China's teenage spin doctors

 

A week ago, an unusual job advertisement popped up on a Chinese university website.

Mianyang University is recruiting volunteer internet commentators, the post explained.
The university in southwest China's Sichuan province wanted "patriots who would cheer China's progress" and "rebut online slander about China, using statistics to unpick lies in order to sway the majority".
In short, the university wanted to hire students to work as unpaid internet spin doctors.
It's long been known that China employs legions of people to plant comments on the internet in support of the Chinese government. They're often called "Fifty Centers", since the state pays 50 Chinese cents for each pro-government message posted online.
Typical pro-government commentators write in support of controversial government policies, or major public campaigns, hoping to sway the public.
The Mianyang University advertisement is unusual because it reveals the Communist Party's use of young people to influence what's said on the internet - a programme that's often hidden from view.

CV booster

Across China, large groups of young people are working as government cheerleaders, many of them just teenagers. Most become involved as part of their initial attempts to join the ranks of the Communist Party, a bureaucratic process that often takes years.
A select few join the party because they agree with its ideology, but a large number see membership as a CV booster, a necessity in a tough job market.
For hundreds of thousands of young people, internet commentating is another step on the ladder.
China's eastern Fujian province has 157,553 commentators, according to an email from the Communist Youth League. More than half of them are teenagers, aged 14 to 18, the email explains.
One senior student from a university in China's central Hubei province agreed to explain the practice of hiring internet commentators, or "youth volunteers for internet civilisation", as he calls them.
He didn't want his name used, but he told us that two years ago he built a team of 500 commentators when serving as the head of his school's youth league.
"Most of the students I recruited are class cadres and the applicants for party membership," he explained. "The more politically correct their behaviour, the easier and faster they get promoted. It is kind of compulsory."
At first, the team was built to refute negative rumours about the university. But later, the student says, things changed, and "we started to challenge political rumours instead".