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

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. So yeah, if you ever get into an argument with a tanky and authoritarian supporter, it'd be like, they don't have gun violence sort of, you have people running over masks, crowds of people in cars. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into

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a taste of everything that we do here on this show. Just visit Jordanharbinger.com/start, research for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, if you've ever posted something online and thought harnes could get me in trouble, imagine doing that in a country where your real name, your national ID, and possibly your future are tied to that post. Today we're going deep into the coded chaotic, weirdly poetic underground language of the Chinese internet,

where censorship doesn't just delete speech. It forces it to evolve. Where people don't say their post was censored, they say it got river-crabbed. Where Tiana and Square becomes May 35th, where you don't criticize the president, you talk about steamed buns, banana peels and shrimp moss, and where even the words for freedom and democracy are so radioactive that people disguise them as milk tea and eagles. This isn't just internet slang. It's a living, constantly mutating survival

code, a linguistic cat and mouse game between millions of Chinese netizens and a government-running AI-powered censorship campaigns with euphemistic names like Clear and Bright. It's clever,

it's hilarious, it's risky, and increasingly, it's dangerous. Even if you'll never log on to Chinese

social media, this is a fascinating look at what happens when speech gets compressed, distorted, and forced underground. So today we're decoding the secret language of the Chinese internet from mythical beasts and 50 cent party trolls to white paper protests, glowing fevers, scientific surfing, and the slang of a generation that's learned how to say everything, without technically saying anything at all. My guest today is Matthew Ty aka C. Mill Coast

“of the China Show on YouTube. He's been on the show before. I think you're really going to”

enjoy this conversation. It's both alarming, yet a lot of fun. Here we go with Matthew Ty. So I've always been fascinated with how censorship works online, how online discussion works in China, because the internet's different, right? It's like an app system. I'll have you explain that in a second as well, but I know certain topics are off limits. You can't use the internet anonymously, maybe you'll have to correct me on that, and people skirt around discussions by using code words,

euphemisms, and I'm hoping you can decode some of that for us today, because look, almost no one listening is going to be on the Chinese internet or the apps and subject to Chinese

sensors here, but certainly some listeners are, even if 99% of us are never going to see this in

person. It's an interesting look inside the collective online mind of China and Chinese hate this word, netizens. Why do you hate that word so much? It's lame. It's netizens. It's silly. It's lame. Really, it's all it is. It's one of those terms that journalists thought up in like 1995, and people were like, "Oh, that's clever." It sounds, I don't want to say boomer because I always offend people, but it really does sound like one of those out of touch. Like, you remember when people used to say

“cybercrime, and it was like, "Wow, this is, we're in the future." That's what it sounds like.”

It sounds like a 90s internet term that needs to retire. What am I going to do with all my e-worms and e-mail viruses? Yeah, an electronic mail. So, first of all, can you briefly explain the Chinese internet and how it's fundamentally different from the US? Because I think one, people don't know that like you use a couple of apps for everything. You don't use your phones OS for most things in China. Yes, so the whole ecosystem of the Chinese internet is different. And that is because the Chinese

government does need centralized control of what people are doing online. The internet has just become part and parcel of what we do nowadays. It's our payment. It's how we communicate to each other. It's how we post our opinions online. So, China needs a way to make sure that it can watch what everyone's doing. So, what they have is an all-in-one app called WeChat. And what that is, it's kind of like you picture WhatsApp, but if WhatsApp did everything else, it pays your bills.

Can use it to pay for your coffee or your meal. And pretty much everyone uses that every single day for everything. Because the government has full control over that, they can monitor people when they're in China. And then also when they're out of China. Because what I've noticed is that when Chinese

use this app to stay in touch with people back home, which brings me to my next point. They can't use apps that we use in the West because if they're trying to communicate with people in China,

all those are blocked. And in fact, some experts think we're talking like 70 to 80 percent of all

websites and apps from foreign countries are blocked in China. So, there's really no way to stay in touch unless you're on these government-controlled apps. I'd like to call it an intranet. Everything you do, and if you're accessing the Chinese internet, is within their own system. You can't have another way outside looking in, unless you're using something like a VPN. Which may sponsor this episode of TVD on that, I suppose. So, this is really interesting.

So, my Chinese teachers, they all are on WeChat. And I can't message them on anything else. They were on Skype, but Skype is gone. That was one of the weird ones where they would install that just to talk to me and help me with Chinese. And it somehow wasn't blocked. It was very interesting that I could use that. But you can't message them on pretty much any other system. Other than, of course, email. And I went to China and I wanted to get ice cream or something.

“I can't remember what it was. It was like, you have to use WeChat to pay. And I was like,”

I have cash, credit cards, I was silly. And other apps and they're like, we literally only take WeChat. And you have to order inside WeChat by scanning this QR code. And I thought, well, I guess I'm not getting ice cream here, because I would have to install that. Somehow, figure out how to do that. Set up payment systems and all this. And it wants like your ID, your bank info. So, the government

in China basically knows when you buy ice cream. Not that it's that different here. I mean, we have

credit card companies. They can see where you're buying things, what you're swiping. But it's a little different, because this is all centralized. So imagine if you wanted to buy your food and then you went to get dessert in the same app. And then you got an Uber in the same app. And then you paid your electric bill in the same app. And then you, I don't know, talk to all your friends in the same app. And then you book your movie tickets in the same app. It's basically, that's what it is. And it's just

all that data goes somewhere. It might teach you to hold me. I think I mentioned this on the show before. She was talking to one of her friends. There's something in this message appeared below his profile that was like, this man does not pay his bills or something like that. It basically was like, this guy has defaulted on debt. And she's like, what is that? Yeah, I didn't pay for something. And now I can't book flights on WeChat and I can't book trains. And she's like, oh, okay.

That's interesting, because that actually ties into, do you remember and everyone in the West was talking about the social credit system? Yeah, of course. We did a show on that, a long time ago. Yeah, we did. Yeah, there's like this black mirror idea. If anyone didn't listen to the show,

that the Chinese government basically grades their citizens. And like, based on what your grade is,

“is what you can do in society. And so WeChat really ties into a lot of that because you need to use”

that to book your high speed rail ticket. They can block you from the app. If you have to use that app to do something, then they can block you from that level. So it's a very tightly controlled society. And now it's almost like a techno dictatorship at this point. Yeah, that was episode 643. How the Chinese social credit score system works is quite old. But I'm sure most of that still holds up. One thing I want to focus on today is China, you can't talk about anything you want online.

So people have invented essentially a secret language and that sounds very dramatic. But I just mean puns, code words inside jokes that are maybe inside joke isn't quite the right term. People have to change these things. These words to get past sensors because you can't say something like I'm sick of Xi Jinping. You have to be like, I've had enough dumplings or something. I want to decode a few of these because they're weird and they're kind of funny. And again,

you cannot use the internet anonymously. So you can't just post, I'm so sick of this government not give them me what I want. My job sucks in my life sucks because the police will come and

“visit you if you do that. I think there's a couple of things to preface this with. Number one,”

we have to understand that China despite their billions of dollars of propaganda effort to convince Westerners that it's a free country. It's very much not a free country. I'm sure your listeners know this, but I think it ranks right now nine out of a hundred, like nine points out of a hundred on the Freedom House index, whereas the US I think is like an 84 or something. Not that we are the poster child for freedom at the, you know, these days. Now, that's probably Denmark or something.

I don't know. Actually, who is at the top? I'm curious. I think it's actually Finland. That makes sense. Anyway, long story short, we have to put this in our heads. We have to understand that China is an absolute totalitarian dictatorship. So these words to get around censorship are very necessary. And I want to say the punishments before we get into this to understand what Chinese people face in terms of trying to express themselves. So the first thing is if you've spread rumors,

right, if you spread rumors online, and remember, this is the classification of what the government comes up with. Whatever they think is spreading a rumor, you can get three years in

making people have a debate or a discussion about something online. And if the government decides that you're having a discussion about something that don't want you to talk about, that gets you five years in prison. And then you have inciting subversion. And in China, that is absolutely

“positively the worst thing you can do. I mean, to the Chinese government, that's like trees and”

animals. So then get you up to 15 years in prison. And people do face these jail times just for stuff they post online. So keep that in mind when we try to decode some of this language, people are literally risking their freedom and lives to post these things and get their worries out there into the world. That's scary. My Chinese teachers are paranoid sometimes too. I mean, there have been occasions where I'm like, screw it. I'm curious about something. And I'll ask them.

And sometimes they're like, all right, I'll talk about this. It's never like,

Xi Jinping or whatever. It's like, so your internet is censored and you can't look at certain things. And they're like, yeah, but I use a VPN. And I look at this and I've been watching Wednesday on Netflix or whatever. And I'm like, okay. And they're like, all right, download movies illegally, whatever. That stuff's probably less of a deal. But they'll talk about it. And I will tell you, this is probably a coincidence. We're probably just being paranoid. But last time we did that

the last two times, the internet cut out. And she had trouble getting back on. And she was like, let's change the subject. And I'm like, come on, that was an accident. Whatever. They're not listening. And she's like, I don't care. I'm worried. And that was enough. So it's almost like they don't even need to enforce this. People aren't forcing it on themselves. That's actually a really good point. If you don't mind, I done my tin foil hat here. I do think that might have not been a coincidence.

I also worried about that. But I didn't want to be like, you might get arrested for this, but that's a price I'm willing to pay for this company. That's on you. Exactly. That sounds like a

you problem. I could always get a new Chinese teacher. No, I'm kidding. These young ladies. They're

really, really nice. And they do a lot for me. But yeah, no, it's just it's scary to me. That's like even something you have to worry about. And you're right. Maybe they have speech to text recognition. And then there's an AI that goes, uh, they're talking about internet censorship. Let's fire a shot across the ball and just disrupt their internet for five minutes. And they'll get it. Yeah, I like what you said Jordan about the self censorship, like the self policing, because

“as we go through some of these like code words, the key to understanding this is that when this”

kind of internet censorship started, when the internet started taking off in China in the early mid late 2000s when I was there. What I noticed was it started as a very innocent fun thing that people weren't necessarily scared to talk about. It was, I'll give you an example, a way to make fun of censorship back in 2008 when I was there 2009 was to use these mythical creatures I like to

call them. In fact, I turned them into t-shirts at some point. But basically, they would take these

words that would sound like a Chinese word and turn them into an actual like animal. So for example, Tounima, that's Hounima is a grass mud horse, which is like this weird little alpaca animal that they invented. But when you change the tones, because Chinese is a tonal language, it actually sounds like F your mother, which was a swear word that was banned in China. So what they did was it was playful censorship, but it was like, how do we get around this, but we also can have fun with

it. And in fact, it was so popular to have the grass mud horse that's Hounima that people were

“making little stuffed animals out of it. There was another one I remember. It was called”

Fakuyo. Say the F word F you in English, but with a Chinese accent to it. But the characters, when you break down the characters, Fakuyo actually means a French Croatian squid. So it became this people were making like mock ancient paintings of a French Croatian squid and it's swimming through the ocean or whatever with like Chinese characters next to it. It was a playful time for censorship. It wasn't anything super politically charged. There's a very famous one that kind of

proliferated over time before it was banned, but it was River Crab, Hushia. And River Crab, these two words when you have them together, if you change characters, it actually means to harmonize. And that's the official way of saying something was removed from the internet or censored. So the Chinese government would have these live censors that would go out and take down foreign posts or if people are leaving comments on certain things that they found to be

maybe anti-government or a little risky. They don't want to expose like the true nature of the quality of people's lives or something. If they removed those posts, that would be called getting River Crabbed because again, it sounded like harmonized. So that was the more innocent time of censorship that's where I started in. It's a really if you just wanted to fast forward a quick glimpse into what we're dealing with now. In China, people are terrified of actually

even having those discussions anymore. So there's a lot of code words, but the people that are using code words to have protests language now are at Witsend. It's not like the fun

very oppressed people. I see. So it's not just like teenagers being edgy and using these things

and being like, "Haha, it sounds like FU, but it's grass mudhors, let's throw this around, let's put it on a t-shirt, let me name my live stream broadcast, grass mudhors, and people will

“laugh when they tune in and they don't do that anymore." The risk is higher. Is that the idea?”

The risk is higher for doing this? Absolutely. I think through this coded language, I actually put together a couple notes here just to have a timeline of the whole thing because it's actually kind of messed up because it starts so fun. I used to make fun of these words and stuff like I said, I put them on t-shirts. It was a fun time and it was like almost novel in a selfish way to be like, "I'm over here living in this communist country or whatever,

and you can't even say this or that." It's like there's no real political consequence to a lot of these things. It morphed into a very serious crime for these people. Especially under the current leadership in China, China's not the same place as when I was there. It is really started to care about online speech and controlling public sentiment rather than just cracking down on it. I've said this on the show before. I used to ask my teacher, "What do you think about Tiananmen Square

or whatever?" I'd be like, "You know the famous tankman photo, and for people who don't know, it's a man standing in the middle of this super-wide exists in communist countries only, boulevard, next to Tiananmen Square with a tank in front of them and the tank keeps trying to drive around him until these, I don't know, secret police or something like, "Rush him away."

By the way, the guy was never seen again and no one knows who he is. And I don't think that's

ever been legend. I tried to research this and no one knows who that is. And some teachers would say, "No," or they'd be like, "Yeah, but not much," or they'd go, "I know it's famous abroad, but we don't learn about it." And then one teacher was like, "My uncle was there and we never saw him again." My mom talks about him sometimes. And I'm like, "Oh, that's really sad," because he was probably like 20, right, when that happened. But I sent the tankman photo and people were like,

"A different photos or famous in other places." And I was like, "I think almost the entire world knows this photo except China." Right? It's such an iconic photo and they're like, "We have photos that you don't know of." And I'm like, "But are they as famous as tankman?" You recognize the statue of liberty. And they're like, "Of course." And I'm like, "Well, it's the same thing except the

opposite." It's kind of the opposite of liberty. And that to me was really interesting. And I sent the

tankman photo to a few people. One out of 10 of my teachers had seen it. And of course, as soon as I

“sent that the internet got disrupted again, different teacher, different time. So that's why I'm like”

coincidence. And I don't know. You'd say, "No." And I'm like, "Maybe not." Because they probably can scan photos that are being sent back and forth. And that's probably at the top of the list, tankman. Yeah. In fact, photos and videos, they have live censorship algorithms to be able to pick up when anyone's posting this kind of stuff. It's funny because there's actually a new trend that we've seen people try to get around this. There was a massive protest, which even my

protests in China are massively cracked down upon. They don't want people out in the streets. There were some nightmares like large gatherings of people. And what happened was this girl at this school, she had gotten bullied. And there was videos of it online. And I guess the school administration didn't really do anything to these other classmates that had bullied her for hours on camera. Right? The people saw this. They said, "This is completely unjust. This is unfair." And it didn't start

as like an anti-government protest. It started as a protest outside of a school to be like, "You gotta punish these girls that brutally were bullying this girl." They were bullying her because her parents were like disabled or something. It was the most messed up thing you've ever been very very common in China, by the way. To be fair, we were shitty to kids, too. When we were younger, for things that you shouldn't be, maybe I'm a uniquely bad person. I'm still open to that

interpretation. But anyway, continue. Let's do that. Yeah, it was anyway. This protest started out as a protest against the school. But then, of course, anti-government messaging will creep into some of these things. Because when you realize that the corruption goes to the top, the people start finding out, "Hey, actually, this students, parents are in the CCP or something." Right? And those rumors start

“spreading. Oh, so it's like they didn't get punished because this kid has connections. And that's why.”

And guess what? 99% of the time. That's the case, too. People get away with things because they are family members or friends or have some equal Guanxi or connections, as we say in Chinese, with people that are in political leadership. What happened was people were spreading around images. They were making artwork of the believed girl. They were starting into anti, you know, government protest type stuff. Oh, oh, in support of her, not to continue to bully her. Okay,

I was like, geez, that's horrendous. No, okay, that makes more sense. She became like almost a symbol of protest, of freedom, really, in China. So, right, she's like a Malala use of, as I kind of figure. Yes, ish unintentionally. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, unintentionally. So what people were doing is trying to spread the video around of all the police brutality because the police came in and it looked kind of like Tiananmen square. I mean, the cops came in, the SWAT team,

afterwards. But the police brutality that happened there was all getting scrubbed. So people would share

videos online and they would get scrubbed immediately of the police beating people up in crowds. So what they would do is we call a deep frying it. They would post process the video until you can't even barely see what's going on. It'd be like monocolor, be like red and there's some like shadowy figures of maybe if you didn't know what was happening, you'd have no idea. But because people had already seen it before these videos got pulled, it was like a way to keep it going.

Even if it was unrecognizable, it was like a way to continue the protest. And you see really ingenious methods of Chinese people doing this to get around censorship, just to make sure. Because I think a lot of people in the West think that Chinese people, although brainwashed and living in a totalitarian state, there is a massive chunk of people when they do face adversity from the government do want to stand up and do something about it. So if I suddenly start referring

to myself as podcast dumpling emperor, just know that things have taken a turn. But before I get

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connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer in a few minutes a day. Take the well before you get thirsty and by the way, many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to that course. To come on and join us, you'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, all free zero shenanigans at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Matthew Ty. We used to have the moral high ground with all this stuff, but

depends on when you're listening to this whether or not you're confused or to wish a country we're talking about, I suppose. Although 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 we're designed to get around censorship are also now getting censored. So, if you said like rivercrabbed instead of harmonized, then they were like, "Oh, okay, well, rivercrabbed,

“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, like, for example, Tiananmen is obviously broken down at the 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 out of 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 1989, June 4th. And that's when that Tiananmen square massacre happened. So that was a way for people to go and say, "I wonder what this weird coded number means." It's almost like

worked for a while. The government caught on to this and said, "We're actually going to ban

these numbers in succession." So if your phone number ends in 8, 9, 6, 4, you're screwed.

“I don't even really get any dick though. 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 death in their apartments. They 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, you 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 killed their dogs because it turns out they thought dogs were spreading COVID. Like, it got out of control. As you remember, the hypocrisy of all these

people in the West that were saying like China was doing a good job cracking down on COVID.

If they were, it'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 tests and they're standing next to thousands of people in a line multiple times a day. One of whom is affected. Yeah. 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 a situation where people are like congratulating authoritarianism here. It doesn't work. Okay. Yeah. That's like reusing a needle. Hey, one of you has AIDS. Here's the problem. We have one needle in two, 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 too

“craziest thing you've ever heard. But up north, I think this is an on the way and in Hlenon.”

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 is in the 90s. And what happened was people would go donate their plasma. But because of like 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. Like they 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 in entire areas of China have AIDS now because of that. I'm getting crazy thinking about that. I'm not afraid of needles. That's just actually really disgusting to think about. It's grim. The COVID was like a modern version of that. I would 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. So 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 like how they felt. But when they put that out there, it became locally known as like a protest slogan, I want a COVID test. It's like screw you government. We don't want these lockdowns anymore. They came of 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. They were like these little, I don't know, like trailers, which you can find for sale now, by the way, because they're disused. You can find them on like Ali Express and Ali Baba and stuff. Why would you want one of those? I was 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. This is where a grandmother died of starvation. We could as of COVID lockdowns. It's so grim. God weren't

both going to hell for this joke. He got to have some humor to get past this. It was the stuff we saw and that people were talking to you back then. It was just, I have long standing, 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's 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. There 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. Like, so the government imposed this”

massive lockdown for months and months. People even in the developed cities like Shanghai, which are fairly westernized. We're starving to death in their apartments. There were reports of that. And so people had to have different words for lockdown. I remember they would use like emojis. They would have a little city and like 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, you had to use

little picture representations. It's really interesting how censored all of this got during COVID.

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. It's what he said.”

Yes. You know, this phrase is 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. To 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 and try to 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. The only person who works here is job is to like burn nearby trees to keep this

hot water thing going 24/7. 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 and 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. Are your pregnant? God forbid, you should eat something that was made with cold water at any

point when you're pregnant. You might as well throw yourself down a flight at 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 LA Express. We'll link to that in the show.

“The code word for those was square cabin. I remember that one. That's how people”

talk because even that was blocked. Like you weren't even allowed to tell them going out to the square cabin. Geez. I'm taking a little vacation. What about Xi Jinping? Can you freely say Xi Jinping? Something something or is that kind of not a good idea? You know, even that gets me nervous. That's the top level stuff. I'll put it to you this way. If there was a way to fast track, it's someone to get in trouble and China would be to talk about

the leader for sure. And even Chinese people get confused. 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. It's just that it's so much flash here. 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 just say, continue liberalizing because China was kind of opening up. I 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. 100%. And so back then,

people will felt comfortable to make up cute little names for Xi Jinping, right? There was this famous scene where he went to go eat some steam buns or bouts at this little restaurant. And at the time, people were calling him Xi bouts 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. And that eventually turned into like a negative term for him, a way to slander the leader went 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 this sore point. So what's happening is obviously China, if you guys don't know, China claims Taiwan

“is their own Taiwan is a separate free functioning democracy with freedom of speech. I think they rank”

even higher than the US on freedom out there than the name. Yeah. Taiwan has freedom of speech. They have all these abilities to express discontent. They have a very strong protest culture or political culture. You're in a situation here where the China keeps threatening to take Taiwan militarily. They threaten Taiwan. We're going to blow up. We're going to take you back. They indoctrinate kids in China to say we're going to build a railway to Taiwan. We're going to take them all home.

They really want to come home. And then to Taiwan, these people are 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. But 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 Doyan Group Streaming. And if you guys don't

in its own intranets. I spoke about before. And in this intranet, one of the biggest phenomena 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. If I knew how to use filters,

“I'd probably do that too, to be fair. But okay, continue. They dancing sing for donations, right?”

So just like any livestreaming 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. It looks like a boy band or a girl band. We'll sing your name. And they'll say, like, you're so handsome. We love you. You know, 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. And Taiwan has

free internet. So they don't have to deal with VPNs or like 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 Doyan. So they were able to operate within the Chinese ecosystem and they speak Chinese too. So what they were doing is going under 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. There 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 Xi 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, Xi Jinping, you're so handsome. Like, we love you or they'll make them say like they'll say Xi Jinping, sit down and shut up. They'll make

them actually say these words and then the live streams get pulled. And 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 a 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 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 Doye. 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. So to get that in front of the eyes of 100 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 a more like stop threatening our sovereignty. Wow. Okay. Do they use English characters? Because I know that sometimes they'll say instead of like jungle government using the just characters,

they'll write like this is a yes. Right. Are they doing that still? Absolutely. The problem is

those get cracked down on just as fast as anything else now. I think what I want your audience understand is that this like cute subculture of like censorship on the fly, it gets dealt with so quickly now. Sometimes 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. That's how like”

sophisticated this is. Oh, they're using chat GPT, Chinese version, deep secret, whatever to be like, okay. If democracy is mutual and freedom is zeal, what are that 100 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, you 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 deep seek to make predictions on what is humanly capable of coming out of this. And of course, it's not 100% success, 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

talk about Xi Jinping. I know I'm not allowed to talk about the government. I'm not going to

not talk about my local government. But at least I can talk about, man, life sucks right now, like stuff is 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 is like, hey, I'm a street sweeper here in this village in Hubei, 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, blah. People have these conversations and people were 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. That's like how to express discontent

“the 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 Bowlen 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

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and the world that they're living, and what unfolds is not just a story about guilt and silence. It's about impossible choices, redemption, and what happens after the worst mistake of your life. Search for blood will tell wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and consider it listeners do. That is take a moment,

support our amazing sponsors. They make the show possible. All of the deals discount codes

and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbanger.com/deals. If you can't remember the name of the sponsor, you can't find the code email me, [email protected], someone here will dig that up for you. It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Matthew Ty. I know when they talk about democracy and freedom, they have to use weird phrases that don't mean

anything. Eagle metaphor, okay, 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 I'll argue about where milk tea comes from, okay? So milk tea being bobo. It could say blah, people might know it as bobo. Yeah, love it. And it was originated in Taiwan. Taiwan, a free country, if the free version of China really.

So that became synonymous with freedom and that respect. But then what happened was other countries that also really either like bobo or milk tea or claim to have had something to do with its invention form this 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 ways. So you had like at some point Taiwan, I think the Philippines and these countries have come together

and form the milk tea alliance. So milk tea became this like object of almost like internet democracy or freedom. What 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 Shabi, which means it's a very vulgar way of calling some of

“that idiot, right? Foolish sea word is at the best way to do it. I don't want to get demonetized.”

Yeah, foolish sea word. You're technically not supposed to be using these words in 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. But then even that started to get in crackdown, not so there is euphemisms, right? There's R by Wu, which is

can kind of look at like a timeline of this. He looks starts with the Chinese characters and it

“goes to the abbreviation of what it would be if it was spelled in opinion or in English. And then”

that gets crackdown and then they go to numbers and then who knows from there? I see some of these examples are kind of hybrid. Well, they'll go, oh, you can't say if you're mom. So we're going to write like T and N D, which is bleep your mom acronym, but in English. And 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, Tom, duh. 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 to human a face on it. But how quick to these evolutions happen? Is it like one day it's this, one day it's at 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.

So you see it a month later. How quickly does it evolve? Yes. So that's a good question. The

example you use that can actually use as an early example. So for example, Tomada, right, if you're mom, right, don't get too scientific, a 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. I don't know if I can do that. But what happened was that turned into like you just said, T and N D. And why that is? The two ends together. If you put the ends 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 you have 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. A lot of them have been abroad,

or they've learned English, 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 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. What started is like an anti-COVID kind of uprising turned very quickly into a anti-government uprising. This is where you saw very famous video clips of people saying communist party step 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, it'd say like freedom or something. The cops would run in, SWAT team would run an attack limb, take the banner, rip it up. Or they would do this thing where they would hold up like actual physical like censorship curtains, the like blockoff protesters so that people couldn't take videos yourself when 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 in their signs because the police are just sort of awkwardly running around with this wall to block them that 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. So 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 this 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. I can't be illegal. So people would go down to the street and literally just hold up an A4 size piece of paper. It was completely blank and it became known as the white paper protest. The piece of white paper

and these marches and then the in these protests that they were doing became synonymous with democracy or are like the government kind of relinquishing authoritarian control on the people. And so China was actually banning the sale of A4 paper in the areas 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. They used 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, sorry. I really need to

I can imagine someone running across town. Can I borrow sheet of paper? Can I borrow 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 a pocket full protest 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?”

What 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.

That'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 and decisive. 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 and 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 harken 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 jungle floods happen. When the entire tunnel filled up and thousands of people died and the government claimed only a few hundred died. And 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 threw 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 they happen, now I can't even find it anymore. I 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 had 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 hold up the blank sheet of paper instead of handing them out. But 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. But 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. It definitely happened in Russia in 2022 in 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 tell 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? A 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. They'll always go out and say, hey, actually”

anybody in China can see whatever they want. They're just going to 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. So the point where we know dissidents that posted stuff with a VPN while they're in China and then left China and we're

serious. This is not a joke. These people do go to jail and get disappeared for using VPNs. In fact, there's a very high profile case. It's 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 a government, then absolutely they're going to hunt you down. If 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. This stuff have a lot more leniency. That makes sense. How do you even say VPN in Chinese? Or do they just say VPN? People will say fun chunks. So they'll say I need to get over the wall because you don't want to use those characters. Those will be blocked. Okay. Fun chunks. So hopping the wall is usually what people say. It's funny. It's 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 that 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 does it call? Like, boy love fiction or something. That was like, okay, that sounds worse than just saying gay, by the way. But I wonder if LGBT topics are targeted on the internet. Because I know it's kind of a conservative society when it comes to that stuff, right? Yeah. So things have morphed a lot in that

respect. When I was in China, had a gay friend that I just had to just tell his parents that he was going to get married some day and he would bring over friends that were girls and then be like, oh, maybe he'll marry her some day and just put up this facade because nobody would accept it. And in fact, I would say, and that sentiment would hold true today. It is very old fashion. It's very much round 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 and 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 akin to like the treatment you'd get if you're in

some places in northern China. But yeah, 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. And 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.

This is these boy, a lot of 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 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. They'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 images 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 popbelly chains, smoking guys that if a blue on them did 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. And that's how my activism I'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 called a maccomrad, which is funny, because that's actually how you address everyone in China up until like the 80s. So 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, no. He's the kind that will

arrest you for being a comrade. If you know what I'm saying. Oh, okay, never mind. 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? Otherwise, you just don't know what people are talking about. And ideally, the government people are to the last to find out.

at all times. I'll be honest with you. If I was to put together some study, I'm sure I'd find

out the China as 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 ebreeding ground or ecosystem for all these sub cultures and these words slang terms that didn't previously exist to get around censorship, because people online talking to each other so much. Can 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 US 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. That'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 doyin as they call it to run in its own internet, it's only go system. And when you go on there, you will find video after video fed to you of American cops shooting

people un-sensored. 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 and 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 with a 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.

We actually saw foreign propaganda, so like American propaganda on behalf of China, running Nepalese current government propaganda against the protests. So it depends on if China is strategically involved in another country in the Tibetans 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? I haven't heard that term for a while. Is that still even a program that exists? Yes. 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. We usually rely 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 as they do have labor camps, a forced labor we 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 to 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 O'Mau 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 O'Mau per comment. Now I 100% don't believe that I think they're paid much less than that. I think maybe O'Mau 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. A couple cents. But it morphed. O'Mau 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 Zagong O'Mau, which means like a self-motivated O'Mau to go out and fight for the country, or you get actual paid O'Mau in these massive huge troll farms, which are probably mostly bots nowadays. All these are considered O'Mau because they're spreading the government's message. They're fighting people on YouTube comments sections that are disparaging the CCP. They're spreading nationalist rhetoric. They're disparaging

“dissidents. That's what O'Mau 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 the show free for you. We'll be right back. All right y'all, don't forget

practical, and has an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, and relationships.

“It is an under-two-minute read. We'd probably see 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/news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Matthew Ty. 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." And then there'll be

something where it's like, "Is this really a thing?" And you can just tell that it's completely propaganda-bodied 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 of the downvotes are just like tanky, crazy sympathizers who are like, "No, North Korea is the workers' 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, "Okay, 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." It does been shown, for example. And we know that that's

true. She's literally vanished. And then she might have gotten released recently, but she was gone for years. And they're like, "No, this is a bunch of propaganda." And then you get the what aboutism 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. It's entertainment. You could go visit someone in a prison here. There are people that I know, personally, who cannot visit their family in the Chinese prison, because they're not acknowledged to have been in prison in the first place. So I don't know. She's very odd to me that you see this massive campaign. It's weird that they give a crap with 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. And because China's whole MO, the way the CCP operates is, "Let us do what we want. We'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 not in your business. We'll 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? 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

they're hacking America's electric grid. And the water system, right? They're prepping for

“some sort of conflict in the future. So China is absolutely involved. I think near times”

at a great piece of the day on how they got involved in New York City elections, very much involves 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 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 in your Chinese person, you still probably

shouldn't be talking a lot 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. And 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 R China. And it was one of the only subreddits I've ever seen about a country that is opposed to its government like wholeheartedly. So not our China, but like R slash China, R slash China. So it's just the China subreddit. Okay, got you. Yeah. And so you go to like, I don't know, Brazil subreddit or something. Maybe there's some political stuff in there. But it's probably a lot about general 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 like what the sentiment is. A lot of the people on there, 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 was propaganda pieces. And they'd get upvoted and anything critical

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 astronomical explosion of allowed Chinese propaganda bought accounts. This real foreign influence campaign coming from China has gotten so much worse since around October and November from what I've seen. And 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 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 a four grand if you post this video about I can't

“remember the last thing I got. But it was some sort of silly COVID related thing. It's been a while."”

It wouldn't surprise me if they went to the moderators and said, "Your ant still lives in China.

Why don't you let me take over your red of the count? 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 of 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 freaking online account for a subreddit where I discuss things. Sure. I'll take that deal. So you invest 100 grand and now you've got four out of five moderator accounts that you're controlling. To zoom out, that's 100% 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 like a cease 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 like 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. They're getting big western voices to do that for them. It's very clear they're paying for it in some way, whether it's incentivizing

people or whatever, but we 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. So 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 the 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 and it goes further down. It's 22 stories up and they all say the exact same thing. They 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'd 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 like these amusement parks in China and they'll have like a knockoff-shrek booth where like it sprays water in your face and has like a fart smell come out and they say this is 8 dimensions, right? 8D, right? 2D is like Mario, side to side. 3D is the realm

that we live in. But China and their typical marketing fashion out of the outdo themselves and went up themselves over and over again. So you'll 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 the sudden a fake rat or something will jump out on your arm. The craziest stuff you're seeing but anyway they're 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 overlay the audio and all the clips and they all say the exact same thing at the same times 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. It's like a bunch of these we call him Chills, right? They're Chilling 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 4D”

ministry spokesperson of the CCP took that isolated that clip where they all say the same thing

look at all these Westerners that love to come to Chongqing. It was very funny.

“Geez they put so much effort into this. In the United States we just have movies that kind of do”

the like work right? They 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 Laef 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 Laef 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 Laef flat. You know, exist. In authoritarian government dreams of having a populist like this, right? Stand your devices live on the bare minimum or whatever. But at the same time, China is a manufacturing economy. They need these people to work in factories and make stuff. So it was this catch 22. We're trying to 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 live flat thing. 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 and be 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. They were happy to have people to 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 you're just refused to talk about in the West is that you can go off of China's GDP growth and stuff. But 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 we have to live off of understanding China through its own official data. But at the same time use real images in video and eyewitness accounts of people in China to realize it's actually not what they're reporting. So this life-lat movement's continued. Their 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. That can our situations 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. They just care about quality of life. And I'm like, okay, 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 literalless slogans where 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, it's 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. And 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 in a mobile phone. And they're like, all right,

fine. And so a lot of the what about is my see in 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. If that were could a factory, and I'm like, yeah, running water, I've 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 a press losing my rights, whatever you want to call it, not being able to talk about certain things. But now I'm actually broken hungry. So what are

“going to do about it? Absolutely. Your 100% spot on. I think it starts like that because if you start”

with China in the 90s, where everyone is actually like living in abject poverty, it's super, super poor. It becomes very tantalizing to say, oh, actually we can start a little business now,

I've been hungry my entire life. And finally, I can use a note of paper to go purchase food.

“Like, 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. I mean, it's 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. And 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. And 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 the American guy that has like a house and those 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. We'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 has become like a massive problem. But 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 tanky and authoritarian supporter, be like, they don't have gun violence or whatever. They have people running over mass crowds of people in cars.

And they also have kindergarten stabbing. We're grown men going to kindergarten as instead of 20 plus kids. So it's crazy. And I guess 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 ballards everywhere. A ballard 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 the next to the payment machine. They don't want you to back into it and

wreck it. So they put ballards in front of it. You see it in front of buildings now here too. Our government building will have giant planters all around it. You're like, wow, they're really taking their gardening seriously landscaping. Now it's just stopped 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 in a city. It'll be like, you got to put in 10,000 ballards. 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. And we actually started a segment our show called Ballard Report. Where it's funny, like we make jokes out of it because it's so astonishing. Like the way that they're putting

these ballards in is just comical. This so haphazard and so dumb. And it turns out like the corruption goes deeper than that because half the ballards are like hollow. So they don't stop. Like when a car plows into it, 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's expensive. I'd rather have a yacht. I can imagine

some dude leaning up against a new ballard and be like, say, 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 that you go. This is new construction. You're like

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 are people. 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 it up for 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. So thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. I 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 pigbutchering 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. So that's why you're starting to see an uptickiness. It's just interesting to see how many of the same

that I've experienced have moved over into this kind of crypto currency slaughtered a 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 legit in that, okay? And they can string you along for the longest time. They 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 day to base. 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 them and not respond. They do not face

any repercussions whatsoever from the Chinese government and the police that's in 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. Whether 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 Ty on the China show will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers deals discount codes, ways to support the show. All at Jordanherbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six-minute networking as well over at six-minute networking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. In this show, it's created in association with podcast

one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jason Sanderson, Robert Fogad, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Beard, 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. And we'll see you next time.

“This episode is sponsored in part by something you should know podcast. Finding a new great podcast”

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Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later. Quick break to put you onto another show you should be listening to. If you enjoyed my interview with have your leave about romance scams back on episode 11.95, you'll want to check out his podcast Pretend. Havier 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 says a way of getting them to reveal things that I'll make you go away. Okay, 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 Havier are 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 Abigail 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.