Christ, even the aged bali-based plastic spewer can make ohno look silly.
Christ, even the aged bali-based plastic spewer can make ohno look silly.
A hint for TD members: if you do not quite agree with the post, denigrate not only the poster but also all the persons he refers to.
For the ones who do not want to waste much time with the denigration, defamation aspects, nor to elaborate your view: just tell he is communist, case closed...
And right on cue comes the yapping puppy again.
A link to a typical video blogger's site:
Living in China - YouTube
An Englishman who has lived in China for ten years, has a son and presumably a Chinese wife, his son has Chinese documents.
Varied topics are covered by him.
Not your "average Joe (Zhou)".
There must be some mistake. It's actually a link to a paid chinastan lackey's Youtube channel.
Perhaps you should move to Youtube hoohoo. You might find some adoring fans (as you can buy subscribers on the interwebs and I'm sure the chinkies would pay for them for you).
Beijing funds British YouTubers to further its propaganda war | News | The Times"The Chinese government is funding British YouTube stars to produce pro-China propaganda videos, an investigation by The Times can reveal.
Sitting on a bench in a lush green park speaking to the camera in a Midlands accent, the only hint that the man in his 50s is in China are the characters on a small logo on his black hoodie.
However, the words being spoken in the YouTube video by Lee Barrett, praising the camps in Xinjiang, where Uighur Muslims are held in effect as slaves, could have been lifted straight out of the Communist Party propaganda notebook.
Regarding the inhabitants of these camps, where according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Uighur Muslims are locked up because of their religion, he claims “when these young people come out of these camps, they see they have some sort of future for them, jobs, training, so they can do new kinds of jobs”.
The comments written by viewers below the video are unfailingly positive, including insights such as “we need these re-education camps in Hong Kong for those brain-washed young rioters”.
Lee’s son, Oli, 23, who previously had a successful following as a YouTuber making videos of him playing the computer game Call of Duty, addresses the Hong Kong protests himself in another video, called “Western media brainwashing”.
Oli, who moved to China in 2019 to live with his father, tells viewers that the “western media” is wrong to say Hong Kong protesters are “pro-democracy”.
He adds: “Police brutality is another thing pushed in the media of the Five Eye nations — that the Hong Kong police during the protests over the last year have been so brutal against their citizens . . . which is just blatantly not true.”
Amnesty International said in September that it had evidence of detained Hong Kong protesters being severely beaten in custody and suffering “other ill-treatment amounting to torture”.
The videos are one of several that push a pro-China government agenda and has led to the Barretts scoring a runaway success since they launched their channel in 2019.
Titles include “Western media lies about China” and “Camera surveillance is great in China” and several are in support of the technology company Huawei.
According to analysis by the computational propaganda project at the University of Oxford, their videos have been tweeted by members of China’s Communist Party across the world including the Minister for the Chinese Embassy in the UK, Ma Hui.
The Times has found that some of their videos were funded by Chinese Radio International, a media organisation that has been exposed as the secret owner of an international network of propaganda radio stations.
Grammarly, a writing app, has pledged to remove their adverts from the videos and JD Sports promised to investigate after The Times revealed its adverts were being shown.
The Barretts started producing videos about China and as their videos became more nationalistic, the number of subscribers increased exponentially.
Critics have claimed that pro-China YouTubers are benefiting from ad-revenues in part driven by an alleged Chinese Communist Party network of bots that promote videos supporting the state.
The Barretts have nearly 200,000 subscribers, and have produced 255 videos since the start of last year, gaining a combined 16.5 million views. Their videos are thought to earn them about £53,000 a year through advertising alone, according to analysis by Social Blade, a website that monitors social media channels such as YouTube.
In November they visited the Shaanxi district of China with several other foreign YouTubers who live in China and make videos supporting the government.
The trip was organised and funded by the Chinese Radio International and an official press release described the visit as “International Internet Celebrities Witnessing the Happiness of Shaanxi People”.
In a candid video about the visit that was subsequently removed, Lee admitted that a trip to a mountain was cancelled so they could witness “propaganda” regarding the area’s prosperity.
He said: “It wasn’t until the second day they started talking about cutting the trip short by a day, and there was no real reason given for that.” A fellow YouTuber Jayoe Nation said: “They had to fit in more propaganda.”
Lee replied: “They didn’t say that, did they, but that’s what happened.”
Various videos from the trip show the YouTubers visiting locations in the district including a farm where Oli performed a farcical dance while holding vegetables.
The Barretts are part of a growing number of foreigners who live in China making videos endorsing the government and criticising the West.
Jason Lightfoot, who went to university in Sheffield where he met his Chinese wife, has a channel, Living in China, with 35,000 subscribers.
His videos include titles such as “The World can’t compete with China’s Infrastructure!”, “The World is Hiding China’s Success”, “The Chinese Government is Doing a Great Job” and “The World Needs to Learn from China”.
In one, he walks around filming BMW cars and says: “This is one of the poorest provinces in China. China has become a beautiful utopia of this world. I’m astonished by it. Am I lying?
“Is this not a utopia? Is this not the way the world should be? People say ‘communism is bad’ Well maybe it’s not that bad. Take a look at China for example. Is it that bad? This is communism.”
Despite the praise of China, such YouTubers are not technically allowed to be posting such videos. YouTube, along with Facebook, Google, Instagram and Twitter, is banned in China. The Barretts and Mr Lightfoot rely on a virtual private network to bypass the Chinese firewall by routing traffic through a server in another country.
Gray Sergeant, research fellow at the Asian studies centre at the Henry Jackson Society, said: “This co-opting of influencers is something new and is quite clearly attempting to legitimise the regime.
“It’s probably quite wise to get in with YouTube because although it can’t be easily viewed in China without a virtual private network, it’s a way for them to get their message out to the West.
“If they were to step out of line and say something controversial then life would become very difficult for them. They clearly know that so it’s difficult to know whether you can trust anything they are saying.”
Hannah Bailey, who specialises in China’s use of state-sponsored digital disinformation, at the Oxford Internet Institute, said: “This strategy of using Westerners to project a positive image of the Chinese Communist Party is one that has been used by Chinese officials for quite some time.”
She added that such videos were not only aimed at improving its image to an international audience, but to influence thinking among Chinese citizens too.
“China is continuously aware of its need to maintain legitimacy among its domestic population. Part of this legitimacy stems from its perception among international audiences. In other words, if domestic audiences believe that the rest of the world admires China, this instils confidence by domestic audiences in Chinese Communist Party rule.”
The Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Chinese Research Group, told The Times: “Vloggers shilling for tyrants is a new version of an old idea. Dictators have always used useful idiots to whitewash their crimes and sadly the current rulers in Beijing are following the same playbook.”
The Barretts, Mr Lightfoot, Chinese Radio International and the Chinese Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. "
Last edited by harrybarracuda; 14-09-2021 at 12:04 AM.
Fortunately, they are as free to spread their message, as RFA is it's own. And if someone just wants to launch an ad hominem snidey piece without addressing any of the actual content, they are free to do that too. That seems to be what most of the piss weak criticism consists of these days- hang the messenger, ignore the message.
Well that definitely counts as a "view from Chinastan".
The chaotic and bloody retreat of the US troops from Afghanistan has been widely viewed as the defining moment in Washington's embarrassing failure in its 20-year-old "war on terror."
As Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it is time to do some serious soul-searching on why the United States failed in such an inglorious and tragic way.
A number of reasons explain the fiasco, of course, and American double standards in the collective fight against terrorism rank among the top.
For the past two decades, Washington has conducted its counterterrorism campaign with selfish calculations. The world has witnessed that it only attacks terrorists it deems a threat to America's national security, while badmouthing the legitimate measures of other countries to suppress terrorism on their own soil.
To put it bluntly, the United States is trying to monopolize the rights to define who are -- and are not -- the bad guys based on its own foreign policy needs.
The United States under Barack Obama once took Cuba off its terror list when it tried to restore diplomatic ties with the country. Yet after Donald Trump took over the White House, his administration reversed the decision and put Cuba back on the US list of so-called "state sponsors of terrorism."
Such a move by the Trump administration illustrates the irrational decision-making that has defined American discourse on terrorism.
Take the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as another example. The ETIM is on the terror group lists of the United Nations and many other countries.
For many years this radical group with links with al-Qaida has posed serious threats to the security and stability of the world community. However, Washington unilaterally removed the ETIM from its list of terrorist organizations in late 2020.
The United States has also been aiding terrorists for its own self-interests over the years. Since 2004, the National Endowment for Democracy of the United States, largely funded by the US Congress, has provided 8.76 million US dollars to radical forces related to the ETIM, such as the "World Uyghur Congress."
"US double standards on terrorism point to an awkward mindset among American politicians: political violence may be called terrorism only if it is perpetrated by those they do not like," a South China Morning Post commentary once pointed out.
Moreover, Washington has been using anti-terrorism as a political pretext to meddle in the domestic affairs of other countries for its geopolitical interests and global hegemony. Washington's intervention in Syria and its maneuvers to topple the Syrian government are classic examples.
Two decades ago, the United States launched its counterterrorism campaign, claiming to root out global terrorism. Yet its self-serving "war on terror" has brought even more chaos, destruction and death to the world over the past 20 years.
The Costs of War project of Brown University, a leading US research university, has found that the number of people killed directly in the violence of America's post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere is estimated at more than 900,000.
And according to data compiled by Save the Children, a London-headquartered international humanitarian organization, nearly 33,000 children have been killed and maimed in Afghanistan amid the 20-year war, or one child every five hours.
The world's sole superpower once tasted the cruelty of cold-blooded terrorists in the 9/11 attacks. Therefore, it ought to rally countries around the globe to beat this common enemy of humanity.
Yet Washington's double standards in the global war on terror have not only damaged America's credibility as a responsible global power, but also eroded the foundations for international anti-terror cooperation.
The world cannot vanquish terrorists if the United States continues to play politics with human lives.
The debacle in Afghanistan has once again laid bare the fact that it is high time Washington abandoned its double standards; otherwise, another 9/11 attack could be around corner.
Double standards doom US 'war on terror' - Opinion - Chinadaily.com.cn
[And they didn't even mention Palestine.]
I will, ta. Dissident viewpoints often have merit- just look at the lead up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Just a quick summary of what China means to the global economy.
scroll to video
Evergrande: Shares in cash-strapped China property giant plunge - BBC News
Last edited by helge; 15-09-2021 at 12:35 AM.
There's no difference. They both tow their respective regime lines.
I actually don't think state media is a bad thing per se. I'm over my Ann Rand phase. But there's a lot of dickheads who pretend they are are Ann Rand fans just to get a dig in on China or Russia. Oh man state media ! Sounds dangerous.
We've all been programed to believe state media is beyond the pale while having state media ourselves
Last edited by Backspin; 15-09-2021 at 05:29 AM.
Australia's most trusted news source is the ABC, Britain's is the BBC. 'nuff said.
By which I assume you mean Desmond Shum is a dissident. OK, but it doesn't change the fact that-The difference is, among othert things, that he doesn't remain a China-sycophant.
I think curious minds are more interested to know why, than to cherry pick an individual dissident and pretend it has any tangible impact on the above.According to the Edelman Global Trust Barometer of 2020, the Chinese government enjoyed the trust of 90% of its citizens – the highest level in the world... Another long-term Harvard study found the approval rating of the Chinese central government at 95%
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