When Swedish fast-fashion giant H&M said in September that it was ending its relationship with a Chinese supplier accused of using forced labor, a few Chinese social media accounts dedicated to the textile industry took note. But by and large, the moment passed without fanfare.
Half a year later, Beijing's online outrage machine sprang into action. This time, its wrath was unsparing.
The Communist Party's youth wing denounced H&M on social media and posted an archival photo of slaves on an American cotton plantation. Official news outlets piled on with their own indignant memes and hashtags. Patriotic web users carried the message across far and varied corners of the Chinese internet.
Within hours, a tsunami of nationalist fury was crashing down upon H&M, Nike, Uniqlo and other international clothing brands, becoming the latest eruption over China's policies in its western region of Xinjiang, a major cotton producer.
The crisis the apparel brands now face is familiar to many foreign businesses in China. The Communist Party for years has used the country's giant consumer market to force international companies to march in step with its political sensibilities, or at least not to contest them openly.
But the latest episode has illustrated the Chinese government's growing skill at whipping up storms of patriotic anger to punish companies that violate this pact.
In H&M's case, the timing of the furor seemed dictated not by anything the retailer did but by sanctions imposed on Chinese officials last week by the United States, the European Union, Britain and Canada in connection to Xinjiang. China has placed hundreds of thousands of the region's Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in indoctrination camps and used harsh methods to push them into jobs with factories and other employers.
"The hate-fest part is not sophisticated; it's the same logic they've followed going back decades," said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times, a website that tracks Chinese internet controls. But "their ability to control it is getting better," he said.
"They know how to light up those ultra-pro-government, nationalist users," Xiao continued. "They're getting very good at it. They know exactly what to do."
On Monday, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, rejected the notion that China's government had led the boycott campaign against H&M and the other brands.
"These foreign companies refuse to use Xinjiang cotton purely on the basis of lies," Zhao said at a news briefing. "Of course this will trigger the Chinese people's dislike and anger. Does the government even need to incite and guide this?"
After the Communist Youth League ignited the public anger Wednesday, other government-backed groups and state news outlets fanned the flames.
They posted memes proposing new meanings behind the letters H and M: mian hua (cotton), huang miu (ridiculous), mo hei (smears). The official Xinhua news agency posted an illustration depicting the Better Cotton Initiative, a group that had expressed concerns about forced labor in Xinjiang, as a blindfolded puppet controlled by two hands that were patterned like an American flag.
The buzz quickly drew notice at Beijing's highest levels. On Thursday, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman held up a photo of slaves in American cotton fields during a news briefing.
The messages were amplified by people with large followings but largely nonpolitical social media presences.
Squirrel Video, a Weibo account dedicated to silly videos, shared the Communist Youth League's original post on H&M with its 10 million followers. A gadget blogger in Chengdu with 1.4 million followers shared a clip showing a worker removing an H&M sign from a mall. A user in Beijing who posts about television stars highlighted entertainers who had ended their contracts with Adidas and other targeted brands.
"Today's China is not one that just anyone can bully!" he wrote to his nearly 7 million followers. "We do not ask for trouble, but we are not afraid of trouble either."
One Weibo user posted a lushly animated video that he said he worked through the night to make. It shows white-hooded men pointing guns at Black cotton pickers and ends with a lynching.
"These are your foolish acts; we would never," a caption reads.
Less than two hours after the user shared the video, it was reposted by Global Times, a party-controlled newspaper known for its nationalist tone.
Many web users who speak up during such campaigns are motivated by genuine patriotism, even if China's government does pay some people to post party-line comments. Others, such as the traffic-hungry blog accounts derided in China as "marketing accounts," are probably more pragmatic. They just want the clicks.
In these moments of mass fervor, it can be hard to say where official propaganda ends and opportunistic profit-seeking begins.
"I think the boundary between the two is increasingly blurred," said Chenchen Zhang, an assistant professor of politics at Queen's University Belfast who studies Chinese internet discourse.
"Nationalistic topics sell; they bring in a lot of traffic," Zhang said. "Official accounts and marketing accounts, they come together and all take part in this 'market nationalism.'"