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

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

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Laowhy86: We're watching China's crime rate in real life. Go up through the roof and we're watching weekly cases where people are getting in cars and running over pedestrians. It's become like a massive problem. It's almost an epidemic at this point. I mean, one guy ran over like 90 something people.

So yeah, if you ever get into an argument with a tanky and authoritarian supporter would be like. They don't have gun violence or whatever. Yeah, but they have people running over mass crowds of people in cars.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional chess grand legendary actor or Emmy nominated comedian.

And if you're new to the show or you [00:01:00] want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on this show.

Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, if you've ever posted something online and thought, huh, this 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 Tiananmen 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. [00:02:00] This isn't just internet slang. It's a living constantly mutating survival code, a linguistic cat and mouse game between millions of Chinese zens 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 onto 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 Tye, aka C-Milk, host 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

Laowhy86: both alarming yet a lot of fun. Here we go with Matthew Tye.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:03:00] 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.

'cause 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. I hate this word, netizens.

Laowhy86: Why do you hate that word so much?

Jordan Harbinger: It's lame. It's netizens.

Laowhy86: It

Jordan Harbinger: is. It is silly. Super

Laowhy86: lame.

Jordan Harbinger: It's, 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, Ooh, that's clever. It's sounds, I don't want to say boomer 'cause I always offend people, but it really does sound like one of those out of touch.

Like you remember when people used to say cyber crime? Yes. And it was like, wow, this is, we're in the future. That's what it [00:04:00] sounds like. It sounds like a nineties internet term that needs to retire.

Laowhy86: What am I going to do with all my e worms and email viruses?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Got 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 phone's os for most things in China.

Laowhy86: Yeah, 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 a all in one app called WeChat. And what that is is 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 [00:05:00] in China and then also when they're out of China. Because what I've noticed is that when Chinese people go abroad or they leave China even, especially some dissidents and stuff, they still need to 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% 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 like to call it an intranet. Everything you do. If you're accessing the Chinese internet is within their own system. You can't have another way outside looking in unless they're using something like A VPN.

Jordan Harbinger: Which may sponsor this episode, TBD 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 [00:06:00] gone. That was one of the weird ones where like 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, bazillion 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. 'cause this is all centralized. So imagine if you wanted to buy your food [00:07:00] 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 booked your movie tickets in the same app.

It's basically, that's what it is. And it's just all of that data goes somewhere. My teacher told me, I think I mentioned this on the show before. She was talking to one of her friends or something, and 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. She's like, oh, okay.

Laowhy86: That's interesting because that actually ties into, do you remember when everyone in the west was talking about the social credit system?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course. We did a show on that a long time ago.

Laowhy86: 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 [00:08:00] you need to use that to book your high-speed rail tickets.

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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 censors 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. 'Cause 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 [00:09:00] government not giving me what I want. My job sucks and my life sucks because the police will come and visit you if you do that.

Laowhy86: I think there's a couple 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 uh, you know, these days.

Jordan Harbinger: No, that's probably Denmark or something. I don't know actually who is at the top. I'm curious.

Laowhy86: I think it's actually Finland.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense.

Laowhy86: 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 spread rumors, right?

[00:10:00] 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 prison, right? The second level of this is picking quarrels and picking quarrels is when you're, uh, making people have a debate or a discussion about something online.

And if the government decides that you're having a discussion about something they 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 treason almost, so they can 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 in lives to post these things and get their worries out there into the world.

Jordan Harbinger: That's scary. My Chinese teachers are paranoid sometimes too.

I mean, there've 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 [00:11:00] 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 or 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 are enforcing it on themselves.

Laowhy86: That's actually a really good point. If you don't mind, I don my tinfoil hat here.

I do think that might have not been a coincidence.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 conversation. Hey,

Laowhy86: that's on you. Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: That sounds like a you problem. I could always get a new Chinese teacher. No, [00:12:00] I'm, 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 there's an AI that goes, eh, they're talking about internet censorship. Let's fire a shot across the bow and just disrupt their internet for five minutes and they'll get it.

Laowhy86: 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 two thousands 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 [00:13:00] they would take these words that would sound like a Chinese word and turn them into an actual like animal. So for example, taima. A taima is a grass mud horse, which is like this weird little alpaca animal that they invented. But when you change the tones, 'cause 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. 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 Tony Ma, that people were making little stuffed animals out of it. There was another one I remember. It was called fao, which was a way to just say the F word FU in English, but in with a Chinese like accent to it.

But the characters, when you break down the characters, FAO 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 [00:14:00] ocean or whatever with like Chinese characters next to it and stuff. 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 huia 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 sensors that would go out and take down forum posts, or if people were leaving comments on certain things that they found to be maybe anti-government or a little risky, they didn'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 it started. And so really, if you just wanted to fast forward a quick glimpse into what we're dealing with now in China, people are terrified of [00:15:00] actually even having those discussions anymore.

So there's a lot of code words, but the people that are using code words to have protest language now are at wit's end. It's not like the fun. Everyone knows what this means type thing anymore. It's now like coded language of very oppressed people.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So it's not just like teenagers being edgy and using these things and being like, ha ha, this sounds like F you, but it's grass, mud horse.

Let's throw this around. Let's put it on a T-shirt. Let me name my livestream, broadcast grass, mud horse. 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?

Laowhy86: 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 'em 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 like communist country or whatever, and you can't even say this or that. It's like there's no real political consequence [00:16:00] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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, do you know the famous Tank man photo? And for people who don't know, it's a man standing in the middle of this super wide exist in communist countries, only boulevard next to Tiananmen Square with a tank in front of him 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, that guy was never seen again, and no one knows who he is and that, 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 [00:17:00] like, oh, that's really sad. 'cause he was probably like 20. Right when that happened. But I sent the Tank man photo and people were like, eh, different photos are 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 Tank Man? 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 Tank man 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 say no and I'm like maybe not. 'cause they probably can scan photos that are being sent back and forth and that's probably at the top of the list.

Tank man.

Laowhy86: 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 'cause there's actually a new [00:18:00] trend that we've seen people try to get around this. There was a massive protest, which keep in mind, protests in China are massively cracked down upon.

They don't want people out in the streets there. Worst 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, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Laowhy86: Yeah. So anyway, this protest started out as a protest against the [00:19:00] school, but then of course.

Anti-government messaging will creep into some of these things. 'cause when you realize that the corruption goes to the top, the people start finding out, Hey, actually this student's parents are in the CCP or something. Right. And those rumors start spreading.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh. So it's like they didn't get punished because this kid has connections and that's why,

Laowhy86: 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 something called guci 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 bullied girl there was turning into anti, you know, government protest type stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, oh. In support of her not to continually bully her. Yes. Okay. I was like, geez, that's horrendous. No. Okay, that makes more sense.

Laowhy86: She became like almost a symbol of protest of freedom, really? In China, so,

Jordan Harbinger: right. She's like a Malala Yusufzai kind of figure.

Laowhy86: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Ish.

Laowhy86: Unintentionally. Yeah, exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, unintentionally.

Laowhy86: [00:20:00] So what people were doing is trying to spread the video round of all the police brutality. 'cause the police came in and it looked kind of like Tianmen Square. I mean, the cops came in, the SWAT team, the PLA, like they all descended on this place and they cleared it out real quick. It was pure silence 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 it deep frying it. They would post-process the video until you can't even barely see what's going on.

It'd be like mono color, it'd 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.

'cause I think a lot of people in the West think that Chinese people, although brainwashed and living in its totalitarian state, there is a massive chunk of people when they do face adversity [00:21:00] from the government, do want to stand up and do something about it.

Jordan Harbinger: So if I suddenly start referring to myself as Podcast Dumpling Emperor, just know that things have taken a turn.

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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 in terms that were designed to get around censorship. Are also now getting censored. So if you said like River Crabbed instead of harmonized, then they were like, oh, okay, well River Crabbed, let's get rid of that word too.

And so now you have to say some other term, or you can't say Tiananmen Square, so you start writing the date and they're like, well, that's a date we don't want. So then you have to start writing the date in different formats

Laowhy86: for sure. Like for example, Tianmen is obviously broken down into Chinese characters, right?

So Tianmen, and so what people would do is if they wanted other people on the Chinese internet to look into it, maybe like get on A VPN and look into why people are talking about Enemen over and over again. Eventually the government's like, yo, we gotta 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 [00:25:00] 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 this puzzle. And so they'd go and maybe get on A VPN and Google it and figure it out.

And this worked for a while. Government caught onto this and said, we're actually going to ban these numbers in succession.

Jordan Harbinger: So if your phone number ends in eight, nine six four, you're screwed.

Laowhy86: You probably can't even pick that. Who knows? But there's other examples too. For example, I think a lot of your listeners probably remember the COVID Lockdowns in China, which were crazy, right?

People starved to death in their apartments. They were forced to line up multiple times a day to get COVID tests. It was a true nightmare.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I remember talking about this. That's 1984, but more efficient. That was crazy.

Laowhy86: Yes. Let me remember the footage of people getting welded into their apartments to stop the spread.

The guys in the white suits that would go inside of people's apartments and kill their dogs, because it [00:26:00] turns out they thought dogs were spreading COVID like it got outta control. I just remember that the hypocrisy of all these people in the West that were saying like China was doing a good job cracking down on COVID,

Jordan Harbinger: they were.

It's just that they couldn't also eat or leave their apartment. That's technically correct.

Laowhy86: We talked to some people that would line up for their COVID test and they're standing next to thousands of people in a lion multiple times a day.

Jordan Harbinger: One of whom is affected. Yeah. Yeah,

Laowhy86: 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God. So gross.

Laowhy86: I just didn't want us to get a situation where people are like, congratulating authoritarianism here. It doesn't work. Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: Yikes. 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.

Laowhy86: I dunno how much time you have, but that's exactly why China has so many people with aids.

Jordan Harbinger: Stop, get outta here. Are you serious?

Laowhy86: Yes. What happened, and this is the craziest thing you've ever heard, but [00:27:00] up north, I think this is in UE and in Hunan, 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 'cause they needed plasma from blood. I think this was in the nineties, and what happened was people would go donate their plasma, but because of like lack of education or whatever. 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.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm getting queasy thinking about that. I'm not afraid of needles. That's just actually really disgusting to think about.

Laowhy86: It's grim. The COVID was like a modern version of that, and we saw a lot of instances like that happening, but while people were getting oppressed and getting welded into their apartments, they wanted to be able to [00:28:00] 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 colloquially known as like a protest slogan's. I want a COVID test. It's like, screw you government.

We don't want these lockdowns anymore. They came up with these science fiction words. For example, if you were glowing, it was the code word that you actually had a fever because if the government found out you had a fever, I don't know if you remember this. They set up. Hundreds of thousands of these capsules.

There are like these little, I don't know, like trailers, which you can find for sale now, by the way. 'cause they're just used. You can find 'em on like Alley Express and Alibaba and stuff.

Jordan Harbinger: Why would you want one of those?

Laowhy86: It's like memories. I don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: 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. [00:29:00] 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?

Laowhy86: Here's my Gundam collection. This is where a grandmother died of starvation because of COVID Lockdowns.

Jordan Harbinger: It's so grim. God. We're both going to hell for this joke.

Laowhy86: See God have some humor to get past this. It was the stuff we saw and the people we talked to back then. It was just, I have longstanding damn mental damage from some of these stories. But anyway, these code words. If you said you had a fever, like for example on WeChat, you're like, ah, 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, were starving to death in their apartments. There [00:30:00] were reports of that, and so people had to have different words for lockdown, and 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 a little picture representations.

Jordan Harbinger: It's really interesting how censored all of this got during COVID. One of my old teachers, he lived in Germany at the time, and he would say something like, we can talk about this 'cause I'm in Germany, but once I go home and visit Shanghai, we can't talk about this anymore.

Or they'll inspect my water meter, is what he said.

Laowhy86: Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you know this phrase?

Laowhy86: There's two ways of saying this. You can say. The police invited me to drink tea. Or you can say the police are going to inspect my water meter so the police will come actually pay you a visit to investigate you as to why you're having these conversations.

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.

Jordan Harbinger: You could go to the most austere place in China, like a bus [00:31:00] 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, his 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? 'cause I feel like that's true.

Laowhy86: A hundred percent. Yeah. I just love that you know that because I can't have these conversations with most people.

It is so true. People in China think that if you drink cold water, you die. Specifically if you're a woman on your period or something

Jordan Harbinger: that's right. Or you're pregnant, God forbid you should eat something that was made with cold water. At any point when you're pregnant, you might as well throw yourself down a flight of stairs.

At this point, they equated eating the wrong foods or showering with lighting up an unfiltered cigarette during pregnancy. It's the same [00:32:00] level.

Laowhy86: A hundred percent. You might as well lock yourself on of those uh, quarantine boxes at

Jordan Harbinger: that

Laowhy86: point. That's right.

Jordan Harbinger: Which you can buy on LA Express. We'll link to that in the show notes.

Laowhy86: The code word for those was square cabin. I remember that one. That's how people would talk. 'cause even that was blocked, like you weren't even allowed to tell. I'm going off to the square cabin.

Jordan Harbinger: Jeez. Yeah. 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?

Laowhy86: Yo, even that gets me nervous. All right. That's the top level stuff. I'll put it to you this way. If there was a way to fast track someone to get in trouble and China, it would be to talk about the leader. For sure. And even Chinese people get confused. They're like, at least we're not like North Korea, right?

Where like,

Jordan Harbinger: 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 sixties or seventies, which is true.

Laowhy86: The problem is if you look at objective freedoms, it is approaching that level of North Korea [00:33:00] now. It's just that it's so much flashier.

It's got buildings and lights and stuff. It's got a, a budget for Western propaganda and you can travel there, right? It's just, it's so much more covert. So talking about the leader is so off limits, it's not even funny. I mean, that's where you get the 15 years to just actually just disappearing. People that do bring up or ask the leader to step down, that is the worst thing you can do in China, period.

So there was a time in the beginning when he first took office that people were excited. They thought he was going to liberalize China, or I should say continue liberalizing. 'cause China was kind of opening up.

Jordan Harbinger: 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,

Laowhy86: a hundred percent. And so back then people felt comfortable to make up cute little names for Xi Jinping, right? There was this famous scene where he went to go eat some steam buns or bza at this little, uh, restaurant. And at the time people were calling him, she bza like a cute [00:34:00] little way of saying like, they love this image of him eating normal people food, right?

The leaders down there with the people. And that eventually turned into like a negative term for him, a way to slander the leader. When after people realized that actually he was going to continue cracking down on freedoms like way worse than the previous leadership. What's really funny about that right now is Taiwanese people now know that that is like the soar point.

So what's happening is obviously China, if you guys dunno, 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 House. They're in the nineties. They

Jordan Harbinger: probably do. Yeah.

Laowhy86: 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 China keeps threatening to take Taiwan militarily. They threaten Taiwan, we're going to blow you up, we're going to take you back. We're they indoctrinate kids in China to say, we're going to build a railway to Taiwan and we're going to take 'em all home.

They really want to come home. And then to, to Taiwanese people, they're like, it doesn't [00:35:00] 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 Ian Group Streaming, and if you guys don't know, doin is China's TikTok. They're the same thing, but it operates in China with Chinese laws in its own intranet. As I spoke about before, and in this intranet, one of the biggest phenomenons is getting groups of five or six girls, or five or six guys that are good looking, although they use filters to obviously look much better than they actually do.

Jordan Harbinger: If I knew how to use filters, I'd probably do that too, to be fair, but okay, continue.

Laowhy86: They dance and sing for donations, right? So just like any live streaming thing, basically the equivalent of a super chat, if you've used YouTube, and what'll happen is stuff will happen on the screen and then those singers and [00:36:00] dancers that are lined up kind of looks like a boy band or 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 dancing 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 Ian.

So they were able to operate within the Chinese ecosystem, and they speak Chinese too. So what they were doing is going onto the top streams. 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 [00:37:00] is if they started talking about Xi Jinping. So what they would do is cut off the character she and just say, Jinping, which is technically a given name in Chinese. And these live streamers are going 12, 13, 14, 15 hours a day.

And they're so tired and so lost in what they're doing that they get this donation from a top donor in Taiwan. And they'll be like, oh, Jinping, you're so handsome. Like we love you. Or they'll make 'em say like, they'll say, Jinping, sit down and shut up. They'll make them actually say these words and then the live streams get pulled.

And so it's like a modern version of like internet warfare from Taiwan on China. It's pretty funny.

Jordan Harbinger: I feel bad for those streamers though. One 15 hour day basically enslaved working online. That's awful. And these people are trying to make a living and I have some level of sympathy for them and then they lose their living and or get a visit from the police and it's like, I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm delirious. I've been awake for six days with four hours of sleep per night dancing on, give me a break. Yeah. I don't know. I get it. It's funny, [00:38:00] but it's also like human cost.

Laowhy86: I a hundred percent 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 1,000 million Chinese people as a form of protest, I do understand it from that perspective.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I get it. I see. I didn't realize that many people were watching these things. That's crazy.

Laowhy86: Oh no. It's less trolling and more like stop threatening our sovereignty.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow, okay. Do they use English characters? Because I know that sometimes they'll say instead of like Jung Fu government using the characters, they'll write like zf, right? Are they doing that still?

Laowhy86: Absolutely. The problem is, is those get cracked down on just as fast as anything else. Now, I think what I want your audience to understand is that this like cute subculture of like censorship on the fly, it gets dealt with so quickly now sometimes it doesn't have even time to proliferate.

Jordan Harbinger: That's the idea, right? They don't want it to catch on and become part of the lingo and evolve. They want it [00:39:00] to just die on the vine.

Laowhy86: A hundred percent. 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.

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.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, they're using chat, GPT Chinese version, deep seek whatever, to be like, okay, if democracy is mean and freedom is zillion, what are the a hundred ways these could be combined cleverly to come up with a new word and what does it mean and show how many people are using this in a weird context. It doesn't make sense.

Laowhy86: One of my favorites of that one was cloth self oil. Cloth. Self oil was like, give me liberty or give me death. Basically a play on those. And that [00:40:00] was cracked down on. But basically they'll use things like deep seek to make predictions on what is humanly capable of coming outta this. And of course it's not a hundred percent successful because human ingenuity cannot be replicated a hundred percent by AI models, obviously.

But they can get it down to a science, really. They can predict behaviors based on what people have been saying on certain forums, things like that. Recently, the way of talking about the current economic situation in China has gotten people arrested. They went from a situation where like, I know I'm not allowed to talk about Xi Jinping.

I know I'm not allowed to talk about the government. I'm not even allowed to talk about my local government, but at least I can talk about, man, life sucks right now. Like stuff's pretty expensive and I can't attest to this, like food prices in China have gone up like crazy. And so people were going online and having conversations.

They're like, Hey, I'm a street sweeper here in this village in Hube, and I only make this amount, but online it says that I'm supposed to be making this amount right. I can't believe, I can't afford to send my kids to school anymore. I can't, blah, blah, blah. People have these conversations and people were getting arrested for that.

[00:41:00] 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. That life is getting too uncomfortable.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 pick in the cafe. Here's something that won't end in electrified

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It really is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Matthew Tye.

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 [00:44:00] there?

Laowhy86: So there's countries that all argue about where milk tea comes from. Okay? So milk, tea being bobo, we could say a lot of people might know it as Bobo

Jordan Harbinger: Uhhuh. Yeah, I love it.

Laowhy86: And it was originated in Taiwan. Taiwan, a free country, the free version of China really. So that became synonymous with freedom in that respect.

But then what happened was other countries that also really either like boba or milk tea or claim to have had something to do with its invention. Formed 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 way.

So you had like at some point Taiwan, I think the Philippines and these countries had come together and formed the Milk Tea Alliance. So milk tea became this like object of almost like internet democracy or freedom.

Jordan Harbinger: What about outright insulting words? Can you swear on the Chinese internet or is that not allowed?

Laowhy86: 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 someone that eight idiot, right? [00:45:00]

Jordan Harbinger: Foolish C word. Is that the best way to do it? I don't want to get demonetized.

Laowhy86: Yeah, foolish C word. You're technically not supposed to be using these words on the Chinese internet, and most places will pick that up through the filter.

So what people were doing is just using the word SB in Roman characters to say shabi, which is the swear word. But then even Nat started getting cracked down on. So there is euphemisms, right? There's R by W, which is 250, which also means stupid or like an idiot. So people would use the number two 50. So you can kinda look at like a timeline of this.

You look starts with the Chinese characters. Then it goes to the abbreviation of what it would be if it was spelled in opinion or in English. And then that gets cracked down and then they go to numbers and then who knows from there.

Jordan Harbinger: I see some of these examples are kind of hybrid, where they'll go, oh, you can't say F your mom, so we're going to write like TNND, which is bleep your mom acronym, but in English.

And then it's, or we're going to use the. Chinese character for [00:46:00] you, the letter M, and then another Chinese character, because now it's like, okay, ta um, 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 too human a face on it, but how quick do these evolutions happen?

Is it like one day, it's this, one day, it's that, or is it like, this works for a month and then next month you realize you can't type that in WeChat, so you just have to type something else? Or you see it a month later? How quickly does it evolve?

Laowhy86: Yeah, so that's a good question. The example you used, I can actually use as an early example.

So for example, Tam, right? If your mom right,

Jordan Harbinger: don't get too scientific and technical on us here.

Laowhy86: Well, I'll, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: But how else are you supposed to tell someone to go screw their mother? I don't [00:47:00] understand.

Laowhy86: You just gotta give it

Jordan Harbinger: up. You just gotta give it up. I don't know if I can do that.

Laowhy86: But what happened was that turned into, like you just said, TNND, and why that is, 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 for phrase, like for example, if it has something during the white paper protests, like what happened in uh, Shanghai?

Jordan Harbinger: What's the white paper protest?

Laowhy86: 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, and they kind of understand how things are abroad.

A lot of them have been abroad or they have 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've taken it a little more easy on them?

I don't want to get into the whole political reasons that happened. [00:48:00] 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 as like an anti COVID, OVID kind of uprising turned very quickly into a anti-government uprising.

And this is where you saw very famous video clips of people saying, communist Party stepped down. Xi Jinping stepped down. Like the things that get you just disappeared for the rest of your life. That's where that was happening. And so what people were doing, and I think this is very related to what we're talking about, they'd hold up banners and as soon as they would hold up banners that say like freedom or something, the cops would run in, SWAT team would run in and tackle 'em.

Take the banner, rip it up. Or they would do this thing where they would hold up like actual physical, like censorship curtains to like block off protestors so that people couldn't take videos or cell phone pictures of them.

Jordan Harbinger: So if people are confused about, you never see an injury at the Olympics in Japan or China and they bring up that weird folding wall [00:49:00] to protect the person's dignity.

It's like that, but huge. And they use it outside. So it's like, yo, you can't see the protestors and 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.

Laowhy86: It's sad though because the people that are behind those curtains are probably never going to see the light of day again.

That's the grim side of this. But anyway, during this protest, people, instead of getting physically censored by these walls, these like curtain cubes or whatever, and not being able to hold these banners, they said, I'm just going to hold up a blank piece of paper. There's nothing on it. It can't be illegal. So people would go down to the street and it literally just hold up an a four size piece of paper.

It was completely blank. And it became known as the white paper protest. The piece of white paper in these marches and in the, in these protests that they were doing became synonymous with democracy or like [00:50:00] the government kind of relinquishing, authoritarian control on the people. And so China was actually banning the sale of a four paper,

Jordan Harbinger: gosh,

Laowhy86: in the area so that people couldn't buy blank paper to go to these protests.

And to me, that's like what we're talking about with this evolution of language. You're in a situation where people had to evolve language in that they couldn't have banners anymore. They use white pieces of paper.

Jordan Harbinger: So if you needed to print something during that protest, you were just, shit outta luck, man.

Like, no, no. I swear I really need to print out my term paper. My professor does not have email. Sorry, this is not allowed it. You're going to, I can imagine someone running across town being, can I borrow a sheet of paper? Can I borrow a sheet of paper? Just having to do that the whole day to get enough to print off a 20 page paper.

This is ridiculous. You know what? A couple of possibly apocryphal protests in the Soviet Union, somebody would be handing out blank pieces of paper in the street and the KGB would go up and be like, what are you doing? 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 [00:51:00] 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,

Laowhy86: it makes me wonder if the Chinese protestors did take influence from that event in the Soviet Union.

That's really cool.

Jordan Harbinger: It's possible. Yeah. I'll have to look it up. I read about it when I was reading stuff about the Soviet Union recently, so it's not new, but it also sounds like one of those potential urban legend things. Okay, when did this happen? No one knows. Did anybody see it? Somebody told me about it.

Okay. Maybe it's from a book, right? It's one of those things, but it's quite sharp, incisive.

Laowhy86: 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 democracy. There's people that throw away their entire lives to hold a banner, right?

And they get [00:52:00] murdered by the government. These people exist, and what the government does is turn these events into urban legends, 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 DJ Joe floods happened 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 'cause they're trying to hide that. Everyone died in there. We're trying to find this stuff again 'cause it was big news. People talked about this stuff. But somehow the Chinese government, through the take down requests or servers or hacking or something, a lot of these clips or this evidence of these very powerful events.

End up [00:53:00] disappearing into the annals of history, really, actually not the annals of history. Just memories in our minds to say, do you remember when that happened? Now I can't even find it anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 it happened in China, 2022.

But in Belarus it happened in 2020 because they were protesting then also with blank paper. But the earliest incident that I can see here, 'cause there's a list of them. Moscow in the sixties and then again in the seventies. And they also had silent demonstrations where they would just hold up the blank sheet of paper instead of handing them out, basically saying, it's not even safe enough for me to write anything, so I'm just going to show you that I can't do it.

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 sixties and seventies, but it definitely happened in Belarus in 2020, and it definitely happened in Russia in 2022 and China in [00:54:00] 2022.

Laowhy86: 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.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned VPNs before. Tell me about those, 'cause 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?

Laowhy86: 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, uh, 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's 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 just get a VPN. What they don't talk about on purpose is the fact that people all the time get arrested. There's been high [00:55:00] 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 are posting things that you're not supposed to, to the point where we know dissidents that posted stuff with A VPN while they're in China, and then left China and were still hunted down in the US about what they posted on A VPN when they were in China.

It's that serious. This is not a joke. Uh, these people do go to jail and get disappeared for using VPNs. In fact, there's a very high profile case just very recently about that.

Jordan Harbinger: Can you talk about VPNs in the Chinese internet or do you have to use a euphemism for that too?

Laowhy86: Yes. It depends on what you're on.

So if you're talking about using A VPN because you [00:56:00] want to express dissatisfaction with the 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.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. It's almost like case by case slash whether or not you have good luck with the police that day.

Laowhy86: The average person would absolutely get punished if caught. I'll say that companies that operate in China and have to do like foreign business and stuff have a lot more leniency.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. How do you even say VPN in in Chinese? Or do they just say VPN?

Laowhy86: People say Fun Chang. So they'll say, I need to get over the wall because you don't want to use those characters.

Those will be blocked.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Laowhy86: So hopping the wall is usually what people say.

Jordan Harbinger: It's funny, I was talking with my teacher about this. She loves boy bands, one of my teachers, and she's always going to see her boy band and she mentioned there was a guy who came all the way from whatever city alone. And I was like, okay, but.

Maybe he's a gay dude and she's like, yeah. He writes, what is it called? Like boy love fiction or something. And I was like, okay, that sounds worse than just [00:57:00] 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?

Laowhy86: Yeah. So things have morphed a lot in that respect. When I was in China, I had a gay friend that I just had to just tell his parents that he was going to get married someday, and he would bring over friends that were girls and then be like, oh, maybe you'll marry her someday and just put up this facade.

'cause nobody would accept it. And in fact, I would say. That sentiment would hold true today. It is very old fashioned. It's very much frowned upon, but it's not the homophobia that you might see in places like in Eastern Europe or something like that. It's more like we choose to ignore it and we don't want to know anything about it.

And you're also, you shouldn't do anything about it in public,

Jordan Harbinger: but you're not going to get beat up and put in the hospital for it maybe, hopefully.

Laowhy86: 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.

It [00:58:00] would be more akin to like the treatment you'd get if you're in some places in Northern China. But yeah, I'd say it's more like don't talk about it, don't express it. We don't want to know anything about it and you can't do anything about it legally. You can't get married or anything like that, 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 is these boy 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. My teacher, she said they met because she loves these books, but she's not gay. She just likes reading about men falling in love. I don't, I, I don't quite, I don't quite get it.

Laowhy86: 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. 'cause these C [00:59:00] CCP guys are like the least manly men you've ever met in your life. These are potbelly chain smoking guys that Yeah, you have a blew on 'em. They'd fall over. Right. They obviously have slang names and stuff for this.

For example, if you want to say like gay friend, you can say chicken oil. And that's a way around that because there was online crackdowns of LGBT speech as well. I'm not talking about activism, I'm talking about just stuff that's gay.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Laowhy86: Yes. That is the classic way to say a gay person is called them a comrade. Which is funny because that's actually how you address everyone in China up until like the eighties.

Jordan Harbinger: I assume one, this only started being used in the last [01:00:00] decade or so, because otherwise, how confusing would it be? Like he's a comrade.

Oh, good. No, no, no. He's the kind that will arrest you for being a comrade, if you know what I'm saying. Oh, okay. Nevermind. It would just be like extremely confusing. Now they have all kinds of different abbreviations, including bl, which is what my teacher calls it, which is boy love, which is, like you said, a genre of writing as well as also being gay or whatever.

It's so difficult to keep up with this. I guess you have to kind of be terminally online to keep up with the slang, but that's the idea, right? Otherwise, you just don't know what people are talking about and ideally the government people are the last to find out.

Laowhy86: Yeah. The interesting thing is the government simultaneously wants people to be on their devices at all times.

I'll be honest with you, if I was to put together some study, I'm sure I'd find out that China has the highest screen time usage in the entire world. There's not a chance that it's not. So while that happens, it's a huge e breeding ground or ecosystem for all these subcultures and these words, slang terms that didn't previously exist [01:01:00] to get around censorship because people are online talking to each other so much.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Laowhy86: 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 comradery and suffering based on like government oppression or a 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 Ian, as they call it, to run in its own intranet, its own ecosystem. [01:02:00] And when you go on there, you will find video after video fed to you of American cops, shooting people, uncensored, police brutality, violence, just the worst stuff that you would never be able to see on the Chinese internet about stuff happening in China.

But you can see plenty of that from America. 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 the drug problem or homelessness and all this kinda stuff.

If it's in relation to countries abroad that China's 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 Propagandas on behalf of China running [01:03:00] Nepalese current government propaganda against the protests.

So it depends on if China is strategically involved in another country, and it depends on if China sees you as the enemy of today. So for example, Japan and America and most of the Western world would be China's current enemies.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's fascinating. That must have got drowned out. 'cause 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?

Laowhy86: Yeah, so originally the 50 cent Army were people that were paid to leave certain comments on the Chinese internet to steer the conversation in a more pro-government direction.

Usually relied on like prison labor. So what the Chinese government would do is they'd go to a prison and they turn it into a labor campus. They do have labor camps of force labor where you have shackles on and you're like digging mines and stuff. But they have also these internet server farms basically with tons of servers, tons [01:04:00] and tons of computers, and they get these prisoners to sit there.

Then they'll have a target. They 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 or 0.5 RMB. So that's why that slang term came out. The prison labor ones would've been free, but the people that actually do it for a job, were getting paid wau per comment.

Now I a hundred percent don't believe that. I think they were paid much less than that. I think maybe wau for like an entire, like half an hour of posting or something like that.

Jordan Harbinger: But that's 1 cent, isn't it?

Laowhy86: Yeah, it's very low. Yeah, A couple cents, but it morphed. Wmao started as a paid person to go run defense for the CCP and then turned into people that just support the C CCP online, whether it's Zang Wau, which means like a self-motivated wau to go out and fight for the country, or you get actual paid wau in these massive, huge troll farms, which are [01:05:00] probably mostly bots nowadays.

All these are considered wau because they're spreading the government's message. They're fighting people on YouTube comment sections that are disparaging the CCP. They're spreading nationalist rhetoric. They're disparaging dissidents. That's what a WMA 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

Jordan Harbinger: when you can't say tariffs. So you complain about egg prices instead. That is elite level linguistic parkour. Speaking of things that keep getting more expensive, here's a quick word from our sponsors who keep this show free for you. We'll be right back.

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Laowhy86: Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my [01:06:00] conversation with Matthew Tye,

Jordan Harbinger: I'm on Reddit a lot and I see the Ask China subreddit is crazy 'cause 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 Botted on the side of China, and there'll be Americans that are like, yeah, I heard people can get arrested for talking about political topics and it'll have 187 down votes. And it's like, wait, it's true.

Why are you down voting this? And I'm guessing half the down votes are just like tanky, crazy sympathizers who are like, no, North Korea is the Worker's Paradise. Those people exist, but also a lot of it's gotta be bots. 'cause 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.

Desmond Shum, for example, and. We know that that's true. [01:07:00] She's literally vanished. And then, I don't know, she might have gotten released recently, but she was gone for years and they're like, nah, this is a bunch of propaganda. And then you get the what about him 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 fricking 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 a Chinese prison because they're not acknowledged to have been imprisoned in the first place. So I don't know, it's just very odd to me that you see this massive campaign. It's weird that they give a crap what people outside China actually think about China.

That part I don't totally get.

Laowhy86: I think that's been a huge shift in this current leadership in China. I don't think they cared as much back in the day. Now, shifting global opinion, 'cause China's [01:08:00] 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 none your business. We'll just never get involved in your stuff. When China recently has just shown time and time again that they are absolutely getting involved in everything abroad. China's hacked our telecoms. Everyone in America's phone has been hacked by China from Salt Typhoon.

Jordan Harbinger: What's that?

What's salt typhoon?

Laowhy86: Oh, it was basically a huge telecoms hack where China hacked all the major telecoms providers in America. You also had some of the other typhoon programs, these hacking programs that are state sponsored by China. 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's absolutely involved. I think New York Times did a great piece the other day on like how they got involved in New York City elections. Very much involved in stuff that happens, especially here in America. So what they say and what they do [01:09:00] is completely different.

But the point I was trying to make with that is that China is now living in this. They have this weird goal of like, and I think this comes from the top of needing to control the narrative at all costs. Before, if you were abroad and you're a Chinese person, you still probably shouldn't be talking a lot of smack about the government.

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 sub Reddit called our China. It was one of the only subreddits I've ever seen about a country that is opposed to its government, like wholeheartedly.

Jordan Harbinger: So not our China, but like r/China.

Laowhy86: [01:10:00] r/China,

Jordan Harbinger: sorry. Right. So it's just the China subreddit. Okay, gotcha.

Laowhy86: Yeah. And so you go to like, I don't know, the Brazil subreddit or something.

Maybe there's some political stuff in there, but it's probably a lot about, I know beaches or festivals or something. In China, the, our China stuff, Reddit 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 are people that used to live in China like me, and it switched overnight, I swear in November. It turned on a dime. All the posts started going very pro-China. It was propaganda pieces and they'd get upvoted and anything critical of China was getting downvoted into oblivion.

It was literally like an overnight shift. I've never seen anything like it. And I did notice that behavior was mirrored across a lot of social media platforms on YouTube on X. We've seen a huge, just an absolute astronomic explosion of allowed Chinese propaganda BA accounts. [01:11:00] This real foreign influence campaign coming from China has gotten so much worse since around October, November from what I've seen, and I don't know why.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 four grand if you post this video about, I can't even remember the last thing I got, but it was some sort of silly COVID related thing. It's been a while. It wouldn't surprise me if they went to the moderators and said. Your aunt still lives in China. Why don't you let me take over your Reddit account.

You're spending a lot of time on this, or this user lived in China 2014. I'll give you $25,000 for that account. Oh, okay. So you're no longer the moderator of our China, somebody else is because it would be a, an easy investment [01:12:00] 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 fricking online account for a subreddit where I discuss things. Sure, I'll take that deal. So you invest a hundred grand and now you've got four out of five moderator accounts that you're controlling

Laowhy86: to zoom out.

That's a hundred percent happening. But to zoom out and look at it at a personal level, and I won't name drop anybody, but there are people, actual real people. Who have had online legacies for many, many years. They're big key opinion leaders, right? People like yourself that are out there and they're doing a hundred percent 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 [01:13:00] them.

And 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.

Jordan Harbinger: I have seen that. It actually looks really cool. But go on.

Laowhy86: 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. 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 a sudden all these guys are in the exact same place in Chong [01:14:00] Chang, and they all are standing in the same building that apparently looks like you're standing on the ground.

But actually it's a building. It goes further down. It's 22 stories up, and they all say the exact same thing. 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 would say, Chongqing is an 8D City.

Nobody in the west is going to say a city is an 8D city. That is a specifically Chinese phrase because you'll go to like these amusement parks in China and they'll have like a knockoff Shrek booth where like it sprays water on your face and has like a fart smell come out. And they say this is 8Dimensions, right?

8D, right? 2D is like Mario side to side 3D is the realm that we live in. But China, in their typical marketing fashion, had to outdo themselves and one up themselves over and over again. So you get like a 4D simulator and that just means there's a smell that comes out now five D simulator is you're in a fighter jet and all of a sudden a fake rat or something will jump out on your arm, the [01:15:00] craziest stuff you've ever seen.

But anyway, they were all saying, this city is this 8D city. And I was like, oh my gosh. They're totally reading a script. And we put 'em all together and we overlaid 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 'em shills, right? The shill in for the Chinese government all saying the exact same thing at the same time. And the Chinese government took that clip as like it was a positive thing.

I think it was a foreign ministry spokesperson of the CCP took that isolated, that clip where they all say the same thing about Chongqing is whatever, and then posted it on their ex from the government's account and said, look at all these Westerners that love to come to Chong ch. It was very funny.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, they put so much effort into this. In the United States, we just have movies that kind of do the legwork, right? They go around [01:16:00] the world or like jeans or fashion and stuff like that. We don't have to try as hard switching topics. What about the lay flat movement? I heard all about that, how people didn't want to get jobs and whatever.

Is that still a thing? Are people still kinda like, yeah, I'm just not going to get a job anymore. I'm going to lay around. Is that still a movement?

Laowhy86: Yes. In fact, it was this weird double-edged sword. So the life flat movement basically means you don't do anything. You don't protest, you don't stand up for your rights, you don't work, you don't do anything.

You just lay flat. You know, exist. Authoritarian government dreams of having a populace like this, right? Stay on your devices, live on the bare minimum or whatever. But at the same time, China's a manufacturing economy. They need these people to work in factories and make stuff. So it was this catch 22 where China can't afford to pay their factory workers to do their job.

So people don't want to get the factory job. They can't afford to live on said salary. So they do this live flat thing where they just exist. Maybe they live with their parents, so they go move to a little outskirts village or something and live in a flat that costs a hundred [01:17:00] RMBA 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.

'cause 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 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's no good.

Laowhy86: And so this is an economic indicator that people, I don't know why, just refuse to talk about.

In the West is that you can go off of China's GDP growth and stuff, 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 [01:18:00] 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 and video and eyewitness accounts of people in China to realize it's actually not what they're reporting. So this life flat movements continued.

They're apathetic. People are nostalgic for the time when China was growing. They had this social contract with the government that said, Hey, you give up your rights, we'll make sure you get rich. Unfortunately they took their rights more so than ever now and then didn't give them money. Economic situations is going down.

Jordan Harbinger: They kind of broke the contract. It's interesting 'cause one of the things that I'll debate about when I am just wasting my time on like the USSR subreddit or the Chinese subreddits is people go, at the end of the day, most people don't care about this authoritarian crap you Americans are always [01:19:00] 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 protestors, literalist slogans were we want democracy and we want freedom and stuff like that.

I'm like, oh yeah, that sounds like a quality of life protest, bro. But he did have a point in which it probably often starts as a quality of life issue and then goes, you know what? Screw this. 'cause the contract, the kind of unwritten rule is. We are 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 and a mobile phone. And they're like, all right, fine. And so a lot of the what about is, am I seeing these subs are, at least we have healthcare, 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 [01:20:00] 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 I work at a factory and I'm like, yeah, I have running water, I have internet, I have a mobile phone, my kids can go to school.

And it's like, oh, but I haven't been paid in six months. Wait, then you are defaulting, you are breaching your side of the contract. You are not performing anymore because I was tolerant of being oppressed, losing my rights, whatever you want to call it, not being able to talk about certain things. But now I'm actually broke and hungry.

So what are you going to do about it?

Laowhy86: Absolutely, you're a hundred percent spot on. I think it starts like that because if you start with China in the nineties 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 where we can actually handle money and profit off of something.

It's delicious idea in a way because 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 [01:21:00] government to tell me when I can eat. So these things like trading this, you're relinquishing your freedoms in the future doesn't mean anything when you're hungry.

It means it's absolutely nothing to you. That is how it starts. But I always like to say the CCPs doctrine, their constitution, everything that they've written, it's, 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 that American guy that has like a house and goes to work and has a car. I didn't get those things yet, and I'm already not being paid. I'm already losing my opportunity for employments.

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 [01:22:00] 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,

Jordan Harbinger: is that the China equivalent of mass shooting? 'cause they don't have guns. They just run people over with the car. Wow.

Laowhy86: So yeah, if you ever get into an argument with a tanky, an authoritarian supporter would be like, they don't have gun violence or whatever.

Yeah. But they have people running over mass crowds of people in cars. And they also have kindergarten stabbings where grown men go into kindergartens and stab 20 plus kids. So. It's crazy and 'cause China Watchers, we have these weird things that we try to keep our eyes out for and we notice something in China, they're putting up these bollards everywhere.

A bollard is like a way to stop a car in a way.

Jordan Harbinger: It's think those yellow poles that you see in parking lots, that it's next to the payment machine. They don't want you to back into it and wreck it, so they put bollards in front of it. You see it in front of buildings now here too. Our government building will have giant planters all around it and you're like, [01:23:00] wow.

They're really taking their gardening seriously. Landscaping now it's to stop trucks from running into the building, right? That kind of thing.

Laowhy86: Correct. So China, what we noticed was they've had these, there's been so many added to the point where it's comical. And this is another example of how top down government doesn't really work, is they'll get a mandate and the city will be like, you gotta put in 10,000 Ballards.

And they'll all put 'em in like one road. So it's like people are like zigzagging, throw 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, we make jokes out of it because it's so asinine.

Like the way that they're putting these ballards in is just comical. It's so haphazard and so dumb. And it turns out like the corruption goes deeper than that. 'cause half the Ballards are like hollow. So they don't stop. Like when a car plows into it, it just, it's like playing shuffleboard or something.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh gosh. Yeah. That reminds me of like Russia and the Ukraine stuff where they, the tanks had like egg crates painted over instead of armor. 'cause they were like, oh that all that metal's expensive. [01:24:00] I'd rather have a yacht. I can imagine some dude leaning up against a new Ballard and be like, see nothing's stopping this bad boy just slaps it and it just cracks 'cause 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 and you're like using your fingers to rip basically a what looks like a concrete facade just off the side of a building with your hands.

Laowhy86: Yeah. 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. People don't have a reliable way to invest their money, so they buy their rights to an apartment that's not done yet and it doesn't get finished. 'cause the economy is going down despite what you're hearing in China.

Jordan Harbinger: That'll be an interesting, probably separate show.

Man, I've taken enough of your time. Thank you for coming on. It's super fascinating. The internet stuff was on my mind for a while, and I think it's just a really, it's almost like a fun slash cute slash also a little bit grim. Like you said, look at the lives of, again, my favorite word, Chinese citizens [01:25:00] and how they live in have discourse or don't have discourse online.

So thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it.

Laowhy86: Thank you. Appreciate it, Jordan. Always a pleasure.

Jordan Harbinger: What if the person love bombing you online is actually grooming you for financial slaughter? Winston Sterzel spent 14 years in China and has seen firsthand how the pig butchering scam works and how shockingly deep the deception goes.

JHS Trailer: 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 uptick in this. It's just interesting to see how many of the same tactics that are used in these in your face, real tangible scams that happen in the streets of China that I've experienced, have moved over into this kind of cryptocurrency, slaughter, the pig scam, which was [01:26:00] now being experienced around the entire world.

The way they pull it off is even more interesting. And like I said, I played along all the way to the point where I was going to send the money, so I figured out how it all works and it looks legitimate. 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 database.

And when they see that there's a response, like you say, you're validating that you're a real contact, the absolute best thing you can do is just block and and not respond. They do not face any repercussions whatsoever from the Chinese government and the police. It's an us versus them type of thing.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [01:27:00] 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 Tye and The China Show will be in the show notes on the website, advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. All at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. [01:28:00] You can also connect with me on LinkedIn In this show, it's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in China, Chinese internet culture censorship, definitely share this episode with them.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.