Just My Fifty Cents

Although the government employs tens of thousands of censors, and forces web administrators to take responsibility for the suppression and deletion of critical comment, it also takes action to ensure that pro-Party views appear in response to specific criticisms. It commands officials to post as if private citizens, often in vast numbers, in order to turn the tide of public opinion.

Rumour long had it that these lower-level civil servants were paid ¥0.50 (wǔ máo) for each posting of Party policy made in their own names. But some insisted to friends, who then repeated it on-line, that they were paid nothing at all. However a 2006 report from Ānhuī Province revealed that there were Internet commentators charged with ‘opinion guidance’ on salary, who were paid an additional ¥0.50 per posting, a payment subsequently offered in Húnán Province to all employees who wanted to participate, setting up a secret response network that could swiftly drown criticism in contrary opinions.

So on the Chinese Internet Wǔmáodāng (五毛党) or Fifty Cent Party is the pejorative name for organised supporters of the Communist Party both individually and collectively — wǔ máo for short — and often used as a logically weightless response to unconvincingly positive postings that attempt to excuse all Party wrongdoing.

The same ineffective riposte is now seen in below-the-line comment on the pages of major Western media sites, too, although it’s uncertain whether the names that appear again and again with often poor English and weak reasoning are indeed the government in thin disguise or a more recent phenomenon called zìgānwǔ (自干五), or BYOG50s (‘bring your own grain 50-centers’), who deliberately seek out any criticism of China and react to it with the standard propaganda without being paid at all.

The term is also applied to often ill-educated bloggers and micro-bloggers whose on-line efforts are all fawningly pro-Party and pro-all things Chinese, and whose simple-mindedly patriotic offerings are repeatedly praised by Xí Jìnpíng for their ‘positive energy’ (正能量, zhèng néngliàng) which he compares unfavourably with criticisms by intellectuals. The same term is being used in widespread suppression of critical analysis within universities.

Meanwhile the zìgānwǔ bloggers, who sometimes preen themselves on their ignorance, are pilloried on-line by other Chinese for their misquotations, miss-attributions, plagiarism, and general ignorance of the history, culture, and politics they set out to defend, and mocked overseas for their lack of logic and for wildly inaccurate claims about society and politics in the West.

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