Chinese social media propaganda targets India and its tourism sector
Campaign highlights hygiene, safety and transport issues in India
China uses influencers to shape its narratives globally
After its alleged propaganda about the Indian Rafale jet losses during Operation Sindoor, China has launched another campaign to target India, specifically its tourism sector.
India Today's Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) team has uncovered at least 100 accounts on Chinese social media platform Weibo and YouTube amplifying videos to portray India as a filthy, unwelcoming and unsafe destination for foreign travellers.
To lend credibility to their campaign, these accounts selectively pick up parts from vlogs of Western influencers complaining about certain aspects of Indian life, during their visit.
The propaganda campaign features five edited videos focusing on areas where India has struggled to improve, such as public hygiene, cleanliness, public transport, urban road traffic management and women's safety.
The campaign started on Weibo on July 17 with a widely shared video of a British influencer, who visited India after China. The clip, accompanying a hashtag in Chinese which loosely translates to "British internet celebrity who complained about China, breaks down in India", shows her breaking down in tears, saying, "I feel stupid about complaining about China." The Chinese hashtag was used on popular social media platform Weibo. SELECTIVE EDITS
Clips part of the propaganda campaign were selectively edited to show Western influencers criticising India and praising China. Videos of influencers who visited both India and China are included in this campaign. The edited videos were shared with Chinese subtitles and voice-over narration, tailoring the content for domestic audiences.
But the reality is somehow different.
Though the criticism of India's poor public cleanliness and women's safety by foreign tourists is a harsh reality, their perception is not as black and white as these Chinese propagandists try to frame.
In their original videos, these foreign influencers point out flaws where they see them and praise things they find alluring. For instance, a vlog on the Australia-based "Travel for Phoebe" YouTube channel documents an incident of harassment while praising Indian food and scenic destinations in Rajasthan's Udaipur.
The Chinese propaganda campaign, however, picks up only the part where harassment is reported. CAMPAIGN ON YOUTUBE
The campaign wasn't limited to Weibo. At least four Chinese YouTube channels uploaded similar content, featuring foreign influencers.
Propaganda videos on YouTube, dozens in number, carry provocative and derogatory titles such as, "Are Chinese toilets cleaner than Indian restaurants?", "The worst country on earth" and "Bloggers went to India happily, went home crying".
China is known to use social media influencers in influence operations targeting other countries to boost its image, and promote its narrative and interests.
Earlier this month, China announced a programme inviting US content creators on a 10-day, fully sponsored trip to promote its positive image, as per Bloomberg. Last year, Indian security agencies flagged several Indian influencers whose travel and production expenses were allegedly funded by China to create content promoting a pro-China narrative.
After its alleged propaganda about the Indian Rafale jet losses during Operation Sindoor, China has launched another campaign to target India, specifically its tourism sector.
India Today's Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) team has uncovered at least 100 accounts on Chinese social media platform Weibo and YouTube amplifying videos to portray India as a filthy, unwelcoming and unsafe destination for foreign travellers.
To lend credibility to their campaign, these accounts selectively pick up parts from vlogs of Western influencers complaining about certain aspects of Indian life, during their visit.
The propaganda campaign features five edited videos focusing on areas where India has struggled to improve, such as public hygiene, cleanliness, public transport, urban road traffic management and women's safety.
The campaign started on Weibo on July 17 with a widely shared video of a British influencer, who visited India after China. The clip, accompanying a hashtag in Chinese which loosely translates to "British internet celebrity who complained about China, breaks down in India", shows her breaking down in tears, saying, "I feel stupid about complaining about China." The Chinese hashtag was used on popular social media platform Weibo. SELECTIVE EDITS
Clips part of the propaganda campaign were selectively edited to show Western influencers criticising India and praising China. Videos of influencers who visited both India and China are included in this campaign. The edited videos were shared with Chinese subtitles and voice-over narration, tailoring the content for domestic audiences.
But the reality is somehow different.
Though the criticism of India's poor public cleanliness and women's safety by foreign tourists is a harsh reality, their perception is not as black and white as these Chinese propagandists try to frame.
In their original videos, these foreign influencers point out flaws where they see them and praise things they find alluring. For instance, a vlog on the Australia-based "Travel for Phoebe" YouTube channel documents an incident of harassment while praising Indian food and scenic destinations in Rajasthan's Udaipur.
The Chinese propaganda campaign, however, picks up only the part where harassment is reported. CAMPAIGN ON YOUTUBE
The campaign wasn't limited to Weibo. At least four Chinese YouTube channels uploaded similar content, featuring foreign influencers.
Propaganda videos on YouTube, dozens in number, carry provocative and derogatory titles such as, "Are Chinese toilets cleaner than Indian restaurants?", "The worst country on earth" and "Bloggers went to India happily, went home crying".
China is known to use social media influencers in influence operations targeting other countries to boost its image, and promote its narrative and interests.
Earlier this month, China announced a programme inviting US content creators on a 10-day, fully sponsored trip to promote its positive image, as per Bloomberg. Last year, Indian security agencies flagged several Indian influencers whose travel and production expenses were allegedly funded by China to create content promoting a pro-China narrative. Join our WhatsApp Channel
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Mint
25 minutes ago
- Mint
Trump slaps 25% tariffs on ‘friend' India starting August 1, plus ‘penalty' for ‘buying Russian oil'
President Donald Trump announced a 25 per cent tariff on Indian goods starting August 1, citing India's high trade barriers and continued energy and defense ties with Russia. More details are being added
Hindustan Times
25 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
How China Is Girding for an AI Battle With the U.S.
China is ramping up efforts to build a domestic artificial-intelligence ecosystem that can function without Western technology, as it steels itself for a protracted tech contest with the U.S. Washington has been trying to slow China's AI progress through export controls and other restrictions that limit Chinese access to U.S. capital, talent and advanced U.S. technologies. To an extent, those restrictions have worked. But China is fighting back with expanding efforts to become more self-sufficient in AI—a push that could ultimately make it less vulnerable to U.S. pressure if it succeeds. Many of the initiatives were on display at an AI conference that ended this week in Shanghai, which Chinese authorities used as a showcase for products free of U.S. technologies. One startup, Shanghai-based StepFun, touted a new AI model that it said required less computing power and memory than other systems, making it more compatible with Chinese-made semiconductors. Although Chinese chips are less capable than American products, Huawei Technologies and other companies have been narrowing the gap by clustering more chips together, boosting their performance. China also released an AI global governance plan at the event, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which called for establishing an international open-source community through which AI models can be freely deployed and improved by users. Industry participants say it showed China's ambition to set global standards for AI and could undermine the U.S., whose leading models aren't open-source. The conference followed a series of announcements and investments in China aimed at turbocharging its AI capabilities, including rapid expansions in power generation and skills training. The whole-nation effort, led by Beijing, includes billions of dollars in spending by state-owned enterprises, private companies and local governments. China's securities regulator has largely refrained from approving initial public offerings of companies whose businesses aren't related to 'hard tech' sectors such as semiconductors and AI, so that capital can concentrate on funding technologies of strategic importance, people involved in the process said. China's AI push has included the expansion of skills robots boxing at the AI conference in Shanghai. Victory in the global AI race carries high stakes. AI is expected to upend economies and militaries, and leadership in the sector is seen as critical to future global influence and national security. The U.S. maintains its early lead, with Silicon Valley home to the most popular AI models and the most powerful chips. Much of China's AI spending has led to waste and overcapacity. China also clearly wants U.S. technologies. Access to advanced chips has been a priority for Chinese negotiators in trade talks, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Sales of Nvidia's H20 AI chips to China were recently restored by Washington after it restricted them in April, a reversal seen by Beijing as a gesture of good faith in the talks. The Trump administration is taking steps to try to preserve the U.S.'s lead. It recently announced an AI 'action plan,' which aims to slash red tape and make it easier for tech companies to build data centers needed to train AI models. Earlier this year at the White House, OpenAI and Japan's SoftBank unveiled a $500 billion effort to build new AI data centers, though the project has faced delays. China, though, has shown a willingness to spend whatever it takes. The rising popularity of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup, has buoyed Beijing's hopes that it can become more self-sufficient. Huawei has published several papers this year detailing how its researchers used its homegrown chips to build large language models without relying on American technology. 'China is obviously making progress in hardening its AI and computing ecosystem,' said Michael Frank, founder of think tank Seldon Strategies. 'Project Spare Tire' China's biggest AI challenge is overcoming its difficulty in sourcing the world's most-advanced chips. Washington has cut China off from some of Nvidia's most sophisticated semiconductors, as well as the advanced machine tools used to make cutting-edge chips, restrictions that many experts believe will continue to hold China back. Huawei is helping spearhead efforts to navigate those restrictions. During a meeting with President Xi Jinping in February, Chief Executive Officer Ren Zhengfei told Xi about 'Project Spare Tire,' an effort by Huawei and 2,000 other enterprises to help China's semiconductor sector achieve a self-sufficiency rate of 70% by 2028, according to people familiar with the meeting. Increasingly, the company has been able to bundle together the best chips it can produce to match the performance of some American computing systems. That is helping local companies reach some of the same computing goals as the U.S., such as training state-of-the-art generative AI models, though it consumes more power than U.S. chips. U.S. researcher SemiAnalysis recently reported that one such Huawei cluster, which connects 384 of its Ascend chips, outperforms Nvidia's flagship system with 72 graphics-processing units on some metrics. Morgan Stanley analysts forecast that China will have 82% of AI chips from domestic makers by 2027, up from 34% in 2024. China's government has played an important role, funding new chip initiatives and other projects. In July, the local government in Shenzhen, where Huawei is based, said it was raising around $700 million to invest in strengthening an 'independent and controllable' semiconductor supply chain. Prodded by Beijing, Chinese financial institutions, state-owned companies and government agencies have rushed to deploy Chinese-made AI models, including DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen. That has fueled demand for homegrown AI technologies and fostered domestic supply chains. Some companies ordered expensive AI servers to deploy the models even before they came up with a use for the technology, according to people familiar with the matter. Open-source advantage At the Shanghai conference, organized by China's government and featuring more than 800 companies, Chinese researchers played down the impact of U.S. export controls on advanced chips. They compared notes on how they were focusing on overcoming bottlenecks through better model designs and engineering techniques. Many also touted Chinese companies' tendency to give users free access to modify and deploy their AI models, an open-source approach that has boosted adoption of Chinese models globally. While the world's best large language model is still American, the best model that everyone can use free is now Chinese. According to benchmark provider Artificial Analysis, the overall performance of China's best open-weight model has surpassed the American champion since November. In recent weeks, a flurry of Chinese companies have flooded the market with open-source models, many of which are claiming to surpass DeepSeek's performance in certain use cases. OpenAI's Sam Altman said his company had pushed back the release of its open-source model indefinitely for further safety testing. Talent and power China is also investing heavily in other areas, including more electricity to power domestic data centers to develop and run AI. It is spending $564 billion on grid construction projects in the five years up to 2030, an increase of more than 40% from the previous five years, Morgan Stanley researchers forecast. China currently has about 2.5 times as much power-generation capacity as the U.S., a disparity that is projected to grow larger in the next five years despite the U.S. expanding power generation. China has also approved more than 600 colleges to set up degree programs in AI, according to data released by the country's Ministry of Education in April. That is up from 35 universities with such programs in 2019. In Beijing, primary and secondary schools will begin mandatory AI lessons for students starting in September. China's efforts have already enabled it to develop a robust pipeline of homegrown talent, according to researchers from the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, who recently evaluated the backgrounds of more than 200 authors involved in DeepSeek's papers between 2024 and February 2025. More than half of these DeepSeek researchers never left China for schooling or work, they found. The U.S. has fewer universities that offer AI degree programs, but American universities dominate rankings for computer and information science. This April, President Trump signed an executive order mandating AI education and learning opportunities for American youth. Write to Raffaele Huang at and Liza Lin at How China Is Girding for an AI Battle With the U.S. How China Is Girding for an AI Battle With the U.S.
&w=3840&q=100)
First Post
25 minutes ago
- First Post
Tsunami warning: Is there any threat to India? What about Indians in US, Japan?
An 8.8-magnitude earthquake in the Kamchatka Peninsula has triggered a tsunami in Japan, Russia and the US. However, there is no threat to India. Meanwhile, the Indian embassy in San Francisco has issued an advisory, urging nationals to 'be prepared for emergencies' and set up an emergency helpline read more Soon after tsunami warnings were issued for the US West Coast and Hawaii, the Consulate General of India in San Francisco put out an advisory for Indian citizens living in affected regions. Image for Representation. Reuters A massive 8.8‑magnitude earthquake struck Russia's remote Kamchatka Peninsula on Wednesday, triggering tsunamis as far away as Japan, Hawaii, and the US West Coast. The tremor, which is now tied as the sixth‑largest earthquake ever recorded, has put coastal communities on high alert and sparked a wave of emergency evacuations. With a large population of Indian nationals living in Russia, the US and Japan, the disaster has raised concerns about their safety. Not only this, but worries whether India's own coastlines are also at risk of facing a potential tsunami are present. Here's what we know STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'Be prepared for an emergency': Indian embassy in the US Soon after tsunami warnings were issued for the US West Coast and Hawaii, the Consulate General of India in San Francisco put out an advisory for Indian citizens living in affected regions. 'The Consulate General of India in San Francisco is monitoring the potential tsunami threat following the recent 8.7 magnitude earthquake off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Indian nationals in California, other US West Coast states, and Hawaii are advised to take the following steps Monitor official alerts from US authorities Move to higher ground immediately if a tsunami alert is issued Avoid coastal areas Be prepared for emergencies and keep devices fully charged,' the advisory read. An emergency helpline number (+1‑415‑483‑6629) and email support have also been set up to assist Indian nationals in the US. 🚨🚨🚨 The Consulate General of India in San Francisco is monitoring the potential tsunami threat following the recent 8.7 magnitude earthquake off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Indian nationals in California, other US West Coast states, and Hawaii are advised to take the… — India in SF (@CGISFO) July 30, 2025 In the United States, tsunami sirens sounded in Honolulu as waves up to 5 feet high reached Hawaii. Emergency shelters have been opened, and residents in Honolulu have been urged to move to higher ground. Read latest updates on the tsunami warnings Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed waves over 4 feet were recorded in Haleiwa, on the north shore of Oahu Island in Hawaii. Much of the US West Coast, including Canada's British Columbia, Washington state and California, remains under a tsunami advisory. India's Consulate General in Seattle also issued an advisory saying, 'National Weather Service USA has issued Tsunami Advisories along parts of the US West Coast, including areas in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. Indian citizens in these areas are advised to follow advisories issued by local government authorities and take necessary precautions to ensure safety. In case of any emergency, CGI Seattle may be contacted at Helpline: +1 (206) 608-0608.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Tsunami Advisory National Weather Service USA has issued Tsunami Advisories along parts of the U.S. West Coast, including areas in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. Indian citizens in the these areas are advised to follow advisories issued by local government authorities and take… — India In Seattle (@IndiainSeattle) July 30, 2025 The massive earthquake in Russia has been described as the 'strongest in decades' by Russia's Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov. According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake was recorded at a depth of 19.3 km, centred 119 km east-southeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The agency had initially labelled the earthquake as 8.0 magnitude but revised it later. Strong aftershocks of magnitude 6.9 were also felt in the region. More such are expected. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD ALSO READ | Why earthquake in Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula is dangerous Japan urges caution, evacuation near coasts In Japan, tsunami waves began hitting multiple areas along the country's eastern coastline, from the northern island of Hokkaido down to large parts of Honshu, including regions close to the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi urged people living near the coast to act without delay. 'Those near the coast should evacuate immediately to higher ground or safe buildings in the areas covered by the tsunami warning from Hokkaido to Wakayama Prefecture. Please be aware that after the initial wave, second and third waves of tsunamis can be even higher,' he said. So far, waves measuring up to 60 centimetres have been recorded, significantly lower than the earlier prediction of three metres. More than 1.9 million people across 21 prefectures in Japan are now under evacuation advisories. In Hokkaido, local media reported that some residents had taken shelter on the rooftops of tall buildings to stay out of danger. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD As of June 2025, data from the Indian embassy in Tokyo showed that 51,345 Indian nationals reside in Japan. Tsunami advisories, watches and warnings have also been issued in several other countries around the Pacific, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Taiwan Are India's coasts safe? Amid rising anxiety back home, the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) has confirmed that India's coastlines face no risk from the Pacific tsunami triggered by the Russian quake. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'There is no tsunami threat to India or the Indian Ocean region,' INCOIS said in a statement posted on X. Experts explained that the quake's epicentre lies deep within the Pacific Ring of Fire, a seismically active zone known for generating most of the world's strongest earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. While tsunami alerts remain in place for several northern Pacific regions, no evacuation advisories have been issued for any part of India. INCOIS also confirmed that its Tsunami Early Warning Centre in Hyderabad is operating round the clock and continues to track developments to ensure public safety. With input from agencies
