Louder with Crowder - May 23, 2025


How China Broke America Without Firing a Shot: Ft. The China Show-China Uncensored-China Insider


Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

172.35956

Word count

2,301

Sentence count

161

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

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Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:58.000 They're in our power grids.
00:01:00.000 They're in our water systems.
00:01:02.000 They have hacked our governments.
00:01:04.000 They have hacked our telecoms.
00:01:06.000 Almost every single telecom in America, right?
00:01:09.000 They're already involved in a multi-billion dollar propaganda campaign to change your mind against your own country.
00:01:14.000 And it's working, whether you are on the left, or whether you are on the right, or somewhere in between.
00:01:21.000 China's not on your team. 0.99
00:01:23.000 China's against your team.
00:01:25.000 If you are a Westerner that believes in democratic ideals, China is the land of shortcuts and facades. 0.82
00:01:37.000 It's all about the facade.
00:01:38.000 It's very easy to put a bunch of Christmas lights on some shiny buildings and take night shots of it.
00:01:43.000 But during the day, the pollution is there.
00:01:45.000 You walk a few minutes out of the city center, you start to see the problems.
00:01:49.000 You start to see the beggars on the road, you start to see infrastructure You start to see the hollow buildings and nothings in there.
00:01:56.000 You know, you never see that side of things because they don't allow that kind of thing to be shown. 0.98
00:02:02.000 China is a country that uses rape as a form of torture. 0.98
00:02:05.000 It's true. 0.96
00:02:06.000 We 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. 0.88
00:02:15.000 Straight up Nazi behavior. 0.73
00:02:17.000 For 20 years, these Chinese think tanks would send scholars to exchange with American scholars.
00:02:24.000 They didn't come here for knowledge.
00:02:25.000 They came to understand how we can exploit your system better.
00:02:29.000 The 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.
00:02:45.000 And they can cover everything, but we can't cover anything.
00:02:48.000 Winston Sturzel and Matthew Tai.
00:02:51.000 I wish she wouldn't say that.
00:02:54.000 Better known as Serpents at A and Laowai86 are the original China YouTubers. 0.98
00:02:59.000 The 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.
00:03:08.000 All before being forced to flee after their content became what the Chinese Communist Party saw as, let's just say, unflattering.
00:03:16.000 David Zhang.
00:03:17.000 I've got some very explosive details from some of the rumors that came out this weekend.
00:03:21.000 Host of China Insider.
00:03:22.000 Grew 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.
00:03:39.000 And finally, Shelley Zhang.
00:03:40.000 If you were born in America, but you are ethnically Chinese, they think that you belong to them.
00:03:45.000 One-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.
00:03:59.000 Together 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. 0.83
00:04:09.000 Now, 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.
00:04:28.000 Power.
00:04:34.000 I know that we were talking about this a little bit before, especially with David, because he's kind of the expert on this.
00:04:39.000 But 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.
00:04:49.000 And before, it was a bunch...
00:04:51.000 I 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.
00:05:16.000 Before we get into that though, I want people to know kind of why you're who you are.
00:05:22.000 You all spent time in China, have traveled there, lived there extensively.
00:05:26.000 So just give me a little bit about like your background, what took you to China and you know.
00:05:30.000 What you were doing there.
00:05:31.000 Okay, I suppose I'll start since I'm the first person to ever make YouTube videos out of mainland China.
00:05:36.000 The first YouTube vlogger, I suppose you could say.
00:05:39.000 And I went on a business trip in 2006.
00:05:43.000 Loved the place so much.
00:05:45.000 I flew back home, sold everything I had, my furniture, my cars, and I went back because I saw an incredible, vibrant place just bustling.
00:05:54.000 There was so much going on.
00:05:55.000 And compared to what I was used to back home, I thought, this is where I want to be.
00:05:58.000 This is what I want to see.
00:05:59.000 So 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.
00:06:11.000 Awesome.
00:06:12.000 Yeah.
00:06:12.000 I don't know if I was the second YouTuber in China, but I was definitely close.
00:06:16.000 Close, yeah.
00:06:17.000 I used to make YouTube videos in China just to show family and friends back home that I was alive.
00:06:22.000 They thought I was insane.
00:06:23.000 That I moved to there.
00:06:25.000 And I just wanted to be like, you know, it's not that bad.
00:06:27.000 And, you know, it really wasn't.
00:06:28.000 I lived in China, and we both did in China, during the golden period, as we call it.
00:06:32.000 When it was kind of up and coming, it was kind of facing the world.
00:06:36.000 It was like, we're going to open up.
00:06:37.000 We want to interface with, you know, America and Canada and Europe, yeah.
00:06:41.000 And we watched the country turn into really what it has always been on paper, an authoritarian dictatorship.
00:06:48.000 but we became the victims of that.
00:06:49.000 So in our process of making videos, We built custom bikes, rode around the country, did two television documentaries.
00:06:57.000 In that process, busted in, our hotel was busted in by the SWAT team, and we realized the writing was on the wall, and it was time to go.
00:07:06.000 We're basically chased out.
00:07:08.000 It's fun.
00:07:09.000 Exciting.
00:07:09.000 It's a good story.
00:07:11.000 I had the reverse of these two guys.
00:07:13.000 I was born in China.
00:07:14.000 I left when I was 11. During a time when they...
00:07:21.000 The general feeling in the very, you know, lower middle class citizens there was that you had no future.
00:07:28.000 So I was struggling.
00:07:29.000 My parents were dealing with things like where would I go to middle school?
00:07:32.000 Where would I go to high school?
00:07:33.000 Can I get into a university?
00:07:34.000 So 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.
00:07:46.000 And Chinese people unfortunately I think over the years that feeling hasn't changed.
00:07:51.000 And so that's where I am.
00:07:54.000 So, I was born in China and left China when I was four.
00:07:59.000 My parents were some of the first grad students to come to America to study back in the 80s.
00:08:06.000 And then they were supposed to go back to China.
00:08:09.000 My dad had a scholarship from the Chinese government to get his PhD in physics, and then it was the Cold War, right?
00:08:14.000 So he was supposed to go back.
00:08:15.000 And then the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened.
00:08:17.000 And one morning I walked Supposedly happened.
00:08:21.000 supposedly happened.
00:08:22.000 Well, one morning He was an art student in Beijing at the time.
00:08:27.000 I have some photos that he took at Tiananmen Square, not during the night of June 3rd and 4th, but...
00:08:39.000 Like, people were bringing their kids down to the square to see the goddess of democracy and all this stuff, and it was amazing.
00:08:45.000 But when the crackdown started, my dad took me on a march.
00:08:50.000 All the Chinese students in the university were marching around campus protesting.
00:08:54.000 And 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.
00:09:11.000 Yeah, 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.
00:09:18.000 And kind of against all odds, they managed to reform their global kind of, how do you want to put it?
00:09:24.000 What's the word I'm looking for?
00:09:25.000 Image?
00:09:25.000 Image, yeah, reputation, right?
00:09:27.000 Reframe the reputation against all odds and then by the It's a great place to be.
00:09:37.000 Go see it for yourself.
00:09:38.000 You could travel there.
00:09:40.000 You guys were all aware, maybe you to a lesser extent, but you were there around that point.
00:09:45.000 you had spent considerable time there.
00:09:47.000 Was there a moment that you saw or personally experienced where you're like, okay, the narrative that I'm hearing Absolutely.
00:10:03.000 You know, you talked about the Olympics.
00:10:05.000 The Beijing Olympics, the 2008 Olympics, were so important to China.
00:10:08.000 This was a massive face project.
00:10:11.000 This is the first time that they're really going on the international stage.
00:10:14.000 So they really pulled out all the stops to make sure that it was an incredible performance.
00:10:18.000 But as somebody who was living in China, it was the opposite.
00:10:21.000 First of all, all foreigners that were in China at the time, When they renewed their visas, previously you could go to a neighboring country. 0.64
00:10:28.000 You could actually go into places like Hong Kong to renew, but they stopped that.
00:10:31.000 You had to fly back to your country. 1.00
00:10:32.000 The visa restrictions got a lot harsher.
00:10:35.000 Things got pretty hectic when there were a bunch of free Tibet activists tried to douse the torch, I think, in France.
00:10:43.000 They came with fire extinguishers, tried it, you know, the Olympic torch.
00:10:47.000 Overnight, the attitude towards foreigners changed.
00:10:50.000 And 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.
00:11:01.000 Walking down the road, people were looking at me with daggers.
00:11:03.000 This 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. 0.91
00:11:12.000 I was studying at the time at Chang 'an University.
00:11:15.000 I was studying English.
00:11:16.000 And the university locked all the foreigners inside and didn't let us go out when the Olympic torch was being run through the city. 0.99
00:11:23.000 So 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.
00:11:30.000 Because in about half an hour or so, they're closing the gates and no foreigners will be allowed out.
00:11:35.000 Because they were worried about us foreigners causing trouble with the torch run.
00:11:38.000 Because it's all about, you know, image and all about face.
00:11:40.000 So, 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.
00:11:49.000 The first time I saw that.
00:11:50.000 But of course, things got very bad near the end when we had to leave.
00:11:53.000 And that's quite a big story.
00:11:54.000 I don't know if we have time for those.
00:11:56.000 Yeah, for me, it was over time.
00:12:00.000 But it was specifically when I learned Chinese.
00:12:02.000 All 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. 0.88
00:12:15.000 5,000 years of history.
00:12:17.000 All 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.
00:12:26.000 First moment I noticed that was when I bought a motorcycle.
00:12:28.000 I bought a $200 motorcycle.
00:12:30.000 You could buy a $200 new motorcycle in China.
00:12:32.000 It's worth $200.
00:12:33.000 It was.
00:12:35.000 I'm not even joking.
00:12:36.000 It was a copy of a Chinese copy motorcycle.
00:12:39.000 Anyway, I got on that bike and I left the city center for the first time.
00:12:42.000 And I saw...
00:12:44.000 And how long have you been in China before you...
00:12:47.000 Just a few months.
00:12:48.000 And 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.
00:12:58.000 Houses without any sort of glass in the windows.
00:13:02.000 Stray dogs digging through piles of dead animals and carcasses and stuff, right?
00:13:07.000 It was abject poverty.
00:13:09.000 Versus what looked like middle class downtown.
00:13:12.000 So I was like, that kind of woke me up.
00:13:13.000 I was like, this is not the place that I am seeing on the news, that's for sure.
00:13:17.000 But it made me want to understand China more.
00:13:19.000 So I'd go out and see different things.