Discussion Regarding the Peoples Republic of China
https://theprint.in/opinion/eye-on-chin ... t/1145361/Despite claims of a ‘coup’ and political turmoil linked to Xi’s ‘flight cancellation’ being debunked, The Epoch Times hasn’t given up backing them.
The rumours of a coup in Zhongnanhai and Xi Jinping’s ‘house arrest’ dominated all trends on Twitter from 24 to 26 September. But at the heart of the rumours is a sprawling media ecosystem backed by the Chinese religious movement ‘Falun Gong’. Falun Gong considers the whole of the Chinese Communist Party a mortal enemy and evil. The Epoch Times and the New Tang Dynasty TV are part of the Falun Gong-backed media ecosystem, which provides news to the overseas Chinese community in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Europe, and Singapore.
Within the Chinese dissident community, YouTubers like Jennifer Zeng are ardent followers of Falun Gong and amplify stories produced by its media ecosystem.
The Xi Jinping ‘coup’ rumour was first picked up by New Tang Dynasty. The TV channel cited a former journalist and now dissident named Zhao Lanjian, who made some minor flight cancellations sound far more sensational than they were. But that’s the everyday bread and butter of the Falun Gong-backed media. A combination of factors made the rumour circulate widely, and Indian social media users played a role. Since the Covid pandemic started, the Falun Gong media has become an outsized influence on the Indian media space. Jennifer Zeng is given a regular platform in Indian TV debates on China, including appearing on Times Now, StratNewsGlobal, TV9Bharat, and others. Zeng’s YouTube channel is also hugely popular among the Indian audience interested in China.
A social media handle named ‘Nepal Correspondence’ was the first in the subcontinent to pick up the rumours from the Falun Gong-backed media, which later circulated on India Twitter. On 23 September, ‘Nepal Correspondence’ repeated the claims initially appearing in Zeng’s YouTube video about Xi Jinping getting ‘arrested’.
The rise of a Chinese ‘alt-media’
The Epoch Times, a once-obscure newspaper handed for free on the streets of New York and Toronto, began to rise in prominence after the newspaper aligned with former US President Donald Trump’s political movement. The newspaper’s popularity started to rise in prominence around 2016 and 2017.
The Falun Gong religious movement came into the spotlight after media outlets tied to the movement gained an outsized influence within the US’ conservative politics and populism – especially supporters of Trump. The Falun Gong-backed media tried to throw their weight around when Joe Biden won the election too. The Epoch Times published extensively to cement the theory of voter fraud started by Trump to sway the US election results.
According to NBC, The Epoch Media Group spent over $1.5 million on about 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements in 2019. Its revenue almost quadrupled since the beginning of the Trump presidency, and the newspaper was endorsed by the former president himself.
In 2017, The Epoch Times leadership envisioned a new future for the paper with a Facebook strategy that included turning the paper into a hub of alternative media and spreading Falun Gong ideology around the world, according to a New York Times report. Now, The Epoch Times has over 535,000 subscribers on YouTube. The management’s gamble to turn the media group into a gigantic alt-media operation has worked, confirmed by a study of the group’s growing influence on Germany’s media space.
The media house reports in French, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Russian and German, apart from Chinese and English.