May 23, 2025 - Louder with Crowder
13:21
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| They're in our power grids. | |
| They're in our water systems. | |
| They have hacked our governments. | |
| They have hacked our telecoms. | |
| Almost every single telecom in America, right? | |
| They're already involved in a multi-billion dollar propaganda campaign to change your mind against your own country. | |
| And it's working, whether you are on the left, or whether you are on the right, or somewhere in between. | |
| China's not on your team. | |
| China's against your team. | |
| If you are a Westerner that believes in democratic ideals, China is the land of shortcuts and facades. | |
| It's all about the facade. | |
| It's very easy to put a bunch of Christmas lights on some shiny buildings and take night shots of it. | |
| But during the day, the pollution is there. | |
| You walk a few minutes out of the city center, you start to see the problems. | |
| You start to see the beggars on the road, you start to see infrastructure You start to see the hollow buildings and nothings in there. | |
| You know, you never see that side of things because they don't allow that kind of thing to be shown. | |
| China is a country that uses rape as a form of torture. | |
| It's true. | |
| We have interviewed people who have been raped in prisons as a form of torture, like men being raped by their prison guards as a form of torture. | |
| Straight up Nazi behavior. | |
| For 20 years, these Chinese think tanks would send scholars to exchange with American scholars. | |
| They didn't come here for knowledge. | |
| They came to understand how we can exploit your system better. | |
| The fact that we see how they can go from tanks rolling down Tiananmen in 1989 to every other political movement to now still They understand us. | |
| And they can cover everything, but we can't cover anything. | |
| Winston Sturzel and Matthew Tai. | |
| I wish she wouldn't say that. | |
| Better known as Serpents at A and Laowai86 are the original China YouTubers. | |
| The pair each spent 10-plus years in China documenting their experiences and pulling back the veil on a China that had rarely been seen by the outside world. | |
| All before being forced to flee after their content became what the Chinese Communist Party saw as, let's just say, unflattering. | |
| David Zhang. | |
| I've got some very explosive details from some of the rumors that came out this weekend. | |
| Host of China Insider. | |
| Grew up in Zibo, China in Shandong Province before immigrating to the West at the age of 11. Recently, David has become one of the Internet's most prominent critics on the Chinese Communist Party with his mega-viral content highlighting issues like China's dilapidated infrastructure and political corruption. | |
| And finally, Shelley Zhang. | |
| If you were born in America, but you are ethnically Chinese, they think that you belong to them. | |
| One-third of the China Uncensored trio, who has been integral in building a show that has exposed the misdealings of the CCP to the American public since the early 2010s, including Hallmark coverage on China's Hong Kong takeover in 2019. | |
| Together they have amassed millions of subscribers, billions of views, and untold amounts of ire from the Chinese government and their paid army of online trolls. | |
| Now, for the first time, they are all together to detail the propaganda war the CCP is waging on the American public, their tactics, their strategy, their willing American co-conspirators, and most importantly, their grand ambition to once and for all replace the United States of America as the world's leading superpower. | |
| Power. | |
| I know that we were talking about this a little bit before, especially with David, because he's kind of the expert on this. | |
| But what got me so interested in putting together this panel or roundtable was the iShow Speed fiasco when he went to China a month or two ago. | |
| And before, it was a bunch... | |
| I saw obscure people spreading Chinese propaganda and I was like, "Okay, whatever, you can get over it." And all of a sudden America's most popular streamer is in China, essentially, So it's like, okay, we have to get together the people that know what's going on here so they can disabuse the narratives that we're seeing a little better than I can because you're the experts and I'm here to learn a little bit for sure and hopefully our audience will too. | |
| Before we get into that though, I want people to know kind of why you're who you are. | |
| You all spent time in China, have traveled there, lived there extensively. | |
| So just give me a little bit about like your background, what took you to China and you know. | |
| What you were doing there. | |
| Okay, I suppose I'll start since I'm the first person to ever make YouTube videos out of mainland China. | |
| The first YouTube vlogger, I suppose you could say. | |
| And I went on a business trip in 2006. | |
| Loved the place so much. | |
| I flew back home, sold everything I had, my furniture, my cars, and I went back because I saw an incredible, vibrant place just bustling. | |
| There was so much going on. | |
| And compared to what I was used to back home, I thought, this is where I want to be. | |
| This is what I want to see. | |
| So I went there and had an adventure, ended up homeless for a couple of days, figuring things out, ran out of money, got a job teaching English at a kindergarten, built myself up eventually to what I am today. | |
| Awesome. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I don't know if I was the second YouTuber in China, but I was definitely close. | |
| Close, yeah. | |
| I used to make YouTube videos in China just to show family and friends back home that I was alive. | |
| They thought I was insane. | |
| That I moved to there. | |
| And I just wanted to be like, you know, it's not that bad. | |
| And, you know, it really wasn't. | |
| I lived in China, and we both did in China, during the golden period, as we call it. | |
| When it was kind of up and coming, it was kind of facing the world. | |
| It was like, we're going to open up. | |
| We want to interface with, you know, America and Canada and Europe, yeah. | |
| And we watched the country turn into really what it has always been on paper, an authoritarian dictatorship. | |
| but we became the victims of that. | |
| So in our process of making videos, We built custom bikes, rode around the country, did two television documentaries. | |
| In that process, busted in, our hotel was busted in by the SWAT team, and we realized the writing was on the wall, and it was time to go. | |
| We're basically chased out. | |
| It's fun. | |
| Exciting. | |
| It's a good story. | |
| I had the reverse of these two guys. | |
| I was born in China. | |
| I left when I was 11. During a time when they... | |
| The general feeling in the very, you know, lower middle class citizens there was that you had no future. | |
| So I was struggling. | |
| My parents were dealing with things like where would I go to middle school? | |
| Where would I go to high school? | |
| Can I get into a university? | |
| So we had the opportunity to immigrate to the West and that's where I, it's short but it's a good representation I think of what the general population in China really feels like. | |
| And Chinese people unfortunately I think over the years that feeling hasn't changed. | |
| And so that's where I am. | |
| So, I was born in China and left China when I was four. | |
| My parents were some of the first grad students to come to America to study back in the 80s. | |
| And then they were supposed to go back to China. | |
| My dad had a scholarship from the Chinese government to get his PhD in physics, and then it was the Cold War, right? | |
| So he was supposed to go back. | |
| And then the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened. | |
| And one morning I walked Supposedly happened. | |
| supposedly happened. | |
| Well, one morning He was an art student in Beijing at the time. | |
| I have some photos that he took at Tiananmen Square, not during the night of June 3rd and 4th, but... | |
| Like, people were bringing their kids down to the square to see the goddess of democracy and all this stuff, and it was amazing. | |
| But when the crackdown started, my dad took me on a march. | |
| All the Chinese students in the university were marching around campus protesting. | |
| And I think that was the beginning of my parents really radically changing how they felt about, they'd both lived through the Cultural Revolution, but a lot of people felt like, Like, things were going to get better, and then the Tiananmen Square massacre just changed that completely. | |
| Yeah, well, I'm glad you said that, because it kind of brings you into the next, I guess, phase in the life of China, you know, after Tiananmen Square. | |
| And kind of against all odds, they managed to reform their global kind of, how do you want to put it? | |
| What's the word I'm looking for? | |
| Image? | |
| Image, yeah, reputation, right? | |
| Reframe the reputation against all odds and then by the It's a great place to be. | |
| Go see it for yourself. | |
| You could travel there. | |
| You guys were all aware, maybe you to a lesser extent, but you were there around that point. | |
| you had spent considerable time there. | |
| Was there a moment that you saw or personally experienced where you're like, okay, the narrative that I'm hearing Absolutely. | |
| You know, you talked about the Olympics. | |
| The Beijing Olympics, the 2008 Olympics, were so important to China. | |
| This was a massive face project. | |
| This is the first time that they're really going on the international stage. | |
| So they really pulled out all the stops to make sure that it was an incredible performance. | |
| But as somebody who was living in China, it was the opposite. | |
| First of all, all foreigners that were in China at the time, When they renewed their visas, previously you could go to a neighboring country. | |
| You could actually go into places like Hong Kong to renew, but they stopped that. | |
| You had to fly back to your country. | |
| The visa restrictions got a lot harsher. | |
| Things got pretty hectic when there were a bunch of free Tibet activists tried to douse the torch, I think, in France. | |
| They came with fire extinguishers, tried it, you know, the Olympic torch. | |
| Overnight, the attitude towards foreigners changed. | |
| And I woke up and I went downstairs and the people that were usually friendly and smiling, like the person I knew very well, the Laoban at the shop where I used to buy stuff in the morning, scowled at me, didn't want to talk to me. | |
| Walking down the road, people were looking at me with daggers. | |
| This happened overnight and this was due to the fact that now foreigners were their enemy because they were trying to, you know, besmirch China, trying to put out the torch. | |
| I was studying at the time at Chang 'an University. | |
| I was studying English. | |
| And the university locked all the foreigners inside and didn't let us go out when the Olympic torch was being run through the city. | |
| So we got a heads up, because I was very good friends with one of the teachers, and he said, "Listen." If you want to get out of here, you've got to leave here now. | |
| Because in about half an hour or so, they're closing the gates and no foreigners will be allowed out. | |
| Because they were worried about us foreigners causing trouble with the torch run. | |
| Because it's all about, you know, image and all about face. | |
| So, you know, that was the first taste that I saw, where they were more interested in an international image than the quality of life for the people actually living in China. | |
| The first time I saw that. | |
| But of course, things got very bad near the end when we had to leave. | |
| And that's quite a big story. | |
| I don't know if we have time for those. | |
| Yeah, for me, it was over time. | |
| But it was specifically when I learned Chinese. | |
| All of a sudden, when you can understand the language, everything that you're hearing around you is not some mystical dragon like, you know, China is some country that nobody understands with an ancient culture. | |
| 5,000 years of history. | |
| All of a sudden, now, you start understanding that people's standard of life isn't like what we're seeing on news, the inevitable rise of China, the Olympic procession or whatever. | |
| First moment I noticed that was when I bought a motorcycle. | |
| I bought a $200 motorcycle. | |
| You could buy a $200 new motorcycle in China. | |
| It's worth $200. | |
| It was. | |
| I'm not even joking. | |
| It was a copy of a Chinese copy motorcycle. | |
| Anyway, I got on that bike and I left the city center for the first time. | |
| And I saw... | |
| And how long have you been in China before you... | |
| Just a few months. | |
| And it didn't make me dislike China, but it opened my eyes because what I saw within 10-15 minutes of getting outside the city center was kids warming themselves over burned barrels. | |
| Houses without any sort of glass in the windows. | |
| Stray dogs digging through piles of dead animals and carcasses and stuff, right? | |
| It was abject poverty. | |
| Versus what looked like middle class downtown. | |
| So I was like, that kind of woke me up. | |
| I was like, this is not the place that I am seeing on the news, that's for sure. | |
| But it made me want to understand China more. | |
| So I'd go out and see different things. |
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