreign ministry.
He caused controversy in March after tweeting articles suggesting that coronavirus originated in the United States.
The US and China traded unverified theories about the origins of coronavirus
Those tweets have been shared more than 40,000 times and referenced in 54 different languages, according to research from the Digital Forensic Research Lab, part of the Atlantic Council think tank.
Popular hashtags referencing the posts have made waves at home too – they’ve been viewed by users of Chinese social network Weibo more than 300 million times.
In December, Zhao Lijian was widely criticised for sharing a fake image of an Australian soldier killing an Afghan child, for which China refused to apologise.