BEIJING - The video posted in 2023 on Chinese social media showed more than 100 Japanese children, supposedly at an elementary school in Shanghai, gathered in their schoolyard.

Chinese subtitles quoted two students leading the group as screaming: “Shanghai is ours. Soon the whole China will be ours too.” The messages were alarming and infuriating in China, which Japan invaded during World War II.

Except that the scene actually took place at an elementary school in Japan. And the students were not stoking hatred of China; they were swearing an oath to play fair at what looked like a sporting event.

The video was not taken down until after it had been viewed more than 10 million times.

Xenophobic online content like the schoolyard video is the subject of debate in China right now.

Last week, a Chinese man stabbed a Japanese woman and her son in eastern China. Two weeks earlier, four visiting instructors from a college in Iowa were stabbed in north-eastern China.

Some in China are questioning the role that online speech plays in inciting real-world violence.

China has the world’s most sophisticated system to censor the internet when it wants to. The government sets strict rules about what can and cannot be said about politics, economics, society and the country’s leadership.

Internet companies deploy an army of censors. Private citizens censor themselves, knowing that what they post can get their social media accounts deleted or, worse, land them in jail.

Yet the Chinese internet is laden with hate speech towards Japanese, Americans, Jews and Africans, as well as Chinese who are critical of the government.

False information about Japan and the United States regularly tops lists of popular searches and receives a ton of reposts and likes.

What is happening online is influenced by the rising nationalism that has been promoted in China under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.

In 2023, China spread disinformation about the safety of the Japanese government’s decision to release treated radioactive water from the ruined Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the ocean.

There was fear and outrage about what was known in China as “nuclear-contaminated wastewater.”

After Mr Liu wrote several articles challenging what was being said, someone reported him to the internet regulator in Shanghai.

Mr Liu deleted the article, posted an apology and promised to stay away from commenting on current affairs. Then, his public WeChat social media account was suspended for six months.

Mr Liu is one of a number of Chinese intellectuals who have voiced their concerns about the online condemnation of foreigners.

In another article on WeChat in 2024, he criticised the trend of praising traditional Chinese medicine while belittling Western medicine. He was reported again.

“If the backbone of a society is completely submerged by the tide of nationalism, the future fate of the country is predictable,” he wrote.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokespeople said the recent attacks on foreigners were isolated crimes. The local authorities have not shared much information. But on social media, many comments praised the attacks and the perpetrators.

On June 28, Chinese people learnt that a 52-year-old woman named Hu Youping, who had tried to stop the attack on the Japanese mother and son in eastern China, had died from her injuries.

Many people mourned her on social media. Some said they wondered if the crime, targeting Japanese people, had anything to do with China’s nationalistic online environment.

In a rare move, China’s biggest internet platforms issued notices over the weekend that they were cracking down on hate speech that targeted Japanese and incited extreme nationalism.

The questions are: How long will this continue? How much can it change an ecosystem that has been breeding hatred? And what will happen when it is politically convenient for the government to use Japan and the US as the bogeyman again?

The notices themselves got many nasty comments.

“In this grand drama that plays out every day, some are directors, some are actors, some set the stage while the others are the audience,” wrote Mr Peng Yuanwen, a former journalist.

He called the attacker in June’s incident a victim of nationalistic brainwashing.

“He became too deeply immersed in the play, finding it difficult to extricate himself,” Mr Peng said. NYTIMES