this is the full report:
******qz. com/311832/hacked-emails-reveal-chinas-elaborate-and-absurd-internet-propaganda-machine/
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"There are at least 5,000 districts this size or bigger,” said Qiang Xiao, editor of China Digital Times (CDT), a news site affiliated with the University of California Berkeley that first reported on the emails.
Despite its small size, Zhanggong employs nearly 300 wangpingyuan, or “internet commentators,” according to the emails.
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he 50-cent party is everywhere
Ganzhou’s urban population is roughly 1.9 million, according to the latest government figures, making it a relatively small city by China’s standards. Zhanggong district is Ganzhou’s administrative center and home to about 460,000 people.
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Among the hacked documents are instructions to paid commenters, their posting quotas, and summaries of their activity. The emails reveal hundreds of thousands of messages sent to Chinese microblogging and social media services like Sina Weibo, Tencent, and various internet forums, including working links to the actual posts. All told, they demonstrate the Chinese state’s wide reach on the internet, even at the lowest levels of government.
Zhanggong’s propaganda department comes across as surprisingly large, yet comically unsophisticated. To get a sense of its inner workings, Quartz examined emails related to a single event: an online Q&A with the local Communist Party secretary earlier this year. What we found was a Potemkin online village of adoring citizens posting favorable messages and easy questions—all manufactured by the propaganda department.
“NOTICE: We request every internet commenter carry out the following task today,” begins an email from the supervisor.
It’s just another day in the propaganda department of Zhanggong, a district in southeast China’s modestly sized city of Ganzhou. Employees and freelancers are paid to post pro-government messages on the internet, part of a broader effort to “guide public opinion,” as the Chinese Communist Party frequently puts it.
The details of these directives are usually hidden from public view. But thousands of emails obtained from the Zhanggong propaganda department by a Chinese blogger—and released on his website—offer a rare view into the mechanics of manipulating web conversation in China at its most local level.