• Jabril [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    54·
    2 days ago

    I think her whole thing is making clickbait titles and then the videos are positive of China. She also did an interesting one about the secret homeless populations of Japan.

    edit: After watching the video, it seems like she is a pro capitalist lib irl, and the video is very balanced with providing examples that make China look much better to her Western audience than any other 1 million + follower content creators, but there is always an undertone of “but China is authoritarian.”

    She talked about doing a paper, in her Chinese language foreign relations master’s degree level class, on “how China has a bad view of Japan,” and then implied that when she got points deducted the teacher’s reasoning of “the sources not being valid” were actually because you just shouldn’t talk about that topic because it is taboo in China. There was no mention of, I don’t know, the 22 million Chinese people brutally killed by Japan or even Japanese colonialism in general. She also is married to a Japanese guy and lives in Japan now fwiw. It is strange to me that the implication is that her sources must be valid so the teacher is wrong, instead of maybe her bias towards American and Japanese narratives meaning that she is picking and chooses authors who have those same biases and are not accurate, even if they are upheld by 5 eyes academic systems.

    She also talked about mentioning to “Tienanmen Massacre” in a presentation and seeing some students visibly shudder because, she assumes, they had never heard to it referred that way before. I feel like there is a subtext here that is “it was a massacre and they are not allowed to know that,” but she was using it as an example of how it was actually not a problem to bring up this topic and discuss it which dispels the common myth that it is like, an erased history that is forbidden to be discussed. the vibe is that she is informing the students of something true that they didn’t know about before because of Chinese information control.

    Another weird one was in a debate, she argued in favor of free markets dictating the economy because they were more efficient and the other student froze up, the professor asked the student how they were going to respond and they said they didn’t know how. This, she surmised, was because they had never heard of these ideas of free market capitalism before, and so the student couldn’t have been prepared to respond. She at least says “like we are in America in the opposite way,” and generally holds this both sides tone, which is I guess the best you can expect for someone with a large following.

    Still, it is frustrating that someone who has grifted so hard off China and Chinese culture for a decade is still so american brained.

    • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      2 days ago

      Another weird one was in a debate, she argued in favor of free markets dictating the economy because they were more efficient and the other student froze up, the professor asked the student how they were going to respond and they said they didn’t know how.

      I feel for them. I mean where do you even start with a position that dumb? Its like not knowing what to say in a debate with Jordan Peterson when he’s five minutes deep in a rabbit hole about dragon’s a biologically real because fire and lions are both predators.

    • LaughingLion [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      the students didnt shudder they cringed because chinese people aren’t shielded from tiananmen square they are taught about it

      also that debate probably just caught the chinese student off gaurd. obviously the response to that is that is a market created efficiency through competition then how can non-competitive supply chains completely insular to major corporations like walmart be so efficient? they are are completely shielded from the usual market forces and are, de facto, a form of planned economy on a smaller scale. i doubt your average chinese debater has read “the peoples republic of walmart”

    • CutieBootieTootie [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      2 days ago

      White people using the term “Orient” or “Oriental” goes back to colonialism and imperialism in Asia and often represents simplified racist narratives of non-Occidental cultures which are demeaning and derogatory. There may be some name remnants within Asia or MENA that reference these terms but they’re historical leftovers of this brutal age of colonialism these regions endured. For more information, Google Orientalism and it’s consequences.