(This is the expanded version of a series of tweets I posted on Monday; they’re collected in a 88 Bar post here.)

Weibo pushes out about a dozen general news notifications a day about everything from trending topics to celebrity gossip to major world events. Monday afternoon, on my way to the subway to meet a friend on my last night in Shanghai, I got this one:

Push notification from Weibo starts: “The election of President Trump triggers reactions: a sudden rise of domestic racism, overseas Chinese called ‘chinks’…”

As an American citizen traveling in China this fall, I’ve been questioned about the election and its consequences a dozen times over. In China, the mainstream consensus is that while both candidates are bad, Trump is better for China (whether through incompetent governance, less hawkish policies in Asia, or both). This week, when people have asked me why people are so upset about the results, I tell them about the massive increase in hate crimes perpetrated by Trump supporters emboldened by his victory over the last week; eyes widen in horror and minds start to change. This Weibo notification gave me hope that this discussion was spreading.

I clicked through to the hashtag #Trump Wins# and then to the article pinned at the top of the hashtag page. I read the headline, then stopped dead in my tracks to reread it, then read the whole article and felt my jaw drop. I even ran it through a translator, just to make absolutely sure I was getting it right. For a moment, the idea that I could suddenly lose my ability to read Chinese felt much more plausible than what I was reading:

The topic page for #Trump Wins#: an article from “American College Encyclopedia”. The moderator of the hashtag (a state-run media agency account) has recommended this article, whose headline reads “Americans march in protest against Trump. ‘Not My President!’ Are Chinese people to blame for Trump’s election?”

The article itself includes the following gems:

“This weekend, American media report that anti-Trump protests have turned racist. And the people who are most poorly treated in America’s racial dynamics, the Chinese, have been unfairly targeted again.

According to reports, Chinese Americans mostly supported Trump during the US election (not true, by the way: polls put Trump support among Asian Americans at 15–29% and the Asian American Election Eve poll shows that Chinese/Taiwanese voters still mostly supported Hillary)… Because of this, some anti-Trumpers blame Chinese Americans for his victory. Since discriminating against the Chinese is not considered politically incorrect in the US anyway, it should be no surprise that they are being attacked.”

Highlighted paragraph reads: “According to an interview in US media outlet Nextshark, ‘My younger cousin grew up in the US. When he passed by the anti-Trump march in New York, was scolded and told to “Go back to your country, chink!”’” (There’s no such story on Nextshark.)

The story then goes on to recount a bunch of other Twitter accounts of hate speech, including that of Fusion journalist Wilfred Chan. It mentions, off-hand, that Trump supporters are also doing racist things, but the overall article implies that most of the trouble is coming from anti-Trump protesters.

This, I thought, was doubleplusungood.