How China Broke America Without Firing a Shot: Ft. The China Show-China Uncensored-China Insider

Summary

Summary of "Louder with Crowder" Podcast Episode: "How China Broke America Without Firing a Shot: Ft. The China Show-China Uncensored-China Insider"

Release Date: May 23, 2025

In this episode of "Louder with Crowder," host Steven Crowder assembles a panel of experts from prominent China-focused media outlets—The China Show with Chris Chappell, China Uncensored with Shelley Zhang, and China Insider with David Zhang—to discuss the multifaceted strategies employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to undermine American society without direct military engagement. The conversation delves into China's extensive propaganda campaigns, censorship tactics, and their broader implications for Western democracies.

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1. Introduction

Crowder sets the stage by highlighting the urgency of understanding China's covert operations against the United States. He underscores the significance of gathering insights from individuals with firsthand experience in China to dismantle prevalent pro-China narratives.

2. Panel Member Backgrounds

• Matthew Tai & Winston Sturzel (The China Show): Pioneers in China-based YouTube content creation, they documented life in China during its "golden period" and experienced firsthand the crackdown that forced them to leave.

  Matthew Tai [05:12]: "I suppose I'll start since I'm the first person to ever make YouTube videos out of mainland China."

• Shelley Zhang (China Uncensored): Immigrated to the West at age four, witnessing her parents' disillusionment post-Tiananmen Square massacre.

  Shelley Zhang [07:20]: "They both lived through the Cultural Revolution... the Tiananmen Square massacre just changed that completely."

• David Zhang (China Insider): Grew up in Shandong Province before immigrating at age 11. Currently a prominent critic of the CCP, he shares experiences of targeted harassment upon attempting to report on sensitive issues like Tiananmen Square.

  David Zhang [02:45]: "One third of the China Uncensored trio... have amassed millions of subscribers..."

3. China’s Propaganda and Censorship Tactics

The panel discusses how China meticulously curates its international image while suppressing dissenting voices domestically.

• Facade of Prosperity: Matthew Tai emphasizes the stark contrast between China's polished urban centers and the underlying societal issues hidden from foreign eyes.

  Matthew Tai [00:35]: "China is the land of shortcuts and facades... You never see that side of things because they don't allow that kind of thing to be shown."

• Censorship Mechanisms: Content creators face numerous challenges, including mass flagging, demonetization, and suppression of negative portrayals about China.

  Winston Sturzel [05:18]: "We used to make YouTube videos in China just to show family and friends back home that I was alive... but then we realized we were being chased out."

4. Case Studies: Hong Kong Protests, COVID-19, and Beyond

• Hong Kong Protests: Shelley Zhang recounts the massive protests in Hong Kong as a pivotal moment that signaled China's intent to clamp down on dissent.

  Shelley Zhang [25:08]: "These protests absolutely blow up where you have 2 million people marching down the street..."

• COVID-19 Response: The panel critiques China's handling of the pandemic, highlighting the Zhengzhou flood as an example of state suppression and misinformation.

  Matthew Tai [56:01]: "They let the floodgates go on... People were trapped in the subway systems. They were live streaming themselves. Drowning in the subways. It was horrendous."

5. Social Media and Information Warfare

China leverages platforms like TikTok and Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu) to propagate pro-CCP narratives, targeting both left and right-wing audiences in the West.

• TikTok as a Tool of Influence: Winston Sturzel describes TikTok as an "instrument of war," capable of shaping public opinion and manipulating political discourse.

  Winston Sturzel [74:00]: "Imagine if they invade Taiwan, they could quite literally get rid of any piece of critical content overnight..."

• Influencer Manipulation: The CCP incentivizes local influencers to produce content that aligns with its agendas, often through state-supported promotions and suppressing dissenting voices.

  Matthew Tai [29:06]: "They started gaining support from the nationalists which boosted their egos and made them think, 'Okay, this is a good idea.'"

6. Challenges Faced by YouTubers and Online Content Creators

Content creators like Matthew Tai and Winston Sturzel share their struggles with platform censorship, algorithm manipulation, and coordinated harassment campaigns orchestrated by Chinese online trolls.

• Algorithm Bias: Chris Chappell notes that YouTube's algorithms may favor pro-China content, marginalizing critical voices.

  Chris Chappell [91:02]: "The algorithm seems to read it as we're too extreme on this particular topic."

• Operation Honeypot: Shelley Zhang explains a successful campaign to boost their channel's visibility by increasing audience engagement despite suppression.

  Shelley Zhang [88:42]: "We launched a campaign called Operation Honeypot... and it actually did have an effect."

7. The Role of Western Leadership and Business

The panel critiques Western leadership's complicity in China's rise through policies that favored economic integration over addressing human rights abuses and intellectual property theft.

• Trade Relations: David Zhang highlights how Western business interests, such as integrating China into the WTO, have inadvertently supported the CCP's global ambitions.

  David Zhang [45:35]: "Western leadership and the Western business class... has been just as complicit."

• Intellectual Property Theft: Shelley Zhang discusses China's exploitation of Western technology and manufacturing to dominate global markets.

  Shelley Zhang [65:02]: "They stole the IP from American companies and then decimated the market otherwise by undercutting the prices supported by state subsidies."

8. The Threat of TikTok and Future Implications

The discussion intensifies around TikTok's potential to serve as a multifaceted tool for espionage, propaganda, and public manipulation, posing significant threats to national security.

• Data Security: Matthew Tai and Winston Sturzel express deep concerns about ByteDance's control over TikTok and its ability to access and manipulate user data.

  Matthew Tai [81:37]: "The Communist Party has control over every single Chinese company... they can turn on their camera and their microphone."

• Psychological Operations: The panel warns of TikTok being used for large-scale psychological operations, potentially influencing public perception and readiness for conflict.

  Winston Sturzel [74:00]: "They could push huge campaigns... demoralize almost every single American..."

9. Concluding Remarks

The episode wraps up with each panelist urging listeners to remain vigilant against China's insidious strategies aimed at restructuring global power dynamics. They emphasize the importance of recognizing and countering CCP propaganda to preserve democratic values and national sovereignty.

• Matthew Tai [93:29]: "China's out to eat your lunch... you're being fed a very curated image of what China really is."

• Winston Sturzel [96:21]: "China's the enemy. It is the enemy. And that's just the be-all and end-all of it."

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Notable Quotes

• Winston Sturzel [00:00]: "They're in our power grids, they're in our water systems. They have hacked our governments..."

• Matthew Tai [00:35]: "China is the land of shortcuts and facades..."

• Shelley Zhang [07:23]: "My dad took me on a march... the crackdown started."

• David Zhang [26:24]: "They're a few people, less than a dozen up against an entire machine."

• Chris Chappell [91:02]: "The algorithm seems to read it as we're too extreme on this particular topic."

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Resources and Further Listening

• The China Show: A long-form podcast hosted by Chris Chappell, discussing China’s propaganda and systemic issues.

• China Uncensored: Hosted by Shelley Zhang, offering humorous yet critical insights into China’s political landscape.

• China Insider: David Zhang’s platform providing in-depth analysis and firsthand accounts of China’s socio-political climate.

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This episode serves as a critical examination of China's strategic maneuvers to influence and destabilize Western societies through non-military means. By leveraging advanced censorship, state-sponsored propaganda, and manipulation of digital platforms, the CCP aims to erode democratic values and position China as the premier global superpower. Listeners are encouraged to remain informed and proactive in countering these covert operations to safeguard their national interests and uphold democratic integrity.

Transcript

[Winston Sturzel]

They're in our power grids, they're in our water systems. They have hacked our governments, they have hacked our telecoms. They have almost every single telecom in America. Right. They're already involved in a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign to change your mind against your own country. And it's working. Whether you are on the left or whether you are on the right or somewhere in between, China's not on your team. China's against your team. If you are a Westerner that believes in democratic ideals or if you are somebody around the world that believes that people should have a say in anything, China is your enemy.

[Matthew Tai]

China is the land of shortcuts and facades. It's all about the facade. It's very easy to put a bunch of Christmas lights on some shiny buildings and take night shots of it. But during the day, the pollution is there. You walk a few minutes out of the city center, you start to see the problems. You start to see the beggars on the road. You start to see infrastructure messes, you start to see the hollow buildings and nothing's in there. You know, you never see that side of things because they don't allow that kind of thing to be shown.

[Shelley Zhang]

China is a country that uses rape as a form of torture. It's true. We have interviewed people who have been raped in prisons as a form of torture. Like men being raped by their prison guards as a form of torture.

[David Zhang]

Straight up Nazi behavior.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes.

[Chris Chappell]

For 20 years. These Chinese think tanks will send scholars to exchange with American scholars. They didn't come here for knowledge. They came to understand how we can exploit your system better. The fact that we see how they can go from tanks rolling down Tiananmen in 1989 to every other political movement to now still having people shell for them. It's precisely the fact that we don't understand them enough. They understand us and they can cover everything, but we can't cover anything.

[David Zhang]

Winston Sturzel and Matthew Tai.

[Winston Sturzel]

I wish she wouldn't say that.

[David Zhang]

Better known as Serpentza and Laowai 86 are the original China YouTubers. The pair each spent 10 plus years in China documenting their experiences and pulling back the veil on a China that had rarely been seen by the outside world. All before being forced to flee after their content became what the Chinese Communist Party saw as, let's just say, unflattering.

[Chris Chappell]

David Zhang I've got some very explosive details from some of the rumors that came out this weekend.

[David Zhang]

Host of China Insider grew up in Zebo, China, in Shandong Province before immigrating to the west at the age of 11. Recently, David has become one of the Internet's most prominent critics on the Chinese Communist Party with his mega viral content highlighting issues like China's dilapidated infrastructure and political corruption. And finally, Shelley Zhang.

[Shelley Zhang]

If you were born in America, but you are ethnically Chinese, they think that you belong to them.

[David Zhang]

One third of the China Uncensored trio who has been integral in building a show that has exposed the misdealings of the CCP to the American public since the early 2010s, including Hallmark coverage on China's Hong Kong takeover in 2019. Together, they have amassed millions of subscribers, billions of views, and untold amounts of ire from the Chinese government and their paid army of online trolls. Now, for the first time, they are all together to detail the propaganda war the CCP is waging on the American public. Their tactics, their strategy, their willing American co conspirators, and most importantly, their grand ambition to once and for all replace the United States of America as the world's leading superpower. I know that we were talking about this a little bit before, especially with David, because he's kind of the expert on this, but what got me so interested in putting together this panel or roundtable was the ishowspeed fiasco when he went to China a month or two ago. And before it was a bunch, I saw obscure people spreading Chinese propaganda, and I was like, okay, whatever, you can get over it. And all of a sudden, America's most popular streamer is in China, essentially parroting Chinese talking points. So it's like, okay, we have to get together the people that know what's going on here so they can disabuse the narratives that we're seeing a little better than I can, because you're the experts and I'm here to learn a little bit for sure. And hopefully our audience will, too. Before we get into that, though, I want people to know kind of why you're who you are. You all spent time in China or have traveled there, lived there extensively. So just give me a little bit about, like, your background, what took you to China, and, you know, what you were doing there.

[Matthew Tai]

I suppose I'll start since I'm the first person to ever make YouTube videos out of mainland China. First YouTube vlogger, I suppose you could say. And I went on a business trip in 2006, loved the place so much, I flew back home, sold everything I had, my furniture, my cars, and I went back because I saw an incredible, vibrant place just bustling. There was so much going on. And compared to what I was used to back home. I thought, this is where I want to be. This is what I want to see. So I went there and had an adventure. Ended up homeless for a couple of days, figuring things out. Ran out of money, got a job teaching English at a kindergarten. Built myself up eventually to what I am today.

[David Zhang]

Awesome.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah. I don't know if I was the second YouTuber in China, but I was definitely close.

[Matthew Tai]

Close? Yeah.

[Winston Sturzel]

I used to make YouTube videos in China just to show family and friends back home that I was alive. They thought I was insane, that I moved there. I just want to be like, you know, it's not that bad. And, you know, it really wasn't. I lived in China, and we both did in China during the golden period, as we call it, when it was kind of up and coming, it was kind of facing the world. It was like, we're going to open up. We want to interface with, you know, America and Canada and Europe. Yeah. And we watched the country turn into really what it has always been on paper, an authoritarian dictatorship. But we became the victims of that. So in our process of making videos, we started a motorcycle shop. We built custom bikes, rode around the country, did two television documentaries in that process. Busted in our hotel, was busted in by the SWAT team, and we realized the writing was on the wall and it was time to go. We were basically chased out.

[David Zhang]

Fun. Sounds exciting.

[Winston Sturzel]

It's a good story if you're gonna do it.

[Chris Chappell]

I had the reverse of these two guys. I was born in China. I left when I was 11 during a time when they, the outside thought China was growing and rising. The general feeling in the very lower middle class citizens there was that you had no future. So I was struggling. My parents were dealing with things like where would I go to middle school, where would I go to high school, Can I get into a university? So, so we had the opportunity to immigrate to the west. And that's where it's short, but it's a good representation, I think, of what the general population in China really feels like. And Chinese people, unfortunately, I think over the years that feeling hasn't changed. And so that's where I am.

[Shelley Zhang]

So I was born in China and left China when I was 4. My parents were some of the first grad students to come to America to study back in the 80s. And then they were supposed to go back to China. My dad had a scholarship from the Chinese government to get his PhD in physics. And then it was the Cold War, Right. So he was supposed to go back and then the Tiananmen Square massacre happened. And one morning I watched.

[David Zhang]

Supposedly happened.

[Shelley Zhang]

Supposedly happened. Well, one morning.

[Winston Sturzel]

Are we there?

[Shelley Zhang]

Well, my uncle was actually there. He was an art student in Beijing at the time. I have some photos that he took at Tiananmen Square. Not during the night of June 3rd and 4th, but otherwise. And it looked like, you know, a period of great hope for people. Like, people were bringing their kids down to the square to see the goddess of democracy and all this stuff. And it was amazing. But when the crackdown started, like, my dad took me on a march, like, all the Chinese students in the university were marching around campus protesting. And I think that was the beginning of my parents really radically changing how they felt about. They both lived through the Cultural Revolution, but, you know, a lot of people felt like there's opening up in the 80s, right? Like things were going to get better. And then the Tiananmen Square massacre just changed that completely.

[David Zhang]

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you said that, because it kind of brings you into the next, I guess, phase in the life of China, you know, after Tiananmen Square. And kind of against all odds, they managed to reform their global, kind of. How do you want to put it? What's the word I'm looking for?

[Chris Chappell]

Image.

[Matthew Tai]

Image.

[David Zhang]

Image. Yeah. Reputation.

[Matthew Tai]

Right.

[David Zhang]

Reframe their reputation. Against all odds. And then by the mid-2000s, around the time of the Olympics, it's okay. China is inevitably going to replace the United States. It's a great place to be. Go see it for yourself. You could travel there. You guys were all aware, maybe you to a lesser extent, but you were there around that point. You had spent considerable time there. Was there a moment that you saw or personally experienced where you're like, okay, the narrative that I'm hearing in the media or the narrative that they're trying to spread is not actually what's happening. And things are actually starting to go backwards.

[Matthew Tai]

Absolutely. You know, you talked about the Olympics, the Beijing Olympics, the 2008 Olympics were so important to China because it was a massive face project. This is the first time that they're really going on the international stage. So they really pulled out all the stops to make sure that it was an incredible performance. But as somebody who was living in China, it was the opposite. First of all, all foreigners that were in China at the time, when they renewed their visas previously, you could go to a neighboring country. You could actually go into places like Hong Kong to renew, but they stopped that. You had to fly back to your country. The visa restrictions got a lot Harsher. Things got pretty hectic when there were a bunch of Free Tibet activists tried to douse the torch. I think in France, they came with fire extinguishers, tried, you know, the Olympic torch. Overnight, the attitude towards foreigners changed. And I woke up and I went downstairs, and the people that were usually friendly and smiling like the person I knew very well, the Lao ban at the shop where I used to buy stuff in the morning scowled at me, didn't want to talk to me. Walking down the road, people were looking at me with daggers. This happened overnight, and this was due to the fact that now foreigners were their enemy because they were trying to, you know, besmirch China, trying to put out the torch. I was studying at the time at Shenzhen University. I was studying English, and the university locked all the foreigners inside and didn't let us go out when the Olympic torch was being run through the city. So we got a heads up because I was very good friends with one of the teachers, and he said, listen, if you want to get out of here, you got to leave here now, because in about half an hour or so, they're closing the gates and no foreigners will be allowed out because they were worried about us foreigners causing trouble with the torch run. Because it's all about, you know, image and all about face. So, you know, that was the first taste that I saw where they were more interested in an international image than the quality of life for the people actually living in China. The first time I saw that. But of course, things got very bad near the end when we had to leave. And that's quite a big story. I don't know if we have time for those.

[Winston Sturzel]

Sure. You know, yeah, for me, it was over time, but it was specifically when I learned Chinese. All of a sudden, when you can understand the language, everything that you're hearing around you is not some mystical dragon like, you know, China, some country that nobody understands, with an ancient culture, 5,000 years of history. All of a sudden, now you start understanding that people's standard of life isn't like what we're seeing on news. The inevitable rise of China, the Olympic procession or whatever. First moment I noticed that was when I bought a motorcycle. But a $200 motorcycle. You could buy a $200 new motorcycle in China.

[Matthew Tai]

It's worth $200.

[Winston Sturzel]

It was. I'm not even joking. It was a copy of a Chinese copy motorcycle. Anyway, I got on that bike and I left the city center for the first time, and I saw.

[David Zhang]

And how long have you been in China before a Few months.

[Winston Sturzel]

Just a few months. And it didn't make me dislike China, but it opened my eyes. Because what I saw within 10, 15 minutes of getting outside the city, city center was kids warming themselves over burn barrels, houses without any sort of glass in the windows, stray dogs digging through piles of dead animals and carcasses and stuff. Right. It was abject poverty versus what looked like middle class downtown. So I was like, that kind of woke me up. I was like, this is not the place that I am seeing on the news, that's for sure. But it made me want to understand China more. So I'd go out and see different things. But it was my interactions with the Chinese government that really opened my eyes to the kind of evils of the situation. I'll just tell you one anecdote. I was in the back of a car with a Chinese government official, and we were driving to a restaurant, and he was ripping through these back roads probably at 50 miles an hour on like a single lane track in these people that were carrying, like, rice and all kinds of crops and stuff were jumping out of the way of the car as he almost ran them over. And I said, what's going on? And I asked the person, what's going on? They asked the driver. He said, it's actually not a concern if I run these people over because they can't do anything about it. Their lives are meaningless and worthless, so don't worry about that. And when I heard things like that, when I could communicate in Chinese and I saw how depraved it could be, it really made me think, like, wow, there's a lot to see here. And I want to understand China, but there's some real evil under the surface.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[Chris Chappell]

I remember in 2008 when I was trying to tell people that China is not what you think.

[David Zhang]

China, China, you were saying.

[Chris Chappell]

So in 2008, I was trying to tell people.

[David Zhang]

So about the same time Winston was talking.

[Chris Chappell]

Yeah. But I was very young, and basically, if you told people that China was bad, they didn't listen to you. They didn't think you were telling the truth. Because China's so good at putting political makeup over their image. And it's crazy because 2008, the Olympics, was honestly a turning point for everything. They, you know, the reports on organ harvesting before 2008, after 2008, the rise of Xi Jinping, because he was the one who really was putting up the Olympics. Right. So everything for 2008, for me, I felt like was really at the height of domination of. Of Chinese power. It obviously went downhill from there, but I feel like, for me, that was when the world was so in love, so attracted, so romantically obsessed with China, that I think. I don't know if you guys had experience telling people that, but during that time, I felt the most darkness in terms of what I was telling people and what they were seeing on tv. It wasn't adding up, correct?

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there's something with the older Chinese generations where they don't really want to talk about, like, all of the terrible things that happened. So my parents didn't talk about the Cultural Revolution, Right. They didn't really talk about, like, they would talk about, like, going down to the countryside, but it just sounded like. Oh, like, they. It didn't sound like what it actually was.

[David Zhang]

Can you explain that for people that might not know what that phrase is?

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah. So basically, during the cultural revolution, from 1966 to 1976, Mao was. Chairman Mao was losing power. So he started this whole, like, revolution inside China, basically, where he had the young people kind of rise up to overthrow, like, the people in the party that he was that were fighting against him. And so people were like Red Guards. People were shooting each other in the streets. Like, it was really bad. My mom, like, told me much later that she watched, like, all the other kids and in her class tie up and beat their teacher because she was in elementary school. But the idea was that you had to get rid of the four olds. You had to rise up and destroy society, essentially. So it was a lot of bad stuff that people would report their own parents to the CCP and be like, oh, feel justified if their parents were taken away, you know, because that's what you had been brainwashed with. But, like, then after Mao died, it ended. And so I think a lot of people felt like they couldn't talk about all the stuff that happened. So my parents didn't really talk about that. But I knew growing up that they were very afraid of, like, my parents would tell me in elementary school in the us like, not to tell anybody anything about what happens at home. Right? Like, no, you do not tell anybody about what happens at home. You keep it private. And it's because you're afraid of, like, they grew up with, like, neighbors spying on you. Like, people could report you to the police and all that stuff. And I didn't understand until much later that that was like, a really warped way of looking at the world that came up because they grew up under communism. But, like, that's the kind of Stuff that you couldn't really explain to people because all they would see is like, the Olympic flight show and, you know, how many people were drumming and the Forbidden City, that kind of thing. So, yeah, I agree that it was hard to get that message across right around that time.

[David Zhang]

The Cultural Revolution is interesting because I think for the first time, and it kind of surprised me. I don't know if it came out last year, but that show on Netflix, right, the Three Body Problems, actually depicted it seemingly accurately. So I would recommend anybody to kind of look at that if they want, like an entertainment historical mix. But something interesting that I find is you're mentioning, like, back as far as the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square, and you're mentioning the Olympics TV 2008, and even David mentioned 2008, but that's still 16, 17 years ago at this point. And since then, we've only seen China really enhance their global presence in a lot of ways. And now they have the most beautiful cities in the world. And you have commentators talking about how amazing it is over there. But you guys are seeing the warning signs as early as, you know, the mid-2000s. So how over the last 16 years and over Xi Jinping's reign since, I guess, 2012, 2013, wherever you want to start it, how have they managed to kind of depress the things that you were seeing as early as 2007, 2008?

[Matthew Tai]

Quite simple, just by censoring it. You know, China is the land of shortcuts and facades. It's all about the facade. It's very easy to put a bunch of Christmas lights on some shiny buildings and take night shots of it. But during the day, the pollution is there. You walk a few minutes out of the city center, you start to see the problems. You start to see the beggars on the road, you start to see infrastructure messes, you start to see the hollow buildings and nothing's in there. You know, you never see that side of things because they don't allow that kind of thing to be shown. If you are living in China and you're making videos on social media, first of all, it's very risky to do that. I'm the first person to do it on YouTube. I took a huge risk when I did that, because you technically need a journalist visa and journalist license to film and make documentaries or anything inside of China, and it needs to be approved every step of the way. But if you're on social media, you can get away with it as long as you're being positive about China as Soon as you start to show things negative about China, you start to show the cracks behind the scenes, they will come down on you. And we know people who have actually been deported for making videos where they just were being very factual about, like, what it's like in China, but because it wasn't positive, they got deported. And that's the reason why you only see positive stuff come out. Because if you try to put something negative out, they will come and talk to you, they will deal with you.

[Winston Sturzel]

I think we were relatively untouched from 2008 to like 2015. And I think we did notice a huge change when Xi Jinping took over, but it really cracked down around 2015, 16, 17. And what I think people don't understand is that China is the same as North Korea. I think they like to think it's some open version of North Korea. Like, yeah, it's authoritarian, but everyone can do whatever they want. What China is, is North Korea with better pr, better technology, more funding, More funding, better budget. Right. So what we saw was them go from maybe 08 to 2015 from what we call the golden period, where they kind of wanted people to think that China was opening up to the rest of the world. And that's why they kind of tolerated, because people like us, even though we were making largely positive content when 2015 came around. What we noticed actually on one of our film trips is we went through a town that we had no idea about, and it turns out there was a minority region. There's 56 minorities in China. Well, officially.

[Matthew Tai]

Officially, yeah.

[Winston Sturzel]

And one of these towns apparently had some sort of uprising or something against the government at some point. We had no idea, but because we were there, they wouldn't let us stay in a hotel. And we noticed there was police every 100, 200 meters with a little notebook. As we rode by documenting where we were going, we were like, this is different than when we first started riding around China. I think what happened was it went from, we need to face the outside world and say we're opening up to. Xi Jinping said, nah, like, we don't care about that anymore. We need to make sure that everyone within the borders of the China are suppressed and controlled. And I don't care if someone's positive or negative about China, we need to control that message. So we kind of lived through that transition. I understand what David was saying. Of course, it was probably Quite grim in 08 for a lower to middle class Chinese person.

[Matthew Tai]

Oh, absolutely.

[Winston Sturzel]

It was for us. We were seeing China at least pretend to open up to the rest of the world and then watch it further crack down. So in our opinion, it got worse.

[David Zhang]

Well, I feel like you brought up a cogent point. There is. It didn't matter if it was positive. It had to be controlled. Because to you, what could be a positive message? Say, what comes to my mind, there's somebody sick and the community comes together to raise money for them to get an operation. Yes, well, that's a good story to us, but no, the government provides everything, so there should be no need for the citizens to get together and do that.

[Winston Sturzel]

You know, that's a great point, because what we would get in our feedback is finally someone going out of the city center and talking to people, people in rural China, in Chinese, giving them a voice. Nobody said, oh, I loved when you went to the Bund in Shanghai. Right. They said, I loved when you talked to that old man and he gave you some green beans from his garden and then talked about his life a little bit. I loved when that old lady brought you into her house and she said, this is all I got and gave you some peanuts and you guys chatted about how her village is going to be gone next year. Those were all positive messages. People loved when we covered that kind of stuff. Chinese government hated it because that's not. Not the image they want to portray.

[Matthew Tai]

They don't want to show the poverty.

[Winston Sturzel]

It doesn't matter if it's good or bad. They have to tell you what to say. And I'll make a statement. If you see a foreign person in China right now with a decent following and they're making videos in this climate in 2025 under Xi Jinping, that message is from the government or it's approved by the government.

[David Zhang]

We're going to get to a couple of my favorites here a little bit later on that I want to jump over to, because where I became the most familiar, I think, with your outlet. China Uncensored was around the Hong Kong protests, and I was actually in Korea by that point, so I was closer to it. But the first time I went to China was 2015, just to travel, visit family, and it seemed great. I came back in 2018, 19 to study. And I was telling you the story last night in my first or second class in international relations. The professor said, good question, can't answer it. I'm a member of the Communist Party. Moved on. Then they gave me the report to talk about. Is it 6, 4? What is the Tiananmen Squared? They obviously don't call it. They said, you're going to do a report on 6 4. What do you want me to say about this? And then, like, two days later, I'm coming back from the bar with my friends and a taxi picks us up, but it's just a black car that lied about being a taxi. And then they lock us in and won't let us out until they extort us for money in front of our apartment. I was like, okay, maybe this is. This isn't the place for me. So I'm out of China by 2019. And when the protests are going on. But what about what you saw there kind of. I don't want to say scared you, but set off alarm bells. And what do you think people should have been seeing over here that they haven't still taken into account?

[Shelley Zhang]

Well, I think with the Hong Kong protests, the Hong Kong people understood what was happening, right? Like, they understood that the CCP, ever since they took over Hong Kong in 1998, 1997, that they were going to lose their freedoms eventually. The promise was that for 50 years, they were going to keep their ability to have some kind of elections, their ability to have a British judicial system or whatever. But people knew. I mean, the first protests against this.

[Matthew Tai]

Were like, 2004, 2014 was a big one.

[Shelley Zhang]

I went the umbrella movement, 2004, there was a protest of like, half a million people against the Article 23. Like, they had tried to put a national security law in that extradition law, Right?

[David Zhang]

Or was it.

[Shelley Zhang]

In 2004, they tried to put in this national security law? That was basically what they did in 2020.

[David Zhang]

Gotcha, gotcha.

[Shelley Zhang]

But, like, half a million people came on the street. They backed off. They couldn't do it. And then 2014 with the umbrella protests again, they tried to impose Beijing's will on Hong Kong. The Hong Kong people fought back, but then they had this long game of, like, okay, because we're now going to try to, like, indoctrinate the youth. We're going to go into the schools. We're going to try to change how people learn, like the kids learn about China growing up. And so in 20, like, after 2014, I think people were kind of demoralized. And so I think the CCP thought that they were going to just slowly transform Hong Kong into. And then 2019 happens, and these protests absolutely blow up where you have 2 million people. We saw, like, we're in the middle of 2 million people marching down the street like, it's. You've never seen anything like that or heard anything like that in your life.

[David Zhang]

And I don't think you could comprehend that happening.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah, like the.

[David Zhang]

Since the civil rights movement, probably.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah, it was absolutely incredible. And I think that was the moment where they decided we have to break Hong Kong. And, you know, being there and seeing like a lot of the protesters we talked to kind of knew that they weren't going to win, but they were hoping that their message would be loud enough so that people could see the rest of the world could see what the CCP was and that, you know, this is what will happen to the rest of the world if you do not stop the Chinese Communist Party. And so they knew that they were not going to. To win, but they were hoping that, like, their resistance would bring attention to it. And I think if it hadn't been for Covid, things would have been a lot different because Covid gave the CCP the kind of excuse to be able to really finally crack down on Hong Kong and change everything.

[David Zhang]

Well, one would have thought Covid would have been kind of the straw that broke the camel's back as far as their image making. And it didn't.

[Matthew Tai]

No.

[David Zhang]

And so we can talk about economics, we can talk about military, we can talk about whatever, but everything I'm hearing here is messaging and information and information used in, you know, nefarious ways.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yes.

[David Zhang]

So that brings me to kind of the reason that I wanted everyone here today. And that is the giant propaganda machine that is running against everyday Americans from people as young as, like you were saying, how old?

[Chris Chappell]

You're almost Gen Z. Gen Z. Late stage, millennial.

[David Zhang]

But you said, you know some younger people in your family that are getting like all their news off TikTok at this point. And Even you'll see 50, 60 year old government officials or ex government officials parroting the same talking points. So speak freely, whoever wants to jump in. How did they concoct this propaganda machine and what are they trying to do with it?

[Winston Sturzel]

Honestly, to go back to Shelley's point, I think it started in earnest around the Hong Kong protests. And I think if anyone's informed foreign policy or whatever, you need to study what happened in Hong Kong in 2019, 2020, from the CCP's perspective, it was a successful takeover. I mean, Hong Kong is just mainland China now. From a national security perspective, what they did there to suppress voices abroad during those protests, the people they employed, the tactics they used was surgical. And it started, it was crazy. The amount of time, money and effort and the amount of people we saw converted from travel vloggers and now pro CCP shills. Happened at that time. So it was kind of their time to really employ all of these things they had probably planned ahead of time. Then when Covid hit, they just doubled down. Right. So Covid happened and they went from, yeah, it happened in Wuhan. Demonize Wuhan. Then. No, wait a minute, let's actually blame it on other countries now. Let's test this out. How can we control global opinion around this thing that clearly we did. Right. It's clearly our fault. The ccp. How can we manipulate public opinion around the world? And they got so much training ground and so much practice during this time to actually see if people would sway or bend their opinion. And I think they started to see some real success. But really, when it came down to it, I saw them go from really sloppy propaganda to very, very successful propaganda around the same time that they decided they were going to be friends with Russia. And I think either they learned something from Russia or they, I don't know, had some sort of dialogue. No one knows what happened behind closed doors. But we saw propaganda go from kind of silly, dumb people on the street saying, look, China is so cool, I love this paradise here, it's better than America, to very, very coercive and unbelievable propaganda with tourism campaigns and things like TikTok campaigns and getting big influencers under state media umbrellas. But to amplify state media without the label of state media anymore and really pick up a lot of success on short form media in particular.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, I'd like to say narcissism is one of the biggest reasons for this. You know, in order to be an influencer of any kind, narcissism plays a role role. It takes a certain kind of person to stick a camera in their face and walk around and say, hey, look at me, I'm gonna tell you something. Right? So we're all guilty of that in one way or the other.

[David Zhang]

Shots fire a little bit.

[Winston Sturzel]

I'm offended triggered.

[Matthew Tai]

I 100% admit to that. You know, I was young when I started my YouTube channel. I wanted to show people my life and, you know, to be the cool guy, you know, everyone does. So when you've got a narcissist and they're not getting the attention that they, they want, if you give them that attention, they will lap it up and they will lie and they will cheat and they will steal and they will do whatever they need to do in order to get that attention. So what happened was you had a bunch of YouTubers. Many of them I know personally because being the first YouTuber in China that I used to be part of these groups. I told a lot of these guys how to set up their cameras, how to walk around, what to do, how to do it, how to use VPNs to get your videos online. A lot of the guys, guys who ended up turning on me and attacking me all around the same time. And it was all around that 2019 era. I used to make videos, I was popular, they hated that because their videos used to tank. They put out a video, get like a hundred views and I'm getting a million or a couple hundred thousand views on a video. So then they turned around and they started to attack me. Then they started to see a little bit of support from the nationalists which then again boosted their egos and made them thought, okay, this is, is a good idea. Then when the 2019 Hong Kong riots happened, the uprising, you saw people start to get boosted like crazy people that talked against the Hong Kong protesters, they would suddenly get on state media. So you've got these no name youtubers or influencers and doesn't matter TikTok or whatever at the time, they would suddenly go on state media, they would suddenly get shared by the government. So now they're like a big shot, they're like, now I'm on tv, now I've got the people of China support me. And it gave them all this drive to continue to do that kind of thing. And then on top of that you had an outpouring of support in their comments, a massive jump in viewership. So you've got a completely obscure YouTuber, for instance, that would maybe hit a couple of hundred views. Suddenly he's getting 10, 20, 30,000 views. Suddenly he's got 50,000 subscribers overnight, which he didn't have before.

[David Zhang]

Right.

[Matthew Tai]

Suddenly his stuff is being boosted and magically popping up on the first search terms on YouTube and things like that. Because the Chinese government is good at SEO and they're going to help these guys out because they're getting the message out. So whether they get paid monetarily, a lot of these guys or not, they're incentivized by the Chinese government because they feed their egos, they make them important, they make unimportant people important, you know.

[Shelley Zhang]

And that's, yeah, to build off what you're talking about. I think that what you really saw the CCP doing with a lot of these guys was Xinjiang first, right? Like where they were trying to take over the search term Xinjiang on YouTube. And so they deployed all of these like influencers that you were talking about. Or proto influencers to Xinjiang to talk about how they don't see any genocide here. Like, there's. There's no people, and suddenly this influencer is in the middle of a corn. Not a corn, like a cotton field, in the middle of Xinjiang.

[David Zhang]

The song is awesome.

[Matthew Tai]

Cotton song, yeah.

[Shelley Zhang]

Or he bumps into a CCTV reporter who just happens to be there to ask him how this Western YouTuber feels about Xinjiang. And it's obviously all orchestrated. I know you. You guys have done some great videos looking at how you could tell that this is all orchestrated, but I think that was the first success for them.

[Winston Sturzel]

I agree. I think Xinjiang was a huge push for them. And I remember the first instance I got of that was thousands of videos uploaded at the same time saying, go away, Pompeo.

[Matthew Tai]

Shut up, Pompeo.

[Winston Sturzel]

Shut up, Pompeo. It's like these Uyghurs that are like shaking in the camera and they're like, shut up, Pompeo. You stay out at Xinjiang, you don't know anything about our utopia. There's no genocide here. And then when I saw it off screen and it was on these random channels I'd never seen before, and when I saw that, I started putting it together and I got attacked. It got so bad that they employed two beautiful women from Xinjiang and they took out an ad campaign on our videos that we did about Xinjiang to kind of debunk what they were doing.

[David Zhang]

They're running ads on our videos and.

[Winston Sturzel]

They would stick, stand there and say things like, don't believe these guys.

[Matthew Tai]

There's no genocide here.

[David Zhang]

Because they know your video will be the one that running it on to directly address you.

[Winston Sturzel]

Which kind of.

[David Zhang]

That's a lot of power.

[Winston Sturzel]

I know. Which uncovered kind of how they work. Like, if they're running ad campaigns, they're definitely paying Google AdWords for SEO and stuff like that. What we noticed was when they got our attention, we started doing some digging and we eviscerated this campaign. We found the roots of it. Gave me a lot of passion to kind of uncover where this was coming from. And I realized that when China decides it's going to do something or cares about a specific topic, they really, really go into it and they. I don't think there's an endless budget for it. Right. It was just the scary part.

[Chris Chappell]

I think you guys probably all experienced this is how the government can target you based on what you desire the most. They really explore the original sin, so to speak.

[Winston Sturzel]

That's a good point.

[Chris Chappell]

You want girls, you want anything else?

[David Zhang]

Oh, I Thought you were asking. I'm sorry, do you want those things?

[Chris Chappell]

I don't have any of them to offer.

[Winston Sturzel]

We call them Harem Globetrotters.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes, that's what we call the Harem Globetrotters.

[Chris Chappell]

So I was talking with this guy, he has a lot of information from China. But basically, you know how the CCP would do these honeypot operations, right? They would send not most beautiful girls, but the mediocre looking girls. But they're trained. The point is the. They understand that especially men want three things, right? Money, lust, and power. And so they do these things. They target what the weakness is. And so, you know, why is it that so many foreign faces are willing to do this is while they're either getting money or they're getting something in China, or they're getting girls or something else. And so I realized that talking to even the Chinese dissidents now, many of them have turned because of these three things or one of the three things that they lack. Right. If you're a poor democracy activist, you come live in America, maybe you no longer have money. Like what did they do? They offer you the money and you can, you know, tell them certain things about your group. And so this, I think really happened somewhere after Xi took power because they systematically changed the way that the spy apparatus works now in China. So they have the Ministry of State Security overseeing all the other intelligence which targets, you know, the propaganda side and those things. It lines up further now after Covid, which they, I personally believe did suffer some reputational damage, but they did repair it. Which is the scary thing, and I think that's we're most afraid of going forward in the future is we're a few people, less than a dozen up against an entire machine. I'm sure we're going to talk about the speed thing too, but that's what I'm afraid the most, is that they have so unlimited amount of resource to do what we essentially have to take months or years to try to break down by ourselves. By ourselves.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[Shelley Zhang]

I mean, we had a video that came out during COVID that showed like the terrible lockdown things that they were doing during zero Covid that was literally called the cure for the coronavirus is not authoritarianism. Because we saw so many people praising the lockdowns and China like, this is the way we should be going. So we did this video and it got pulled by YouTube, like they literally pulled it down. Yeah, yeah.

[David Zhang]

And I don't want it to sound like I'm praising the Chinese propaganda machine, but in a way I am. Because it's so effective.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yes.

[David Zhang]

So I'm recognizing the effectiveness of it when I say this. But what they've been able to do is not target just kind of one sect of the American public. But as much as it makes sense, where they would probably be able to target the left wing, because the communism, like, they kind of tilt that way anyway towards the left wing. People on the right wing, I've noticed, have been captured by this phenomenon as well, and that coming obviously from a very conservative show. We are very critical of the CCP to the point where we've been kicked off TikTok. And you can find a million videos of us exposing Chinese lies in similar ways that you have. But when I'm on X for Work or I'm reading things or watching YouTube or whatever, I notice China based. Right? That's what I keep hearing. China's based. They don't like lgbt. They have traditional family values. You and I know all of that is just insane. But how do they target. And specifically because for this audience, people on the right wing, like, how are they so effective at doing so?

[Matthew Tai]

The America Bad Party, we like to call it. Listen, they have no allegiance.

[David Zhang]

They.

[Matthew Tai]

The CCP has no allegiance to the left or the right. They find out what's bothering either side and they go in and they tickle it, and then they justle it about, and then they really create a big storm. You know, they find out, okay, LGBTQ stuff is a problem. The right doesn't like it. Okay, then we're going to make a big thing about how that's bad. And they go in and they agitate that side. Then the other side, they'll see, oh, this whole base thing or whatever, they go for that. They do the whole, oh, you know, free, socialist healthcare stuff, which doesn't exist in China, by the way, but they say it does. And then people on the right. Sorry, on the left are like, oh, it's all free. It's a utopia there. They know exactly what they're doing and they go and they press these little pressure points and they cause this thing. And the easiest way to do it is through the America Bad Party, which is, America is the worst at everything, no matter the cost. And I see this. It's just. It's an American phenomenon. It's something that Americans all have built into them. And that is to think that America is always the best at being the worst. Okay, so, for instance, I made a video about South Africa, where I'm from, about the crime rate, you know, okay, there's like 76 murders a day or whatever. I make a video, someone in the comments are like, oh, you think that's bad? What about downtown Chicago? You know, that type of thing. There's always somebody who has to. You talk about the domestic violence issue in China.

[David Zhang]

There's a lot of. Whataboutism?

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, yeah. Domestic domestic abuse in China is just off the rails. It's awful. The police don't get involved. It's always seen as a domestic thing. Talk about that. Someone's like, oh yeah, well, in America, domestic abuse is off the charts. It's like, come on, shut the hell up. You don't know what you're talking about. But that's what they do. Because of this built in like reaction that a lot of Americans have to blame America and put America first is the worst. They like to stroke that, they like to enable that.

[Winston Sturzel]

I definitely saw them used the left way more in the beginning and we saw this in social rights movements. So like the anti Asian hate protest, something we publicly endorsed was to fight back against the Asian hate that was happening during COVID But what happened very quickly was China could see a weakness and a vulnerability. And we had a friend go to one of the protests and a bunch of the people were holding up these posters said stop Asian hate. And then on the other side it said, stop bullying China. So what, what China was doing was co opting legitimate movements that pull at people's heartstrings and things that people actually care about in real life. And they'll go and pry that. But what has happened is that we've seen the right become more vocal online and they say, how can we kind of work this, how can we work our narrative into this? Right? So China, everyone knows China is not based. China is not a traditional moral society. It's a morally, it's a moral back.

[Matthew Tai]

It's got the most amount of infidelity I've ever noticed.

[Winston Sturzel]

High infidelity, high abortion. All the things that a lot of pro life conservatives might care about. Right? Very poor on religious freedom.

[Matthew Tai]

So the things, there is no religious.

[Winston Sturzel]

Freedom, There is no religious freedom.

[Chris Chappell]

Right.

[Winston Sturzel]

But what they do is they say a lot of people care about these issues right now. So if we pretend and we put a billion dollars into a propaganda campaign to get this audience capture of right wing people, we can now say we have traditional culture, we have traditional society, we care about moral family values, gender norms. Look at us, we're actually trying to boost the birth rate while the west declines. Right. And they just 0.8. Yeah, it's the worst in the world. It's the lowest in the world, depending on if you think that's good or bad, I guess. But, yeah, they have the lowest birth rate in the world. They have all of the opposites of reality, but they've managed. And I think this is the scariest thing. As we look at Hong Kong, we look at Covid, we can watch them drive the reputation into a crater into the ground where you could. You're like, china's never going to come out of this. This is such a bad look. They keep screwing up, and they manage to come out of it even stronger every single time because of how much priority there is in propaganda. So for them to capture. Get audience capture on the right doesn't surprise me one bit. I called a couple years ago, saw it on the left. I said, the right's next. They know how to really. I think Americans have a big problem with this too. You can agree with someone on 90% of stuff, but as soon as that person says one thing that you disagree with, now that person is bad. They know how to take advantage of that 10%. It's exactly like that, right? We've become so divided and polarized. It's a field day. I bet they're sitting there in their intelligence offices while they devise these plans and. And they're just salivating watching the division in America right now. Something that we have fought against tooth and nail. We have stayed apolitical and domestic politics on our show for a very good reason. The more division there is in America, the more open farmland there is, no pun intended for China to take advantage of.

[David Zhang]

Well, they can't buy that in Texas anymore.

[Winston Sturzel]

Nice. Congratulations.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, well done.

[Chris Chappell]

You know, what it is, is fundamentally, it's a lack of understanding of what communism really is. Because we always talk about the political stuff, but we never talk about the ideological stuff. During the 60s is the same thing. The bigger the divide, the more chance that the communists can do their thing. The takeover. In the start of the Soviet Union, Lenin capitalized on the division. In the Russian society, the start of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao capitalized on the division of the Chinese society. And now you're. They no longer call it communist. Right? Even though ccp, they're like, we're socialists. They have elements of fascism, elements of authoritarian, totalitarian. What they do is like Winston said so perfectly, they mold the exact image you want to see of China so that you can accept it. Most people have never experienced the hammer of communism until they've Experienced it like people in Hong Kong. So what happens? Even people in Taiwan, you see now they're saying it doesn't hurt to try because democrats, democratic systems, capitalism, it's failed us, Right? We're poor in America, we have homeless, we have poor infrastructures, all these things. Why not give communism a try? But the problem is people don't realize that in this so called bad capitalist society, you have a chance to elect somebody else. If you don't like them, you have a chance to vote for somebody else you don't like. But once you get into the space of that, you no longer have those opportunities. But then it's already too late. By 2020, Hong Kongers no longer have a choice.

[David Zhang]

It's like the boiling water, the fog.

[Chris Chappell]

Yeah, the fog, right. So that's what they're really basing it on. It's this curiosity especially. I see a lot of young people now, they are curious, which is good, curiosity is good. But they precisely capitalize on that. And to say that hey, let's try this.

[David Zhang]

They take advantage of the openness of our society. Exactly. And that is not by random chance. It's very much a structured decision.

[Chris Chappell]

They studied.

[David Zhang]

What's the book that you were recommending to me last night? Because I'd like people to.

[Chris Chappell]

So the Chinese strategist for Xi Jinping, his name is Wang Huning. He came to America, toured around cities, countrysides, and he studied America extensively. He wrote a book called America Against America. Essentially the ideas that the CCP have used now against America are written. It's the core of the book basically what the problems with fentanyl, the problems with homeless, racial division, how the political system works. Everything was studied and you know, for 20 years, like these Chinese think tanks would send scholars to exchange with American scholars. They didn't come here for knowledge. They came to understand how we can exploit your system better so that even in times of COVID they can bounce back, even times of massive protests. The fact that we see how they can go from tanks rolling down Tiananmen in 1989 to you know, every other political movement to now still having people shell for them, it's precisely the fact that we don't understand them enough. They understand us and they can cover everything, but we can't cover anything.

[David Zhang]

Well, the thing that bothers me the most about that is you would expect them to do that because they want to be the power. It's the way the world, world's work forever. So I don't even necessarily hold that against them per se because you would expect it. Who I do hold responsible is our leadership over the last 30 years. And you told me you protested in front of George W. Bush at George W. Bush, Right? Well, his father is the one that basically let Tiananmen Square slide.

[Shelley Zhang]

Why?

[David Zhang]

Because there was a market to be captured. Let's let him into the World Trade Organization. Why? Because we can get cheap goods, and the venture capitalists can make a lot of money investing in China. So the Western leadership and the Western business class, in my opinion, has been just as complicit. So not only are we trying to fight against the narrative coming from China, we're trying to fight against the dollars coming from the Fortune 500 companies and the government leadership in America. I think that's changing a little bit. Little by little, maybe. But then you see who is the Jensen Huang, right?

[Chris Chappell]

Nvidia.

[David Zhang]

Nvidia. Yeah. He's like, well, why wouldn't we sell to China? If we don't sell to them, they'll just make it themselves. And then someone had. I don't know if it was on Twitter, like, they're like, well, we never sold Virginia class submarines to the Soviet Union. This is a stupid argument. Oh, it's Dmitry Alperovich. Really good writer too, by the way. To get this message out. We've already talked about that. They need people, and they need people at all levels of society, from the lowest of the low to the highest of government officials. So I want to take a little look at what that is for our audience that might have not seen it before. So we'll start with kind of what I think is funny and kind of get into a little bit more serious. But if we could run that clip. Yegor, if someone has that. That montage.

[Winston Sturzel]

Welcome back to Unboxing China.

[Shelley Zhang]

I'm Nancy and I have back on our show, Yegor.

[Winston Sturzel]

I mean, I really miss. You miss the show, and most of.

[Chris Chappell]

All, I missed what's in the box.

[Shelley Zhang]

So why don't you open it?

[Winston Sturzel]

Okay, let's go straight to it.

[Shelley Zhang]

We have here what waiting for this moment. It is actually a favorite snack here in jungle, and it is called Watuo.

[David Zhang]

Hold the bowl. Hold the bowl.

[Chris Chappell]

But I don't think that's like, the.

[Winston Sturzel]

Final stage of this food. Right?

[Shelley Zhang]

You're exactly right.

[Winston Sturzel]

So let's go and check out how we actually eat it.

[Shelley Zhang]

So guess where the water is from. Hang tins.

[Winston Sturzel]

Look. Is it from the river?

[Shelley Zhang]

Yes, you're exactly right.

[Winston Sturzel]

This is what river?

[Shelley Zhang]

Yellow River.

[Chris Chappell]

Oh, the famous Huanghe.

[Shelley Zhang]

Right, right. Our mother river, the Yellow River.

[Winston Sturzel]

So this is pretty clear, actually.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[Winston Sturzel]

I will be flying like a bird. Oh, my God.

[Matthew Tai]

Hey, it's too late for you to regress.

[Chris Chappell]

I'm not afraid.

[Shelley Zhang]

This is crazy.

[Matthew Tai]

I'm still in trim.

[Winston Sturzel]

Feeling like fighting.

[Matthew Tai]

Unexpected.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Winston Sturzel]

You get the speed? I won't tell you. It felt like just flying into the sky. It was like Superman.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Zhang]

So it's innocuous enough, right? But how does someone like Igor go from being probably random Russian or Eastern European in China to being part of a state media campaign?

[Matthew Tai]

He has a very interesting and sad story. We know all about him. He's Ukrainian, and he studied Chinese and Chinese history and everything. And the culture. He's one of those guys who had a genuine interest and went over there and found out very quickly that they don't care about a foreigner who knows the culture and who can speak the language. They care about a foreigner they can make fun of. So they put him on state media and he. We found an old archived article that he wrote where he was complaining about, because he was interviewed about the fact that he has to pretend to be stupid and not understand everything. And he has to pretend to be stupid and be amazed by every little thing, like, oh, wow, I've never seen this before. And they make fun of him on purpose. So he's got a pretty interesting backstory.

[Winston Sturzel]

Didn't they call him, like, Mr. Shit or something?

[Matthew Tai]

Yes, because they put him in this, like, Chinese drama skit show. And his. His name was supposed to be Nicholas in the thing, but he had to say it with a bad accent, so it's Nicolas, which means, like, nicholas take a shit, basically. So he would walk on the streets and people pointed him and like, oh, it's Nicholas take. It's Mr. Shit. And this guy is, like, one of the guys who genuinely was interested.

[David Zhang]

So he had a dream of being a proper journalist.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah, yeah. So these kind of guys, they don't. I mean, to his credit, he has not done Xinjiang genocide denial.

[David Zhang]

No, like I said, it's innocuous but entertaining.

[Winston Sturzel]

It's sad because he devoted his life to the point where when he speaks Chinese, no one would know he's white. No one would know.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, but he has to pretend that he doesn't speak it. He's one of the. The less immoral shills. And he's just what we term a white monkey. It's somebody who they put up there. He's a foreigner. He's like, oh, China's so amazing. It's so great. Oh, I Can't eat spicy noodles, that kind of thing. That's who he is.

[Winston Sturzel]

I don't want to harp on about this clip you showed, but that ride that they were on, we have footage of that ride malfunctioning and the guy's leg just folds. It whacks and folds. It's bad. We actually, that show that they're on is called Unboxing China. Because I think they saw the unboxing videos. This is an example of bad Chinese propaganda. They're like, oh, they. People like to watch people unbox things. So, like, here's a bottle of water that's like opaque and. Oh, it's real clear. Whichever.

[David Zhang]

That giant one right behind me.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[Winston Sturzel]

But what's funny is they actually had a presenter on that show named Box.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes. When they started the show. Yeah, Box. Her name was Box and the other one's Nancy. And they used to do it together. Like, hey, Box, what's in the box today? You know? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, yeah, nothing could bother her anymore.

[Chris Chappell]

Do they. The girls, like, they speak English, like, it's pretty good English.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah.

[David Zhang]

Right.

[Chris Chappell]

So are they like international school training?

[Matthew Tai]

So many of them have studied abroad.

[David Zhang]

You're talking about the Chinese presenters. Yes.

[Winston Sturzel]

What's funny is that. Didn't you to be like that? China's full of nepotism and government corruption. And what you would do is you'd have to go get things translated if you live in China, like an official office, and the people they would hire are just the niece of a CCP official. So they have a CCP job of translating. And they don't speak one word of English. They open a dictionary and they verbatim translate stuff and it's always completely wrong, but they get these locked in iron rice bowl government positions for the rest of their life. But what China saw was if we're going to be talking to foreigners, to English speakers on YouTube and stuff, we got to get real English speakers. So they upped their game.

[Matthew Tai]

Oh, yeah. I find people that have studied abroad.

[David Zhang]

Mostly for the longest time, that's all I'd see. Right. These goofy videos. It's a little pathetic, but, you know, whatever. I understand people want to be on TV, but then since 2019, and especially since Twitter has become the main disseminator of news is when I've started noticing the biggest change. And that's kind of why I want to show the next clip. And you are the two that have recommended me all these books. So I want you to take a look at this clip. I think it's a clip Fent.

[Winston Sturzel]

You may be asking, why is the fentanyl tariff still in place? The fentanyl issue in the United States has nothing to do with China. And you'd be 100% right. In fact, I detail that in my new book, the wu Mao Handbook, 20 Anti China Lies Debunked, which is available worldwide on Amazon from May 15th.

[David Zhang]

What reaction to that?

[Shelley Zhang]

Well, I'm gonna have to get the Wu Mao handbook so I can know.

[Winston Sturzel]

How to be you. Jesus.

[Chris Chappell]

That's so crazy because every single one of them can be countered with video evidence you can easily find on Chinese social media or even on Twitter. So I don't understand, but it's like that's where I don't understand is what is exactly their audience base. It's not people who've lived in China, it's not Chinese people.

[David Zhang]

That's a great question.

[Chris Chappell]

Is it Americans who apparently love to listen to.

[Winston Sturzel]

It's contrarians. It's contrarians. It's people that their only purpose in life is not to be for something, it's only to be against something. A normal person would be against something because maybe they're for something. These people have been either conditioned or the brain rot at this point, for lack of better words, to now just be against something. So it's almost tantalizing if I'm, I'm just going to pretend to be a guy on Twitter or whatever scrolling and I see this and I go, wait, it's not China's prop. China didn't give us fentanyl. And all of a sudden in my mind in 2025, I feel like that's like, oh, I'm validated because that's like, that's different from what I heard. Now I'm gonna actually latch onto that opinion.

[Chris Chappell]

I'm gonna sound like a Chinese person right now, like a Chinese, Chinese person. And I'll say that Americans and Westerners have simple brains in that you tell them.

[David Zhang]

Pretty messed up, but okay, go ahead.

[Chris Chappell]

Feel free to be offended. But it's true. Because what you tell them because we live in such a credit based society, credibility is such a big thing here that you tell somebody something, someone's gonna believe you most of the time.

[Matthew Tai]

High trust. Yeah, high trust.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah.

[Chris Chappell]

They don't think that you're lying to them. Right? If I tell you my neighbor has a cat, you believe that I have a cat. You don't think I have a dog. But it's so different because in China if you tell them you have a cat, you actually have A dog. That person was second guessed and probably think that you have a dog. So they're one step ahead of you. So everyone in China plays this like, mental game. So that's why I feel like this, this effectiveness for our Westerners is because, like, we don't really second guess them. And also now people don't fact check too.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah. Okay. I wanted to talk a little bit about. You mentioned the homeless thing. And that's something that they pushed very hard for a long time. They've kind of backed off on that for a bit. But they would always show, you know, the Philadelphia, Kensington, Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia, those, the drug addicts there, because that's all of America. Yeah. And they would say, America has all this homeless problem. But in China there are no homeless people. And they get these guys, you know, the shills would walk out on the street and say, like, look, it's the middle of the night. There's no homeless people. Which is nonsense because all of us who've lived in China know that there are homeless people and a lot of homeless people. And they're everywhere. And in Shenzhen, I used to be friends with a reporter and she told me what would they would do around about wintertime is they'd offer if a homeless person was like stuck out in the cold. Yeah, come and get a blanket or something, you know, some food. But then they would ship them off. They'd actually put them on buses and ship them off into the interior far away where they couldn't get back. They want to get rid of the homeless people in the places where people can see them. But they exist. They're everywhere.

[David Zhang]

But it's a face problem.

[Matthew Tai]

It's a face problem. But it's this whole idea of, let me show you something that's freely available because America, there's nothing to hide. Everybody can go out to, you know, Kensington Avenue and film the drug addicts and put them online. No one's gonna stop you. You can't do that in China. You try to put it online, they will stop you. And I wanted to just shift quickly to the Zhengzhou flood. Do you remember that?

[Winston Sturzel]

Very important.

[Matthew Tai]

It's insane what happened underground.

[Chris Chappell]

The subways were flooded recently.

[Matthew Tai]

You see on Twitter and other places this video that they always show, it's like a half and half thing where half of it is like the New York subway, subway in disrepair. It shows rats or like a homeless dude and maybe some water like spilling out of a pipe. And then they show like a brand new building on the other side, like a new Subway either in Guangzhou or Shenzhen or something. A show like a pristine, amazing looks futuristic and they look America sucks. It's in the past. It's like everything's broken and run down in China. They build and it's all amazing. I always counter this with the fact that in the Zhengzhou floods, hundreds of people drowned slowly to death in the subway.

[Winston Sturzel]

Hundreds is very nice.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, it's a nice way. You'll never know. But for those of you who don't know, what happened was there was a huge amount of rainfall that they weren't expecting. They didn't want to stop the services even though they knew it was a bad disaster thing was happening. They let the floodgates go on. Some of the reservoirs there flooded the city in a matter of minutes. People were trapped in the subway systems. They were live streaming themselves. Drowning in the subways. It was horrendous. People after the fact put up, you know, these bouquets of flowers the mourners came to put at the entrance to the subway. And there were so many flowers there that the government decided they had to block it off. And they actually put up barriers so people, they couldn't see the amount of flowers that were being put in there. When they took the train cars out, they blacked out the windows. There's footage of them taking them out on trucks and all the windows were blacked out of the subway train cars. Obviously there were a lot of corpses inside they didn't want people to see. But guess what? There was also a four kilometer tunnel that was flooded in five minutes. And it was four lanes, two ways this way, two way that way. Jam packed back to back back traffic because there was a toll booth on the other side. People were stopped having to pay toll. So it backed all up. It flooded in five minutes.

[Winston Sturzel]

Everyone died.

[Matthew Tai]

There's no way, if you're in the middle of that tunnel, it's 2km either way to walk out. Even if you did get out of your car and walked, you wouldn't make it out in five minutes. Countless people died in that tunnel. The official death toll for everything, for the whole city and all the surrounding areas was like first 310, no, 200 and something. Then the government said no, some people were lying. There was more. The official death toll is like 398. 398. And that's impossible.

[Winston Sturzel]

There's footage, pictures of a car graveyard of the cars that were flooded just by the math of like kind of if there was one or two people in each car, it was thousands of people. That were drowned.

[Chris Chappell]

But you know what happened in the aftermath that made me really sad was when the BBC journalists went there to try to report on this. Old Chinese people were saying they're foreign journalists, don't like block them, don't let them report on this. They thought that these people were there to expose the bad side of China and that's how things have turned. In 1989, they were thanking the BBC journalists for getting the news out of Tiananmen. And now you see that the population has been breached, brainwashed so much that they think that they're here for disaster celebration. And that's where I think a big portion of this is the domestic change as well, what they've done.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah. I think the biggest problem I have morally, if we can get into morals.

[David Zhang]

I have a couple.

[Winston Sturzel]

Okay. Is the fact that Chinese people consume state media and they have no choice. So they'll see that official figure and maybe the local people will be like, oh my goodness, there's no way it was that. But the rest of the country is going to believe it. And I don't blame them at all. Right.

[Chris Chappell]

That's all they have.

[Winston Sturzel]

But when you just to bring it back to the clip you just showed, when you have these guys that are from New Zealand, Australia, America, Canada, and they know what's happening. They know that thousands of those people died in that tunnel and then were basically arrested for talking about it afterwards. And. And they lost their families and loved ones. And they get on state media and get paid or incentivized to champion this government when faced with these facts. Makes me sick. It's unreal. Because they know what's happening. They don't have to consume Chinese state media primarily. They still watch BBC, they still watch CNN and Fox.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah. As a result, nobody in the west knows about it either because. So blocked off in China. That's why when they show a New York subway is bad, we have bright, shiny, you know, subways. Everyone's like, china is better. But they don't realize that in China you can drown if you take a subway. Because the government doesn't care about the people. They care about their face projects. They don't understand that because they didn't know.

[David Zhang]

So they could just turn it around on us and do the what about ism. Oh, America's bad. Why are you saying what about China? Look at China. Fine. I think we'd all agree with the fact that we're Americans or we live in America or in Western countries where you're for the most part able to Criticize your government. And we would encourage that because we want improvements. But if they really want to see us improve these American shills or Western shills, why not point to countries like Japan or Taiwan that are open societies with better infrastructure, with better public safety records? Why are they shilling on behalf of our biggest adversary? That is the why.

[Winston Sturzel]

It's simple though. It's simple because South Korea and Japan and these democratic alternatives like Taiwan don't have billion dollar propaganda campaigns pointed directly at their insecurities. Because that's what China is doing. Right. They're not consuming something from Taiwan that says, look at us, we're amazing. Beautiful, vibrant democracy with a great subway system. They're consuming that from China. China's got the budget and the need to do that. The need to change people's minds. You don't have to change any minds when you're already good. Right?

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah. You don't need to sell a good product really hard. You know what I mean? If you got a bad product, you put a lot of marketing into it. You have to try to convince people it's good. If you got a good product, it sells itself.

[David Zhang]

China's show, Ferrari does run commercials.

[Matthew Tai]

Exactly, yeah. That type of thing. America doesn't need that.

[Chris Chappell]

I think Shelley has something to say, but let me talk about Ferrari after.

[David Zhang]

Yeah, Shelley, wait.

[Shelley Zhang]

Okay, go ahead. With Ferrari.

[Chris Chappell]

No, I was just gonna say like the whole thing with xiaomi, the new EV or the BYDs and stuff, it's like the people. Anyways, the people that can buy the Ferraris, it's like if you want to buy an iPhone, you would never buy a Huawei. Right. The people that buy Ferraris, like, don't buy BYDs. But the way that they're making these cars out to be, it's like they're going to replace the Lamborghinis and the Ferraris. And I think that's where like another point which is like they're trying to sell China as something that's so much better, but it's not. But it's working with a lot of these younger generation of people. And I think that's. I really don't have an answer for that. But I think at the end of the day, I think it's. These people don't have experience and we need more education on them, on that. But that's something that we have no resources on and China has a lot.

[David Zhang]

Did you want to throw something around that.

[Shelley Zhang]

I was going to say $8 billion was the. Their propaganda budget, their outward facing propaganda budget in 2013. So we don't have like numbers for what we are now.

[Winston Sturzel]

I was going to say outward facing is the key word.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah. This is outward facing propaganda just for the state run media. So if you imagine what it is now, because that was just 12 years.

[David Zhang]

Ago, that was during a relatively friendly point in relation to.

[Winston Sturzel]

This is coming from a country that has an 8 out of 100 on the Freedom House index. Right. 8 out of 100. And we are seeing the most media from this country. Right. That restricts all media and only has state media. Everything you see coming out of China is illegitimate if it's run through the state.

[Shelley Zhang]

One thing that Chris likes to say all the time is like China, on our show China Uncensored, he just says China is a country that uses rape as a form of torture. It's true. We have interviewed people who have been raped in prisons as like, as a form of torture. Like men being raped by their prison guards as a form of torture.

[David Zhang]

Straight up Nazi behavior.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yes. And, but like there is no, like all you see is the shiny surface. I have a friend who works for a tech company that rhymes with Moogle and he went to China to do some like business exchange thing. And even though he was friends with me and he had heard me talk for years about how corrupt the system is, how terrible things are, like, he still came back a little bit with like, he was like, oh yeah. And they took us to this brand new facility where like it's like so high tech and you know, like he knew he was being propagandized, but there was still a part of them that was a little dazzled by that propaganda. And I think that is like at scale. What the ccp.

[David Zhang]

If they can dazzle Tim Cook, who can't they dazzle at that point?

[Shelley Zhang]

Oh, there's a, there's a new book out now called Apple in China that is about how Apple essentially went into China and built China's entire high tech.

[David Zhang]

They built a road. They built the infrastructure.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yes.

[David Zhang]

To ship things in China.

[Shelley Zhang]

And the interesting thing is in the introduction they talk about how the author talks about how people in America think that Apple went to China and exploited Chinese workers. He's like, the truth is that Beijing let Apple into China to exploit Chinese workers so that Beijing could exploit Apple.

[David Zhang]

Sure.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah.

[Shelley Zhang]

And you can replace that with any like major multinational company name. Right. This is what they do. They let these companies in so that the CCP can exploit those companies, steal their intellectual property, like make money off of them, kick them out. And so when we have this new, like, trade deal. Trade deal negotiations, and Scott Besant and like, President Trump say, oh, hey, the great news is China is going to open fully to.

[Matthew Tai]

That's just so frustrating.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yes. It's like, first of all, they're not. Because they're a Leninist system, and the core of their system is state control, and they will never let that go. And then the second thing is, we don't want. Like, how stupid can we be? Like, you could argue that people in the early 2000s maybe didn't understand what they were doing, but now it's almost 30 years later. Like, China is a company that use. A country that uses rape as a form of torture. We want our more American businesses to go into China and keep feeding the Chinese Communist Party money. Like, in 2024, foreign direct investment was 4.5 billion. That was the lowest it's been in over 30 years. Like, at the height in 2021, it was like, over $350 billion of foreign money was going into China. It is propping up their entire system. Like, it is propping up the Communist Party. We are propping up the Communist Party. So with this trade war and the tariffs, like, you guys have talked about this with, like, what's happening in the factories and things like that, it's finally, like, making a. Like, we are actually, like, hurting the ccp. And then now it's suddenly like, oh, well, the good news is they're gonna let us American companies fully into China so we can pump more money into it.

[Winston Sturzel]

It's like a knife in the back. It's like, we just don't learn.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah.

[Winston Sturzel]

How many examples have we given just today of how many times China's screwed over their own people and us?

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[David Zhang]

And I like that you got that. Because I want to, like, when we finish it, I want to end on that point because I think there's a couple really cogent points to be made. But real quick, one thing on the propaganda that I want to get to a little bit is, first of all, the cognitive dissonance of that book is crazy because he's selling it on Amazon.

[Chris Chappell]

Yeah.

[Winston Sturzel]

He's trying to own the meme.

[David Zhang]

Amazon, putting the video on Twitter, talking about how bad the west is.

[Shelley Zhang]

So I dig the blocked platform for sieging ping books.

[David Zhang]

Potentially not a high IQ individual. But I digress. Couple people that are high IQ individuals. I have a clip of that I want to run and just kind of get your reaction to it. I think it's the last one with Tucker and Jeffrey Sachs.

[Matthew Tai]

Oh, no.

[Chris Chappell]

No one can attack us. We have every amount of deterrence. China does not threaten us and could not threaten us. And so what are we talking about?

[Winston Sturzel]

War?

[David Zhang]

Correct me if I'm wrong, the century of humiliation came from the west doing what, going to China and attacking it, per se. Right. Why could they not do the same thing to us? Why. Why would that be out of the realm of possibility? Why is he shilling against that point?

[Matthew Tai]

He is China's most prolific propagandist, Jeffrey Sachs. He is a mainstay on Chinese state media. And I think most people don't realize that, that almost every day you'll see an interview of him on Chinese state media. Yeah. Praising China and for lack of a better word, trashing America. That's what he does. That is his job. He. He is their expert. He belongs to China. And to see him on a platform like Tucker being taken seriously, and now he's been on all sorts of mainstream media, all sorts of things, being used as an expert. China's own propagandist. He's a demagogue, by the way. He's not a good guy, this Jeffrey Sachs guy, but he is China's biggest propagandist. And people don't know that.

[Chris Chappell]

You know, I tweeted about this, actually, or posted on X. Americans who go to China get paid to speak on behalf of the ccp, can come back to America with their American passport and still be protected by this country's rule of law and enjoy all of the freedoms. But a Chinese person, if they were to do the same thing but say for the American government, they cannot go back to China anymore, they will be arrested, they no longer enjoy, they have to give up their citizenship if they want to stay in America and become a refugee. So this idea that Americans especially can do that and not feel any guilt towards it and knowing that the citizens on the other side, they cannot do the same thing, I think this is a huge shame. It's not just America, but I've seen prominent American figures are doing this and for a very long time, and that's where I see the issue. When you don't want to understand that the other side is harming you, and then you're employing these figures from your own country to talk about those things, saying that they won't harm you, when in fact they're preparing for a very big, very imminent threat. In terms of, I think, scale, we've never seen if the US and China were to go to war, but then, you know, giving you this, like, numb like numbing drug that your own people are speaking from their own mouth. It's something that I think only, only the ccp, maybe Russia can do, but the CCP is really good at doing. And that's where I think we have less authority to counter. Maybe you guys can, but because we're not Americans, right? Even the Chinese immigrants who understand this threat very well, they're not, you know, born Americans who were, you know, started out in this land. They come here and then. So it feels like they're one. Words don't matter as much. And I think that's a lot of struggle is this. I know there's a lot of Chinese Americans out there who say, I know the Chinese Communist Party well, but their words aren't being heard because, well, they're not Americans, to be exact, in that they're immigrants. And that's. I find a really. A part where I think we need to improve on getting to connect with those Chinese Americans or people like you guys who come from China. But it's not there yet. And I really, I really don't think any near future that the American government will take that seriously. Because, you know, to be frank, I think the State Department could really use some help or resource for us to do this.

[David Zhang]

We're not getting paid by the CIA already.

[Winston Sturzel]

Usaid, CCP always says we are.

[David Zhang]

I won't make you comment on, yeah, sorry, it's not live. We'll cut this out.

[Chris Chappell]

But you know, you know what I'm saying, right? It's like if we're given more resources or we're paid more attention to, I think that would have been a great way to send a message out. But instead we have clips like that where you have Americans who are shelling for prominent Americans.

[David Zhang]

Prominent Americans, intelligent Americans that know what they're doing. I can forgive a shill because it's a little bit of money. These people know exactly what they're doing.

[Winston Sturzel]

What Winston was saying is that if you go on China Daily and you see someone like Jeffrey Sachs doing an interview, you go, that's just, you know, a guy being a villain, basically, right? Shitting on America, praising the Chinese government. That's just what he does. But when you see him get platformed by basically the biggest platform in America to legitimize and galvanize his message, which is, China will win. America is bad. I personally think that's borderline traitorous.

[David Zhang]

Which is less like, I don't know, Right around the same time you had him on, he's had Elbridge Colby on Multiple times. Most brilliant person at the State Department, in my opinion, has said over and over and over just what the Chinese Communist Party said, that a Chinese control of Asia is an existential threat to the United States and we absolutely need to shift resources to prepare for that.

[Winston Sturzel]

Agreed.

[David Zhang]

So what happened to the guy that would platform that and be like, wow, that is a great point. Elbridge to Jeffrey Sachs. Yeah, you're right. America's kind of dog. And Russia has cool grocery carts.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[Shelley Zhang]

And China is harmless. That was that clip.

[David Zhang]

It was harmless.

[Shelley Zhang]

China's harmless. They're not going to go to war with us. They wrote the book on unrestricted warfare. They are at war with us.

[Matthew Tai]

They are at war. They really are.

[David Zhang]

And this brings me to a really important point that I wanted to get to is they're already in the information war. Pretty soon it could be a hot war. TikTok, they haven't banned it? Well, they have banned it, but we're sh. Tting around with that a little bit. I'd like to see us get off the pot right now. Two questions. Why do you think TikTok is still available in the United States and what is the potential harm of TikTok moving forward? TikTok if it continues to exist?

[Winston Sturzel]

TikTok is and was an instrument of war. That's not sensationalist. We saw what happened when the CCP managed to utilize TikTok to get people to call their own congressman. People in America. Was it a button that actually forced it?

[Matthew Tai]

It was a pop up. And before you could use TikTok, it had a button to push to call.

[Winston Sturzel]

And the reason you would call.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, you want to do your brain rot stuff. You first have to call your congressman and complain about this bill.

[Winston Sturzel]

Because this bill was threatening to ban TikTok. Right. To me, that was the first instance where you go, this is being utilized to directly contact Americans and have political influence. That's already an instrument of war to me. Right. But now you have, with surmounting evidence that the CCP is in control at least a part of TikTok and at any time, any moment can use it for whatever it deems legal, push whatever.

[Matthew Tai]

Narratives they want to push.

[Winston Sturzel]

In 2017, for example, the CCP made a law that said any Chinese citizen that they asked to gather intelligence in America or wherever they are, they're legally liable to get intelligence for them. Right. TikTok's the same thing. If you have a part CCP owned app that has access to hundreds of millions of Americans that they can turn on like that Imagine if they invade Taiwan, they could quite literally get rid of any piece of critical content overnight and then push huge campaigns, which we've already seen them do with other issues. Two TikTok feeds to make it the only thing that the vast majority of Americans see to form, shape and control their opinion about the invasion of Taiwan and then potentially, if it goes into a hot war with the US demoralize almost every single American to the point where they don't want to participate or back their own government. And I think to go back to the clip you just showed is quite literally inklings of that already. Right. Coming through and seeping through other forms of media that we're already seeing. Right. China's doing it now, and they could do it so much worse if we don't get rid of TikTok.

[David Zhang]

What worried me the most is not even. Not even necessarily that we wouldn't support the United States, but when you saw things like Little Red Book. Right. Sha Wang Xu.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yes.

[David Zhang]

It wasn't just, oh, maybe China's not that bad. It was China's awesome. So not only will you be going against your government, I can see a case where there's active support amongst younger generations for the Chinese cause. Yes. To which the most brilliant people in our State Department are saying that could be an existential threat to the long term prosperity of America.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yes.

[David Zhang]

And the best soldiers the Chinese Communist Party will have will be Gen Z Americans.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[Shelley Zhang]

There was some woman I followed on Instagram because she raised backyard chickens and she got radicalized by Xiao Hongshu.

[Matthew Tai]

Really?

[Shelley Zhang]

Like, she started getting Chinese followers because she was on TikTok and then she, like, they told people to go on Xiaohongshu. Right. And so then she started like making videos where she was talking in Chinese and because she was like having Chinese followers and all this stuff. And then I was like, this has suddenly become this backyard chicken farmer has turned into a propaganda vehicle for the ccp.

[Winston Sturzel]

You know what's interesting? Oh, God.

[Matthew Tai]

Okay. Just like you said, TikTok told people to go and join Little Red Book as they. And they renamed it Red Note overnight to try and get away from the negative connotations.

[Shelley Zhang]

And there was so much gas leak highlighting about the Red Book where they were. The Financial Times wrote an article where they were like, oh, it doesn't mean Mao's Little Red Book, because that's not what people call it in China. And it absolutely is.

[Matthew Tai]

Everybody, my wife uses Little Red Book and she knows that it's about the Mao Zedong Little Red Book. Everybody uses Little Red Book. But the problem with Little Red Book or Xiaohongshu is that. Yeah, Red note is that it is a curated view of what China is. Only if you are sophisticated, upper middle class, usually a sophisticated woman wearing makeup and is rich, is driving a Maserati or whatever, you're fine on there. Okay? You cannot show homeless people on Xiaohongshu. You cannot show any kind of negative thing when it comes to the economy. You can't show the filth, the dirt, the drug problems, anything that's wrong with China, you cannot show it. So you can only see idealistic lifestyles. It's kind of like when you go through Instagram, usually have like a pretty girl in a bikini at the beach and someone with a fancy car or something. That's Instagram. You don't expect to see like negative stuff on Instagram. So when people go on Xiaolongshu, it's not a realistic picture of China. But they're being fed this rubbish and they think it's real.

[Winston Sturzel]

In fact, they actually deleted content. If you were an American and you showed that you're wealthy, they were deleting that content. And if you were Chinese and you showed that you were below middle class or just not exorbitantly wealthy, they actually would delete, delete your shadow, ban your content as well.

[Chris Chappell]

There was a lot of videos on how much money Chinese people, like how much they had made, how their apartments were so affordable in cities like Shanghai.

[David Zhang]

Well, everyone owns a house in China.

[Chris Chappell]

Yeah, everybody. And then how that you go to a grocery store with a hundred yuan, which is like 20, $15 or so, that you can buy grocery carts full of food and all the amazing products. Right. But then in reality, you. You see actually how much you can buy with the Chinese yuan, Chinese purchasing power. And what you can get is really not a lot. And there's more than one video showing it up. But they do this because I don't understand why we don't believe stuff we see on Instagram. But then when we download another app, somehow that becomes a reality because it's foreign.

[Winston Sturzel]

And in America, we're taught to be kind of, I think, polite and tolerant of other cultures. So if you don't understand that culture, you can't. You're racist if you try to criticize it or even second guess it.

[Matthew Tai]

Right? Yeah, true.

[Chris Chappell]

And then when you do criticize that, they call you extreme. You know, you have an extreme view on China or it's always negative about.

[Winston Sturzel]

China, you're extremists and we're a racist. If we say anything.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, Exactly.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah. The TikTok thing with the tariff war was really interesting, too.

[David Zhang]

Glad we're back. I wanted to get to that, too.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah. Because it was like, okay, now you have these videos where these Chinese, like, factory people are saying, oh, well, we make Gucci. We make, like, Hermes. Like, they're all lying. That's the thing. None of those things are made in China, but they claim they are. And then there's this authoritative AI voice that's saying that, like, China's actually the one making all these things, and then they just send it to Europe. And so they're really redirecting your anger about high prices and then saying it's the west that's the problem.

[Matthew Tai]

Right.

[Shelley Zhang]

Like, China is just trying to help. You have cheap altruism to them. Yes, yes.

[Matthew Tai]

Isn't it funny that they targeted European brands and American ones? Because it's like, those are the people you're having the trade war with. Why are you throwing all these European brands under the bus?

[Winston Sturzel]

Because foreigners are foreigners.

[Shelley Zhang]

And it's so interesting how many people bought that.

[David Zhang]

The thing that it just. Again, it was an argument. Eating itself is. And again, I think it's probably very clear. I'm a. A Trump supporter for the most part, but then I see him launch this tariff war on China, and I'm fully in support of it. But then I see him refuse to ban TikTok, which is being used as a medium to undermine the tariffs that he instituted.

[Winston Sturzel]

It's a PSYOP. TikTok is a PSYOP.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes, it is.

[Winston Sturzel]

Get rid of TikTok.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes, 100%. Anyone with a clear mind will know that this is a bad idea. The Communist Party has control over every single Chinese company. It's built into the law. TikTok belongs to ByteDance. ByteDance is a Chinese company. The Communist Party can walk in there and say, give me the location and the IP address and whatever of this person, and turn on their camera and their microphone so I can listen to it. And they have to do it.

[Shelley Zhang]

We already have documentation that they went after journalists who were looking into track them.

[Winston Sturzel]

Their counter is that. Oh, well, we came to an agreement that will store data on American shores in Texas. Right. Right here. Right. But the problem is the Internet doesn't matter.

[Matthew Tai]

You can access anything from anywhere.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yes.

[David Zhang]

The engineer said the code was changing so fast from day to day, they had no idea what they were even looking at.

[Winston Sturzel]

I'm just gonna devil's advocate and say that, okay, it's all safe. American's Data is safe now. Right. Does that mean that the CCP can't go into the ByteDance office and say, okay, algorithm now literally show pro China work process propaganda? That part hasn't been solved.

[Matthew Tai]

No, you know.

[Shelley Zhang]

Oh, yeah, definitely. And they. What was the news that came out today that there are these hidden, like, secret communication channels in power inverters.

[Matthew Tai]

Solar panels.

[Shelley Zhang]

In solar panels. So there are these parts of solar panels, wind turbines, EV batteries that are controlled. Like you use them to remotely control the device. And there are the ones made in China. They. They found hidden communication devices in there, which means that China could shut off your solar grid.

[Matthew Tai]

Sure.

[Shelley Zhang]

They could shut off your wind turbines. Like all of this renewable energy that we very gullibly brought to China, and they stole the IP from American companies and then basically decimated the market otherwise by undercutting the prices supported by state subsidies. So now no one else can make solar panels panels except China. And then they've got these hidden backdoors in all of them. Like, so if they can do that with solar panels, it's totally random.

[David Zhang]

Right? That just happened.

[Shelley Zhang]

It just happened.

[Winston Sturzel]

Right. I'm so glad you brought that up because we keep bringing up these different points and we used to be able to spend a year, like, kind of honing in like a big thing that CCP is doing, like Uyghurs, Right? The Uyghur genocide. Talk about that for a year now. It's getting so difficult to cover because there's almost a new psyop every month. The rednote migration, the solar panels.

[Chris Chappell]

Deep seek.

[Winston Sturzel]

Deep seek. It's like, I can't keep up. If we're not aware at this point that China's already using unrestricted warfare on the U.S. i don't. You gotta be stupid to me. I'm sorry.

[David Zhang]

I mean, you mentioned Sha Hong Shu, you mentioned Deepseek, we've talked about Xiaomi cars, but it's like Apple. It's also American companies, and that is Moogle. You know, but then we've all from time to time and depend on things like YouTube or different platforms to get our message out. And we here have obviously dealt with our share of censorship for a variety of reasons that probably differ from you. But I know all of you have dealt with censorship because of the content that you talk about. So could you just kind of let our audience know your struggles with that big time?

[Matthew Tai]

I mean, first of all, in the early days, China had a very effective way of saying, censoring what we said, and that was to mass flag our Videos. And we found instructions on Chinese forums that targeted specifically my videos and your videos at some point. But they had like pictures because a lot of the Chinese Internet warriors, keyboard warriors as they call them, they couldn't speak English, right. So they would have screenshots.

[David Zhang]

You are true?

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, exactly, yes. And they would show a step by step procedure in the. And they'd say, go to his channel, go to his latest video. You click on this little icon, you go down to here, you say report it. And then they say copy and paste this reason. And it would be like this shows danger towards children or this is violence. Violence or you know, something about, you know, sexual this or that. They'd always find like the worst things. And then they have these tutorials on how to mass flag my videos. And that worked. My videos would get demonetized, my videos would get suppressed, my videos would actually get taken down. And so they used to do that for the longest time and they used to brigade and down vote brigade and stuff. And you know, YouTube finally cottoned onto that kind of thing. Right. And they stopped that. And after a while that wasn't effective anymore. But then they found other ways, like manipulating search results right now. And I checked it again in the hotel, you know, I went on the tv, I searched China and hundreds of videos scroll down. And you don't see a LAO86 video. You don't see a Serpent Today video. You don't see the China show video. You see the Bloomberg's China show, which they copied our name, maybe others. Yes, in Minecraft. But you know, you don't see a China uncensored video. What you see is Chongqing, the biggest city you never heard of. You see living in China, USA versus China.

[Winston Sturzel]

Eight times.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes, eight times we drew bins videos. Yeah, that's what you see. You see pro China propaganda and I mean of course you'll get your normal news cycle stuff. You'll see something from cnn. You'll see all the usual, like new stuff. But that's because they've got a good partnership with YouTube. But to find. We only talk about China. Okay, I've got videos that have got millions of views. So do you. Our stuff doesn't turn up, but you'll see like a three year old video from a shill that's got like 500 views, turns up in the circle. Search results for China. This is being manipulated.

[Winston Sturzel]

There's search results that are coming up. So again, there won't be one video from us. If you search China, there will be search results of videos with zero views. Like, they came out two days ago and they haven't gotten one view yet. Something's weird.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah. So I don't know if YouTube is willingly complicit in this. I think the Chinese Communist Party, like, always has found a way to manipulate the system, and it's probably through some kind of SEO something along the way.

[Winston Sturzel]

Well, I mean, the CCP brags about being in every Western company already.

[David Zhang]

Who would think of all the. And I know this was kind of a sticking point is the looking for espionage through, like, college students that came from China. And that became a big problem. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, they stopped it because of sort of racial discrimination accusations.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[David Zhang]

Why? Again, that's using our open society against us now. Why not, like we saw at Stanford, why not flood a ton of people in that are going to end up getting jobs in Palo Alto, end up getting jobs in Silicon Valley? So those. I don't want to call them accusations, but to posit that as something that might be happening doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility.

[Winston Sturzel]

Of course they're doing that.

[Shelley Zhang]

There was a Twitter whistleblower that came out before X that said that there were. Well, no, this was when it was Twitter.

[Matthew Tai]

Okay, can say that, right?

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah. So it was before Elon bought it. So a whistleblower came out and talked about, among other things, that there are CCP spies embedded inside Twitter in different groups and they, you know.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, makes sense.

[Shelley Zhang]

So if it's in Twitter or X.

[Winston Sturzel]

Of course you get a lot of propaganda, Chinese propaganda on X. Yeah.

[Matthew Tai]

Twitter has also hotbed so bad.

[David Zhang]

That's my entire. And it's because I engage with them.

[Winston Sturzel]

I don't.

[Matthew Tai]

I engage with that a lot. And the propagandists and state media propagandists and state officials have Twitter accounts pushing.

[David Zhang]

Mao Zedong's speeches from the Korean War. I was like, what am I seeing right now?

[Matthew Tai]

Isn't it crazy that a country that you're not allowing your own citizens to access Twitter, they're banned and people have been arrested who've used a VPN to make a post on Twitter. They've been taken away and disappeared, but the officials are allowed to go on Twitter and put stuff out there.

[Winston Sturzel]

Then you get the WUMA handbook.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we have faced a lot of the same things that you guys have. Like, with us, it also started with demonetization, age restriction. Like a lot of our on the ground Hong Kong coverage in 2019 was just demonetized. Because, you know, we were showing protests and things like that, and it took a journalist looking into it and calling YouTube before they magically undemonetized all of our videos. But it's been a constant structure struggle through Covid, where they started pulling videos down and actively censoring. And now I think, like, I think we all experience the same thing, where suddenly, right around the November election last year, our views got cut in half.

[Matthew Tai]

Yes. Overnight.

[Shelley Zhang]

Overnight. With no rhyme or reason.

[Winston Sturzel]

All of us.

[Matthew Tai]

Right, all of us. And that's why I reached out to Chris. I sent him an email, and I said, listen, because we look. We look at what other channels are doing. We saw that your numbers were down, too. And we were like, listen, this is really strange. All of a sudden, our views were cut in half. You know, was it. Did it happen to you? And it turned out it was at the same time.

[Shelley Zhang]

At the same time. And then we did a survey of our audience, and they were telling us things like, you know, a lot of them were. Like, a third of our audience said they'd been unsubscribed from our channel, like that YouTube had taken us off their feed without them wanting to. And then also that they were never recommended, like, anti CCP content, like you guys or David's videos.

[David Zhang]

So what did you guys do about that? Yeah, I was really impressed by that.

[Shelley Zhang]

So we launched a campaign called Operation Honeypot. Because what our YouTube rep told us was that, oh, you know, your videos just aren't maybe aren't getting enough engagement. Like, maybe people aren't as interested overnight. Overnight, all of a sudden, all of them. But because they were saying the engagement's the key, right? We're like, okay, well, we will call your bluff on this. We will get our audience to engage. We told our audience to, like, put a honeypot emoji in the comments to show us that you are engaging with our content. And then, you know, we'll see if this makes a difference in terms of, like. And then we started getting people commenting that, like, I thought you guys quit making videos. I haven't seen your videos in months or years. You know, like, I didn't know that you guys were still around. So it actually did have an effect where, like, suddenly it was coming up in people's feeds because there was a little bit more engagement, but it was obviously still incredibly suppressed.

[Matthew Tai]

You know, there is something important I forgot to mention is at the time when our videos and we had a discussion, we did a little video together and stuff. But at the time when our views Got cut in half. And you searched China and you couldn't find anything from any of our channels. They were buried. Even if you go down to the bottom, none of them would turn up. I did an experiment on my channel. I released two videos which were negative in the title about America. It was like, america is screwed. China beat us. China won. I made that. And those came up in the results.

[Winston Sturzel]

And they went viral.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah, and those like, I made that one about Red Books. Just basically told the truth about China. America's lost 600,000 views. Something like that. Almost immediately, none of my other content was turning up.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah.

[Matthew Tai]

So there is something going on where.

[Winston Sturzel]

Only anti American content, anti American pro.

[Matthew Tai]

China content is being boosted and anything that's critical of the CCP or China is being shadow banned somehow.

[Shelley Zhang]

We asked our audience that too, and they said, like, half of them said that they were being fed pro CCP content that they didn't want, but they were constantly seeing that coming up in their feeds.

[Chris Chappell]

My suspicion is the algorithm somehow favors less radical criticisms. Like, you see how the. The way that the shells are making videos is. It's very tame. It's very good for the general viewing. But if we do something and we barely criticize that same thing, then the algorithm seems to read it as we're too extreme on this particular topic. And so combined with that, because I don't know if you guys noticed this too. Every video that I put out, the recommendation is the opposite side of the U.S. yes.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yes, that's a good point.

[Chris Chappell]

Or that we get like an ad for Temu or we get an ad for Red Note around that time that we're talking about that. So it almost seems like for every step we push, there's six steps around us that are being pushed in the opposite direction. And, you know, I don't want to accuse YouTube of being paid by China for doing this, but it just seems like whatever it is being done on the other side, it is clearly flooding the recognition of China content on YouTube. And so far I didn't get that same thing as you guys, but I did notice that Winston did the reverse clickbait. I did too. My videos got much better numbers. But I did notice that for me, right now, that the shorts algorithms and things like that have changed for the worse. So we'll see what happens. But in general, yeah, like them, my videos never showed up when I type in China. And even I believe a China Tech YouTuber named David Zhang as well, which show up on a higher search for David Zhang than I do. Even Though I have more subscribers and more views.

[Winston Sturzel]

And you make China content?

[Shelley Zhang]

Yes. All of our shows have the word China in them.

[Matthew Tai]

China uncensored, you know, China uncensored, the China show. But that doesn't turn up. But like, random. Other ones.

[Winston Sturzel]

Small ones.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[David Zhang]

So that brings me to this last point. I think I'm glad that we get to do it here because we've been fortunate enough to move off YouTube in a lot of ways and work on Rumble, which is great for. I mean, China and Russia banned them too. So, you know, it is what it is. But if you wanted to get your one word out that you want people to know about what's going on with the China situation to people that might never get the chance to hear from you otherwise, what's the one thing each of you would want them to know?

[Matthew Tai]

China's out to eat your lunch. Honestly, China at the moment is not. It's not your friend. China's not this you utopia that they make it out to be. And if you. If you think. If you're buying into the propaganda and you think that China is a better solution to where you are, it's better than where you live. You know, it looks nicer, it looks cleaner, it looks more high tech. You know, everybody looks pretty and beautiful. Remember that you're being fed a very curated image of what China really is. That's not the reality of China. And just like Mike Tyson said, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. And I have, because I a lot of subscribers, I have so many people who've reached out to me who have apologized to me for talking bad about me because they were in China. They were living their life. They were living like a king, doing their stuff. And then they got hit. They either got caught in a drug bust or something went wrong with their visa, or they made enemies with somebody, or they got involved in a legal dispute and they were screwed and they were detained and they were taken away and they were deported. And it's only when you actually hit up against the problem, you realize how bad the system is and how rigged it is against the ordinary people and how little freedom people really have in China.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah, I think people dance around this idea that we can't say China is our enemy. That is a loaded statement. It sounds vicious, right? In reality, the ccp, the Chinese government, is our enemy. There's no buts about it. The Chinese people are, by and large, large the victims of this system. Right. We need to be allied with the humanity the people of China, at the same time, also remember that China in its schools right now is teaching its kids to be ready for armed conflict with America and that America and Americans are the enemy. Right? They are already doing that. They're having their cake and eating it too. They're showing you a curated image of them being peaceful. They're going to be the future of globalization and trade and freedom and everything. And America is going to isolate itself and they are the enemy. Right? So there's two images that they're portraying. One domestically in China, which is of hate and that America is bad. And then to the rest of the world, that China is the alternative and it's peaceful and it's wonderful, Right? China is currently involved in unrestricted warfare. They're in our power grids, they're in our water systems. They have hacked our governments, they have hacked our telecoms, almost every single telecom in America, Right? They're already involved in a multi billion dollar propaganda campaign to change your mind against your own country. And it's working. Whether you are on the left or whether you are on the right or somewhere in between, China's not on your team. China's against your team. If you are a Westerner that believes in democratic ideals, or if you are somebody around the world that believes that people should have a say in anything, China is your enemy. It is the enemy. And that's just the be all and end all of it.

[Chris Chappell]

Donald Trump, don't trust China. China is asshole. But I mean, I think the fundamental idea for Americans to understand is that when we say China, we mean the ccp, of course. And the Chinese people are like you mentioned, the victims. But unfortunately, what the ccp, CCP has done is they tried to be the representative of the Chinese of China. Right? So when we are critical of China, we're really critical of the government, the Communist Party and what it has done to harm everybody around the world. And this threat is comprehensive. We talked about many examples today, but it's not a single sort of lane type of situation. It's multiple fronts. And you know, they always say that you should prepare for the worst. And I think it's, don't let your guard down and really be prepared for the worst and realize that what could possibly happen, you know, what did happen in World War II with the Nazi situation couldn't happen and is happening in China for much worse for what they've done. So really you can't trust them. And this comes from, you know, we have people that lived in China, we have people that were born in China. You have people that know China a lot, just heed our words and really just at least keep in the back of your mind that we're. What we're saying is not that we're crazy, right. We're not being paid by the certain government bodies, but we are actually trying to tell you the truth.

[Matthew Tai]

Yeah.

[Shelley Zhang]

You say that America is still the beacon of hope for the world. Like, where do Chinese people, where do rich Chinese people want to send their money? They want to send their money to America. Where do Chinese people want to go? They want to go to America. They want to settle America. Where did Chinese leadership sent his daughter to go to university, to Harvard? Like, this is like, what the CCP wants to portray is that America is a terrible land of chaos and violence. And China is so much better to their own people and to, you know, Americans to demoralize us. But what you see is like, what do Chinese people want? They want to get out of China and they want to go to America. And I think that speaks a lot too, that, you know, they know what their society is like. They know how repressive it is there and how terrible it is to live in a place where you're censored all the time. You have to self censor. You know, you are not like the government's enemy and you are living your life and then suddenly you are, and you're in prison. You know, it can happen like that. And it happens like that to about 10% of the Chinese population at any point in time because they always have to repress part of their people. So, you know, when they try to make Americans think that America is a terrible place, China is so much better. That is a lie. That's not what the. That's not what the Chinese people's money is saying. Right.

[David Zhang]

The leadership doesn't believe it.

[Shelley Zhang]

Yeah, they don't believe it themselves.

[David Zhang]

Well, guys, thank you so much. Before, before we get out here, I want people to know where they can find you, what's the best place? And Shelley, I think you have something too, because I really want people to follow you guys moving forward.

[Winston Sturzel]

Thank you. Yes. The China Show, Hechina Show. It's a long form podcast, every Friday live.

[Matthew Tai]

Join us. It's super fun. We talk about the propaganda. It's kind of humorous. We look at the nonsense China's putting out, the serious stuff too, and we just lift the veil off of China.

[Winston Sturzel]

They don't like us very much.

[David Zhang]

No, it's fun. It's functional.

[Chris Chappell]

I want to join your show.

[Winston Sturzel]

Yeah, absolutely. Coming on our show.

[Chris Chappell]

Thank you. My show's called China Insider. I do a lot of short form content, some long form analysis as well. And this August, I'm actually heading to Malaysia to investigate the ghost city there. So if you want to support, consider donating to us on our channel and checking us out.

[Shelley Zhang]

So my show is China Uncensored. My main coast is Chris Chappell.

[David Zhang]

And also first, thanks for Chris for helping us get all this together.

[Shelley Zhang]

Unfortunately, Chris couldn't make it. He's very sad about it, but maybe next time. Yeah, but yeah. So we've actually started a subscription website to try to help us fight the YouTube demonetization. So it's ChinaUncensored TV and if you put in Crowder, you can get your first month free.

[David Zhang]

Cool.

[Shelley Zhang]

Come check us out.

[David Zhang]

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you all so much. This is an absolute pleasure.

[Chris Chappell]

Thank you so much.

[David Zhang]

Really is, you know, a fan, if not anything else. So I appreciate all this. Thank you guys.

[Winston Sturzel]

You're welcome.

[Matthew Tai]

Absolute pleasure.

[Chris Chappell]

Click Rumble Premium and join now for 99 annually or 999amonth to get the entirely ad free experience and an ever expanding roster of content creators and free speech.