Both The West and China No Longer Need “China Hands”
I’ve recently seen many videos on YouTube featuring international vloggers traveling in China, covering a wide range of topics. Most of the videos involve exploring the local cuisine or adventuring through the streets, comparing their experiences with the “China filter” presented by Western media. They visit religious sites, street-side police booths, and matchmaking corners in parks. At last, most of them exclaimed that they were misled before and that China isn’t as depicted by the mainstream Western media.
Among these videos, I particularly enjoy those made by a couple named Sammy and Tommy. They enlisted an Australian guy living in China for 15 years as their guide. He seems to be a food blogger and knows Beijing’s street food inside out, providing expert-level introductions. This makes their videos stand out among the numerous “foreigners hunting for food” videos and greatly alleviates my urge, as a viewer, to jump in and shout, “Why are you eating this shit? That’s the wrong thing!”
Additionally, their videos intentionally include many shots of local people’s frontal faces, which gives a warm and welcoming feel. As a photography enthusiast, I personally enjoy Bruce Gilden’s intrusive street photography, but the couple’s videos give me the opposite feeling, which is also appealing.
The Australian guide who has lived in China for 15 years. | Source: Sammy and Tommy’s YouTube Channel
The frontal face shots of local passersby. | Source: Sammy and Tommy’s Youtube Channel
It’s clear that strengthening nongovernmental people-to-people exchanges can break the Western ideological propaganda hegemony on the narrative about China. This helps to debunk both explicit and implicit lies, presenting an authentic China to the ordinary Western audience. But what problems might arise next? Among millions of viewers of these grassroots videos, some will want to learn more about China. At this point, they will inevitably seek advanced learning materials. However, the issue is that many of these materials are still under the control of Western ideological propaganda departments.
I have the authority to speak on this matter because of my firsthand experience. In 2021, I wrote an essay discussing Mr. Peter Hessler, a well-known journalist for The New Yorker and a prominent figure in nonfiction writing. The essay primarily conducted a factual verification of the four articles about China written by Mr. Peter Hessler from 2020 to March 2021 published in The New Yorker. I summarized the paragraphs that contained lies and one-sided narratives and categorized which falsehoods were targeted at Chinese readers and which were tailor-made for an American audience.
As a comrade of “China’s Strategic Deception Bureau (Zhanlue Huyou Ju),” Mr. Hessler’s works have made an outstanding contribution to numbing the American public’s understanding of China. However, as a channel for Sino-American exchange, Mr. Hessler’s excessive desire to perform and his misuse of fictional writing techniques could potentially lead to some negative impacts.
A representative example of the former is in the article “The Rise of Made-in-China Diplomacy,” where Mr. Hessler lies to The New Yorkers’ target audience by saying that China has banned CNN but not FOX to appease Trump, a lie clearly contradicting reality as neither CNN nor FOX has been banned. A representative example of the latter is in “Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic” where Mr. Hessler discusses the motivations of the workers who constructed the Huoshenshan makeshift hospital, providing only one economic motive, that of high wages. He then opposed high wages to patriotic and altruistic motivations. While boasting of his non-fiction writing techniques, he also indulges in biased guidance.
This so-called professional attitude is highly disappointing, particularly to those who have grown up in American society with a strong pro-military atmosphere and which attracts the poor to enlist with high benefits. The binary thinking that high wages imply a lack of patriotism, found in the writings of an American author who is an idol to many youths, is truly undermining his own reputation.
During Mr. Peter Hessler’s tenure at Sichuan University, he used to associate the university’s delivery robots with something out of a “horror movie,” make meaningless rants about the university’s Marxism Academy’s parking lot, and conduct trap-like surveys with students in his course. In 2021, the university suspended his contract. Later, it is said that Mr. Hessler left China. As expected, I faced criticism from commentators on international social platforms, claiming that my article which sorted through Mr. Hessler’s lies, was an “attack” on him and caused him to lose the job. Specifically, a very popular account on platform X named “itrulyknownchina,” followed by many foreign journalists in China and “experts on Chinese issues,” exposed my Wechat public account, and took my words out of context, painting me as a villain in an amusing way.
“itrulyknownchina”‘s X posts on Lin Yi Wu’s essay. | Source: X
At that time, members of the Chinese academic community suspected that the account owner was a certain assistant professor who, during his or her studies in the United States, had written to a congressman calling for sanctions against China. This letter was showcased as a political achievement on the congressman’s election campaign website.
After the “itrulyknownchina” account doxxed my information, a journalist claiming to be from the Paper’s Sixth Tone reached out to interview me. To be honest, this journalist was very polite and serious in demeanor. We exchanged a few emails back and forth, and the communication was quite efficient and friendly though I wasn’t very fond of the biased or even trap-laden questions they posed. I answered the questions very carefully to keep my answers not to be twisted. A few days later, the reply came that the magazine had decided not to publish the article. Not long after that, the Sixth Tone organized a “Nonfiction Writing” competition and invited Mr. Peter Hessler to be the judge, which may have been a consideration for their earlier decision.
Among those emails, two sections remain insightful even against the current backdrop of visa-free transit policies:
“Regardless of whether Mr. Hessler chooses to stay or go, his departure, in the long run, is inevitable. He is getting old. As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, he is no longer a suitable intermediary to convey messages between China and the United States. If we analyze the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in Mr. Hessler’s articles, we find that some stem from his deep-rooted values, while others arise from a disconnect with the daily lives of Chinese people. He is curious, but his curiosity no longer sustains him in uncovering new, real issues or supports the ability to understand and learn about related situations. In other words, he cannot keep up with the rapidly changing realities of China or the unpredictable nature of Sino-American relations. Therefore, his good writing skills, his curiosity, and his passion do not bring about the refreshing analysis one would hope for (especially for someone like me, who has worked and lived both inside and outside of China, and I’ve asked a few friends who are in similar situations—they share similar feelings, although this may be a minority view and not representative). Many articles fall back into his set patterns, leading to awkward paragraphs where the author wants to critique but misses the point, creating a sense of cringe-worthy criticism. If ideas are not continuously liberated, there is a risk of regression. Unfortunately, the objective reality is that it is difficult for older individuals to escape their cognitive inertia. Mr. Hessler might have been a bridge for communication in the past, but now he has been left behind by reality. I’ve seen a notion that describes his ‘displeasing both sides’ with a tone of admiration as an independent stance, but I find this view too literary, too superficial. Displeasing both sides could be due to being ahead of the times or being left behind. The old will always be replaced by the new. In this era, both China and America need American journalists who are younger, more peaceful, less ideological burdened, more willing to spend significant time learning about Chinese people and culture, and more committed to fact-checking rather than pandering to potential readers.”
“Mr. Hessler does not belong to the grassroots, and many (if not all) Western journalists are also not part of the grassroots but a part of Western discourse hegemony. A few days ago, I saw a friend on X complaining that an American Chinese journalist he had followed for over ten years had rapidly shifted towards anti-China reporting in the past two years. Setting aside the stance, the main issue is the significant decline in the objectivity and accuracy of the reporting. He questioned whether the journalist had changed or if something else behind the phenomena had shifted. Is there an invisible hand in the Western media industry? Therefore, we need to distinguish what genuinely represents grassroots. On this premise, my view is to break the invisible shackles of this discourse hegemony that bind both Chinese and Western citizens. The world should be more open and nongovernmental people-to-people exchange is essential. Based on my own experience, most ordinary people worldwide do not care much about things beyond their lives, making it easy for them to be bound by these shackles. Building on this viewpoint, I believe the world has always been open, especially in the information age. Western media, still acting according to past inertia, will inevitably suffer a significant loss of credibility both domestically and internationally. It seems there is an opportunity to break these shackles.”
To a certain extent, the vloggers who come to explore China are the “more peaceful and less ideologically burdened” youth we hope for, aren’t they? They have torn a corner from the filter of Western ideological propaganda for their international viewers and provided a more grounded, outsider’s perspective that helps the Chinese examine themselves. Everything seems to be progressing in a good direction.
Overall, it is progress that foreign friends travel to China and promote people-to-people exchanges. But this is just the beginning of the struggle, not the end. Based on this situation, many pressing issues need to be addressed. Looking at the examples above, there is still a small clique lagging behind the times that has been creating prejudice against China and blocking mutual communication. For those dedicated to promoting equal and friendly exchanges between countries, compared to the hegemony of Western ideological propaganda, this small clique is more covert, more stubborn, and more difficult to deal with. Everyone should be mentally prepared for this challenge.
