Panic World - Has China already won the internet?

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Today we’re talking about a panic that’s been simmering for a while but has, in the past couple of years, become a full-blown panic. And that’s the technological Cold War that the US is waging with China. (Okay, and now also the tariff war, but that’s with pretty much everyone.) Are the Chinese really so radically different from us, or — at least when we’re browsing the net — are we the same? Tianyu Fang joins us to compare Chinese and American internet culture, and who suffers from more online brain rot. Our guest Tianyu Fang is a Technology and Democracy Fellow at New America, an editor at Reboot, and formerly co-founded Chaoyang Trap. You can follow him on Twitter @tianyuf, and all of his latest endeavors at https://www.tianyufang.net/.  Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I want to start with like a really basic, I think, simple question. And we always do this with every episode. Grant wrote the wrong question. So Grant at the top of our outline said, I should ask you why will China's internet crush American democracy? And I want to change that to when. When will it crush American democracy, do you think? It's already happened. Okay, cool.

It's already in the past. There's no rescue. Yeah, I mean, this idea that just by having a foreign app in your country, your democracy or your political system be crushed. That's exactly what China has done. So congratulations. It already happened. This is so exciting.

I feel much safer in the hands of the Chinese government, actually, than the American government right now. So I'm glad that they've successfully taken over the country via dancing trends. I'm Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is our producer Grant Overing, who you will hear pop in throughout the show. This is Panic World, a podcast about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and our reality.

So I don't know if you guys are aware, but along with being in an AI arms race with China, we are also now in a tariff war with China. And they have recently said that they will fight it to the death, which you can interpret however you want. The basis of the China Cold War that we're currently in is the idea that Americans should be panicking over China's increasing control of the economy, of technology, of culture. And all of that assumes that the Chinese are radically different from us, that they have some sort of grandmaster plan that the government is engaging in and that, you know, our way of life is better than what theirs is and we're fighting to defend it. You know, all of the sort of like jingoistic feelings that comes with a Cold War. But to help make sense of this panic that's helping destroy our economy and really turning the volume up on our on our AI arms race and, you know, freaking everybody out about TikTok, is. is I think some pretty serious misunderstandings of what life is actually like on Chinese internet. So that's what we're going to be talking about today.

And joining me is Tech and Democracy Fellow at New America, editor at Reboot, and the writer of one of my favorite newsletters, maybe of all time, Chow Yang Trap House, Tianfu. How are you? Good. Good. It's so great to be here. I've been a big fan of Garbage Day and so glad to be talking to you guys. I don't want to say this, like, to sound arrogant. The worlds that I live in online are very niche and bizarre, and I get so excited when someone is covering those worlds or even more niche and more bizarre worlds than mine better than me. And when I saw your guys stuff years ago, I was like, fuck, this is so good and I could never do this.

It's so great. To kick things off at the very top level, how would you say the way culturally the Chinese Internet works differs from the American Internet? Well, I think broadly is very similar, right? I think you do have the obvious stuff going on, right? There's more state directives. There's more censorship. The platforms themselves have less of a less power in recent years because of government restrictions.

You know, more broadly, I think it's very similar, right? They're very similar platform incentives or very similar incentives for users. And you have a lot of niche subcultures that are interesting and fun. So, yeah, I would say, you know, people tend to portray the Chinese Internet as. something that's completely different. The fact that the Chinese Internet and the American Internet do have a lot of cultural similarities. And obviously, like, there are differences and we're going to get into them. But one of the pieces Chayang Trapp House made, like, very early on, I remember sort of like, I remember, like, gasping when I saw it, I think.

Were you guys did a whole thing about the Joe Rogans of China? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's my, our friend, Tai Wei Chen. Yeah. Three characters on a Chinese internet. One of them was this Tinder, co-exam. Yeah, that was a weird world of Chinese masculinity bros. And I feel like it's actually kind of a good place to start with this because so much of the way the American government right now, the sort of the Trump administration, is talking, especially the China Hawks in the Trump administration.

So much of the way the U.S. government is talking about the Chinese Internet is, you know, the idea that they can use technology to brainwash Americans. And obviously we can all agree that we have been brainwashed by the Chinese government. That is totally fine and I like it and it's great. Do you worry personally about sort of the rise of global Chinese tech platforms? Is that a concern for you? No, just in part because I don't think these platforms are actively censoring speech on other platforms. Clearly there are things I can post on TikTok here in the ways that, but I wouldn't be able to post them on like Do-In and China. Right.

But I just don't see sufficient evidence to say that this entire censorship apparatus that is focused on domestic political stability in China, right? It's going to be expanded to America in a way that like, oh, I wouldn't be able to talk about like the private lives of Chinese like Chinese politicians. I just do not think that that is part of what's happening right now. I mean, it could happen, but I would believe it. I see it. You're actually hitting on something really funny and it's like a really funny contradiction that I don't think got talked enough about during the like the brief TikTok

ban stuff which was like if China has a very specific domestic policy that it's enforcing censorship to defend why would it also be like upholding American Christian values in America like it why would it ban like the word sex right from its algorithm like the rise of like self-sensorious algos speak. Yeah, yeah. Like, why would it be upholding a Christian, right, like, censorship program here? I mean, if there's anything like censorious, if you will, it's precisely that I think if TikTok and they would at least came from this similar sort of algorithmic system,

then I think the intention or one of the byproducts of Chinese censorship is that they want to tone down all these sort of political debates, right? Right. Like, Dotyne's intention is not to stop particular types of political debate, but they're just very worried about political debates in general, whether they're pro-state or anti-state, right? So I think when people are talking about how, like, TikTok is, you couldn't talk about sex, and that's more sort of sensitive.

It's precisely that. And from the platform's perspective, they don't want to get into, quote-unquote, political trouble, whether it is questioning the systems of the Communist Party of China, or it is like Israel, Palestine in the U.S. It doesn't want scrutiny from either country. Like, it doesn't want scrutiny in the U.S. or scrutiny at home. Right.

I mean, I don't know if that's what TikTok is actively doing, but I... Sure. But, I mean, in terms of, like, comparing the darker corners of the web, what kind of similarities have you seen? So, like, yes, there are Joe Rogan-esque figures. I mean, and I know for a fact that you guys, that China has the 50-cent. party, which is like kind of a term that I think is an older term for like nationalist trolls. But like how similar are the weirder corners? Like what what do they have there that we would have here?

There's always this perception that every single person in China is either either resisting the state or they're being complicit with the government. And that is just a total that that's clearly not true. Right. So what you see more often is it's much more complexity and nuance during COVID, there were people who were trying to protest COVID restriction. I was actually going to bring this up. Yeah. There were people who were saying like, how, ha, ha, ha, which means like, great, great, great, right?

It's just like all positive comments on social media platforms. But if you read it, you will know that they're criticizing this idea that you could only be cheerleaders for the government when it comes to discussing these policies. I remember there was like a really magical month. I mean, not magical in the sense of like what COVID was doing to China. But there was a magical sort of moment between. like December and January where I had a translator working with me and we had we chat running and it was I've I've sort of been and you can tell me if I'm wrong here but my understanding is that like

the Chinese government in terms of like in times of crisis will sometimes allow like a pressure valve release point of just like okay everyone can kind of like complain and bitch because like it's better than not letting that happen and so there was this moment right before COVID really spread beyond China where the average person on public we chat feeds were just like complaining the way that you would see people complain on Twitter here. And I remember just thinking like, I wish Americans knew not even just for China, but for like the whole world that like the internet is sort of the same everywhere you go. It was like kind of a nice moment of human connection in this weird way. But then it seemed like it disappeared really fast. Like the white sign protests. Yeah, I don't know what the

intentions of the government were in many ways allowing these. criticism to come out. But throughout the history of Chinese internet, whether there was or without was not a severe or intense censorship, there's always been people who are trying to dance around this censorship apparatus. Right. Got to be a little more sly, a little more clever with it, I think. Yeah. And government does have, they could detain someone or like, they could like knock on somebody's door and be like, hey, you've been criticizing Xi Jinping. You shouldn't do that again. But most of the time, It's just people trying to say things in a different way, right?

That they're trying to go around these restrictions. So what you said kind of rings true for me. I was in Beijing in December 2019, and I went out for lunch with someone who was kind of working at like a digital media outlet kind of place in China. And, you know, the conversation eventually, it wasn't like we were having a totally open and honest conversation about how censorship works in each country, but like we kind of got to point and she said something that has really stuck with me ever since where she was like, look, we have over a billion people here all using the same internet. And like if you want to hear

the argument, the censorship argument from the Chinese perspective, it is if we had your internet, we would have riots every day because we have so many people who are coming online for the first time right now. And I'm not saying that like I agree with this. And I'm not saying that even she agree with it. But it was like, that is the. argument that is made here is that like we need guardrails because if we don't everyone will start killing each other which then she was like look at your country and i was like okay all right um like thank you i get the i get the i get the thought process which i think is one that is also not communicated to americans very often that like and i've heard this argument also in europe i've heard this

argument in south america like other countries that don't have freedom of speech they're much more comfortable with the maybe we don't just say everything we think and feel on the internet all the time. So I can understand it even if I don't maybe necessarily agree with it as an American. Yeah, I mean, I don't agree with it either, but I think we have to go back to the premise that is, I think this kind of free speech that we talk about in America is a very specifically American thing. Yes. That it is not widely accepted by a lot of Europeans, you know, to the same extent that we do. Not at all.

And certainly not in Asian countries. I think it is a good thing in many ways. As do I. I also don't think Americans think of it as political. Like, I don't think that Americans think about unlimited free speech access, at least in theory, on an American platform in a country that doesn't have free speech as a political act. Like allowing Twitter to go live in the Middle East leading to the Arab Spring. Like, we don't, as Americans, think that we had a role.

in the politics of that when obviously free speech is a political decision. I mean, but the U.S. did, right? This is part of the foreign policy agenda of the Obama administration in the Clinton State Department, right? She was out there in early 2010 talking about at the museum in Washington, D.C., I think, which is now closed. And she was talking about how, you know, the U.S. must defend the freedom to connect, as she, as Secretary Clinton called it back then. internet freedom was part of U.S. foreign policies. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. I forget what happened with like internet free speech and Hillary Clinton later?

Did that go bad? Did she make, she might have bet on the wrong horse on that one? I'm not really sure. I think, yeah, I think that one didn't work out too well. I mean, I think what happened when they got her emails? This is this is a thing that I think Americans do not consider political. They see it as like a universal. Yeah.

True good. And like, you know, I was raised here. I think that too, but it is political. Yeah. And when Secretary Clinton was making that speech, right, when she was talking about how the internet should help with democracy and revolutions abroad, countries like China and Russia respondent and be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, this is a dangerous thing that American platforms can now, you know, top power of government.

Like, whether I agree with those governments or not, right? I think that was a valid concern from their perspective. And then the U.S. comes back and be like, these people are paranoid. What are they worried about? Right. You know, they are worried exactly about what you said you would do to them. Right. So there's this weird.

These guys are like getting really hostile with us because we keep publicly talking about using our technology to overthrow their governments. I don't know why like they're really hostile now. That's so strange. I don't know. I don't know either. You know, I'm coming around to the idea that maybe we aren't so innocent in this Cold War after a. But let's get into the China side of it. Right after a word from our sponsor, which is Donghu Jin Long Industrial Grade Glycine, we're going to be talking about how China's Internet was born.

Okay, let's figure out how things got so tense. I want to run through a rough timeline of how China came online and how their Internet looks and feels different from ours. I want to sort of like talk about like the beginning buildings of the modern Chinese Internet. So it seems like 1996 was the place to start here. Robin Lee, working for an American tech company, creates a search engine algorithm. It's called Rank Decks, and it becomes like China's biggest internet search provider in the late 90s. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, site Rank Dex in their patent applications for the website that would come Google, which I think is like kind of an adorable moment of like that that's your sliding door moment.

It's like we had a very similar internet for a while. then in 1999 which i eventually want to maybe even write a book about this idea the year that the internet kind of was created around the world as we understand it 10 cent starts a messaging service called open icq um which becomes qq i don't know how old you are but did you ever use like yeah yeah that was my first instant messenger okay i have a question did you ever use msn or a i am I used, I didn't use AAM, but I used MSN. Okay, close enough. What does, like, how, does QQ do, like, do anything cool that MSN Messenger doesn't do?

Yes. I mean, this is, like, 2006, 2007 QQ as opposed to the original early 2001 QQ, but you could have this thing called, like, QQQ show, which is, like a digital character that you can, like, Like an avatar? It's like a digital avatar. avatar and you could like change clothes. It's like every time you talk to someone, you can see their avatar and they can see mine. That's part of it.

They had their own music streaming thing. They have video games. That's awesome. Yeah. So I think in many ways that was also a super app, even though it was before the app form. That's fascinating. In 1999 is also an Alibaba, the sort of Amazon-esque e-commerce platform of China launches. Because 2000 is when we get ranked X becoming its own search engine, Baidu.

This is when web portals in China start to centralize. In the 2000s, American search engines aren't blocked in China, but Baidu is more successful because it's more reliable, which I think is like an interesting thing that like Google clearly is influenced by ranked X, which becomes Baidu, and it still isn't as good, which I think goes against the other American narrative, which is that like our products are open and thus better, which is interesting. But I do it was just better because it's like it was optimized for a Chinese language, right? Right.

What I think is really fascinating about the early 2000s Chinese internet is that they are already experimenting with stuff that we have not even really nailed down now. So like Alibaba launches its own payment service in 2004. AliPay launches, AliPay is 20 years old. We don't even have that now. Like, that's actually crazy to think about. Yeah. I remember back then, you would also buy things and then pay your career, delivery guy in cash.

Not the delivery fee, but the charge for the actual product. So what are you paying with Allie Pay? So I think Alipay has had several different features, right? Oh, I see. Okay. One of the features was like clearly like bank transfer, right? Like you connected to your bank account. Sure.

And the truth was like a lot of people didn't have bank accounts at this time. I know quite a lot of people, they open bank accounts so that they could use Ali Pay and WeChat pay. Cool. Okay. If you think about it, the majority of the country back then was still very rural. And people weren't using bank accounts to transfer things. Or bank transfer was more like wire transfer, like Western Union style.

Interesting. There's a similar thing happening right now. Now in Latin America, there's a Mexican equivalent to 7-Eleven called OXO. And by the way, Panic World believes in OXA supremacy. If OXO ever wants to sponsor the show, they're a great convenience store chain, love them to death. But they've like started becoming like an e-commerce platform. And now like they will they will basically, if you can open a bank account, you can use OXO pay. And the same idea is happening.

So like it makes sense. I think maybe in America like we got stuff. out with our fintech in a way that a lot of other countries didn't. And now we have Bitcoin. So like that, basically the crypto industry wouldn't have to exist if we hadn't stalled out. Yeah. So in that respect, obviously China is in a better place than we are. But what about the hot topic of censorship?

Because like that is real. We sort of have to reckon with the fact that like their internet is heavily censored and surveilled. By the end of the 2000s, we're now getting like proper social media over here. You know, we have Twitter now, we have Facebook, we have YouTube. That's all coming in. And in 2009 in China is like one of the early examples of like anti-censorship protest. You were actually mentioned this at the top, like having to get around by being a little clever.

Are you familiar with the grass mud horse meme? Yeah, yeah. That was one of the earliest memes. Can you talk us through it? How did this work? It's just like one of the arduest, untow. censorship memes in China, the pronunciation is the same for like, uh, Cao Ni Ma, which is like fuck your mother.

Right. Hell yeah. And then Grass Mud Horse is like different characters, but it sounds similar. It's Cao Ni Ma versus Cao Ni Ma. Right. It's like a slightly different tones. So the earlier censorship, a lot of the censorship restrictions were actually imposed by platforms. And their idea was to foster what they called a harmonious, like, internet community, right?

It's like, sorry, no, no, no, no cursing on the internet. And it was less political, right? It was more about, yeah, sorry, just no cursing. And people were coming out of all sorts of ways to make fun of it, right? Tungi Ma was one of them. And like, the word for harmonious, right, harmony is Heesh. And they called it Hechea, which is river crab. So they were saying like, oh, yeah, I had a great idea.

yesterday that I wanted to post by all the rivercraft by the minister at oh that rules that's so good so so you start seeing sort of censorship but also discussions of censorship in a rather explicit way like they're avoiding censorship to have a meta conversation about the censorship yeah exactly yeah there is like a joke in english that you like you learn as a kid that is similar to grass mud horse which is sofa king yeah well yeah Same thing. I guess same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Same. See, you know, as different as we're the same. But I do think it's interesting that one, one, any country on Earth could think that they

could build an internet where no one said swears. First of all, I think that's really funny. I think that's just like a really funny waste of everyone's time. It kind of sounds nice to me. I'm just imagining, I'm imagining people trying to be as mean as they are posting I think you'd be meaner. I think you'd be meaner. I think it'd be cute to watch people have to articulate themselves by not just being like,

you fucking bitch, but having to be like, you ignorant. You can't even do it. You're not even, you're not on the level of grass mud horse. You've got to like really think about it. But surprisingly, right? I think interestingly, right, I think interestingly, some of the most polite discussion boards in China back in that period, not that I was on them, were like porn discussion boards. because they're already blocked by the Chinese internet.

In China. Yeah, like pornography was always sort of sensory, right? There's no question about that. But the mods are extremely good at circummitting censorship by just like changing a server, changing their domain names. So this actually ties to something we touched on in a previous episode of the show where we were talking about the Silk Road, the tour-based dark web drug site. And the guests we were talking about how polite and nice they all were on.

there because like in the darker parts of the web you kind of live or die by your reputation in a way yeah so it that actually clocks with me that like i mean early 4chan had this as well where like obviously it was always kind of a renegade insane place but there were parts of 4chan that were like allowing forms of speech that were unacceptable elsewhere because like you're stuck with each other in a way um that's fascinating that that was happening in china too on these porn uh uh discussion boards you have uh very uh very strict rules, right? Because you might lose your account. And that was considered like a very difficult thing to get during this. And there was no censorship. And all the all the countermarration

was done by the mods. Do you feel like in the 2000s, like does it feel fair to say that like these early anti-censorship protests were the moment when like a unique Chinese internet culture started to form? I mean, you need to China or like or that it was different from the rest of the world. To put this another way, like, do you feel like there's a way to talk about Chinese Internet culture without talking about censorship? Like, because it's like from the outside perspective, it feels like they're very much molded by one another in a way, sort of in the same way that like American Internet culture, I think is you cannot really talk about it without talking about free speech because it is, you know, I mean, we have people posting swastikas on every day now. like we're full Nazi bar now. But like it to me it feels like at this moment in time, as America was defining its internet culture

as one that could allow occupy Wall Street and it could allow anonymous and it could allow WikiLeaks, China's was becoming different in the opposite direction, even if it was producing similar outcomes. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I think it was unique in the sense that, yeah, in that sense that China is different because there's censorship and people were, you know,

finding all sorts of ways around censorship, but also, as you mentioned, right, the U.S. is doing exactly the same exercise, though, towards a very different direction. And the European Union was also grappling with his own thing. Yes. So I think it just led to very different outcomes. I think there is a mistake, it would be a mistake to take the U.S. case as the default and say the Chinese deviated from that norm. No, and I am not saying that, yeah.

Whereas it's just like some sort of, oh, governments became more. Like in the 2000s, in the U.S., you couldn't convince a lot of these people who were working government that the internet mattered, right? Or like what people said on the internet mattered. In case people forgot, censorship in America was so bad that the Dixie Chicks essentially ceased to exist in public after they were aggressively anti-George W. Bush. For reasons, they were historically right about, and their lives are still a mess. We are talking, like, peak American post-19 censorship to even say that America, like, is the default. Like, there's, there's no argument there in my mind. Online piracy was very much popular in China.

Hell yeah, brother. And, yeah, well. I had a terabyte of stolen music by 2009. I should be in jail. Let's keep moving along our timeline to the next big site we can compare it to an American tech platform. Are you familiar with ACFUN? Yeah.

Yes. Okay. So ACFUN is an anime fan site. It gets really popular around 2009. It goes offline. a user and former employee makes a new website, and it's called mikufans.cN. Are you familiar with this version of acting? It's a billy-billy, the original billy-billy, right?

So that's where we're headed. Yeah. So what I think is really funny about this is, do you know Hatsunei-Miku? Are you familiar with Hatsunei-Miku? No, I'm not super plugged in. Okay, so Hatsun-A-Miku is a Japanese vocaloid, which is what, basically, it's like an anime-girl hologram, and she's open-source. and MikuFans.C.N.

Seems to have been like a place for people to talk about Hatsuni Miku. Oh, Hatsunini Miku. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The vocal. Yeah, okay, all right, all right. It all comes back to the love of anime girls. And then that becomes Billy Billy, and Billy Billy, I would say is probably the closest China has to, like, a YouTube. Would you say that's accurate?

Yeah, it was completely run by weaves. Incredible. For a long time. I was actually hunting around on Billy Billy the other day. for a story and the the shit posting level that's happening on billy billy is unlike anything we have in america it's so good it's like people are just like taking shit posting to an art form over there um i'm very jealous of it actually compare it how's it um well okay uh have you seen those cgi home remodeling videos tn you yes yes i'm very familiar with that that world yeah so if you

use hours on them yeah they're amazing and so i was trying to figure out where they came from and I found like a group of artists, like CGI artists on Billy Billy, that are taking requests to make the most ridiculous insane home remodeling video. And they're all giving them really funny titles, like, incredible, perfect house for a thousand children. And in the comments, they're writing things like, I want to kill myself for doing this. Or like, I'm so sad.

I wasted my one life making this. So like, they're just shit posting on a much more intense level, which I really appreciate it. Yeah, there's also, there's also there's also damo, right? So the things that, the floating comments, yes.

Yes. That we don't, we don't have here in the US. Nico Nico doga is another one that does this. And essentially, like, if you comment on a video on Billy Billy or Nico Nico, you're going to see the comment come across the screen. I watched a video of a Japanese guy unknowingly light his apartment on fire by flicking a cigarette behind him. And he, like, doesn't see the comments that are streaming across it being like, your house is burning down.

Your house is burning down. And it's really fun. He didn't get hurt, but it was pretty funny. But so back to our timeline, back to our story here. This is, I think, once again, you can tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like we spotted like the first real big moment of government internet shutdown in China, which is when the government clamps down after the riots in Yurmki. Yeah, Urumqi.

Yomji. So after the riots in Yurumchi, which, by the way, we're not going to be focusing heavily on, the sort of like surveillance and crackdown on Uyghurs in China in this episode. It's a massive topic. And trying to fit that in with everything else just seemed totally impossible. But the earliest days of the Chinese crackdown on Uyghur Muslims after the riots in Yerumchi do play a really important part in the story that we're telling today about the evolution of Chinese internet. So a lot of micro blogging sites shut down.

They don't reopen for a long time. And a lot of those users move over to a site that's much more happy to play ball with the Chinese government. A website that I think is arguably probably one of, if not the most important websites in Chinese history. A little place called Weibo, which is kind of like, I mean, does it sound right? It's kind of like if MySpace evolved into something as important and powerful as Twitter. Yeah, that would be a good way to put it. Do you use Weibo? Have you ever used Weibo?

I got a ban from them like there are three times, I think. please tell me everything. How did you get banned from Waybo? Oh, one time I was using my actual account to test what will get censored. Sure. That's one way to do it. And it turned out it would be a terrible idea. And I think I was like, there were several times that were just like being stupid.

I was like, let me see if I can get banned by doing this. And I got banned several times. But yes, you're totally right. That was the first major like crackdown on sort of like internet platforms. This was also a period of time when, I would mention that before microbloss, before like Weibo, there were plenty of bloggers in China,

and they would do this thing called the annual conference of Chinese bloggers. And they also had a shutdown in 2010, right? So that crackdown was both online and it was also offline, right? That people were told, like, do not organize this conference, do not gather for this event. And also, like, in Xinjiang, because of the riot, I think internet was actually completely shut off to the region for several months, if not a year. I would give nothing more to go back in time and attend the National Conference of Chinese Blockers.

And I also mentioned that these previous iterations of microblock platforms, right? Like, Funfo, for example, they were very important sort of landmarks in Chinese and internet history, precisely because they provided this model for a Weibo, which is like a small project in this larger conglomerate. that was Sina, the larger company. I think the most important piece here before we kind of move forward is that Sina, Sina? I don't know. I don't know. I've never pronounced it in English, you know.

Yeah, Sina figured out a similar strategy to Twitter in the early 2010s, which is if you want to grow a social network really fast, you bring on every celebrity. and I think up until maybe, maybe the late 2010s, Waybo's like big thing was like, it could offer the Twitter experience, the Instagram experience. You had these verified profiles. I've used it a little bit.

It's cool. The emojis are really good. The doge emoji is like really flirty. I made an account there and I got a lot of flirty dojo emojis, which I thought was nice. And it was, it's an interesting thing. I think Americans would really benefit from,

from seeing how it works because it is kind of this alternate timeline of the way our social platforms may have worked. You know, what if our internet was more focused on e-commerce from the jump? What if our internet was more focused on video faster? What if we were more mobile earlier? All of the things that we sort of do now on our internet, a lot of it was very, very, very baked into Chinese internet from the jump. And so it does kind of represent this alternate way of thinking about how information technology functions, which I think is just really neat. But throughout the early 2010s, it's a lot of restructuring Chinese internet is sort of like it's expanding as international companies are leaving. Google leaves in 2010. As it's expanding, the government has, like, I think more of a firmer thumbprint

on it. Billy-billy-billy launches a payment system even before YouTube does. And this is when I think you get the first real American misunderstanding of Chinese technology, which is the social credit score hysteria? Can you explain what we got wrong here just to sort of help us understand why we're still freaking out about the Chinese social credit score? Yeah, sure. So in 2014, there was a state document that was about implementing a social credit system. There were two parts to it, right?

Like, one is this idea of a personal credit score. And the other part is sort of a credit score for companies and business people, right? So one of the part of the problem that we're trying to sold at this time was that a lot of people were, say, taking out a loan from one province, and then they don't pay them a loan back. And then they go start the same business in a different province. And there's no consistent record of that this person has been, has been, I mean, it's very similar to FICO. It's very, not at the high granularity level, right? But if you read the documents of the planning documents during that period of time, they were referencing FICO. They were referencing these like credit systems that we have in the U.S. and Europe.

And they're saying, look, we should do something similar because people are defaulting on their debt. And they go to other places to scam other people. So that was a, it was primarily targeting business transactions. But I think in the 2016, 2017, there was this small part. of this larger plan, that was about establishing some sort of personal credit system. And they had 30, 40 pilot cities in China. And one of them was the city in Shandong province called Rungchang. It's a very small city by Chinese center, but a large city, I'm sure, by any other standard.

They basically came up with their own list of things that you do to get scores and others to get your scores deducted. It never really became a real thing. It was only in pilot. And people sort of decided that was kind of a bad idea because, you know, I could say that being bad. Yeah, right. And it was not really specifically political.

It wasn't about you posting things on the internet. It was like, oh, you can gain points if you, you know, I'm just, I don't remember exact details of this, but you can gain points if you won an award from the city. This is the era where China starts to really expand into what is now, I think, the predominant, I think the predominant, like, internet platform there, which is social shopping. So like, the easiest way for an American wrap your head around is like, what if everything was Groupon? And then what if Groupon was also your FICO score?

And then what if like Groupon and your FICO score like gave you more Groupons for how you like lived in your city? Yeah. That seems. Yeah. So there was also a corporate version of the same thing, right? Right. Is that people were trying to grapple with, okay, now we have all this data.

or we're collecting all these data from people. What do we do with it? And for government, it's like, oh, we want to make sure that people don't go from province to province to borrow money from banks. And I mean, I don't know if they're doing that too well. But for companies like Alibaba, for companies like Maituan, they're trying to figure out how do you monetize on this data and to make sure that like people buy from Alibaba or like and financial, the financing arm, or like people.

You lend money from the same company. You would sell your stuff from the same company. You would bank with the same company, et cetera. So I think they were trying to figure out what all that data could be monetized for. I think one thing that you've touched on several times that I do, I want to try to make explicit because I think it is something that is missing from a lot of the conversations about Chinese Internet. And it's something that like when I've spoken to sort of either experts or people working in Chinese Internet companies, the transition from rural to urban and the sort of still massive. massive split between urban and rural is not in the rear view. Like it is something that was like being addressed as China was coming online.

These tech platforms were not being created for the same kind of like middle-class post-World War II society that America had in the 2000s. In late 2000, early 2010's China, you have what we called the Taubo villages, right? A Taubo village, probably the American equivalent, just for, you know, comparison sake, it would probably be like those towns that exist just for like Amazon fulfillment centers. You know, we, we have them. We just like don't think about them that way. And, uh, ours are also, you know, run by a massive dystopian capitalistic corporation. Like that would be the difference. But they're not that, they're not that different. Um, there are places the Midwest where like there are just people whose only lives are sending stuff out on

Amazon. So it's, you know, once again, pretty similar. Originally, it was more like eBay, so it was vendor to customer. Okay. They charged like a processing fee. But now it's become much more complicated, right? It's like AliPape and Taaba are the same company. Okay. So you're basically saying like there were these villages in China that were making the majority

of their income from just like selling goods on essentially Chinese eBay. Yeah. Most of their customers are not other Chinese like villagers, right? They're these people who live in cities. So you do have this rural urban divide was actually critical to the e-commerce infrastructure that was up and coming during this period. It's not exactly the same, but I read this incredible story years ago about this kid. And I want to say India, it was in the global south, and I'm pretty sure it was India. He was the Google guy in his village.

So he had a phone that he had Google on and he was charging everyone a small fee to Google questions for them. And that was like his job. And I think like Americans just can't even wrap their head around the idea that like you can be in a rural part of the global south and have very, very fast internet on a very, very cheap phone. And your concerns about the internet are just never going to be the same as someone living in like fucking Cincinnati. Like they're just never going to line up. Exactly. Exactly. And when we are confused in America, we love to escalate the situation into, well, a international security and something.

And that's what we're going to be talking about after the break. The first, a word from our sponsors. That guy who sells neon signs on TikTok from that Chinese factory. Those look pretty good. And he's very good at accents. But I don't enjoy like his weird right wing turn, but I assume it's because he's micro-targeting Americans. In the mid-2000s is, I think, where you start to get the creation of the Chinese Internet

that I think most Americans are now, you know, warning their children about right before they go to bed at night saying that President Xi is going to come into their house and brainwash. them through TikTok. So, uh, duion launches in 2016. It gets a hundred million users in a year, which is unreal. Um, it then, uh, Bight Dance launches the owner, uh, of, uh, doing launches TikTok in 2007 outside of China. It merges with musically the, uh, like, cute boy lip sync app in 2018. And that creates the TikTok we know and love. And that is also around the same time that Chinese sensors become, I think a lot more aggressive.

about the kind of cute wordplay protest. This is when they start banning Winnie the Pooh. Well, the Winnie the Pooh meme was never really banned in a sense that like if you refer it, if you make a reference to Win the Pooh, like to talk about Xi Jinping, then it is going to be a problem. But the character itself was never banned. Like you see it everywhere. The actual character isn't.

Okay. But this is when we also start to see WeChat banning non-state approved political videos. And the West starts to fear and really. notice how involved the Chinese government is in controlling what's online when in 2019 the Hong Kong protest breakout. I was actually there and I was talking to protesters and they were all trying very hard not to use Chinese tech products, including ones made by bite dance. But also like the specter of growing increasingly powerful Chinese tech haunted them, whether it was surveillance, whether it was like stuff installed on their phones, what internet they connected to. it was a really fascinating moment where like these young people were trying to create their own internet culture from scratch with their own tools as this like massive behemoth was clearly coming.

Yeah. Can you speak to like how you view that flashpoint? Because to me, looking back, it feels like the sort of switch, I think, in terms of how Chinese tech. Yeah. So I think the, well, for one, the Hong Kong sort of tech ecosystem has always been slightly different. Sure. Where the language was different, people weren't, you know, Google wasn't there.

Most of the American platforms weren't bent there. So it was easier for people to use, say, a non-Chinese stack of technologies, right? Like you can use your iPhones, you can use your telegrams, that was okay. By the same time, right, you do have people cross borders from Hong Kong to China and their phones will get checked to see if they install telegram on it. You would have stories of people being recognized for who they were using facial. recognition technologies. I think it's important to note that 2016, 2019, that particular period was when the Chinese government had much stronger facial recognition capabilities.

And like the reason that censorship became more, more effective from the Chinese government's perspective, was because of artificial intelligence that were using large language models, albeit earlier iterations of that to detect what kind of content should be censored. So I think these two things play, go hand in hand. And the Hong Kong case was interesting because I think it really reshaped the American view of technologies. And I think more so the American's perception than the Chinese reality, because China has been like that for quite a few years. Right. You know, when I first moved to the Bay Area in 2021, I would go around and ask people, you know, 2018, 19 San Francisco was like you would invest in Chinese companies, and you would want to invest in

Chinese startups, you're curious about what's going on in China. In 2021, it's like, no, we're not touching it. So I started asking people what really changed, right? And they would all say it's the Hong Kong protest because they thought China was becoming authoritarian using their technologies, which I still don't understand why that was a valid argument, because China has always been authoritarian, like, why was it that you felt okay that the Chinese government was using technology for quote-unquote authoritarianism in China, but when that's on Hong Kong, that becomes a moral issue for you? Like, I never understood that.

So my thought is that I think a lot of Westerners saw Hong Kong as this separate place. And it was like, oh, if China can do that there, they can do it in Taiwan. And then if they can do it in Taiwan, then they can do it in Taiwan, then they can do it in London. They can do it in New York. And it was, I think, a moment of, to be very frank, as someone who's been very critical of American tech companies, I think Americans saw for the first time what many countries have experienced via Facebook and Twitter and our own technology and freaked the fuck out. That's what I think happened.

Yeah, I think that's definitely true in the story. Yeah, I do think there was a lot of mis-iss-a. assessments of what the Chinese central government could do at this at that point, you know, in 2019. But that's a totally different story. But there was one other thing, I think, that we sort of have to hit when we, when we're telling the story of Chinese internet. And that's COVID. So we hit this at the top.

But I think not only was Hong Kong the moment where Americans started to actually kind of like get a sense of like the Chinese government as a maybe like an imperialist is a, a, an imperialistic or a sort of like aggressive government entity and got a sense of like what their technology kind of looked and felt like but i also feel like covid was a moment where the chinese censorship uh was a lot more like you like we were covering it more here and we had just sort of come and we haven't really talked about like this surveillance with like the wegers and sort of like how all but you'd sort of touch on this like this half decade of like increasingly powerful chinese surveillance And I feel like with Hong Kong, the Uyghurs, and then COVID, it just hits this point where we're at now, where we've been at for five years, where the West is afraid of China, but they're not sure what they're afraid of.

And it's like we're just lashing out, like not understanding what any of these platforms do, how they connect to the government, how people use them. It just seems very confused now. You know, in the first Trump administration, you see this attack of Chinese surveillance technologies. People were making these moralistic statements of Chinese tech. a lot of it is completely valid, the human rights violations. I think those are completely valid. But we're doing exactly the same thing here in the United States. We sure are.

We have companies like Clearview AI at the time selling more or less the same technologies, sometimes better technologies to DHS, to local police bureaus. You know, the scale of these technologies were used differently or the way that they were different compared to the Chinese counterparts, but they were there, right? And we are right now using privately made facial recognition software to pick up random Hispanic men and send them to a gulag in El Salvador for prison sentences that come in 9,000 year increments. Yeah. Like, yeah. We are completely in the deep end and I lost any sort of perceived moral superiority here. This is the point when I think in retrospect, right, a lot of people were mad about Chinese technological development.

and its sort of techno authoritarian state because they couldn't do it themselves or they wanted to be like China and they weren't. A jealousy, yes. I think it's jealousy and it's in both cases the goals are terrible and, you know, I think these are misguided things to do, but they were jealous of it, right? And the way that I hate to get on this carnivir, the abundance, you know, type of ideology that's coming out on the U.S. You're talking about the Ezra Klein book, the Abundance.

I have not spent the, I've not wasted the time to figure out what the abundance agenda is and you can't make me learn what it is. I mean, I'm not going to tell you what it is, right? But I will say that there is a obsession with state-oriented, state-driven, technological progress that involves, like, expert controls, that involves regulations. I mean, that ideology has been around for a long time, right? When the Biden administration was trying to push for this, like, we're going to ban Chinese EV. so we develop our domestic industry, we're going to justify every single piece of our legislation, regulation, based on this narrative, technological competition with China.

They want to become like China. I just think that's what they want, right? It's to become, to do the things that China was able to accomplish in the last 20 years, you know, with all the good things and the bad things. I mean, to hit this point again, because I do think it is like the most important, and least covered aspect of this. China was able to make tech products that are in many ways functionally better.

Like, it beat Google to Google and still worked better in an open market when Google was still accessible there. And it did it while transitioning sociologically, basically where America was in, like, let's say, the 20s or 30s. As like the 1920s or 30s, like, as America, like the 1920s or 30s, like, as America, is going from rural to industrialized society, China did that move while also beating Google to making Google. Like, and you're right, there are, there are humanitarian concerns, there are surveillance concerns,

and those are real. They are real. But every, I think, I think the, the thing that has brought us to this moment right now where everyone is afraid of Chinese tech is a jealousy that, like, China was able to pull that off and we can't even really make a good electric car. Like not like we can't even really do that. In China, you can buy a vape that's also an Android phone. Like, come on.

Why do you think China has been so much better at making everything than us? Is it free speech? Is it the lack of free speech? That is a real question. Like what is your gut tell you there? Like why is China, why has China been so successful? I mean, I think it's a economy of scale. right. It's a sure. It has this incredibly sophisticated manufacturing base that was built up in the

last like 30, 40 years. That by the way, like we often see this narrative that like, oh, like China took away American manufacturing. American manufacturing gave it away to Asia. Like in the 1970s and the 80s, when the corporate bosses, factory owners, unions, and they're saying, we're seeing our manufacturing to Asia. That was a. choice. That was a choice. They could have given it to unionized workers, and they chose not to. Anyways, but China does have a manufacturing base that's much stronger. No matter what you, how hardware needs your manufacturer, the thing that you're manufacturing, it always has a market, right, whether that be domestic or international. A vape that's also an Android phone. Yeah,

exactly. That's also an Android phone. And also just like the way that hardware manufacturing, the hardware designers here in the U.S. like to test a prototype, you have to send your prototype to China, and then they ship it back to you, and then you're like, oh, this is not okay. And you have to do this iterative process, and that takes a very, very long time when your factory is overseas. You know, I think there's a lot of criticism that, like, China was copying stuff in the, in

the, for like 20, 30 years. I think that, in many ways, that was a learning process, right? You learn how to do things, and you do it really well. America can no longer talk about copying anything with any sort of high ground. The argument that... It's over. It's over. Like, I don't think there's any moral high ground. No, we don't have it.

Also, like, the China is copying stuff argument. You saw it most recently with the release of DeepSeek this year, the Chinese chat chit-chip-t competitor. And, like, did they copy Chachap-T? Maybe. What did Chachapit do? Copy the entire internet. Like, it's a stupid argument. But also, as this episode has kind of gone through, like, it, it actually doesn't really bear that out.

Like, China had e-commerce faster. It had fintech faster. It had social media in different and more interesting ways. Like, it is a totally different evolutionary branch. And if you, like, really dig into how people have been using the Internet in China for the last 25 years, like, it doesn't, it doesn't hold scrutiny. Like, I find this stuff super fascinating and I try to read as much as I can about it. And like, I don't see it. I don't see the Chinese internet as a cheap knockoff of American internet.

If anything, it's like weirder and stranger with like kind of cooler features sometimes and kind of dumb in different ways too. Like, I mean, trying to use WeChat as a foreigner in China like to order a car, like kill me. Like, honestly kill me. Like that was so goddamn hard. Like there is dumb things about Chinese internet too. It's just different, I think. Yeah, it's really interesting because you mentioned the car story, right? Like, I was in South Korea for a first, for a first time a few weeks ago.

And it was actually, I got the experience of what a non-Chinese person will get in China. Yep. Where I landed, I realized none of my apps work because Google Maps, you can't use it in South Korea. I should explain this because Korea has a very siloed Internet as well because of concerns of the North Korean government, spying on them. So you can't use Google products. You have to use Korean-made products. And certain geolocation stuff just doesn't work there. So, yeah. Yeah, it's not explicitly bad. I just can't use it. Yeah, it just doesn't work. Yeah, it's blocked. It doesn't work. It will tell you to go to the wrong like bus station. Yeah. I had to read out all these apps. I have to like do verification.

And a lot of things don't work in English. I was like, oh, this is what it feels like to be a non-Chinese person in China. And like a lot of it's just like, oh, I think this sucks. But it's, I think the logic is deeply embedded in the way that these platforms are designed. I think ultimately the really important takeaway for people from this episode is one, Americans should understand more stuff about how other people's internet works and functions. And I think the second one is America has no moral high ground at all and maybe never will again. And God bless the Chinese century upon us because Jesus, like, I mean, yeah, every argument we could have ever made about the Chinese surveillance state we have to like reckon with at home first. TAN, thank you for coming on.

This was great. Thank you for having me. This was a great conversation. Thank you for having me. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that? I'm still on Twitter once in a while. My Twitter handles TNUF, TIA, YUF, and I'm mostly just writing things on my website. I'm just writing things here and there now.

So my website is cuneufang.net. That's the best. Writing things on websites is the true way to defeat global censorship and surveillance. I just want to go back to blogging, the blogging sort of 2000. When we bring back the international committee of Chinese bloggers, we can expand it and we can do like an internet, we can do an international consortium of bloggers. I think that would be really fun. Yeah, that would be great. So normally I would let Grant out of his little producer cage to ask our guests a couple questions.

And then we normally put those on our Patreon version. But this week, we thought we just include them here. But if you do like the sort of feeling of like, wow, the episode's over. Oh, wait, it's not over. That's fantastic. You should definitely subscribe to our Patreon at patreon. Patreon.com slash panic world. Okay, producer Grant, I'm letting you out of your cage.

Also, I have five minutes and then I got to leave. So you got to make this fast. Damn you, Ryan. Compare the surveillance at this stage of America to Chinese surveillance. Yeah, for one, I think the Chinese American and American surveillance dates are just different. For one, I think the surveillance in the U.S. is mostly coming from corporates. corporations, and those are not vacuous, right? They have real implications on your lives, being constantly surveilled by corporations with no limits.

Whereas in China, you do have a lot of regulations in recent years about what kind of data that companies can collect. And, like, what are the terms that they can loan you money? But you are under this surveillance of a very powerful state, right? So I think it's a pick-your-poison type of game, and I don't think either is good. Do you have an Elon Musk running your apps? Because if not, I mean, but Elon Musk is running a factory, the gig of factory in Shanghai right now. So who knows? Who knows what happened?

See, that's the real thing is that both models are so bad that they both allow Elon Musk to the system. So there's really, there's nothing. Like, they both got a test. That's a real start over. Is whether Elon Musk has a business in your country. Both systems have allowed the virus of Elon Musk. and Musk to exist within them, so we have to smash both, unfortunately, yeah. Totally.

Pretty bad. Yeah. Who is more internet brain rot? Oh, oh, China, China, China. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's so, yeah, every time I go there is, I don't know. I feel like all the, all the internet brain rods in the U.S., it's all in the same cultural context, more or less.

There hasn't been a brain rot that is completely incomprehensible to me. I feel like on the inner Chinese. internet. I keep seeing brain raws. They're completely. I just, I have no idea how to make sense of this. There's no way I can make sense of this. I would just completely gave up right now. Yeah. That's awesome.

That's the dream, honestly. Maybe the cure is to get sicker. It works. Maybe that's the only answer. To see a meme so bizarre and specific and niche that it's impossible to comprehend. That's the dream, man. That's all. All right.

I got to run. Thank you again. This is fantastic. Panic World is a garbage day. production, subscribe to the newsletter at garbageday. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing

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