How China Influences Influencers

Millions of people watched Lee and Oli Barrett’s China videos on YouTube. Father and son visit hotels in exotic locations, travel to remote villages, savor delicacies in busy markets, and undergo ear cleanings performed using traditional Chinese methods.

“Today we’re in suburban Shanghai, the most amazing hotel we’ve ever stayed in,” says Oli in one of the videos, just before a camera mounted on a “drone” to film them rises to reveal the newly built luxury resort. at the site of a huge abandoned quarry.

The Barretts are part of a crop of new social media personalities who paint breezy portraits of life as foreigners in China — and they also help to counter criticism of Beijing’s authoritarian mode of government, the authorities’ policies towards ethnic minorities and its conduction of the coronavirus crisis.

The videos have a homely and casual feel. But on the other side of the cameras is in many cases a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled media and other official forms of amplification – all part of the Chinese government’s increasingly widespread attempts to spread pro-Beijing messages across the planet. .

State-operated news organizations and local governments organized and financed the travels of pro-Beijing influencers, according to government documents and some of those influencers. They offered payments to creators. They generated profitable traffic for them by sharing videos with millions of users on social media.

With the help of official media vehicles, the creators are able to visit and film parts of China where the authorities obstructed the reporting work of foreign journalists.

Most of these YouTubers have lived in China for years and say their aim is to counter the West’s increasingly negative perception of the country. They say they decide what appears in their videos, not the Chinese Communist Party.

But even if the creators don’t see themselves as propaganda tools, Beijing uses them for that purpose. Chinese diplomats and representatives show the videos they make at press conferences and share their creations on social media. Together, six of the most popular among these influencers have amassed more than 130 million views on YouTube, and have more than 1.1 million subscribers.

Foreign voices sympathetic to the country are part of Beijing’s increasingly ambitious efforts to shape the conversation between the planet and China. The Communist Party has turned to diplomats and state media outlets to spread its narratives and stifle criticism, often with the help of veritable armies of obscure social media accounts that amplify the impact of its posts.

In practice, Beijing is using platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, which the government blocks from use within the country to prevent the uncontrolled spread of information, such as propaganda megaphones abroad.

“China is the new giant abuser to hit the planet’s social network,” said Eric Liu, a former content moderator on Chinese social media. “The aim is not to win, but to cause chaos and suspicion until there is no real truth.”

the state behind the camera

Raz Gal-Or started making funny videos when he was a university student in Beijing. Now, the young Israeli takes his millions of subscribers with him as he interviews both ordinary people and foreigners residing in the country about their lives in China.

In a video that circulated in the second quarter, Gal-Or visited cotton plantations in Xinjiang to rebut accusations that they were being held together through forced labor.

“It’s completely normal here,” he said, after eating kebabs with some workers. “People are nice and they’re just doing their jobs and living their lives.”

His videos do not mention government documents, witness testimonies and visits by journalists that indicate that authorities held thousands of Xinjiang-area Muslims detained in re-education camps.

And they also omit the business links between the influencer and his family and the Chinese state.

The chairman of YChina, the Gal-Or video company, is his father, Amir, an investor whose fund is backed by the China Development Bank, a Chinese state-owned bank, claims Amir Gal-Or’s company on its website.

YChina has two state-owned media outlets as clients, according to the website of Innonation, a company founded by Amir Gal-Or. Innonation manages shared workspaces and hosts YChina’s Beijing offices.

In emails sent to The New York Times, Raz Gal-Or said that YChina does not have “business contracts” with state news agencies and that Innonation’s website was “incorrect”. He says he did not receive payments or guidance from official entities on his visit to Xinjiang.

Gal-Or said his video series on Xinjiang was about “people’s lives, well-being and dreams.”

“Those who perceive them as politicians certainly have their own agendas,” he added.

‘Doing a job’

Other creators acknowledge that they have accepted financial support from state entities, even though they say this does not make them Beijing propagandists.

Kirk Apesland, a Canadian living in China, operates a YouTube channel called Gweilo 60 (“gweilo” is Cantonese slang for “foreigner”). He rejects reports of repression in Xinjiang and mentions his personal pleasant experiences to challenge the idea that the Chinese people are being oppressed.

After The New York Times contacted Apesland, he posted a video titled “New York Times vs. Gweilo 60”. In the video, he admits to accepting free hotel stays and payments from municipal and provincial governments. And compares its role to that of a promoter of local tourism.

“Do I get paid for what I do? Of course,” he said. “I’m doing a job. Producing videos that reach hundreds of thousands of people.”

According to a document that was featured in a recent report by the Australian Institute of Strategic Policy, China’s internet regulatory authority paid around US$30,000 (BRL 170,000 at current prices) to a media company as part of of the “A Meet China” campaign, which used “foreign internet celebrities” to promote the government’s success in alleviating poverty.

The research institute, funded by the Australian and US governments and by companies that include equipment suppliers to the armed forces, has published several reports on China’s coercive policies in Xinjiang.

When YouTubers travel at state expense, official organizers determine what they see and don’t see. Not long ago, Lee Barrett, an influencer named Matt Galat, and two video makers from Mexico held a livestream debate about a trip they took to the city of Xi’an, organized by China Radio International, a state broadcaster.

Organizers asked Galat to praise a place he had not yet visited, he said, during the debate. And he refused.

Elsewhere on the trip, Galat was frustrated that a visit to a sacred mountain had been excluded from the itinerary.

“They needed to fit in more advertising hits,” he said.

Galat later removed the recording of this discussion from his channel. And refused to say why.

How to get likes and influence people

It’s not clear how much income creators might be generating from this type of work. But in addition to the money, Chinese government entities have offered something that can be equally valuable to a social media personality: digital traffic.

YouTube uses its advertising revenue to reward influencers based on the number of people who watch its videos. These viewers can also help an influencer to sign sponsorship deals with big brands, which happened in the case of several of the pro-Chinese youtubers.

Gal-Or posted his video about Xinjiang’s cotton farms on YouTube on April 8, shortly after Nike, H&M and other brands began to be attacked in China for expressing concern over reports of forced labor.

Within days, his video, with Italian subtitles, had been posted on the official Facebook page of the Chinese embassy in Italy, which has nearly 180,000 followers.

In the weeks that followed, the video, accompanied by other clips of Gal-Or’s visit to Xinjiang, had been shared by at least 35 accounts operated by Chinese embassies and state news outlets. In total, these accounts have around 400 million followers.

On Twitter, Gal-Or’s video was shared by many accounts with tenuous digital personas to the point of arousing suspicion, according to Darren Linvill of Clemson University, who researches disinformation on the social network. This is often a characteristic sign of coordinated operation.

Joshua Lam and Libby Lange, graduate students and researchers at Yale University, analyzed a sample of nearly 290,000 tweets that mentioned Xinjiang in the first half of 2021. They found that six of the ten most shared YouTube videos on these tweets were from influencers pro-China.

No regrets

Galat was one of the most popular of the pro-Beijing YouTubers when he left China this year to take his channel to new destinations. He is now documenting his travels across the United States.

In an interview, Galat said he has no regrets about his videos on China.

Before the pandemic, Detroit native Galat lived in the Chinese city of Ningbo and had created a YouTube audience for his improvised travel videos.

As China emerged from the worst period of the initial coronavirus outbreak, it began receiving travel invitations from local governments and state news outlets.

At the time, China was trying to deflect Western criticism of the country’s response to the pandemic. Galat said these criticisms also bothered him.

His YouTube videos began to take on a more political tone. He talked about the possibility that the virus could have come from the United States, and led a debate on the Western campaign against Chinese tech giant Huawei.

“People like to have dramatic, aggressive feelings about things, and a lot of that content was more popular than, say, my normal travel videos,” Galat said.

When this year arrived, the Galat channel already had more than 100,000 subscribers. He acknowledged that it was support from China’s state media that helped his channel grow. As his travels with state media lengthened, companies paid him more for his time, he said. Galat refused to talk about values.

In the middle of this year, he visited Xinjiang, on a trip planned by Chinese state television network CGTN.

“For those who want to compare China to Nazi Germany, here’s an observation,” he said in a museum video on the culture of the Uighurs, one of the ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region. “Do you think there were museums about Jewish culture in Germany right before World War II?”

Galat’s YouTube video views dropped after he left China. It doesn’t bother him, he said. In the future, your channel will likely not be as political.

“I don’t feel completely comfortable in the position of political debater on important issues,” Galat said.

Translation by Paulo Migliacci