China Looks To Cartoons, Social Media To Form A Patriotic Generation

China has a long history of focusing on the political education of new generations. Under the guidance of President Xi Jinping, however, the Chinese Communist Party has turned to social media and cartoons to instill sympathetic attitudes in the nation’s children.

Pro-China propaganda has become the norm in recent years. A multi-pronged effort to spread nationalistic sentiment across the internet has found great success through appealing imagery and sheer scale.

The Chinese Communist Youth League updated its practices in 2016, expanding onto more social media sites to focus on youth outreach. Its video account on Chinese social media platform Bilibili rivals that of CNN on YouTube, despite Bilibili’s comparatively small reach.

An example of the new style of propaganda is a children’s cartoon called Year Hare Affair, which depicts international events with a heavy pro-China bias using animals to represent countries. Cute Chinese rabbits are placed in opposition to the villainous American bald eagle, surprising him with the development of an atom bomb or foiling his plot to destabilize Hong Kong with the help of scheming cockroaches.