The Surprising Similarity Between the US and Chinese Internets

26:27Oh, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. Do you know that one, the big chess party, or are you familiar with that term? or the 3D chess party or something like that? I'm not sure. There's one I like that I saw that I started using, which is people who are so defensive of the leadership that everything they say, it's like, no, no, you don't get it. They're playing 5D chess. And so I think the term was a big chess party or something like that. I think we need to start incorporating that more. That's a good one. Yeah, it's a fun one. But actually on this note, how difficult is it to keep track of all the different code words or to learn the new code words because, you know, on the one hand, if you're saying Winnie the Pooh instead of Xi Jinping or something like that, it allows you to perhaps bypass censorship.

27:15But on the other hand, if you're talking in code constantly, I imagine it means some people like just aren't getting the message. It's not resonating with a certain sector of society. So how difficult is it and what are the pros and cons of having to keep up with all these keywords constantly? Absolutely. I mean, it's hugely difficult. It just means that these words become more and more obscure. You know, I'm someone who has made a career out of studying the Chinese Internet and I'll often read social media posts and have no idea what's going on. And their entire teams, there's actually this excellent team called China Digital Times, a nonprofit organization that literally studies this.

27:54Exactly, exactly. And I have to consult that because sometimes I'm reading stuff and I have no idea what it's referring to. I want to get into more of this sort of like, especially like how an American or internationally, we might learn more generally about what's going on the Chinese internet. But before we get to that, I want to ask, there is this trope or this thing that gets repeated a lot. And you heard it a lot in the TikTok debates, and it smacks of a certain racism or exoticism or Orientalism, etc. etc., where people say, oh, on American TikTok, they're all like it's all a bunch of garbage and rage bait and slop.

28:31But on the equivalent in China, it's they're learning mathematics and learning how to play violin and all these sort of stereotypical things. Can you talk to us just a little bit about like how similar or dissimilar do these platforms feel from a sort of day to day content standpoint, setting aside sensitivities about politics? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm like kind of torn about that statement because on one hand, it kind of like glorifies. I mean, depending on who you're looking, who's saying those statements, right? You're either glorifying and kind of like projecting a lot onto the Chinese Internet.

29:05It really reveals more about, I would say, like American conservative anxiety about what's appearing on their own Internet and projections. Because the Chinese Internet is full of like crazy slop, too. But this is what I'm like. My assumption is that the gap is like massively overstated. But I've never, you know, exactly whatever the Chinese version of the original TikTok is. So I just have no sense like how real these stereotypes are. Exactly. Like when a young student, you know, in China is just like scrolling through Douyin, they're not just getting wonderful math content. It's going to like help them excel at school.

29:40But what I will say is that definitely within the Chinese censorship context, there is this emphasis on what the party likes to call positive energy. So it is definitely much more sanitized than American social media platforms. Like you are not going to see, quote unquote, unhealthy marital values or like that is taken down. Right. And so while on one hand, I don't want to say like they're completely different. They definitely are different in terms of, you know, what appears there and what doesn't. Since you mentioned students, have we seen any efforts by the party to, I guess, crack down on internet use in general?

30:18And I'm thinking back to, you know, the video game crackdown where there was, you know, a sense or a directive that kids were spending too much time playing video games and they should be learning important and useful things. Do you see a similar attitude towards the internet just out of curiosity? Not as much, but I would say the video game piece is the one that comes to mind when you bring it up. I think the issue being the internet is just such a vital part of daily operation and just getting around. Like you can't really tell a young person to get off WeChat if that's both how he communicates with his mom and his teacher, you know, and to buy basic goods.

31:00But you can say, well, let's get rid of video games for X amount of hours every weekday because that's clearly a net bad.

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33:01If I spoke Chinese, could I open up a Weibo account from here? Would it be easy to just start joining and posting with everyone? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Talk to us about, I should do that. That's a good reason to learn Chinese, which is one of my 2026 goals is to start taking lessons. So we'll see how that. Good luck, good luck. Thank you, thank you. Talk to us about that five-minute period in history in which TikTok was banned in the United States and suddenly there was a flood of American users to that other red note or something like that. I forget what it was called. Well, talk to us about that experience and whether anything interesting emerged from that.

33:39There was 10 days where that happened or whatever. Yeah, it was an incredible moment. I remember it very clearly. But essentially, there was news, impending news that TikTok would get banned in the U.S. and all these TikTok users. It was banned for like a day. Yes, it was banned for a day. It was one day. It wasn't accessible, yeah. But in the lead up to that, TikTok users were freaking out. And they essentially, I think millions of American TikTok users started to flood Red Note, or as it's known in China, Xiaohongshu, which is, you know, people call it China's Instagram, but that's not quite the right equivalent.

34:09It's almost this Instagram meets Pinterest meets Yelp type social media platform mostly used by young urban women. It has a slightly more liberal bent to like catch up on lifestyle news. Now it's all kinds of news. But I was both on one hand struck by the irony of the situation, you know, that the American Internet had somehow become so closed and siloed and controlled that the way to escape it was to then jump to arguably the most repressive. It was sort of like a reverse Berlin Wall moment in which the West Germans were the ones flooding into the other side after this, I don't know, something like that.

34:54It was very, yeah. Exactly. It is irony. Exactly. Ironically, isn't it? Right? We were the ones that had the restriction placed on us in America. And so then suddenly we find a new hole in the wall to spill over onto the other side. Exactly. Which is why they were, you know, like I think American users were looking for their Chinese spies kind of ironically. And Chinese users were teaching them how to get around Red Note sensors. But I think like key to that was just like I felt a lot of delight from that moment because it was the first time there was this like really sincere and earnest exchange between users on both sides of the Internet.

35:30And I hadn't felt that and seen that in years, if not decades. So one of the debates that's constantly ongoing when it comes to TikTok is what the algorithm is doing and what content it's actually surfacing. What are the like parallels with, I guess, censorship in China or where do you see key differences in terms of what the algo can do to influence the general population? So you mean like between the algorithm in China and the algorithm in the U.S.? I would say that, you know, the algorithm, it's always really hard to say to what extent the algorithm is playing a role in censorship of the content.

36:12Right. And I think that's one of the big issues or that the big criticisms that's playing out right now with this TikTok sale, even though the vast majority of the ownership is American, the algorithm is still owned by ByteDance. So to what extent does ByteDance still have influence over what American users are seeing? That's up to question. I think the difference is in China, there's just a lot more tools externally to kind of control what happens after that. It doesn't matter how the algorithm is dictating what appears on the feeds. You know, there are still content moderators who can come in and deal with the content that is posted online after, you know, it's already posted.

36:53Joe, I feel like I need to make a public service announcement. Actually, a public service announcement recognizing someone for their public service, which is Sam Rowe, who does the dirty work of trawling through TikTok on a daily basis and then cross posting the good videos onto Instagram for everyone who doesn't actually have TikTok like me. People should follow him. Genuinely a public service. Yes. Genuinely. I want to go back to this sort of kind of where we started at the beginning, but I think it's a question of some pretty significant stakes. You know, so you talk about the rise of this sort of like very nationalistic impulse that you see on the Chinese internet these days, which again, very similar to here.

37:36And I would say, and many people would agree that if you look at the US government right now, you're like the pathologies, the dysfunctions, et cetera, it's like almost downstream. The internet has shaped the US government in many respects. Max Reed, who we've had on the podcast, who has a really good newsletter, talked about how it's like the comment section is one. And all of the people who are in power in the US government are the people who like 10 years ago were angry about having been banned from the comment section. And now they have the last laugh on everyone else because now they hold the levers of power.

38:11Talk to us about the emergence of the sort of strong nationalistic undercurrent on the Chinese internet. When did that like start to emerge and how does that sort of like reinforce the political direction of travel within Chinese politics? Yeah, I would say similar to what has happened in the US, that patriotic undertone has always been there as early as like the pre-internet period of like the 80s and 90s of people who, you know, perhaps were speaking of a patriotic China in a more liberal sense. They wanted strongman rule. They didn't want, you know, a lot of the leftists in China, as we think about them in China and not in the U.S., wanted, you know, China not to be kind of swept up by liberal influence and needed a strong state to be in charge of the economy.

39:00But I would say, similar to the U.S., that nationalist voice was very fringe. It was niche. It was kind of seen as radical. So, you know, as early as 2008, for example, there were, as you mentioned, like the 50 Cent Army, but also what was known as like angry youths or fencing. So 2008 was like a hugely pivotal moment for China in that the country was stepping onto the world on the global stage as this international presence and it wanted to present itself as super liberal. But at the time, there were these like very angry youth who were online and being like, look at how China is being presented by CNN.

39:42We're being kind of smeared by Westerners, but they were small. I would say today the Chinese internet is largely fencing. They're no longer called that. But, you know, I would say in 2016, there's an emergence of what we now call Little Pinks or Xiao Fen Hong. And it's like you merged the Fencing or you merged the Patriot with Stan or the online fan. Oh, cool. Where, you know, like what they - A softer nationalism. Exactly. Or not even softer, but they use the tactics of online fandom. So, you know, like they use the same tactics of like a group of Justin Bieber fans would do to take down Justin Bieber's nemesis where except they're doing that with maybe like Tai Ing-wen, who was the leader of Taiwan.

40:33And so I would say there's this like fusion of online Internet celebrity culture with online patriotism. And, you know, it's not so much different from like the Reddit insults. Yeah, it feels very similar. I just want to just to go down this road a little bit further. Last year, I read Kevin Rudd's book about Xi Jinping. And one of the points that he makes, you know, a lot of people think of, OK, Xi gets into power and then sort of takes this nationalist turn. And he makes the point that actually the sort of more nationalist turn in Chinese politics, some of the anti-liberal started under the late Hu Jintao years, which makes me again wonder whether there was this brewing force partly cultivated by the Internet that was started, you know, that rather than, OK, Xi Jinping comes in and presses the button and turns the Internet in a more nationalist direction, that this was already an emerging thing and helps explain Xi Jinping's durability.

41:31and ability to consolidate power and so forth, that it's a bottom-up phenomenon as much as it is a top-down thing. Absolutely. And this is why I keep coming back to 2008 as this huge turning point. And Kaiser, who is one of your guests, has made this point a few times, which is, you know, in 2008, I think the big thing that happened at the time was A, the Beijing Olympics, and B, the financial crisis. So at this moment when, you know, Chinese people were standing up and for the first time, a lot of like the great firewalls was getting taken down. So a lot of Chinese Internet users in Beijing could see the news for the first time.

42:10They were seeing two things. They were seeing CNN, you know, posting news about the Tibet protests and not covering the Olympics. And they're also seeing eventually news of the financial crisis. So there was a sense of like, well, you know, we expected to engage with the outside world and instead the West is criticizing China and can't get its own ship in order. And so there is a sense both among kind of ordinary people of this growing patriotism, but also the leadership itself, because they were thinking, well, maybe liberalization is not the way to go, right? Maybe like liberalization leads to unruly financial markets and we need to steer the ship in a different direction.

42:55And so we see both kind of a nationalistic turn, but also in a liberal turn. And that very much precedes Xi Jinping's rise to power. I think people forget what a huge moment the 2008 Olympics actually were, like actually physically changed Beijing and then also changed a lot of Chinese society. But I'm still I'm still annoyed that they got rid of all the fake DVD stores because those were fun. Anyway, we have to get in an AI question. So with the advent of AI, a lot of the technology which is coming out of China is very impressive. Does censorship become easier? I would say yes. I mean, AI has always been or it has been long used in Chinese censorship capacity, not just with the advent of generative AI.

43:46So, you know, the sensor that I interviewed, he said that, you know, before he even goes in and looks at what's being taken down a, you know, automated process first flags all of the sensitive words. I imagine that just makes that process significantly easier. Is there any way to gauge sort of public opinion about the Internet or like because I think there are a lot of people in the U.S. again who would say like, yes, this would be great. I would love to make rage bait illegal. I would love it if people weren't flaunting their wealth. I would love it if there were not pornography easily available on the Internet, etc.

44:24I think a lot of people hear this and it's like, yeah, sounds pretty good. Is there discontent with the state of moderation? Is there discontent with some of the restrictions? Is there no like, is there a way to like gauge some of these questions? There's certainly discontent, but I think it's just very hard to gauge public opinion in China in general. I would say broadly speaking, there is like embrace of technological change and embrace of technological progress that's more elevated in China than in the U.S. But, you know, there are people who are unhappy with the censorship regime and people who like having those controls.

44:59I will say at the heart of that kind of debate or that envy is just like, what are the governance mechanisms that we can put in place at this moment with AI? I think everyone's freaking out about this uncontrollable new technology, and China at the very least seems to have a governance mechanism in place. So, for example, there is a algorithm registry where essentially every single company that has an AI tool needs to submit their algorithm to authorities, and that is then listed in a public registry. And no equivalent of that exists in the U.S. And that's actually, I think, you know, that's actually a pretty interesting form of governance and maybe something that other countries can learn from.

45:45Yeah. I mean, people have criticized algos here for being essentially black boxes. Yeah. Just coming, I guess, full circle back to our intro. The surprising thing here is, you know, the U.S. and the Chinese Internet have followed a very similar evolution despite very different governance regimes. So I think to some extent you could imagine, all right, Chinese Internet heavily censored. Obviously, there's going to be a surge of nationalism, right? Whereas in the U.S., I guess maybe it's more surprising. But what's your overarching thesis for why we sort of ended up in the same place despite having very different systems?

46:30Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I would say first, we were pretty naive about the fact that technology even moves in the direction of freedom, right? That's kind of like based on the assumption. That's just the direction that we're going to go in. I would say probably my overarching thesis is that we've allowed too much of technology to be centralized within the hands of a few people. And it doesn't matter, you know, the U.S. and American systems, people often talk about the differences, but actually they're remarkably similar. It doesn't matter if it is government that has centralized the power of technology in its hands or, as you mentioned, like a handful of tech oligarchs, right?

47:13At the end of the day, how different is Elon Musk's control over X or Twitter different from, you know, the Chinese government's control of Weibo? The whims of one man essentially dictates the way a platform plays out. And I think that's the key problem is that we've taken this like decentralized technology and made it highly centralized. And it doesn't matter under what political system that actually takes place. One thing that I think anyone who, again, the word that always pops into my head is sort of the tribalizing effect of the internet. People start to hate each other. They start to hate people who aren't exactly like them.

47:54Are there cleavages within Chinese society that are deepening or widening because of everyone in the mix together? Are there sort of demographic aspects or whatever in which you can see these sort of team tensions build and sort of domestic stability? Because I think you see that all the time on the American Internet. I think the biggest cleavage that I've observed is just along the lines of wealth and inequality. And that's like another parallel that I'm seeing today. And the biggest parallel that I see is between those who are building the new technologies and those who are using and being used by it.

48:35So, you know, funnily enough, when I visit China, I have a very similar experience of when I visit Silicon Valley, where everyone who is talking about or building or investing in these new AI tools are really hyped. Or, you know, like there's like an occasional doomer in the mix, but they're very excited about it. Even they're still working to build it. Exactly. Like there's a sense of agency. There's a sense of competition. Like we are the builders and makers of the future. Whereas when you talk to just anyone who is just using the technology is not aware of how it's built or involved in that process.

49:10There's this kind of deep sense of pessimism or a lack of agency. You know, which brings me back to this like NPC meme. There's a sense of, well, I don't actually have a role in this process. Like I'm a non-player character. and, you know, I have no say. And so that actually is the biggest cleavage that I'm seeing, both in China and in the U.S. All right, Yu Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers. Congratulations. Phenomenal book, and I really appreciate you coming on Outlaws. Thanks so much for having me.

49:52Tracy, I really enjoyed that conversation a lot. And it really was not until... I know you like talking about the internet. Yeah, I love talking about the internet. I love the internet, even though it is, to your words, and I would agree, in many respects, a cesspool. But thinking about how similar the American and Chinese internets are, despite ostensibly being very different in the legal sense, is like probably one of the more fascinating threads I've thought about in a while, I think. Yeah, I was thinking during that conversation, I was going to ask what's scarier, an army of little pinks coming after you or an army of K-pop fans.

50:28And it's sort of a facetious question. But on the other hand, it highlights this point, right, which is the Internet and the way people behave on the Internet has been remarkably similar across geographies. It doesn't really matter like what group you're in. No, I think that's 100 % correct. And, you know, again, the K-pop stands as their own tribe, but probably one of the less harmful ones, right? Like probably like. They are vicious when they want to be, Joe. I never. Right. I actually I think I tweeted about K-pop once and I was like, I'm going to mute. Never again. I'm muting this thread right away.

51:04But this is what we do. Right. I mean, it feels like we as people naturally are drawn to this sort of, I would say, mob behavior. Right. when presented with these new technologies in which we can connect with like-minded people, whether they share a taste for music or whether they share sort of national impulses or whatever else. This is what most people, a lot of people fall into maybe. And so I think it's like really interesting that for all, yeah, for all this like talk of different rules and so forth, that the patterns just sort of propagate everywhere. The other thing that struck me, And this has come up before in other episodes, but it's the sort of, you know, people think about China as this big centralized entity.

51:49And it is to some extent. But the way that centralized entity actually executes policy ends up being very decentralized. Yeah. Right. And I think that's kind of underappreciated how much scope individual censors or individual local governments have to enact specific directives and how they go about doing it. It's interesting that Weibo's competitive edge was essentially being the best at censorship, right? And that was the one that survived and sort of anticipating and so forth. And it's a little sad. I liked the decentralized internet. That was fun going to different people's websites and seeing what they're all about.

52:29And you could theoretically still do it. But it takes effort in a way that doesn't feel worth it when you can just have an algorithm deliver straight what your sort of id appeals to you, like directly in the moment. It was a great time. Late 1990s were the peak of humanity. Unironically, unironically that. Are you really going to learn Chinese? So, yeah, one of my New Year's resolutions is to take Mandarin classes this year, and I will do that. I really liked learning Mandarin back way back in the day when I did it because there's very little grammar and I hate grammar. I had to learn German and German grammar is the worst.

53:07And also, as you learn words, one thing I really like about it is it's very literal. So a lot of words have meanings that sort of reflect the thing being talked about. So, for instance, if you're talking about America, so America is Meguo, which means beautiful country. So that sort of like meaning is imbibed into these individual words. Or Austria, because that's my other half, is Aureli, which means Eastern Empire. Which, you know, again, very descriptive of what you're talking about. Well, the German is Österreich, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a literal translation. Yeah. That's interesting. You know, both of us have pretty big followings on social media, particularly Twitter.

53:56Wouldn't it be fun as a personal challenge to like, let's start from zero again on Weibo and see if we could do it all over again. It's like, we weren't just lucky. We were really good. Let's start from zero and make names for ourselves on the Chinese internet. I think your definition of fun maybe differs from mine, Joe. It's like I need to prove to myself that it wasn't just luck. So I need to start from zero and try again. Oh, man. Do it in Mandarin. That's what I'm saying. Do a real challenge. Do it on hard mode this time. Yeah, where I have to do it in a different language. All right. Shall we leave it there?

54:26Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow Yiling Liu. She's at YilingLiu95. And definitely check out her new book, The Wall Dancer, Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash OddLots.

55:03And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about the internet, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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