On 21 March, World Forest Day, a short video on conserving global forests sparked angry protests on the Chinese internet, and was taken down by its makers the next day.<\/p>\n
The five-minute film was a joint effort by PaperClip, a group which produces educational films, and the WWF. It showed how farming for livestock and soybean is destroying forests in the Amazon region, in an attempt to encourage consumers to choose products certified sustainable. But linking the purchase of meat, eggs and milk by Chinese shoppers with deforestation sparked accusations that it was \u201cinsulting China\u201d.<\/p>\n
This is not the first time advocacy of environmentally friendly consumption has received a backlash in China. With Chinese markets having an increasing impact on the global environment, efforts to guide sustainable consumption must navigate the fraught terrain of online opinion, rubbing up against nationalism and the \u201cright to development\u201d.<\/p>\n
The video was provocatively titled How to Quickly Destroy the World\u2019s Forests. It was first challenged on Bilibili.com, a video streaming site popular with young Chinese people, where Paperclip is well-known as a producer of science and technology content. A video Paperclip published on 2 February, Everything You Need to Know About the Coronavirus, provided detailed and accurate information on the epidemic and was watched over 100 million times. A mere seven weeks later, Paperclip was being attacked on the platform, for a video about protecting forests.<\/p>\n
The film starts by describing how human activity has damaged forests over the last two decades. Citing the WWF\u2019s 2015 \u201cLiving Forests Report<\/a>\u201d, it links production of beef and soy to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. It describes this global chain linking production and consumption as \u201cthe most efficient forest-elimination machine\u201d and points out the role of Chinese markets. According to the voiceover: \u201cBrazil can\u2019t cut soybean farming, because it needs to sell to the world\u2019s biggest buyer, China.\u201d The film also discusses other commodities associated with deforestation: \u201cThe production, trade and consumption of palm oil, rubber, timber and paper impacts on forests in places including Sumatra and Kalimantan.\u201d Finally, the video suggests opting for products with sustainability certification to avoid becoming inadvertently involved in deforestation.<\/p>\n Within 24 hours, the video had sparked a huge backlash that spread to other social media platforms such as Weibo.<\/p>\n The attacks focused on whether it was fair to link consumption of meat, milk and eggs in China with destruction of the Amazon rainforest. \u201cWe\u2019ve only had meat to eat for a few years, and it\u2019s us that have harmed the planet?\u201d asked<\/a> one poster. Many contrasted<\/a> per capita meat consumption in China and the US, where people eat twice as much, and mainly beef which has a far larger carbon footprint than the pork favoured in China.<\/p>\n The anger did not stop there. Some called Paperclip\u2019s politics into question, after ploughing through its old videos and finding some in which Taiwan island was not clearly visible on what were supposed to be maps of China. Others pointed out that sustainability certifications<\/a> charge fees, so \u201cIt\u2019s all commercial.\u201d<\/p>\n Paperclip then removed the video and made a statement<\/a>: the video had not blamed China and the uses of \u201cwe\u201d referred not to Chinese people, but to humanity as a whole.<\/p>\n Before being taken down, it was copied and published on\u00a0YouTube.<\/p>\n