The Chinese government institution with the biggest social media following goes to...the nationwide anti-vice campaign called "Strike the four blacks, Eliminate the four harms." Da Sihei, Chu Sihai in Mandarin, the four blacks and four harms are: workshops that make counterfeit or tainted drugs and food; factories that produce fake or pirated goods; black markets that sell stolen products; and black dens of gambling, prostitution, and drugs. The three-year-old account on China's Twitter, Sina Weibo, celebrated its anniversary on August 28 with a media get-together in Beijing attended by the country's top cops, including the Chief of Domestic Security Meng Jianzhu. It's just a Weibo feed, but Meng was effusive. "To become the first government body in the country to attract more than 10 million followers on Sina Weibo is not an easy task and is something to celebrate," Meng said. He urged his law and order colleagues to develop more social media brands in the "Dasihei" mold.
That's a tall order. Part of the secret to the account's success is that it's unexpectedly full of clickbait. Dasihei's posts are a mix of facepalm-inducing crime blotter snippets from around China, public service announcements, and tributes to heroic or fallen police. One post put up on the account's anniversary was about a 10-year-old boy in the southern city of Guiyang who cut the safety rope of a construction worker outside his apartment because the man's drilling had interrupted his cartoons. The worker clung to the outside of the boy's eighth floor apartment for forty minutes before being rescued. And Dasihei doesn't just post news like this. It also needles readers for feedback. In the case of the cartoon boy, readers were invited to express their opinions about the kid's behavior: predictably, the readers who responded were outraged.
Other recent tweets include a tearjerker about a six-year-old autistic boy abandoned at the gate of a welfare center in south China's Sichuan province, and a cautionary shocker about a 53-year-old driver who was sentenced to a year in jail after she killed a person on a scooter by opening the door of her car. Heartbreaking photos of the boy at the gate accompanied the first story and a series of cringe-worthy videos of scooters getting nailed by car doors accompanied the latter. Public service-type posts include one from August 28 that gives women seven illustrated tips on how not to fall victim to a gypsy cab rapist or murderer. A sampling: always sit in the back seat, don't give your phone number to the driver, and leave the window open for ventilation to prevent being drugged.
Given the content, the public security celebration of Dasihei seems a little off-color. But Meng is probably smart to spotlight his successes when he can. His former boss Zhou Yongkang is in the grip of a massive graft probe that can't help but make Meng nervous. And President Xi Jinping has urged government officials to be more plainspoken, more in touch with the ordinary people and to get up to speed on social media.
The Dasihei anniversary event made it look like Meng was meticulously toeing the Xi line, and perhaps also tap dancing as fast as he can. (Xi himself doesn't maintain a Weibo presence but there has been speculation that his team could be behind the "Study Xi Fan Club," an account that has 2 million followers and faithfully tracks his activities.) The Deputy Minister of Public Security, Huang Ming, told assembled media at the anniversary event that since its launch, Dasihei has generated 16,000 posts, including 5,500 so far this year, with 250 million shares and 950,000 comments. He said the account had been rated both the top government agency feed and the top government ministry feed by Weibo users.
But it's hardly the overall Weibo leader. It's still a government feed after all. Olympic diver turned actor Tian Liang and Beijing law professor Xu Xin both have more than 14 million followers. Jason Ng, author of Blocked On Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China's Version of Twitter (And Why) told Foreign Policy that one key to Dasihei's popularity could be that new Weibo users are being prompted to follow the feed along with other promoted public service feeds when they first create their accounts. "It's a tactic that is indeed used to pump up the numbers of other governmental/public security accounts," he said. While 10 million is "nothing to sneeze at," Ng added, it's far from a Weibo heavyweight. Even state-run media accounts like People's Daily and CCTV have far more fans than Dasihei, with 24 million and 22 million followers, respectively.
And Dasihei has its critics. Wen Yunchao, a New York-based Chinese blogger and free speech advocate, told Foreign Policy that he finds the political rhetoric on accounts like Dasihei "extremely disgusting." "I don't follow accounts like that and, if there is a worthwhile piece of news on it, I know that the people I do follow will steer it my way." Still, others are more welcoming of any Chinese government experimentation in the realm of public relations. Social media is a big challenge for a system that many see as opaque and unresponsive. One Weibo user tweeting under the handle "Seeking Justice_86119," in Baotou, an industrial city in north China's Inner Mongolia region, replied to Meng's celebratory remarks with words of encouragement. "I support you," wrote the man and addressed Meng directly as he described the hard time that ordinary Chinese have in getting their grievances to the right official. He said there were all kinds of bureaucratic roadblocks between citizens and the central government. "Using new media can bypass those channels," he said, proving his point with his tweet. Whether Meng is reading, however, is another question.