Populists and nationalists spread anti-Muslim and anti-feminist messages, but also the Communist Party line At the start of the 2016 US election campaign, Fang Kecheng, a former journalist for the liberal-leaning Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly and then a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, began verifying Donald Trump’s statements about refugees and Muslims on Chinese social media, hoping to provide more context for the presidential candidate’s report in China, but his effort was soon harshly criticized on the Chinese Internet. Some have accused it of being a “white left,” a popular insult to idealistic, left-wing, Western-oriented liberals; others called…