1299: Laowhy86 | Decoding the Secret Slang of China's Censored Internet

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24:31Although we have a long way to go until we get to where China is today with political freedom, of course. An interesting thing for me is that words and terms that were designed to get around censorship are also now getting censored. So if you said like river crabbed instead of harmonized, then they were like, oh, OK, well, river crabbed, let's get rid of that word, too. And so now you have to say some other term or you can't say Tiananmen Square. So you start writing the date and they're like, well, that's a date we don't want. So then you have to start writing the date in different formats. For sure.

25:02Like, for example, Tiananmen is obviously broken down into Chinese characters, right? So Tiananmen. And so what people would do is if they wanted other people on the Chinese internet to look into it, maybe like get on a VPN and look into why people are talking about Tiananmen over and over again, eventually the government's like, yo, we got to get rid of these characters if they're in isolation or if they're in relation to a protest or an event or a massacre, right? And so what people would start to do is they would write 8-9-6-4, right? Because that was the date, late 1989, June 4th. And that's when that Tiananmen Square massacre happened.

25:38So that was a way for people to go and say, I wonder what this weird coded number means. It's almost like this puzzle. And so they'd go and maybe get on a VPN and Google it and figure it out. And this worked for a while. Government caught on to this and said, we're actually going to ban these numbers in succession. So if your phone number ends in 8964, you're screwed. You probably can't even picked that. Who knows? But there's other examples too. For example, I think a lot of your listeners probably remember the COVID lockdowns in China, which were crazy, right? People starved to death in their apartments.

26:09They were forced to line up multiple times a day to get COVID tests. It was a true nightmare. Oh, I remember talking about this. That's 1984, but more efficient. That was crazy. Yes. I remember the footage of people getting welded into their apartments to stop the spread. The guys in the white suits that would go inside of people's apartments and kill their dogs because it turns out they thought dogs were spreading COVID. Like it got out of control. And I just remember that the hypocrisy of all these people in the West that were saying like China was doing a good job cracking down on COVID. They were.

26:41It's just that they couldn't also eat or leave their apartment. That's technically correct. We talked to some people that would line up for their COVID test and they're standing next to thousands of people in a line, multiple times a day. One of whom is affected. Yeah. And then they go and get their tests. They'd get the swab. And there were cases where the swab was being reused on other people. Oh my God. So gross. I just didn't want us to get in a situation where people are like congratulating authoritarianism here. It doesn't work. Okay. Yikes. That's like reusing a needle. Hey, one of you has AIDS.

27:15Here's the problem. We have one needle in 20 of you. I don't know how much time you have, but that's exactly why China has so many people with AIDS. Stop. Get out of here. Are you serious? Yes. What happened, and this is the craziest thing you've ever heard, but up north, I think this is in Anhui and in Henan, there's entire villages where every single person has AIDS and they're not allowed to leave. What happened was the government set up a program because they needed plasma from blood. I think this was in the 90s. And what happened was people would go donate their plasma. But because of lack of education or whatever and greed, people thought, hey, I'm going to actually, after they take the plasma, I'm going to buy my blood back and put it back in me.

27:58They actually had facilities set up. And the problem is all this blood was communally mixed together. So people were buying back their blood mixed with other blood and actually getting it injected into themselves because of like government corruption. And entire areas of China have AIDS now because of that. I'm getting queasy thinking about that. I'm not afraid of needles. That's just actually really disgusting to think about. That's grim. The COVID was like a modern version of that. We saw a lot of instances like that happening. But while people were getting oppressed and getting welded into their apartments, they wanted to be able to talk about it.

28:30So when they went online, they would say things like, I want a COVID test. It would be like pure sarcasm, pro-government slogans. They weren't able to talk about how they felt, but when they put that out there, it became colloquially known as a protest slogan. It's like, I want a COVID test. It's like, screw you, government. We don't want these lockdowns anymore. They came up with these science fiction words. For example, if you were glowing, it was the code word that you actually had a fever because if the government found out you had a fever, I don't know if you remember this, they set up hundreds of thousands of these capsules.

29:04There are like these little, I don't know, like trailers, which you can find for sale now, by the way, because they're just used. You can find them on like AliExpress and Alibaba and stuff. Why would you want one of those? It's like memories. I don't know. I collect some weird stuff. I've got my anime figurines. I've got some used COVID swabs, but my pride and joy is this used trailer that actually was a prison hospital cell outside of Beijing. God knows how many people croaked in here from either starvation or COVID. Anyway, you want to see it? Like, why would you buy that? Here's my Gundam collection.

29:37This is where a grandmother died of starvation because of COVID lockdowns. It's so grim. God, we're both going to hell for this joke. You got to have some humor to get past this. It was the stuff we saw and that people would talk to back then. It was just, I have longstanding damn mental damage from some of these stories. But anyway, these code words, if you said you had a fever, like, for example, on WeChat, you're like, oh, crap, I have a fever to your family member or something, right? The government is monitoring that and they'll take you away and put you in one of those metal boxes. So people would come up with words like, I'm glowing.

30:11There was other ways to kind of protest that, like I said. There was a whole situation where people couldn't even say the word lockdown anymore, even though that's what it was. So the government imposed this massive lockdown for months and months. People even in the developed cities like Shanghai, which are fairly westernized, were starving to death in their apartments. There were reports of that. And so people had to have different words for lockdown. And I remember they would use emojis. They would have a little city and a lock or something. They would put emojis together because it got to a point where even when mixing up the words wouldn't work anymore, where you had to use little picture representations.

30:45It's really interesting how censored all of this got during COVID. One of my old teachers, he lived in Germany at the time, and he would say something like, we can talk about this because I'm in Germany, but once I go home and visit Shanghai, we can't talk about this anymore, or they'll inspect my water meter, is what he said. Yes. Do you know this phrase? There's two ways of saying this. You can say, the police invited me to drink tea, or you can say, the police are going to inspect my water meter. So the police will come actually pay you a visit to investigate you as to why you're having these conversations.

31:15To drink tea means you actually go to the police station because the tradition is if you go into any sort of Chinese building or something, you're offered some tea or hot water in a cup. You could go to the most austere place in China, like a bus station that has a hole in the ground where you're supposed to pee and go to the bathroom that hasn't been cleaned in 10 years. And they'll be like, however, we do have hot water for you right here from this boiler. And people are making tea and those instant noodles and you're just like, man, this place doesn't even have electricity, but they have hot water.

31:46The only person who works here's job is to like burn nearby trees to keep this hot water thing going 24 seven. So basically hot water is more important than plumbing and electricity in China. Is that accurate? Would you say that? Because I feel like that's true. A hundred percent. Yeah. I just love that you know that because I can't have these conversations with most people. It is so true. People in China think that if you drink cold water, you die. Specifically, if you're a woman on your period or something. That's right. Or you're pregnant. God forbid you should eat something that was made with cold water at any point when you're pregnant.

32:18You might as well throw yourself down a flight of stairs at this point. They equated eating the wrong foods or showering with lighting up an unfiltered cigarette during pregnancy. It's the same level. A hundred percent. You might as well lock yourself one of those quarantine boxes. That's right. Which you can buy on AliExpress. We'll link to that in the show notes. The code word for those was square cabin. I remember that one. That's how people would talk because even that was blocked. Like you weren't even allowed to tell them going off to the square cabin. Jeez, I'm taking a little vacation.

32:49What about Xi Jinping? Can you freely say Xi Jinping something something or is that kind of not a good idea? Yo, even that gets me nervous. All right. That's the top level stuff. I'll put it to you this way. If there was a way to fast track someone to get in trouble in China, it would be to talk about the leader for sure. And even Chinese people get confused. They're like, at least we're not like North Korea, right? We're like, yes, I've heard that many times from my Chinese teachers. And they rightfully say North Korea is just weird. It's like China in the 60s or 70s, which is true. The problem is, if you look at objective freedoms, it is approaching that level of North Korea now.

33:30It's just that it's so much flashier. It's got buildings and lights and stuff. It's got a budget for Western propagandists and you can travel there, right? It's just, it's so much more covert. So talking about the leader is so off limits. It's not even funny. I mean, that's where you get the 15 years to just actually just disappearing. People that do bring up or ask the leader to step down, that is the worst thing you can do in China, period. So there was a time in the beginning when he first took office that people were excited. They thought he was going to liberalize China, or I should say continue liberalizing because China was kind of opening up.

34:04I remember those days. I remember being like, wow, this is going to be like a new era. They're going to keep opening up. It's going to be really amazing. And it went in the complete opposite direction. A hundred percent. And so back then people felt comfortable to make up cute little names for Xi Jinping, right? There was this famous scene where he went to go eat some steamed buns or baozi at this little restaurant. And at the time, people were calling him Xi Baozi, like a cute little way of saying like, they love this image of him eating normal people food, right? The leader is down there with the people.

34:35And that eventually turned into like a negative term for him, a way to slander the leader. After people realized that actually he was going to continue cracking down on freedoms, like way worse than the previous leadership. What's really funny about that right now is Taiwanese people now know that that is like the sore point. So what's happening is obviously China, if you guys don't know, China claims Taiwan as their own. Taiwan is a separate... free-functioning democracy with freedom of speech. I think they rank even higher than the U.S. on Freedom House there in the 90s. They probably do, yeah.

35:07Taiwan has freedom of speech. They have all these abilities to express discontent. They have a very strong protest culture, a political culture. You're in a situation here where China keeps threatening to take Taiwan militarily. They threaten Taiwan, we're going to blow you up, we're going to take you back. They indoctrinate kids in China to say, we're going to build a railway to Taiwan, and we're going to take them all home. They really want to come home. And then to Taiwanese people, they're like, it doesn't matter if you don't want to be part of China or not, we will take you by force. They're surrounding the island all the time with military shows of force.

35:36But Taiwan knows that it's got one massive advantage, and that is just freedom of speech. And this is very much in line with what we're talking about. There is a culture on the Chinese internet called Douyin group streaming. And if you guys don't know, Douyin is China's TikTok. They're the same thing, but it operates in China with Chinese laws in its own intranet, as I spoke about before. And in this intranet, one of the biggest phenomenons is getting groups of five or six girls or five or six guys that are good looking, although they use filters to obviously look much better than they actually do.

36:12If I knew how to use filters, I'd probably do that too, to be fair. But okay, continue. They dance and sing for donations, right? So just like any live streaming thing, basically the equivalent of a super chat if you've used YouTube. And what will happen is stuff will happen on the screen. And then those singers and dancers that are lined up, kind of looks like a boy band or girl band, will sing your name. And they'll say like, you're so handsome. We love you. Thanks for your donation. And then the dance and song is over, and they'll move on to the next one. So what Taiwan was doing, what Taiwanese people were doing is there's a great unknown internet war between China and Taiwan.

36:48And Taiwan has free internet. So they don't have to deal with VPNs or censorship or anything like this. So what they did was they jumped over and they took advantage of the fact that China thinks that Taiwan is China. So Taiwanese people are allowed to use the Chinese versions of these apps. So they were able to get the China version of Douyin. So they were able to operate within the Chinese ecosystem and they speak Chinese too. So what they were doing is going onto the top streams and they would make these live streamers who are under the constant watch of the government shout out things like, for example, the Taiwanese president's name and do a cute dance and song about it.

37:26There was a couple instances where they knew the worst thing that could happen is if they started talking about Xi Jinping. So what they would do is cut off the character Xi and just say Jinping, which is technically a given name in Chinese. And these live streamers are going 12, 13, 14, 15 hours a day. And they're so tired and so lost in what they're doing that they get this donation from a top donor in Taiwan and they'll be like, oh, Jinping, you're so handsome. Like, we love you. Or they'll make him say like, they'll say, Jinping, sit down and shut up. They'll make them actually say these words and then the live streams get pulled.

37:59And so it's like a modern version of like internet warfare from Taiwan on China. It's pretty funny. I feel bad for those streamers, though. One, 15 hour day, basically enslaved working online. that's awful and these people are trying to make a living and i have some level of sympathy for them and then they lose their living and or get a visit from the police and it's like i don't know what i'm doing i'm delirious i've been awake for six days with four hours of sleep per night dancing on do yin give me a break yeah i don't know i get it it's funny but it's also like human cost i 100 agree with you but i will say there's very little ways that a taiwanese person can express discontent in China, like stop trying to like destroy my country and kill my family.

38:41So to get that in front of the eyes of 10 hundred million Chinese people as a form of protest, I do understand it from that perspective. Oh, I get it. I see. I didn't realize that many people were watching these things. That's crazy. Oh, no, it's less trolling and more like stop threatening our sovereignty. Wow. OK, do they use English characters? Because I know that sometimes they'll say instead of like Zhengfu government using the characters, they'll write like ZF, right? Are they doing that still? Absolutely. The problem is, is those get cracked down on just as fast as anything else now. I think what I want your audience to understand is that this like cute subculture of like censorship on the fly, it gets dealt with so quickly now.

39:22Sometimes it doesn't have even time to proliferate. That's the idea, right? They don't want it to catch on and become part of the lingo and evolve. They want it to just die on the vine. 100 % and actually if I scroll all the way to like today like presence one of the new things that I've recently learned about is called the clear and bright campaign and it's actually like a play on words but what this is is it's the government using AI algorithms to hunt for future words that will be used in censorship so they're using massive like language learning models to go and find stuff that may come out of a phrase that was already banned.

39:59That's how like sophisticated this is. Oh, they're using chat GPT, Chinese version, DeepSeek, whatever, to be like, okay, if democracy is Minjoo and freedom is Ziyou, what are the hundred ways these could be combined cleverly to come up with a new word? And what does it mean? And show how many people are using this in a weird context. It doesn't make sense. One of my favorites of that one was cloth self-oil. Cloth self oil was like, give me liberty or give me death, basically a play on those. And that was cracked down on. But basically, they'll use things like DeepSeek to make predictions on what is humanly capable of coming out of this.

40:36And of course, it's not 100 % successful because human ingenuity cannot be replicated 100 % by AI models, obviously. But they can get it down to a science, really. They can predict behaviors based on what people have been saying on certain forums, things like that. recently, the way of talking about the current economic situation in China has gotten people arrested. They went from a situation where like, I know I'm not allowed to talk about Xi Jinping. I know I'm not allowed to talk about the government. I'm not even allowed to talk about my local government, but at least I can talk about, man, life sucks right now.

41:06Like, stuff's pretty expensive. And I can't attest to this. Like, food prices in China have gone up like crazy. And so people were going online and having conversations. They're like, hey, hey, I'm a street sweeper here in this village in Hebei, and I only make this amount. But online, it says that I'm supposed to be making this amount, right? I can't believe I can't afford to send my kids to school anymore. I can't blah, blah, blah. People have these conversations, and people are getting arrested for that. So then they came up with a slang. It was called talk egg prices. If you talk about specifically just eggs, oh, egg prices are really high right now.

41:38That's like how to express discontent that life is getting too uncomfortable. Wow, you have to relegate it to that. And then pretty soon, they'll just make it illegal. to talk about eggs. Invited to tea by the cops sounds cute until you realize you're not the one picking the cafe. Here's something that won't end in electrified clamps being attached to your nipples. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Bull and Branch. The older I get, the more I realize sleep is not the place to cut corners. We spend a huge chunk of our lives in bed, and the quality of that sleep affects pretty much everything when we're awake.

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44:06Someone here will dig that up for you. It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Matthew Tai. I know when they talk about democracy and freedom, they have to use weird phrases that don't mean anything. Eagle metaphor. OK, but milk tea is one of them. I don't quite understand what that would be, but I guess they just decided that milk tea would be democracy. What's the connection there? So there's countries that all argue about where milk tea comes from. OK, so milk tea being bobo. We could say a lot of people might know it as bobo. Yeah, I love it. And it was originated in Taiwan.

44:41Taiwan, a free country, the free version of China, really. So that became synonymous with freedom in that respect. But then what happened was other countries that also really either like boba or milk tea or claim to have had something to do with its invention formed something called the Milk Tea Alliance. So these are countries that adhere to democratic principles or at least online freedom and stood with Taiwan in some way. So you had like at some point Taiwan, I think the Philippines, and these countries would come together and form the Milk Tea Alliance. So milk tea became this like object of almost like internet democracy or freedom.

45:15What about outright insulting words? Can you swear on the Chinese internet or is that not allowed? Yeah. So I don't want to offend anyone, but one of the most common things you could call someone is shabby, which means it's a very vulgar way of calling someone an idiot, right? Foolish C word. Is that the best way to do it? I don't want to get demonetized. Yeah. Foolish C word. You're technically not supposed to be using these words on the Chinese internet. And most places will pick that up through the filter. So what people were doing is just using the word SB in Roman characters to say shabi, which is the swear word.

45:49But then even that started getting cracked down on. So there is euphemisms, right? There's arbaiwu, which is 250, which also means stupid or like an idiot. So people would use the number 250. So you can kind of look at like a timeline of this. You look, starts with the Chinese characters, then it goes to the abbreviation of what it would be if it was spelled in pinyon or in English. And then that gets cracked down and then they go to numbers and then who knows from there. I see some of these examples are kind of hybrid where they'll go, oh, you can't say F your mom. So we're going to write like T-N-N-D, which is bleep your mom acronym, but in English.

46:25And then it's, or we're going to use the Chinese character for you, the letter M, and then another Chinese character because now it's like, Okay. Oh, okay. So if you speak Chinese, you get it. But this whole thing is a living language system that's constantly evolving, not to put too human a face on it. But how quick do these evolutions happen? Is it like one day it's this, one day it's that? Or is it like this works for a month and then next month you realize you can't type that in WeChat. So you just have to type something else or you see it a month later. How quickly does it evolve? Yeah. So that's a good question.

47:01The example you used, I can actually use as an early example. So, for example, Tamada, right? If you're mom, right? Don't get too scientific and technical on us here. My point is when that was abbreviated to TMD, the abbreviation of that, that was censored, but it took a long time for the government to really even care about that. Again, it's not really political, but it kind of is in poor taste. But how else are you supposed to tell someone to go screw their mother? I don't understand. You just got to give it up. You just got to give it up. I don't know if I can do that. But what happened was that turned into, like you just said, T-N-N-D.

47:39And why that is, is the two Ns together. If you put the Ns together and pretend like the middle is joined, that becomes an M. But they caught that one pretty quickly, right? It depends on how or who's paying attention to it. If it's a government phrase, like, for example, if he has something during the white paper protests, like what happened in Shanghai. What's the white paper protest? So this is when people in Shanghai, who are already very westernized, they see themselves as Chinese, but they also see themselves as like the window to the rest of the world. They kind of understand how things are abroad.

48:09A lot of them have been abroad or they've learned English and things like this. It's a very sophisticated city. It's not really representative of most of China. These people suffered some of the worst lockdowns. And that's crazy because this is like the gem of China, right? You'd think the government would have taken it a little more easy on them. I don't want to get into the whole political reasons that happened. It's probably political retaliation based on the different factions of the CCP. But that's another story for another time. What happened was these people suffered some of the worst fates during these COVID lockdowns.

48:40What started as like an anti-COVID kind of uprising turned very quickly into a anti-government uprising. And this is where you saw very famous video clips of people saying Communist Party stepped down, Xi Jinping stepped down, like the things that get you just disappeared for the rest of your life. That's where that was happening. And so what people were doing, And I think this is very related to what we're talking about. They'd hold up banners. And as soon as they would hold up banners that say like freedom or something, the cops would run in, SWAT team would run in and tackle him, take the banner, rip it up.

49:11Or they would do this thing where they would hold up like actual physical like censorship curtains to like block off protesters so that people couldn't take videos or cell phone pictures of them. So if people are confused about, you ever see an injury at the Olympics in Japan or China and they bring up that weird folding wall to protect the person's dignity. It's like that, but huge. And they use it outside. So it's like, oh, you can't see the protesters and their signs because the police are just sort of awkwardly running around with this wall to block them. It has wheels on the bottom. It's actually, it's almost comical because the protesters just have to like turn around and the sign is facing the other way.

49:47So the police are trying to surround this big group of people, but it's like this Laurel and Hardy skit where you can basically hear the Benny Hill music playing in the background. It's sad though, because the people that are behind those curtains are probably never going to see the light of day again. That's the grim side of this. But anyway, during this protest, people, instead of getting physically censored by these walls, these like curtain cubes or whatever, and not being able to hold these banners, they said, I'm just going to hold up a blank piece of paper. There's nothing on it. It can't be illegal.

50:15So people would go down to the street and literally just hold up an A4 size piece of paper that was completely blank and it became known as the white paper protest. The piece of white paper in these marches and in these protests that they were doing became synonymous with democracy or like the government kind of relinquishing authoritarian control on the people. And so China was actually banning the sale of A4 paper in the area so that people couldn't buy blank paper to go to these protests. And to me, that's like what we're talking about with this evolution of language. You're in a situation where people had to evolve language in that they couldn't have banners anymore.

50:50They use white pieces of paper. So if you needed to print something during that protest, you were just shit out of luck, man. Like, no, no, I swear. I really need to print out my term paper. My professor does not have email. Sorry, this is not allowed. You're going to, I can imagine someone running across town being, can I borrow a sheet of paper? Can I borrow a sheet of paper? Just having to do that the whole day to get enough to print off 20 page paper. This is ridiculous. You know, a couple of possibly apocryphal protests in the Soviet Union, somebody would be handing out blank pieces of paper in the street and the KGB would go up and be like, what are you doing?

51:22What is the meaning of this? And the guy would just be like, nothing. And it was really embarrassing because you have these like state security agents arresting a guy handing out blank paper. And it didn't have to say anything. It just showed how afraid the state was that somebody might actually say literally anything. And so the protest worked really well, right? Because this guy got arrested for handing out blank sheets of paper. And it was like, wow, this must be a fragile environment that the state exists on if they're worried about a guy handing out blank sheets of paper. It makes me wonder if the Chinese protesters did take influence from that event in the Soviet Union.

51:55That's really cool. It's possible. Yeah, I'll have to look it up. I read about it when I was reading stuff about the Soviet Union recently. So it's not new, but it also sounds like one of those potential urban legend things. Okay, when did this happen? No one knows. Did anybody see it? Somebody told me about it. Okay, maybe it's from a book, right? It's one of those things, but it's quite sharp, incisive. I think that's a great segue into what the legacy of all this stuff is, because these protests do happen in China. There are people that do want freedom and democracies, people that throw away their entire lives to hold a banner, right?

52:29And they get murdered by the government. These people exist. And what the government does is turn these events into urban legend, just like you said, the Soviet Union. So we don't know if those things happen to the Soviet Union. We do know that they happen in China, but China, what they're doing right now is to remove any instance of this. And my friend and I, Winston, when we put stuff together for the China show, sometimes we want to hearken back to when people got welded in their apartment or when the white paper protests, when the guy says, hey, CCP stepped down. Or another event when the Zhengzhou floods happen, when the entire tunnel filled up and thousands of people died and the government claimed only a few hundred died.

53:05And there's a shot of a subway car where everyone drowned to death. And there's black curtains over the windows because they're trying to hide that everyone died in there. We're trying to find this stuff again because it was big news. People talked about this stuff, but somehow the Chinese government through the takedown requests or servers or hacking or something, a lot of these clips or this evidence of these very powerful events end up disappearing into the annals of history. Really, actually not the annals of history, just memories in our minds to say, remember when that happened? Now I can't even find it anymore.

53:38I did find the thing I was looking at. They did it in Russia in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine, which is the same year that it happened in China, 2022. But in Belarus, it happened in 2020 because they were protesting then also with blank paper. But the earliest incident that I can see here, because there's a list of them, is Moscow in the 60s and then again in the 70s. And they also had silent demonstrations where they would just hold up the blank sheet of paper instead of handing them out, basically saying, it's not even safe enough for me to write anything. So I'm just going to show you that I can't do it.

54:08But it's hard to document in the Soviet Union because they weren't like, let's put this on the front page of the paper in the Soviet Union. It's almost like a Soviet joke that turns into a real protest method in post-Soviet Russia. So I wouldn't put too much credence in it happening in Moscow in the 60s and 70s, but it definitely happened in Belarus in 2020, and it definitely happened in Russia in 2022 and China in 2022. There's a lot of similarities between all of those regimes and how they operate. So I could see some solidarity amongst pro-democracy movements and stuff. You mentioned VPNs before.

54:40Tell me about those, because it seems like everyone I know in China has a VPN, but also that's a selection bias because, of course, the people I'm talking to who live in China are using a VPN to talk to me. So how common are these? relatively common in terms of you'll be able to find one, but the law is very clear in China that VPNs are absolutely positively illegal. One of our favorite things to debunk on the China show is that China pays these Westerners to go out and apologize for the Chinese government to make everyone think that everything in China is great. They're the antidote to the West and actually life is free there.

55:18They'll always go out and say, hey, actually anybody in China can see whatever they want. They just get a VPN. What they don't talk about on purpose is the fact that people all the time get arrested. There's been high profile cases of people that sell VPNs that get arrested. There's people that just use them that get arrested. If you're a foreigner, you're probably going to be okay if you're in China, if you're using a VPN, because they know that people from abroad are going to want to use their own internet sites and stuff that are blocked. But for a Chinese person to jump the firewall, as we say, is a great risk, especially if you're posting things that you're not supposed to.

55:55To the point where we know dissidents that posted stuff with a VPN while they were in China and then left China and were still hunted down in the US about what they posted on a VPN when they were in China. It's that serious. This is not a joke. These people do go to jail and get disappeared for using VPNs. In fact, there was a very high profile case just very recently about that. Can you talk about VPNs in the Chinese internet or do you have to use a euphemism for that too? Yes, it depends on what you're on. So if you're talking about using a VPN because you want to express dissatisfaction with the government, then absolutely they're going to hunt you down.

56:34If you're talking about, oh, I work at a company and I had to use a VPN to talk to my clients or something, that's a different story. I see. It's almost like case by case slash whether or not you have good luck with the police that day. The average person would absolutely get punished if caught. I'll say that companies that operate in China and have to do like foreign business and stuff have a lot more leniency. That makes sense. How do you even say VPN in Chinese? Or do they just say VPN? People say fanchang. So they'll say, I need to get over the wall because you don't want to use those characters.

57:03Those will be blocked. Okay. Fanchang. So hopping the wall is usually what people say. It's funny. I was talking with my teacher about this. she loves boy bands, one of my teachers, and she's always going to see her boy band. And she mentioned there was a guy who came all the way from whatever city alone. And I was like, okay, but maybe he's a gay dude. And she's like, yeah, he writes, what is it called? Like boy love fiction or something. And I was like, okay, that sounds worse than just saying gay, by the way. But I wonder if LGBT topics are targeted on the internet. Cause I know it's kind of a conservative of society when it comes to that stuff, right?

57:39Yeah. So things have morphed a lot in that respect. When I was in China, I had a gay friend that I just had to just tell his parents that he was going to get married someday. And he would bring over friends that were girls and then be like, oh, maybe you'll marry her someday and just put up this facade because nobody would accept it. And in fact, I would say that sentiment would hold true today. It is very old fashioned. It's very much frowned upon. But it's not the homophobia that you might see in places like in Eastern Europe or something like that. It's more like we choose to ignore it and we don't want to know anything about it.

58:14And you're also you shouldn't do anything about it in public. But you're not going to get beat up and put in the hospital for it, maybe, hopefully. I think a lot of places in northern China, you would. It would operate maybe more like a place like Russia or something where maybe a Russian village or something like that would be more into like the treatment you'd get if you're in some places in Northern China. But yeah, I'd say it's more like, don't talk about it. Don't express it. We don't want to know anything about it. And you can't do anything about it legally. You can't get married or anything like that.

58:42And society won't accept that. But there's a lot of gay people everywhere in the world. So they still have to find a way to meet and express their feelings and things like that. So what you had mentioned, actually, interestingly enough, I had learned about this, is these boy love novels or whatever. The biggest audience for those, basically think about anime or manga, but it's about gay men. The biggest audience for those in China are actually women. Yeah. My teacher, she said they met because she loves these books, but she's not gay. She just likes reading about men falling in love. I don't quite, I don't quite get it.

59:18They've had all kinds of crackdowns on that. There was a time where China was banning men from having like earrings on TV. They didn't want this like sissy boy image, as they called it, which was very silly because these CCP guys are like the least manly men you've ever met in your life. These are pot belly chain smoking guys that you have a blue on them, they'd fall over it. They obviously have slang names and stuff for this. For example, if you want to say like gay friend, you can say chicken oil. And that's a way around that because there was online crackdowns of LGBT speech as well. I'm not talking about activism.

59:52I'm talking about just stuff that's gay. I was going through my Chinese vocabulary and one of the words was short sleeves. And I was like, oh, that's easy. And it was like also a word for homosexuals. And I was like, oh, so if you want to call someone gay, you say, oh, they have short sleeves. My wife had never heard of that. But my mother-in-law was like, oh, yeah, we don't really say that too much anymore. Now we say I forget what the term was, but you can also say comrades. Yes, that is the classic way to say a gay person is call them a comrade, which is funny because that's actually how you address everyone in China up until like the 80s.

1:00:25So I assume, one, this only started being used in the last decade or so, because otherwise, how confusing would it be? Like, he's a comrade. Oh, good. No, no, no. He's the kind that will arrest you for being a comrade, if you know what I'm saying. Oh, okay, nevermind. It would just be like extremely confusing. Now they have all kinds of different abbreviations, including BL, which is what my teacher calls it, which is boy love, which is, like you said, a genre of writing as well as also being gay or whatever. It's so difficult to keep up with this. I guess you have to kind of be terminally online to keep up with the slang, but that's the idea, right?

1:01:01Otherwise, you just don't know what people are talking about. And ideally, the government people are the last to find out. Yeah, the interesting thing is the government simultaneously wants people to be on their devices at all times. I'll be honest with you, if I was to put together some study, I'm sure I'd find out that China has the highest screen time usage in the entire world. There's not a chance that it's not. So while that happens, it's a huge breeding ground or ecosystem for all these subcultures and these words, slang terms that didn't previously exist to get around censorship because people are online talking to each other so much.

1:01:32Can you talk about tariffs or is that part of the egg prices because they don't want you talking about that either? Because it seems like that's simultaneously an economic issue and a U.S. diplomatic and economic relations issue that might be sensitive. Yeah, so it's sensitive, but not in the same way. And this is a good way to delineate what's like on and off limits in China. What's off limits in China is when you talk about life conditions in China for Chinese people, right? They don't want people finding camaraderie in suffering based on like government oppression or lack of rights and things like this or economic downturn.

1:02:09That's a no-no. If you talked about something like tariffs, I have seen a lot of discussion about tariffs on the Chinese internet. And that's because there's now a finger you can point at. You're allowed to talk smack about America all you want. In fact, one of the most disturbing things is China sets up TikTok, or Douyin as they call it, to run in its own intranet, its own ecosystem. And when you go on there, you will find video after video fed to you of American cops shooting people uncensored, police brutality, violence, just the worst stuff that you would never be able to see on the Chinese internet about stuff happening in China, but you can see plenty of that from America.

1:02:49And that's because it has a goal, right? It's trying to dissuade Chinese people from seeing a beacon of hope, a beacon of liberty, democracy, or a better life across the pond, right? So the way it's delineated is like, you can talk as much smack as you want about tariffs or America or how bad America is or the drug problem or homelessness and all this kind of stuff if it's in relation to countries abroad that China is not friendly with. The rules actually do change if you start talking about a country where China is friendly to. For example, we've seen a massive propaganda push in support of the government that was being overthrown in Nepal.

1:03:23We actually saw foreign propaganda. So like American propagandists on behalf of China running Nepalese current government propaganda against the protests. So it depends on if China is strategically involved in another country, and it depends on if China sees you as the enemy of today. So for example, Japan and America and most of the Western world would be China's current enemies. Yeah, that's fascinating. That must have got drowned out because all I saw was people celebrating the overthrow of the government. It almost happened overnight. Do they still have the 50 cent army? And can you explain what that is?

1:03:59I haven't heard that term for a while. Is that still even a program that exists? yeah so originally the 50 cent army were people that were paid to leave certain comments on the chinese internet to steer the conversation in a more pro-government direction usually relied on like prison labor so what the chinese government would do is they'd go to a prison and they turn it into a labor camp because they do have labor camps of forced labor where you have shackles on and you're like digging mines and stuff but they have also these internet server farms basically with tons of servers, tons and tons of computers, and they get these prisoners to sit there, and then they'll have a target.

1:04:34They'll say, go to this website and find anybody talking smack about the CCP and then say, no, you're wrong or whatever. The rumor was that each time that they posted one of those things, they were paid wu mao or 0.5 RMB. So that's why that slang term came out. The prison labor ones would have been free, but the people that actually do it for a job were getting paid Wu Mao per comment. Now, I 100 % don't believe that. I think they were paid much less than that. I think maybe Wu Mao for like an entire like half an hour of posting or something like that. But that's one cent, isn't it? Yeah, it's very low.

1:05:07A couple cents. But it morphed. Wu Mao started as a paid person to go run defense for the CCP and then turned into people that just support the CCP online, whether it's Zhegang Wu Mao, which means like a self-motivated Wu Mao to go out and fight for the country, or you get actual paid wumao in these massive, huge troll farms, which are probably mostly bots nowadays. All these are considered wumao because they're spreading the government's message. They're fighting people on YouTube comment sections that are disparaging the CCP. They're spreading nationalist rhetoric. They're disparaging dissidents.

1:05:44That's what a wumao does. So it started as like this little paid position to try to make the Communist Party look better. And now it's a huge focus of the Chinese government. When you can't say tariffs, so you complain about egg prices instead, that is elite level linguistic parkour. Speaking of things that keep getting more expensive, here's a quick word from our sponsors who keep this show free for you. We'll be right back.

1:06:08All right, y 'all, don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. Comes out just about every Wednesday, is very specific, practical, and has an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, and relationships. It is an under two-minute read, we promise you that. It's a gem from an episode from us to you, and if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It really is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Matthew Tai. I'm on Reddit a lot and I see the Ask China subreddit is crazy because there'll be a thread that's super interesting and there'll be tons of Chinese people that answer and you're like, wow, that was really educational and fun.

1:06:43And then there'll be something where it's like, is this really a thing? And you can just tell that it's completely propaganda botted on the side of China. And there'll be Americans that are like, yeah, I heard people can get arrested for talking about political topics and it'll have 187 downvotes. And it's like, wait, it's true. Why are you downvoting this? And I'm guessing half the downvotes are just like tanky, crazy sympathizers who are like, no, North Korea is the worker's paradise. Those people exist. But also a lot of it's got to be bots because it'll happen within minutes. And I'm like, OK, you can't even ask if people are getting disappeared in prison because I've literally interviewed people on this show who have had their wife arrested and they've never seen them again.

1:07:25Desmond Shum, for example. And we know that that's true. She's literally vanished. And then, I don't know, she might have gotten released recently, but she was gone for years. And they're like, nah, this is a bunch of propaganda. And then you get the whataboutism and stuff like that. Yeah, the average Chinese prisoner is much better off than the average American prisoner. And I'm like, I'm not really so sure about that. And neither are you because you've never been able to see a Chinese prison ever. And you can look at an American prison on the frickin' History Channel if you want to. And you can see the worst stuff because they film it.

1:07:58It's entertainment. You could go visit someone in a prison here. There are people that I know personally who cannot visit their family in a Chinese prison because they're not acknowledged to have been in prison in the first place. So I don't know. It's just very odd to me that you see this massive campaign. It's weird that they give a crap what people outside China actually think about China. That part I don't totally get. I think that's been a huge shift in this current leadership in China. I don't think they cared as much back in the day. Now shifting global opinion, because China's whole MO, the way the CCP operates is let us do what we want.

1:08:32We're going to be oppressive. We're going to be totalitarian. We're going to stamp all over the human rights of our citizens, but that's none of your business. We'll just never get involved in your stuff. When China recently has just shown time and time again that they are absolutely getting involved in everything abroad. China's hacked our telecoms. Everyone in America's phone has been hacked by China from Salt Typhoon. What's that? What's Salt Typhoon? Oh, it was basically a huge telecoms hack where China hacked all the major telecoms providers in America. You also had some of the other typhoon programs, these hacking programs that are state-sponsored by China.

1:09:09They're hacking America's electric grid and the water system, They're prepping for some sort of conflict in the future. So China is absolutely involved. I think New York Times did a great piece the other day on how they got involved in New York City elections. Very much involved in stuff that happens, especially here in America. So what they say and what they do is completely different. but the point I was trying to make with that is that China is now living in this they have this weird goal of like and I think this comes from the top of needing to control the narrative at all costs before if you were abroad and you're a Chinese person you still probably shouldn't be talking a lot of smack about the government but if you're like a foreigner or whatever they wouldn't necessarily threaten you that much now it's like prerogative to hunt people down that are talking trash about the Chinese government.

1:10:01And it's terrifying. It's a new world. And what I noticed was, is it's everywhere. It used to be like on a Chinese forum, they're trying to shut down a certain topic. But now, like you said, it's on things like Reddit. And Reddit was very interesting. There is a subreddit called OurChina. And it was one of the only subreddits I've ever seen about a country that is opposed to its government wholeheartedly. so not our china but like r slash china r slash right so it's just the china subreddit okay gotcha yeah and so you go to like i don't know the brazil subreddit or something maybe there's some political stuff in there but it's probably a lot about i don't know beaches or festivals or something in china the r china subreddit was like very much opposed to the chinese government and i don't know what happened but it was in november in 2024 it's a big subreddit right i go on there sometimes to see what the sentiment is.

1:10:56A lot of the people on there are people that used to live in China like me. And it switched overnight. I swear, in November, it turned on a dime. All the posts started going very pro-China. It was propaganda pieces, and they'd get upvoted, and anything critical of China was getting downvoted into oblivion. It was literally like an overnight shift. I've never seen anything like it. And I did notice that behavior was mirrored across a lot of social media platforms. On YouTube, on X, we've seen a huge, just an absolute astronomic explosion of allowed Chinese propaganda bot accounts. This real foreign influence campaign coming from China has gotten so much worse since around October, November, from what I've seen.

1:11:37And I don't know why. Yeah, I'd be curious to see if the moderators of that sub had switched. And I also would be curious to say, and we can't find this part out, but I'd be curious to see if the IP addresses of the moderators have switched because it wouldn't surprise me terribly. You and I have had this where Chinese agencies go, hey, I'll give you $5 ,000 if you post this video that says that COVID came from the American white-tailed deer. Or I'll give you$4 ,000 if you post this video about, I can't even remember the last thing I got, but it was some sort of silly COVID-related thing. It's been a while.

1:12:09It wouldn't surprise me if they went to the moderators and said, your aunt still lives in China. Why don't you let me take over your Reddit account. You're spending a lot of time on this. Or this user lived in China 2014. I'll give you$25 ,000 for that account. Oh, okay. So you're no longer the moderator of our China. Somebody else is. Because it would be an easy investment and a good ROI for an agency to buy those moderator accounts, which is not probably allowed under Reddit's terms of service. But let's say I make 50 grand a year and somebody offers me$25 ,000 under the table to buy a fricking online account for a subreddit where I discuss things.

1:12:45Sure. I'll take that deal. So you invest a hundred grand and now you've got four out of five moderator accounts that you're controlling. To zoom out, that's a hundred percent happening, but to zoom out and look at it at a personal level, and I won't name drop anybody, but there are people, actual real people who have had online legacies for many, many years. They're big key opinion leaders, right? People like yourself that are out there and they're doing 100 % blatant Chinese propaganda for the CCP. And I'm not talking about, oh, look at how pretty this beach is or something. I'm talking about government talking points, genocide denial, the real, real bad stuff that the government's trying to push to try to whitewash its human rights record.

1:13:26They're getting big Western voices to do that for them. And it's very clear they're paying for it in some way, whether it's incentivizing people or whatever. But we He uncovered a massive campaign in Chongqing, which is the cyberpunk city of the future that they keep saying, right? I have seen that. It actually looks really cool, but go on. Anything looks cool at night when you have a million lights and you can't see the pollution and moldy buildings everywhere. Yeah. Anyway, they got, I'm going to say, 50 plus people to go over there around the same time. And we started digging and we were able to put together compilations of when they all say the exact same thing.

1:14:04So these are Western YouTubers, big names, people that are much bigger than me and my partner Winston, going over there and doing verbatim scripts, propaganda. And these are people that pride themselves on being super transparent with their audience. They don't take paid government propaganda trips. They don't do that kind of thing. And all of a sudden, all these guys are in the exact same place in Chongqing, and they all are standing in the same building that apparently looks like you're standing on the ground, but actually it's a building. It goes further down. It's 22 stories up. And they all say the exact same thing.

1:14:40They all say, it looks like I'm standing on the ground level, but actually I'm on the 22nd floor. And they would say the exact same thing over and over again. They would say, Chongqing is an 8D city. Nobody in the West is going to say a city is an 8D city. That is a specifically Chinese phrase because you'll go to these amusement parks in China and they'll have a knockoff Shrek booth where it sprays water on your face and has a fart smell come out. And they say, this is eight dimensions, right? 8D, right? 2D is like Mario, side to side. 3D is the realm that we live in. But China in their typical marketing fashion had to outdo themselves and one-up themselves over and over again.

1:15:18So you get like a 4D simulator, and that just means there's a smell that comes out. Now, 5D simulator is you're in a fighter jet, and all of a sudden, a fake rat or something will jump out on your arm. The craziest stuff you've ever seen. But anyway, they were all saying this city is this 8D city. And I was like, oh my gosh, they're totally reading a script. And we put them all together, and we overlaid the audio and all the clips, and they all say the exact same thing at the same time in the city for the Chinese government's propaganda. And what was funny was my partner, Winston, put together one of these compilations where it looks like the Brady Bunch.

1:15:52It's like a bunch of these, we call them shills, right? They're shilling for the Chinese government. All saying the exact same thing at the same time. And the Chinese government took that clip as like it was a positive thing. I think it was a foreign ministry spokesperson of the CCP took that, isolated that clip where they all say the same thing about Chongqing is whatever. and then posted it on their ex from the government's account and said, look at all these Westerners that love to come to Chongqing. It was very funny. Jeez, they put so much effort into this. In the United States, we just have movies that kind of do the legwork, right?

1:16:29They go around the world or like jeans or fashion and stuff like that. We don't have to try as hard. Switching topics, what about the lay flat movement? I heard all about that, how people didn't want to get jobs and whatever. Is that still a thing? Are people still kind of like, yeah, I'm just not going to get a job anymore. I'm going to lay around. Is that still a movement? Yes. In fact, it was this weird double edged sword. So the lie flat movement basically means you don't do anything. You don't protest. You don't stand up for your rights. You don't work. You don't do anything. You just lay flat, you know, exist.

1:16:57An authoritarian government dreams of having a populace like this, right? Stay on your devices, live on the bare minimum or whatever. But at the same time, China's a manufacturing economy. They need these people to work in factories and make stuff. stuff so it was this catch-22 where china can't afford to pay their factory workers to do their job so people don't want to get the factory job they can't afford to live on said salary so they do this lie flat thing where they just exist maybe they live with their parents so they go move to a little outskirts village or something and live in a flat that costs 100 rmb a month or something but at the same time the government also liked promoting this kind of weird lifestyle where you don't have to do much because that way they could control people a little bit better, especially during these tumultuous times of like the white paper protests I was talking about or any of these movements.

1:17:45They were happy to have people just give up and be apathetic. It's the perfect position. But right now, I'd say they're leaning more towards we need people to work and we can't. And I don't know if you've been following this at all, but we've been tracking dozens and dozens of these factory fires where people will go and set a factory on fire because it turns out they haven't been paid their wages in from six months to four years. That's no good. And so this is an economic indicator that people, I don't know why, just refuse to talk about in the West is that you can go off of China's GDP growth and stuff.

1:18:21But the reality on the ground is that there's videos of people setting factories on fire and saying that they haven't been paid, blocking the entrance to their workplace. And you can tell there's proof of this because when you have the minister of youth unemployment figures is laid off and then it becomes illegal to report on youth unemployment rate in China, then you know that something's wrong. So basically, we're in a situation where you have to live off of understanding China through its own official data, but at the same time, use real images and video and eyewitness accounts of people in China to realize it's actually not what they're reporting.

1:18:55So this lie-flat movement's continued. They're apathetic. People are nostalgic for the time when China was growing. They had this social contract with the government that said, hey, you give up your rights, we'll make sure you get rich. And unfortunately, they took their rights more so than ever now and then didn't give them money. Economic situation is going down. They kind of broke the contract. It's interesting because one of the things that I'll debate about when I am just wasting my time on like the USSR subreddit or the Chinese subreddit is people go, at the end of the day, most people don't care about this authoritarian crap you Americans are always worried about and getting worked up about.

1:19:31They just care about quality of life. And I'm like, OK, that's objectively not true because this guy was Polish. And he's like, in Poland, all the protests were about quality of life. And I was like, that's definitely not the case. There were protesters, literalist slogans were we want democracy and we want freedom and stuff like that. I'm like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a quality of life protest, bro. But he did have a point in which it probably often starts as a quality of life issue and then goes, you know what, screw this, because the contract, the kind of unwritten rule is we're going to take your rights away, but you're not going to have to crap in a hole and you're going to have running water.

1:20:05And it's like, all right, fine. And then it's all right. You have running water and you have electricity and you can't use the Internet how you want, but you're going to have Internet and a mobile phone. And they're like, all right, fine. And so a lot of the what about is my seeing these subs are at least we have health care. At least we don't have gun violence. And I'm like, yeah, you do have a point there. However, what you don't have is upward mobility, for example. And the other problem is that's only true until it's not. And it sounds like what you're saying is this is starting to no longer be the case.

1:20:36If I work at a factory and I'm like, yeah, I'm running water. I have internet. I have a mobile phone. My kids can go to school. And it's like, oh, but I haven't been paid in six months. Wait, then you are defaulting. You are breaching your side of the contract. You are not performing anymore because I was tolerant of being oppressed, losing my rights, whatever you want to call it, not being able to talk about certain things. But now I'm actually broke and hungry. So what are you going to do about it? Absolutely. You're 100 % spot on. I think it starts like that because if you start with China in the 90s where everyone is actually living in abject poverty, it's super, super poor, it becomes very tantalizing to say, oh, actually, we can start a little business now where we can actually handle money and profit off of something.

1:21:17It's a delicious idea in a way because I have been hungry my entire life and finally I can use a note of paper to go purchase food. I don't have to use a ration stamp. I don't have to rely on the whims of the government to tell me when I can eat. So these things like trading this, you're relinquishing your freedoms in the future, doesn't mean anything when you're hungry. It means absolutely nothing to you. That is how it starts. But I always like to say the CCP's doctrine, their constitution, everything that they've written, it's never changed, right? It's the same authoritarian, terrible government.

1:21:49And they've gone through periods where things have gone more in a gray area, where people are allowed to do certain things. And when they decide that's not okay, then they take that away. We're in a current situation where they've taken a lot away and people are now realizing, wow, I was supposed to be like that American guy that has a house and goes to work and has a car. I didn't get those things yet and I'm already not being paid. I'm already losing my opportunity for employment. It doesn't make any sense. It's manifesting in very bad ways. We're watching China's crime rate on paper, the Chinese government doesn't report reliably on crime.

1:22:26We're watching it in real life go up through the roof. And we're watching weekly cases where people are getting in cars and running over pedestrians. It's become like a massive problem. It's almost an epidemic at this point. I mean, one guy ran over like 90 something people. Is that the China equivalent of mass shooting? Because they don't have guns? They just run people over with the car. Wow. So yeah, if you ever get into an argument with a tankie, an authoritarian supporter, it'd be like, they don't have gun violence or whatever. Yeah, but they have people running over mass crowds of people in cars.

1:22:58And they also have kindergarten stabbings where grown men go into kindergartens and stab 20 plus kids. So it's crazy. And as China watchers, we have these weird things that we try to keep our eyes out for. And we notice something in China. They're putting up these bollards everywhere. A bollard is like a way to stop a car in a way. It's think those yellow poles that you see in parking lots that is next to the payment machine. They don't want you to back into it and wreck it. So they put bollards in front of it. You see it in front of buildings now here too. Our government building will have giant planters all around it.

1:23:29And you're like, wow, they're really taking their gardening seriously, landscaping. Now it's to stop trucks from running into the building. Right. That kind of thing. Correct. So China, what we noticed was they've had these. There's been so many added to the point where it's comical. And this is another example of how top-down government doesn't really work is they'll get a mandate and the city will be like, you got to put in 10 ,000 bollards and they'll all put them in like one road. So it's like people are like zigzagging through all these marble looking balls or those posts that you're talking about.

1:23:58And we actually started a segment on our show called Bollard Report, where it's funny, like we make jokes out of it because it's so asinine. Like the way that they're putting these bollards in is just comical. It's so haphazard and so dumb. And it turns out like the corruption goes deeper than that because half the bollards are like hollow. So they don't stop like when a car plows into it. It just it's like playing shuffleboard or something. Oh, gosh. Yeah. That reminds me of like Russia and the Ukraine stuff where the tanks had like egg crates painted over instead of armor because they were like, oh, that all that metal is expensive.

1:24:29I'd rather have a yacht. I can imagine some dude leaning up against a new bollard and be like, see, nothing's stopping. This bad boy just slaps it and it just cracks because it's made out of plaster of Paris or whatever. You see that in the buildings I've seen you film where you go, this is new construction. You're using your fingers to rip basically what looks like a concrete facade just off the side of a building with your hands. These ghost cities that you hear about in China where there's capacity for hundreds of thousands of people in one city and they're completely abandoned and empty. That goes to the whole property crisis there.

1:25:01People don't have a reliable way to invest their money, so they buy the rights to an apartment that's not done yet and it doesn't get finished because the economy is going down despite what you're hearing in China. That'll be an interesting, probably separate show. Man, I'm taking enough of your time. Thank you for coming on. It's super fascinating. The internet stuff was on my mind for a while and I think it's just a really, it's almost like a fun slash cute slash also a little bit grim, like you said, look at the lives of, again, my favorite word, Chinese netizens and how they live and have discourse or don't have discourse online.

1:25:34So thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it, Jordan. Always a pleasure. What if the person love bombing you online is actually grooming you for financial slaughter? Winston Sturzel spent 14 years in China and has seen firsthand how the pig butchering scam works and how shockingly deep the deception goes. China has this very interesting kind of situation when it comes to scammers. It's accepted within China to scam and take advantage of foreigners. But if you scam local Chinese people, that's when you get into trouble. There will be no repercussions at all from the Chinese government if they target foreign nationals, because the Chinese government, in fact, in a way encourages this behavior.

1:26:14So that's why you're starting to see an uptick in this. It's just interesting to see how many of the same tactics that are used in these in-your-face, real, tangible scams that happen in the streets of China that I've experienced have moved over into this kind of cryptocurrency slaughter the pig scam, which was now being experienced around the entire world. The way they pull it off is even more interesting. And like I said, I played along all the way to the point where I was going to send the money. So I figured out how it all works. And it looks legitimate, OK? And they can string you along for the longest time.

1:26:45They steal your money without you knowing that it's stolen. It's so convincing. and it really does make you think that you're dealing with a legitimate person. It's quite despicable. And at the end of the day, every cent is gone. If they do it right, they're very clever. They do it very slowly. And they will contact you every day because they're building up a database. And when they see that there's a response, like you say, you're validating that you're a real contact. The absolute best thing you can do is just block and not respond. They do not face any repercussions whatsoever from the Chinese government and the police.

1:27:18It's an us versus them type of thing. To hear more about how victims are manipulated, why no one is immune, and how to spot the con before you become the next target, check out episode 737 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. This episode is a real reminder that censorship doesn't just silence people. It reshapes language itself. When speech is restricted, it doesn't disappear. It mutates. It becomes jokes. It becomes puns. It becomes steamed buns and mythical alpacas and blank sheets of paper. It becomes lying flat. It becomes glowing. It becomes talk egg price. And sometimes it becomes silence, the kind that's louder than anything you could say out loud.

1:27:59Whether you'll ever set foot on the Chinese internet or not, the biggest lesson here is universal. When people feel pressure, language adapts. When power tightens its grip, creativity finds cracks. And when you can't say the thing directly, you just say it sideways. All things Matthew Tai and The China Show will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking as well over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

1:28:29You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in China, Chinese internet culture, censorship, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

1:28:59And we'll see you next time.

1:29:05This episode is sponsored in part by Little Sleepies. If you got kids, you already know the truth. with bedtime can turn on to a full-on negotiation. But one thing that's been a reliable win in our house is Little Sleepy's pajamas. We're fans of Little Sleepy's for years before they even sponsored the show. Jen fell hard for the adorable prince, grabbed a couple pairs, and then it basically spiraled from there. Now you've got a whole drawer full of them. The kids have the cutest matching sets. And yes, we've even gone full family matching pajamas. Kind of fun, not gonna lie. And the fabric is the real deal.

1:29:34Ridiculously soft, super stretchy. The kids like wearing them, which means fewer complaints when it's time to change. Plus, we've had ours for years, and I can say with confidence, these things hold up. That matters when you're buying kid clothes that get worn constantly and washed, because, you know, lots of stuff gets on those clothes. I'll leave it right there. And they also make a great gift. The prints are adorable. The sizing is easy. Parents are always happy to get something cozy that'll actually get used. If you're expecting or dressing little ones, check out Little Sleepies. You can visit littlesleepies.com and use promo code GOODNIGHT for 10 % off your first order.

1:30:06Quick break to put you onto another show you should be listening to. If you enjoyed my interview with Javier Liva about romance scams back on episode 1195, you'll want to check out his podcast, Pretend. Javier is an investigative journalist who lives in the world of lies, manipulation and deception. And but he's still a nice guy. And on Pretend, he doesn't just tell these stories. He gets inside them. He talks directly to scammers, cult leaders and the people they've conned. He just has a way of getting them to reveal things that will make you go, OK, you're just going to admit that. and the cases are Bananas, a cyber-stalking story where the victims turned out to be the stalkers, a true crime podcaster accused of harassing victims for content, no it's not him, and Javier spending a day with a cult leader, yes including an exorcism, that must have been a fun afternoon, plus he digs into the real Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can, let's just say the movie took some liberties, Pretend has been featured on Netflix's Don't Pick Up the Phone, Spotify tagged it as a breakout hit, and it's consistently up there with the top true crime shows, search Pretend wherever you get your podcasts.