Leaked Emails Show How Vast China’s 50-Cent Army Is

It has been well known that China has paid online commenters that many in China call the “50-Cent Army” or “50-Cent Party”.  One of the 50-Cent Army used to regularly post here on ROK Drop.  Now due to leaked emails the size of China’s 50-Cent Army is now known; they have an incredible 89 million members:

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 in February 2015. The League set out to recruit 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.  [Global Voices]

You can read the rest at the link, but remember that these college students they recruit are also mobilized to do the government’s bidding in countries overseas.  Many ROK Heads may remember the Olympic Torch violence in Seoul perpetrated by Chinese college students mobilized by the Chinese embassy in 2008.