Beijing, China (GVO) – On May 17, a hacker nicknamed XiaoLan leaked a package of emails revealing details of the recruitment of college students by the Shanghai League of Communist Youth, one of the most significant Chinese Communist Party organizations under the single party regime. The students serve as voluntary online commentators that spread positive energy and “purify” the internet.
The existence of the commentators is not a state-secret: the latest round of massive recruitment was revealed in a document issued by the China Communist Youth League back in February which set the target of recruiting no less than 20 percent of its members to serve as “civilization volunteers” by spreading positive energy and acting as models for “good netizens”.
The League had more than 89 million members at the end of 2013, which means it must recruit around 18 million “civilization volunteers” to meet its target. The characters depicted in the sketch at the top of this post are two figurative examples of “civilization volunteers” posted by the Youth League in April on China’s Twitter-like Weibo.
Pro-government Internet commentators are a constant target for criticism by China’s netizens, who give them the sarcastic nickname of “wumaodang” or “50 Cent Party” in English, since it is said that they receive a typical payment of half a Chinese Yuan per post, equivalent to 8 cents in U.S. dollar terms.
Though the nature of their work is similar, the “civilization volunteers” are political loyalists who do not receive payment at all. The hacker’s revelation shows that the League mobilized its members for internet-civilizing via its college sub-branches.
The leak is a zipped package of around 11.49 gigabytes in size, consisting of nearly 10,000 emails with a number of attachments. Most of the emails address the routine activities of the Youth League in local college and high schools, detailing statistics of League activities, how many league cadres are in each college, reports on student opinion about recent social events, and manuscripts from leaders’ speeches.
Within this vast archive, some emails with subject lines such as “Form of Establishing Youth League Online Civilization Volunteers Division in Shanghai’s Colleges” and “Registration Form of Online Civilization Volunteers’ Basic Information,” provide an interesting glimpse into the operation of “youth civilization volunteers” in higher education institutions.
Some of the attachments contain spreadsheets counting “youth civilization volunteers” in each college, and listing personal information — job titles, QQ, WeChat and Weibo accounts, as well as mobile phone numbers.
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Other files specifically recorded students’ publicity assignments on Weibo and WeChat. Their responsibilities involve posting enthusiastic comments on key events and themes. The volume of views, reposts and comments for each post are subsequently recorded in spreadsheets to monitor performance. Tasks vary from publicizing “Xi Jinping’s speech” and “My China Dream” to “commemorate the Nanjing massacre.” The term “China Dream” is a political theme under Xi’s leadership to unify the nation and the people.
A document “Notice of Establishing Youth League Online Propaganda Division in Shanghai’s Colleges” lists six responsibilities for the online propaganda team:
Yang Kangling, like many China’s netizens, who despise pro-government Internet commentators, raged at the phenomenon of students blindly distributing propaganda:
Twitter user Jian Alan Huang believes the civilization volunteers are “more harmful” than the 50 Cent Party, precisely because they fully believe in what they are doing:
The government mouthpiece People’s Daily reported on April 16 that the recruitment of civilization volunteers was proceeding at pace in many provinces, including Jiangxi, Hunan, Henan, Guangdong, Hubei, Gansu, Xinjiang, Hebei and Anhui.