China Mocks US on 9/11 Anniversary With Cartoon

A Chinese state-run news outlet shared a political cartoon on Sunday, mocking the United States by invoking the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Monday marks the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, in which two commercial airplanes were flown into New York City's World Trade Center buildings, bringing the structures down and killing thousands of people. The traumatic event has become a defining tragedy in the course of American history and is marked with remembrance events and memorials each year.

The anniversary is also frequently used as a jumping-off point for adversarial entities to make critical remarks towards the U.S. On Sunday, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev marked the occasion with a social media post predicting that the U.S. will eventually face a 9/11-level attack with nuclear weapons.

Also on Sunday, the conservative Chinese tabloid paper Global Times shared a political cartoon marking the occasion with mockery directed at violence in the U.S.

The Global Times is a daily paper published by the People's Daily, the primary newspaper operated by the leading Chinese Communist Party, and its contents can often be interpreted as reflecting the views of the government.

The cartoon, titled "Mired in mayhem," was illustrated by artist Chen Xia, and features the Statue of Liberty, with an uneasy expression and stance, staring down at a piece of paper, on which is written "22 years after 9/11." The statue casts a shadow behind it, in which bullets can be seen flying and Molotov cocktails being thrown. Beneath them in the shadow is what appears to be the wreckage of buildings giving off two plumes of smoke, evoking the aftermath of the attacks on the twin towers.

Newsweek reached out to U.S. government officials via email for comment.

In 2021, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Hu Xijin, the then-editor-in-chief of Global Times, took to the platform then known as Twitter, with a prediction that the U.S. would face a similar attack eventually, and warned the country not to treat China as its primary adversary.

"The September 11 attacks was [sic] suicide attacks by 19 terrorists, but it was not the 'suicide attack' of the terrorism," Hu wrote. "Terrorism will accumulate power to launch the next deadly attack. Time will prove that it is a mistake for the US to regard China as its biggest adversary."

Medvedev's Sunday post made similar predictions, decrying the U.S. for "arrogance and disgusting narcissism," and suggesting that "another 11/09/2001-style attack, but with a nuclear or biological component," could be launched in the future.