Foreign YouTuber/influencers in China vs the MSM in the West

The long-term trend in globalization means that people regularly cross international borders and often work and live in their non-native countries for years.  The more recent social media explosion shatters the monopoly of the establishments including the Western MSM even further.  The new media has its own problems, with mis- and dis-information traveling much faster than before; however, it is hard to conclude that they are guiltier than MSM, which have been doing it for a much longer time, and the MSM and governments have also had their own hands muddled in the new media water. 

In 2021 MSM such as BBC and NYT reported on foreigners living in China making youtube videos, which is a new phenomenon proliferating like fire partly due to the global events since 2020, although the undercurrent has existed for far longer.  Their videos are very easy to find, so no links/names are given here, neither are the MSM reports.  These foreigners became the MSM subjects only because their videos seriously contest the narratives promoted by the MSM.  And the MSM reports stunk of smears and hypocrisy.     

Background first.  There are millions of foreigners living in China.  Most people have at least an account in myriad social media platforms, but only a small minority make videos, which is true everywhere.  Because to make videos you need to have a particular urge and interest (the vast majority can’t live on it), time (a 10 hour adventure might give 15 min usable video), and skills for shooting and editing.  You must also have a good voice, be articulate and minimally photogenic.  So these foreigners in question pass the criteria.  They are studying, working, having business, retiring, or simply taking care of their families in China.  Some form families with Chinese, some partner with other foreigners, some singles.  All, including various people featured in the videos, have lived in China for years, some less than 10, some over 10, and a few decades.  They speak Chinese usually quite well, most read, and a few even write sufficiently.  Their language proficiency is actually much better than that of many if not most MSM reporters in China.   The motivation of most for video making is to connect with their family and friends, the original purpose in social media, and some further wanting to broadcast the real China to the world.  Few if any will ever make much money from Chinese social media since the payout per view is lower than youtube.   

Predictably more Chinese make videos with similar contents or viewpoints, but they don’t count or matter according to MSM.  To those profiled as foreign YouTuber/influencers by MSM, the designation is odd.  About “YouTubers”, these people have other platforms that publish their videos, whose views might surpass those in youtube.  Because of this feature, they prefer the name of “content creators”.  For “influencers”, exactly what and whom they are influencing, or who is and who isn’t an influencer?  Their audience is whoever watches their channels, which, just like any other cases, includes family, friends, and anybody else interested.  Is an NYT reporter an influencer?   If you publish something but are not a reporter, you are an influencer; if I am a reporter and may reach and influence more people, I am still not an influencer?   Do only social media count, or does it go without saying that a reporter means a “higher” influencer?   

Then, what videos do these foreign “YouTuber/influencers” with their foreign associates in China produce?  All document their lives in China, again befitting the contents of social media.  Either because of their work or personal interest, some focus on food, some on traveling and sightseeing, some merely daily routines.  Some also wade into the political and MSM domains, which is why this whole group of people are implicitly or explicitly maligned by the MSM.  For their videos reveal a very genuine, normal life experience in China over the years.  Even if not all directly challenge the lies about the pandemic and Xinjiang, just the calm, everyday life in China greatly undermines MSM’s narratives of a gloomy Chinese society: Chinese must be sad and fighting with their governments all the time, minorities can’t speak their languages and worship in Xinjiang and Tibet, if not worse, etc.  So BBC/NYT label them “pro-China” or sponsored by the Chinese government.  If telling the truth is “pro-China”, then truth has a China bias.

Whether sponsored by the government or not is irrelevant (but more on that later), since the key question is whether their videos are real or not, reflect their own experience or not.  This is of the utmost importance, as fake news, mis- and dis-information travels fast.   But people can judge with their own eyes and ears, and compare them to MSM and anti-China YouTubers. 

The biggest smear against these foreigners in China is: Of course their videos have to be pro-China, otherwise they will be kicked out of China.  This attack hinges on the belief that a) these foreigners don’t believe or misrepresent in their videos; and b) once out of China they will “tell the truth”, i.e., becoming anti-China. 

But the best thing about videos is that you can watch them as the ultimate evidence and decide for yourself whether they are fake, whether the makers see and interact with the real Chinese and society, and whether the makers truly believe in what they see, hear, or feel.   

These foreigners’ videos actually as a whole give a very comprehensive picture of China that the MSM have never matched even 1% of it in their widest dream.  They document lives in both big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai as well as in remote countryside and poor areas in China.  They show, talk to, and interview Chinese from all walks of life.  They reveal the lives and struggles of Chinese citizens, relatable to everybody else on Earth.  Some tour various cities in Xinjiang and Tibet, observe for days, and talk to people on the streets for hours.  The videos are made by people coming from various continents and countries, Asia, Europe, Africa, the US, UK, Canada, Japan, India, Australia, Israel, you name it.  These people have had vastly different backgrounds and lives, most are young, some more senior, diverse professions, and diverse interests.  In sum, their videos represent the furthest improbable from fake news, much better than the garden variety social media, FB posts or tweets the MSM so dearly cherish.  Ordinary Chinese will have no quarrel with those videos. 

Now compare THAT level of evidence to those in MSM reporting and anti-China youtubers.  MSM rarely has any videos, merely words from the reporters, throwing in a few “experts” and “witnesses”, and you are supposed to believe their words/stories on NYT instead of your own eyes.  In rare cases when BBC or CNN has a video, it is still 90% a reporter talking in front of something that he says something is happening inside but the remaining 10% showing no actual evidence anything is happening there.  For example, you can shoot a video outside WIV suggesting they made COVID-19 there, as if that adds any legitimacy to your thesis, which will never count as evidence WIV did it.  And BBC would tell you the blurred building behind me is a concentration camp, but a casual, drive-by inspection of the architecture and its markings by amateurs later revealed it is a common office building.  Evident-wise oversea anti-China youtubers are just as pitiful if not more.  It is mostly a video of someone speaking in front of a camera at home, expressing his opinions.  Occasionally he will refer to and twist a recent news report, nothing but a FB or twitter post needing more bandwidth to download.  What/who you trust more, mere words from the MSM and anti-China youtubers, or the “pro-China” youtubers that show you his/her actual, daily experience with videos in China?

NYT reporters protested, according to social media-revealed interactions with the video makers: OK, your videos show you walk around Xinjiang and Tibet for days, talk to people, and find nothing but peaceful life, but it is still personal experience, not the whole picture.  That is true for all social media, but then on what ground will MSM claim they and only they give the whole picture?  Further consider this: It is not one foreigner, it is many foreigners, independently visiting overlapping and diverse cities, different streets, different places, different people, in different times.  They show you the exact views around them, what the locals do, and the actual words from the locals.  Lest we forget videos made by more Chinese telling the same picture.  What more credible do you need?

On the other hand, what have the MSM shown you, e.g., about Xinjiang?  Words, words, words, throwing in a handful of videos that mean nothing or get debunked faster than you can see it.  Like the satellite images supposedly showing concentration camps, or the building/concentration/forced labor camp behind a BBC reporter?  Or youtube videos showing concentration camps far away without any evidence they are truly concentration camps?  We are supposed to believe MSM words/stories or meaningless videos without hesitation yet question the heck of real-life videos?  Why are the mere words from a few recycled people, often conflicting with verifiable facts and their othern interviews, and without any physical evidence, the whole picture?   

Remember Vietnam, or Iraqis WMD?  Back then there were so many more “experts’, so many more “witnesses”, and so much more “intelligence”, right?  Wasn’t it a slam-dunk?  In 2002, even most anti-war folks thought Iraq had WMD, because the US produced so much evidence, thus if only 1% was true, Iraq must still have it, right?  The US can't be 100% wrong, right?  Now replace Iraq with Xinjiang.  And the same public is still fooled.

The funny thing is that, for as long as they have tried, MSM have produced exactly ZERO visual evidence of any concentration camp or forced cotton picking in Xinjiang (and ZERO any evidence that WIV made COVID-19), while China has actually showed, and foreigners have visited, vocational training schools (aka MSM concentration camps), and plenty of videos, including those by the foreign YouTuber/influencers, of ordinary cotton farms in Xinjiang.  MSM don’t like what they show, so evidence they are not.  But when MSM give you their evidence, either blank or of even lower quality, you are supposed to swallow it unconditionally?  This is MSM hypocrisy at the highest order.  Worse?  This is just the beginning.

How about the assertions (or wishes?) that foreign YouTuber/influencers will turn anti-China once outside China?  Well, if these videos reflect their true experiences and feelings, why would they?  Indeed, a few have left China, and some may not return for the foreseeable future and probably don’t have any further obligatory connection, family or business, to China.  Yet they don’t drop their positions like flies.  BBC/NYT all think these people are in only for the Chinese money, but how about the elephant in the room: in the Western social media like youtube, anti-China is overwhelmingly dominant and much more profitable.  There are a handful foreigners who left China a few years back before all these happenings and are now limited to spewing anti-China nonsense in their houses (again no names), and their youtube views and subscriptions are easily 10 times higher than the best “pro-China” youtubers.  This writing may be viewed once in 2 months, while those videos twice per second.  Anti-China is a much better business, and a stronger case that they are in for the US money.        

Unable to prevail on the merits of the contents and views of the “pro-China” foreigners, BBC/NYT then attacked from a different angle: they are supported by the Chinese government or media!  Evidence?  Well, for one, you have to be pro-China to earn Chinese social media money.  Much has been rebutted above.  Also foreigners readily lose their eyes, ears, and brains once in China just for the puny, no living wage according to the US standard?    

For two, the Chinese government and state-owned media sponsored some of the foreigners' trips in China.  This is a red herring talked up to prove the moral superiority of MSM but instead reveals their utter ignorance and hypocrisy: COI happens for pro-China, but not anti-China, the much bigger business?  Firstly, governments around the world promote businesses and tourism and sponsor trips all the time, the US included.  Secondly, according to the back-and-forth with NYT, in the few sponsored trips, the Chinese government and media provided logistics supports such as transportation, logging, and meals, while the foreigners could do and say whatever they like during the trips and after.  Thirdly, many more take non-sponsored trips, visit various places by themselves, and report the exact same things in Xinjiang and Tibet!   

The last salvo from MSM is that the Chinese state-owned media use some of the foreigners’ materials and interview some of them.  But what is wrong here, and why is this a problem?  According to the foreigners, the Chinese media contacted them and behaved professionally, just like any other news organization would do, included the American ones.  Is there any evidence that the Chinese had a hand in making the videos in the first place?  MSM want to insinuate, but they can't say it because there is simply no evidence.  MSM then hint that these foreigners make the videos to curry favor with the Chinese government/media so that they can get more publicity later to enhance their future earnings in the Chinese social media?  Ample trashing of this question above, but why don’t the MSM apply the same criteria to all the anti-China “witnesses”, “experts” and youtubers?  They surely have the ears of MSM and earn much more money: won’t they tell you what you want to hear so that you will ask him back again and again and he gains more and more exposure?  In fact, isn’t this also what the MSM do all the time: NYT publishes a story about a country the US doesn’t like, and the US officials use the story to push for sanctions/wars against the country?  MSM are so ignorant of even their own hypocrisy. 

The MSM would like you to believe that they are completely independent of the governments, hence, they are the arbiter of truth.  In reality, Western think tanks/academics, the media, the governments, and NGOs e.g. “human rights” groups are well-known to form a closed, symbiosis and positive feedback loop.  The standard, recurring process goes like this: The US government sponsors a lot of think tanks and “experts”, some associated with NGOs, which produce a report the government secretly wants but is first reported by the MSM (nowadays also the main stream social media, MSSM), the US government then uses the MSM reports as independent evidence to prop up public opinions for future actions, with the help of NGOs.  To better explain why they do what they do, throw in a strong dose of arrogance and neo-racism by the elites in this closed loop: people different from us are incapable or unworthy of understanding, producing, or enjoying the same life as we (https://www.yahoo.com/news/racist-penn-law-prof-makes-220129764.html).  Neo-racism because many Blacks, Browns, and Asians harbor the same view as well, although plenty in the West are also opposed to it.  Glenn Greenwald is 100% correct in dissing the MSM, although he is far from the first one to do so and has a ridiculously narrow category of MSM.

In this new era MSM and governments have already actively engaged in social media and are in the process of corrupting it, so there is a real danger that very soon GOOG, FB, youtube, and twitter (MSSM) will morph into the new MSM.  But for now the social media still allow regular people’s voices, which has burst the bubble and control of MSM.  Pre-social media, few “pro-China” (those foreigners are not even really pro-China, only recording what they see in China) stories could ever be published.  If someone talked about China on the MSM in the 1990s, he was 95% likely in the US and anti-China or Chinese government, as if no Chinese in the US, and in the eyes of Westerners no Chinese in China for that matter, would have a different view.  In reality he might represent at most 5% of the Chinese in the US, yet the rest 95% had no voice since the MSM wouldn’t report it, after dismissing them as brainwashed or unworthy.  But these people can now tell their own stories regardless of NYT/CNN/BBC in 2020, 2021, and 2022.  What is more, even foreigners in China are doing and showing the same things as those “brainwashed” Chinese.  That, is what the MSM can’t absolutely warp their mind around and why they are trying their best to discredit.           

 PS: According to official statistics, there are > 700K foreigners living in China (mainland), not including short-term tourists.  But since there are essentially no foreign tourists due to COVID-19. that number is likely the final number in mainland China.  If we include foreigners in HK and Macau, who often shuttle between the mainland and SARs, there are likely over 1 million foreigners, but not millions.