Prisoners, Proxies, and Propaganda: How Beijing’s Cyber Troops Target Japan

Japan has emerged as the latest target in China’s escalating cognitive campaign against its Asian neighbors.

Published: 11/27/2025, 4:03:21 AM EST

Prisoners, Proxies, and Propaganda: How Beijing’s Cyber Troops Target Japan — A Chinese hacker uses a computer at an office in Dongguan, in China's southern Guangdong Province, on Aug. 4, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)

Amid escalating tensions between China and Japan, a surge of online accounts—many using Chinese IP addresses—has emerged, posting messages that fervently support the communist regime while condemning Japan. According to information released by The Epoch Times, a significant number of these accounts are operated by prisoners in facilities across China.

The latest wave of activity was triggered after Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reiterated the phrase “A Taiwan contingency is a Japan contingency,” a statement that provoked sharp rebukes from the Chinese Communist Party's Foreign Ministry and unleashed a flood of hostile posts across social media platforms.

Mr. Liu, a cybersecurity expert from Hebei Province in China, told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times on Nov. 26: “From a technical perspective, these accounts often rely on overseas proxies or cloud servers to operate, scattering across data centers in the United States, Japan, Singapore, and Europe, making them difficult to track.”

Liu said that although some accounts present themselves as being located overseas, their language patterns, wolf-warrior styles, and active online times are consistent with those of users inside China.

“In a small group I follow, I noticed people discussing how certain overseas social media accounts are actually controlled by powerful entities in the background,” he said. “Their speech and behavior are aggressive—this is definitely not random or spontaneous behavior.”

Japan has emerged as the latest target in China’s escalating cognitive campaign against its Asian neighbors. As Reuters reported in October, Beijing previously launched similar online attacks on the Philippines: after relations soured, China's then-ambassador to Manila orchestrated coordinated disinformation and troll campaigns.

The Chinese embassy reportedly used fake-account networks on Facebook and X, aiming to erode Philippine support for the U.S. alliance, sow division over South China Sea disputes, attack pro-U.S. lawmakers, and promote the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) media's narratives.

Prison-Based Cyber Troops

It has been reported that the CCP operates a nationwide network of online propagandists known as the “50-Cent Army”, a term derived from claims that commentators are paid 0.5 RMB per post.

The Epoch Times has previously reported, citing mainland Chinese media outlets, that prisoners who participate in this propaganda work do not receive cash payments. Instead, their posts and comments are converted into “points”. Accumulating enough points can directly result in sentence reductions, early parole, or other privileges within the prison system.

Former inmate Liu from Liaoning Province told The Epoch Times that while serving time at Liaoning’s Dongling Prison, the prison authorities would select younger inmates and send them to work in a so-called “internet room”.

“They work online for about 10 hours a day," she said. "One inmate told me that her job was to anonymously post content on overseas social platforms—content that was favorable to the CCP or that smeared the United States.”

Liu added that the prison-based cyber troops operated on two fronts: domestic and overseas. On the domestic front, they left comments on Weibo and various other platforms, giving “likes” to regime policies, praising CCP leader Xi Jinping’s published works, or posting texts in support of Russia.

Shi Jin, a department head at a company that provides cybersecurity products to enterprises, made similar observations. He told The Epoch Times that while conducting platform security checks and analyzing Weibo accounts, he discovered that the IP addresses of certain accounts fell within prison network segments.

“The content they posted was mostly standard ‘main-melody’ propaganda—praising China’s economic achievements and government policies, claiming that Taiwan is Chinese territory, or talking about national reunification,” Shi said.

His reaction at the time was, “How could prisoners possibly have access to computers?” Later, he was informed that these were officially assigned tasks inside the prisons.

The speed of creating fake accounts is improving significantly with AI development. Automatically generated avatars, automated text, and localized language models make fake accounts more realistic and harder to detect.

China-linked networks are using generative AI to mass-produce English and Chinese content through fake profiles on TikTok, X, Facebook, and Reddit, to amplify pro-Beijing narratives on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Ukraine, and Gaza while fuelling U.S. domestic division, according to an Oxford Analytica report on China’s AI-driven disinformation targeting U.S. platforms in September.