In this episode of China Uncensored, host Alex Blumberg sits down with three of China's most prominent critics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to discuss their experiences in China and how they got their start in the country.
00:02:06.000We have interviewed people who have been raped in prisons as a form of torture, like men being raped by their prison guards as a form of torture.
00:02:25.000They came to understand how we can exploit your system better.
00:02:29.000The fact that we see how they can go from tanks rolling down Tiananmen in 1989 to every other political movement to now still They understand us.
00:02:45.000And they can cover everything, but we can't cover anything.
00:02:54.000Better known as Serpents at A and Laowai86 are the original China YouTubers.
00:02:59.000The pair each spent 10-plus years in China documenting their experiences and pulling back the veil on a China that had rarely been seen by the outside world.
00:03:08.000All before being forced to flee after their content became what the Chinese Communist Party saw as, let's just say, unflattering.
00:03:22.000Grew up in Zibo, China in Shandong Province before immigrating to the West at the age of 11. Recently, David has become one of the Internet's most prominent critics on the Chinese Communist Party with his mega-viral content highlighting issues like China's dilapidated infrastructure and political corruption.
00:03:40.000If you were born in America, but you are ethnically Chinese, they think that you belong to them.
00:03:45.000One-third of the China Uncensored trio, who has been integral in building a show that has exposed the misdealings of the CCP to the American public since the early 2010s, including Hallmark coverage on China's Hong Kong takeover in 2019.
00:03:59.000Together they have amassed millions of subscribers, billions of views, and untold amounts of ire from the Chinese government and their paid army of online trolls.
00:04:09.000Now, for the first time, they are all together to detail the propaganda war the CCP is waging on the American public, their tactics, their strategy, their willing American co-conspirators, and most importantly, their grand ambition to once and for all replace the United States of America as the world's leading superpower.
00:04:34.000I know that we were talking about this a little bit before, especially with David, because he's kind of the expert on this.
00:04:39.000But what got me so interested in putting together this panel or roundtable was the iShow Speed fiasco when he went to China a month or two ago.
00:04:51.000I saw obscure people spreading Chinese propaganda and I was like, "Okay, whatever, you can get over it." And all of a sudden America's most popular streamer is in China, essentially, So it's like, okay, we have to get together the people that know what's going on here so they can disabuse the narratives that we're seeing a little better than I can because you're the experts and I'm here to learn a little bit for sure and hopefully our audience will too.
00:05:16.000Before we get into that though, I want people to know kind of why you're who you are.
00:05:22.000You all spent time in China, have traveled there, lived there extensively.
00:05:26.000So just give me a little bit about like your background, what took you to China and you know.
00:05:59.000So I went there and had an adventure, ended up homeless for a couple of days, figuring things out, ran out of money, got a job teaching English at a kindergarten, built myself up eventually to what I am today.
00:07:34.000So we had the opportunity to immigrate to the West and that's where I, it's short but it's a good representation I think of what the general population in China really feels like.
00:07:46.000And Chinese people unfortunately I think over the years that feeling hasn't changed.
00:08:22.000Well, one morning He was an art student in Beijing at the time.
00:08:27.000I have some photos that he took at Tiananmen Square, not during the night of June 3rd and 4th, but...
00:08:39.000Like, people were bringing their kids down to the square to see the goddess of democracy and all this stuff, and it was amazing.
00:08:45.000But when the crackdown started, my dad took me on a march.
00:08:50.000All the Chinese students in the university were marching around campus protesting.
00:08:54.000And I think that was the beginning of my parents really radically changing how they felt about, they'd both lived through the Cultural Revolution, but a lot of people felt like, Like, things were going to get better, and then the Tiananmen Square massacre just changed that completely.
00:09:11.000Yeah, well, I'm glad you said that, because it kind of brings you into the next, I guess, phase in the life of China, you know, after Tiananmen Square.
00:09:18.000And kind of against all odds, they managed to reform their global kind of, how do you want to put it?
00:10:11.000This is the first time that they're really going on the international stage.
00:10:14.000So they really pulled out all the stops to make sure that it was an incredible performance.
00:10:18.000But as somebody who was living in China, it was the opposite.
00:10:21.000First of all, all foreigners that were in China at the time, When they renewed their visas, previously you could go to a neighboring country.
00:10:28.000You could actually go into places like Hong Kong to renew, but they stopped that.
00:10:32.000The visa restrictions got a lot harsher.
00:10:35.000Things got pretty hectic when there were a bunch of free Tibet activists tried to douse the torch, I think, in France.
00:10:43.000They came with fire extinguishers, tried it, you know, the Olympic torch.
00:10:47.000Overnight, the attitude towards foreigners changed.
00:10:50.000And I woke up and I went downstairs and the people that were usually friendly and smiling, like the person I knew very well, the Laoban at the shop where I used to buy stuff in the morning, scowled at me, didn't want to talk to me.
00:11:01.000Walking down the road, people were looking at me with daggers.
00:11:03.000This happened overnight and this was due to the fact that now foreigners were their enemy because they were trying to, you know, besmirch China, trying to put out the torch.
00:11:12.000I was studying at the time at Chang 'an University.
00:11:16.000And the university locked all the foreigners inside and didn't let us go out when the Olympic torch was being run through the city.
00:11:23.000So we got a heads up, because I was very good friends with one of the teachers, and he said, "Listen." If you want to get out of here, you've got to leave here now.
00:11:30.000Because in about half an hour or so, they're closing the gates and no foreigners will be allowed out.
00:11:35.000Because they were worried about us foreigners causing trouble with the torch run.
00:11:38.000Because it's all about, you know, image and all about face.
00:11:40.000So, you know, that was the first taste that I saw, where they were more interested in an international image than the quality of life for the people actually living in China.
00:12:00.000But it was specifically when I learned Chinese.
00:12:02.000All of a sudden, when you can understand the language, everything that you're hearing around you is not some mystical dragon like, you know, China is some country that nobody understands with an ancient culture.
00:12:17.000All of a sudden, now, you start understanding that people's standard of life isn't like what we're seeing on news, the inevitable rise of China, the Olympic procession or whatever.
00:12:26.000First moment I noticed that was when I bought a motorcycle.
00:12:48.000And it didn't make me dislike China, but it opened my eyes because what I saw within 10-15 minutes of getting outside the city center was kids warming themselves over burned barrels.
00:12:58.000Houses without any sort of glass in the windows.
00:13:02.000Stray dogs digging through piles of dead animals and carcasses and stuff, right?