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- [00:00]
Tracy Alloway
UKG Their HR pay and workforce management tools help business leaders empower their people. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more@ukg.com work@charmin we heard you shouldn't.
- [00:14]
Yi Ling Lu
Talk about going to the bathroom in public, so we decided to sing about it. Charmin Ultra strong you can use less better than the rest Charmin Ultra strong Booty past the clean text Salmon weave texture it's the best Study up teach.
- [00:29]
Joe Weisenthal
A lesson on fresh your booty past.
- [00:32]
Yi Ling Lu
The cle clean text Charmin Ultra strong Charmin Ultra Strong with diamond weave texture cleans better than the leading one plaid brand so you can use less. Enjoy the go with Charmin.
- [00:45]
Joe Weisenthal
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lot Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
- [01:06]
Tracy Alloway
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
- [01:07]
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy, remember how like, in the late 90s, like, the Internet was starting to become a thing and people thought it would bring like, liberalism and democracy, utopia? I totally bought into that. Like, I, you know, people look back at that and they're like, oh, they were naive. Like, I don't blame them. Like, I think I bought into that too.
- [01:23]
Tracy Alloway
I mean, there was something very wholesome about the sort of mid-90s Internet culture where you could go to everyone's like, little individual blog and people were mostly talking about their hobbies and things like that. Or at least that was my of it. Probably colored by the fact that I was in middle school at the time. But it seemed very innocent, it was.
- [01:41]
Joe Weisenthal
Very cool, it was very decentralized, right? So now we associate the Internet with a handful of tech oligarchs that control various kingdoms. Maybe you could even say within the Internet, whether it's the Meta Kingdom or the Amazon Kingdom or whatever, but it was very decentralized. Everyone at their own little sites, cobbled together and so forth. And I totally bought that idea. It was just like, oh, we're all going to talk to each other, we're going to work things out and. And there's no way that authoritarian governments could ever control this and we'll finally realize the true promise of democracy and all that stuff. I totally bought into it.
- [02:16]
Tracy Alloway
Fast forward to 2026. How would you describe the Internet now?
- [02:20]
Joe Weisenthal
I mean, the word that always comes to my mind and there are many words is just this sort of like, sheer, like sort of tribalism and conflictualism on every level, right? Nationalism, racism, bigotry, antisemitism, sexism, et cetera. It's just like riven with, it's riven with conflict and so forth. It's heavily centralized, all of the sort of utopian promise I'm like, Didn't really.
- [02:45]
Tracy Alloway
Pan out that way, I would say. Cesspool.
- [02:47]
Joe Weisenthal
Cesspool. That's a good one, too.
- [02:48]
Tracy Alloway
You have to try really, really hard nowadays to find, like, good and useful corners of the Internet.
- [02:54]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah.
- [02:55]
Tracy Alloway
I'm not saying that they're not out there, but it is interesting how far we've deviated from that initial utopian premise of the Internet. The other thing that's happening, we're recording this on, let's see, January 27th. What's interesting is that we're starting to have even more discussion about the power of the platform. So over the weekend, there have been some allegations that TikTok, for instance, is censoring Minneapolis video or video of the Minneapolis shooting. And that's just after the new ownership.
- [03:26]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah.
- [03:27]
Tracy Alloway
Took control of the platform. Right. So they spun off the US business, and now it has all these new owners, and people are starting to talk about, well, maybe they're censoring, or even if they're not directly censoring some stuff, maybe the algorithm is influencing what people see.
- [03:42]
Joe Weisenthal
Totally. And then there's one other dimension before we get into the conversation that I think is very important here, which is that the Internet is splintering geographically. Right. So we've known for a long time, of course, people talk about the firewall in China and the Chinese Internet, but it's not just China. Right. We see the UK establishing its own rules, and we see Australia establishing its own rules. We. We saw the thing a couple years ago with Brazil temporarily banning Twitter, et cetera. And so there's all these sort of intermingling of digital platforms and national sovereignty. And I really do believe to some extent that a lot of the leaders around the world are looking at China in a seemingly more controlled Internet, like, with jealousy. Right. And, oh, we would love to, like, have this level of control over our sort of town square, et cetera. And, you know, some countries have the First Amendment, so that makes it very tough, et cetera. But it really feels like there are so many aspects of the Internet that are sort of not panning out, and people are like, we want to constrict what people could see, we want to tighten the algorithms, we want to curb some kind of discourse, et cetera. And I think this is going to be one of the biggest stories of our time.
- [04:52]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah. With China specifically, there's still a big question, which is whether or not the censorship of the Internet basically allows it to act as A sort of like safety valve that lets people, you know, blow off some steam, but not enough steam to actually threaten the regime over there, or whether it's actually a tool or could be a tool of social change, because people are to some extent allowed to say some stuff. I think that question is, like, still kind of unanswered.
- [05:21]
Joe Weisenthal
Well, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest. Someone who has written a fascinating new book all about the Chinese Internet. We're going to be speaking with Yi Ling Lu. She is the author of the new book the Wall Dancers. Thank you so much for coming on Odd lots.
- [05:36]
Yi Ling Lu
Thanks so much for having me.
- [05:37]
Joe Weisenthal
What is this book and why is it called the Wall Dancers?
- [05:40]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, so the Wall Dancers, the phrase comes from this term in Chinese which is called dancing and shackles. And it was first used in the early 2000s by journalists to describe what it means to, like, write and report under state constraints, but slowly became viral as a term that was used by. I've seen, like, software engineers use it, musicians use it, science fiction writers use it. And it really resonated with me, this idea of the dance, because it captured this idea that to live and navigate Chinese society is a dance. It's this dynamic push and pull between state and society. It means living in this place that's on one hand rich with innovation and. And yet on the other hand, rigidly constrained. And I came to see that this dance was most dynamic on the Internet. What we know is the space behind the Great Firewall. And the people that I thought were really good and adept at navigating this terrain, I came to know them and called them dancers.
- [06:45]
Tracy Alloway
So this was the really interesting thing about your book and the reason we wanted to talk to you. You tell this story of the Chinese Internet through the perspective of individuals rather than, say, the Internet platforms that have come to dominate the space. Or even from a sort of state centric point of view. What do you get out of interviewing or following individuals versus taking that other approach which, you know, there are plenty of books out there about the rise of Weibo and stuff like that.
- [07:15]
Yi Ling Lu
I think my main, the main reason behind this choice was if you look at Western news headlines or headlines in general about China and Chinese technology, it almost always falls under one of two binaries. It's reduced to very simple terms. One is China, the kind of sprawling economic juggernaut that's building humanoids and high speed rail and its place of boundless opportunity. And then you have the, like, techno, authoritarian, oppressive regime where mindless People have no agency of their own. And I think the big issue here is that the Chinese Internet is always framed through and seen through the lens of American national security and economic interests. And I wanted to force people out of these tropes. And the way to see kind of China and the Chinese Internet in all its complexity and contradictions is through people and through individual lives.
- [08:10]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, you start the book by telling the story of a gay man who is able, through the Internet, to build community, find people eventually at a time when of course, there was extreme repression. Homosexuality was, I think, illegal at the time. You know, again, this seems both in China and the U.S. what probably a lot of people were very hopeful for with the Internet, this idea that, oh, people are going to be able to find community, like minded individuals find acceptance in these digital spaces. And I suppose in many cases since this happened. But it is interesting how in both the global context and the Chinese specific context, there were similar stories being told, there were similar hopes.
- [08:53]
Yi Ling Lu
Definitely. I think of the story of the Internet in China, at least as a romance. But I'm realizing, as you discussed earlier, the story of the global Internet was also a romance. The story of the World Wide Web was also a romance. I certainly bought into the narrative that you bought into. I thought we were on this like teleological arc towards liberalization. And I think a lot of people bought into that narrative. This idea that, you know, the Chinese Internet, despite the fact that the firewall existed very early, was going to push people towards greater openness, greater freedom, greater connection, and it would just keep going on from there and there.
- [09:29]
Tracy Alloway
So talk to us about what is and isn't allowed on the Chinese Internet then. Because as you say, it's more nuanced than just like outright censorship in many ways, although sometimes it is just outright censorship and you can't say a specific word like Tiananmen or something like that. And I remember actually now that I'm thinking about it, in the early 2000s, when I was in Beijing, like the censorship was very obvious. Like certain sites were just outright blocked on tv. You'd be watching CNN and suddenly it would go black during a news story. Or you get newspapers delivered to you that had literally physical sentences crossed out with a black marker. But what is and isn't allowed?
- [10:13]
Yi Ling Lu
I will start off by saying that if I could answer that question really accurately, I would be a very rich woman right now. I think the reason being, like, the censorship ecosystem thrives off vagueness, right? The fact that it's vague, the fact that there are no Red lines is what allows it to function so effectively. I will say that it's changed quite dramatically over the last few decades, especially since you were last there, Tracy. So, you know, back in the day, I would say the lines were much clearer. A lot of people would say things like no Tiananmen, no Tibet, no Taiwan. They would call them the three T's. So censorship back then was very much about a dissent against the government, criticism of the government, but most importantly, anything that would provoke collective action. So if there was, you know, news of a protest or news of people gathering or any type of unease that might boil into something bigger and bring people together into a physical town square that got censored. But over the years, I would say, particularly in the mid 2010s, that's come to encompass also anything that veers from the party's ideological agenda. So this is where you have statements coming out saying, we don't want unhealthy marital values appearing on the Internet. Like, we don't want. I think recently in 2021, Sissy Boys got added to things that got needed to be taken down the Internet.
- [11:35]
Tracy Alloway
No sissies allowed. I'm imagining like a hand drawn sign on a treehouse or something.
- [11:41]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah. And you know, like everything that comes, you know, everything that's part of its ideological agenda is now scrubbed off. And another thing that add on there is like the excessive flaunting of wealth. You know, that's something that's new that used to be all over the Internet back in the day.
- [11:56]
Joe Weisenthal
We need that here. It's driving people crazy because they look on Instagram and I remember being, you know, during COVID and I was like in my house and seeing like all these people, like flying around. I got very resentful. What about criticism of the government, but not from an ideological perspective per se. Because sometimes you read a story like someone will have gotten hit by a train or a car, and maybe the police, like, didn't do an investigation. You see this big uproar. Talk to us about what's allowed and how they. How the managers of the firewall are managers of the rules, not the firewall per se. Think about these incidents, like just, yeah, criticism of government handling of things.
- [12:39]
Yi Ling Lu
Again, like, I can't say with, you know, definitively what's taken down and what's not taken down. I would veer on saying that whenever there's any criticism of any kind of local, official, local government that's technically looked on with great caution and taken down, but how it actually works behind the scenes is that some higher level top regulators say that the Chinese Cyberspace administration, the cac, will write a directive. So maybe there's local corruption in some county and news starts spilling out and whoever is part of that regulatory committee will be writing a directive that says, hey, downplay this. Let's not have this appear on Weibo. That will then get passed on to Weibo sensors who then start scrubbing that off their newsfeed. Or it happens the other way, where Weibo's censors aren't even receiving that directive, but kind of proactively, like a student who is really nervous about upsetting their teacher in advance will just go and scrub that off even before receiving that directive.
- [13:44]
Tracy Alloway
Oh, interesting. So self censorship, basically.
- [13:47]
Yi Ling Lu
Yes.
- [13:48]
Tracy Alloway
So how labor intensive is the censorship process nowadays? Because, you know, I imagine as you said, directives get made and someone has to enact them. But on the other hand, so much of the Internet nowadays is ruled by algos and most recently AI. You could just, you know, design an algorithm that always downplays political scandal or something like that.
- [14:12]
Yi Ling Lu
I would say hugely labor intensive.
- [14:15]
Tracy Alloway
Armies of Wu MAU. That's what they're called, right?
- [14:17]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah. So that specifically refers to the $0.50 Army Umau. But that specifically refers to not necessarily state sponsored actors or not necessarily state paid individuals, but people who are kind of pumping patriotic content.
- [14:32]
Tracy Alloway
Hobbyist nationalists.
- [14:34]
Yi Ling Lu
Exactly, exactly. So, you know, there's actually not too much of a difference between the Wu MAU and maybe some of the patriotic trolls and incels that you see on X today. Right. To what extent is are some of the people who are posting like pro Trump propaganda on Twitter essentially the same as Wu Mao? There's this dynamic called flooding, which refers to when incels or a particular group of online individuals are pumping just content onto a news feed to try to get rid of news that they don't want people to look at. And that takes place in China all the time. But I think that's different from actual employees who work at places like Weibo or Douyin who are just spending every single day deleting stuff off the web. And you know, when I interviewed actually for the book a sensor for Weibo and he started working there at in 2011, I think he was one of 150 employees. This was right when Weibo was founded and he said, you know, by 2020 he had left already. There were probably like 10,000.
- [15:41]
Joe Weisenthal
Wow.
- [15:57]
Tracy Alloway
Ukg their HR pay and workforce management tools help business leaders empower their people. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more@ukg.com work.
- [16:10]
Joe Weisenthal
I mean, this is sort of what I was struck by reading your book, which is that, you know, you talk about these people who are, maybe they're bought, maybe they're paid, maybe they're just naturally impelled to join a mob and want to flood something. But some of these patterns do not seem distinct to China. It's almost like they're endemic to the Internet itself, regardless of what the official rules are.
- [16:38]
Yi Ling Lu
Absolutely right. We have no sense of whether or not these are kind of homegrown, grassroots, patriotic flames that are just amplified. And, you know, when I say that, doesn't that sound very similar to what's taking place on the American Internet? I forget the name of that one American Twitter influencer who's kind of been talked about as Trump's right hand woman. Do you know who I'm talking about?
- [17:02]
Joe Weisenthal
Laura Loomer. Yes.
- [17:03]
Yi Ling Lu
Laura Loomer isn't there.
- [17:05]
Tracy Alloway
I was gonna say you have to be more specific because there's quite a few nowadays.
- [17:09]
Yi Ling Lu
But, yeah, Laura Loomer, you know, when we read news articles on her, it's, is she being paid out? Is she not being paid out? And, you know, that very much reminds of the dynamic with a lot of Chinese patriotic influencers. Like, they very much earnestly hold the views that they're sharing. But is there a cut being taken by amplifying those views and supporting those views?
- [17:28]
Tracy Alloway
Since we've mentioned Weibo a couple times now and, you know, you just gave us that anecdote about the number of censors they had, and they have experienced phenomenal growth. One thing I never understood about Weibo is the kind of origin story, because my understanding is they were basically born out of censorship. So there was unrest in a room Chi, I think it was. And so a bunch of existing Internet platforms either got, you know, repressed or taken down completely. And then the founder of Weibo was like, I know this is an opportunity for me to get in and start my own platform. I never understood that mindset. What was it that he thought he could do that other platforms had failed to do?
- [18:14]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, so Weibo actually means little blog or microblog. And Weibo is shorthand for Sino Weibo, which is the full company's name. But before 2009, honestly, before 2011, there were many, many Weibo's, or there were dozens of companies that were all trying to be microblogging platforms. So there was a platform called Fanfu, there was a whole bunch. There was a platform called Renren, which was not really a microblogging. Platform. It was kind of like a Chinese Facebook, so to say, back in the day. People.
- [18:44]
Tracy Alloway
People. Right.
- [18:45]
Yi Ling Lu
Ex. Exactly. Exactly. And the founder of Sino Weibo actually founded what is now known as Weibo in 2009. And he did essentially the same thing as all these other companies. He just did a better job of censoring. That's really what happened, as you mentioned, during the protests in Urumqi in 2009. He just did a much better job of scrubbing information off the Weibo feed and the time and didn't get shut down or all of these other companies got shut down.
- [19:15]
Tracy Alloway
Hmm.
- [19:15]
Joe Weisenthal
It's interesting hearing you describe. We did an episode, actually, it was last March with Kaiser Kuo of the Seneca Podcast. We were talking a little bit about how Chinese policymaking works and this idea of this sort of decentralized, centralized, like KPIs. Right. So Beijing will put this was in the industrial policy context, Beijing says, we want more solar production or more electric vehicle production. And then all the provincial leaders figure out what that means in the context of their region and then work quasi autonomously to satisfy that. It sounds similar to some extent with the rules around censorship, especially when you describe some of that preemptive self censorship of everyone trying to figure out the right level or approach that is consistent with the broader level mandate.
- [19:59]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, no, that's a really good point and definitely a parallel that I would draw. You know, for example, if they were to release industrial policy, a tech company CEO will then like, read that policy very carefully and be like, okay, how can we align our company's direction with the rhetoric brick of this policy directive? The same goes with censorship. You know, so one of the subjects that I profile is the CEO, or was the CEO of this dating app, blued? And so if they release a censorship directive saying, we don't want sissy boys on our platform, he's going to go and look very carefully at the platform and see how are we going to make sure there are no Sissy Boys on our app. Right. And so there is definitely this sense of. I don't know if you have read Harry Potter.
- [20:45]
Joe Weisenthal
I never did.
- [20:46]
Tracy Alloway
I did. Did you not?
- [20:48]
Joe Weisenthal
I never did. I never did. But Tracy will get it, and 99% of our listeners will get it. So feel free to use the analogy. It will go over my head.
- [20:56]
Yi Ling Lu
This analogy really hit it home for me. But you remember Dolores Umbridge?
- [21:00]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah. Oh, she was creepy.
- [21:01]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah. You remember how she would, like post these degrees and then all of the. And she would just post them on the wall and then they would be kind of vague and then students would freak out and scramble and, you know, people like Malfoy would aggressively over interpret and that. I think that's the dynamic, essentially.
- [21:20]
Tracy Alloway
I think this is an underappreciated point sometimes, but like the vagueness in the decrees is done on purpose. Right. It's so that, like, you're never really sure what is and isn't allowed. And so you do start self censoring. And also, you know, if the government wants to go after you, they can do it because the rule is purposefully vague.
- [21:41]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah.
- [21:42]
Yi Ling Lu
And it also means that, like, each of these companies have these huge keyword databases of censored words, and those are extremely valuable. They're like proprietary assets where, you know, they. That is how they keep their company alive, essentially. Right. If you have a better keyword database than the company down the road, you're going to have a better chance of surviving.
- [22:06]
Tracy Alloway
So just on the keywords. This is one of the most fascinating things about the Chinese Internet, and I think a lot of people know about it at this point. But, you know, Internet users are very creative in bypassing the censors. So they're always coming up with codes, some of which sound very funny if you don't know the context. Like, isn't there one horsemud or mud grass horse or something fighting a crab.
- [22:30]
Yi Ling Lu
Exactly. Winnie the Pooh.
- [22:32]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, there we go. Winnie the Pooh would be the obvious one. This is sort of tangential, but do you think that, I guess, do you think that kind of creativity or like code wording, do you think that's related to the Chinese language itself and the fact that a lot of the words are very literal? And also you have a lot of homonyms, definitely.
- [22:53]
Yi Ling Lu
Like a huge part of it is like each character can have multiple meanings. So for example, the most famous one that you mentioned that emerged as early as the early 2000s was this idea of the grass mud horse. Right. And so grass mud horse in Chinese is. And just depending on the tones, you shift the tones, it becomes cao ni ma, which means basically your mom. And so, you know, it became this like, rally, because ironic rallying cry, pushing back against, you know, authorities who are being. Who are overstepping their bounds. But it's funny and punny at the same time.
- [23:31]
Joe Weisenthal
I do think even like on Twitter, you see certain communities, particularly more extremist ones, like, you see their esoteric communications and you see their code words. But it does seem like, especially with the prevalence of very subtle homonyms et Cetera, the creativity for esoteric expression probably gets taken to a whole new level.
- [23:51]
Yi Ling Lu
Definitely. Definitely. Though an interesting dynamic that I'm now seeing is that a lot of the terms that are being used on the Chinese Internet are actually echoing a lot of the sentiment that. But of the terms that are being used in the American Internet. So one term that I've noticed come up, it's not hugely viral in either place yet is this idea of the npc.
- [24:12]
Joe Weisenthal
Oh yeah.
- [24:13]
Yi Ling Lu
Or the non player character. And I didn't realize this was like resonating on both sides.
- [24:17]
Joe Weisenthal
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [24:18]
Tracy Alloway
That's interesting.
- [24:19]
Joe Weisenthal
Do you know that one? The big chess party. Are you familiar with that term? Or the 3D chess party or something like that?
- [24:26]
Yi Ling Lu
I'm not sure.
- [24:27]
Joe Weisenthal
There's one I like that I saw that I started using, which is people who are so defensive of the leadership that every. Every thing they say, it's like, no, no, you don't get it. They're playing 5D chess or you don't get it. And so I think the term was a big chess party or something like that. I think we need to start incorporating that more because that's a good one. Yeah, it's a fun one.
- [24:46]
Tracy Alloway
But actually on this note, how difficult is it to keep track of all the different code words or to learn the new code words? Because, you know, on the one hand, if you're saying Winnie the Pooh instead of Xi Jinping or something like that, it allows you to perhaps bypass censorship. But on the other hand, if you're talking in code constantly, I imagine it means some people like just aren't getting the message. It's not resonating with a certain sector of society. So how difficult is it and what are the pros and cons of having to keep up with all these keywords Constantly?
- [25:24]
Yi Ling Lu
Absolutely. I mean, it's hugely difficult. It just means that these words become more and more obscure. You know, I'm someone who has made a career out of studying the Chinese Internet and I'll often read social media posts and have no idea what's going on. And their entire teams, there's actually this excellent team called China Digital Times, nonprofit organization that they have a lexicon. Exactly, exactly. And I have to consult that because sometimes I'm reading stuff and I have no idea what it's referring to.
- [25:49]
Tracy Alloway
Huh.
- [25:50]
Joe Weisenthal
I want to get into more this sort of like under. Especially like how an American or internationally we might learn more generally about what's going on the Chinese Internet. But before we get to that, I want to Ask. There is this trope or this thing that gets repeated a lot and you heard it a lot in the TikTok debates. And it's smacks of a certain racism or exoticism or orientalism etc, where people say, oh, on American TikTok, they're all like, it's all a bunch of garbage and rage, bait and slop. But on the equivalent in China, it's they're learning mathematics and learning how to play violin and all these sort of stereotypical things. Can you talk to us just a little bit about like, how similar, dissimilar do these platforms feel from a sort of day to day content standpoint, setting aside sensitivities about politics?
- [26:41]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, I mean, I'm like kind of torn about that statement because on one hand it kind of like glorifies. I mean, depending on who you're looking, who's saying those statements. Right. You're either glorifying and kind of like projecting a lot onto the Chinese Internet. It really reveals more about, I would say like American conservative anxiety about what's appearing on their own Internet and projections. Because the Chinese Internet is full of like crazy slop too.
- [27:05]
Joe Weisenthal
But this is what I'm like. Yeah, my assumption is that the gap is like massively overstated. But I've never, you know, exactly. Whatever the Chinese version the original TikTok is. So I just have no sense, like how real these stereotypes are or whatever.
- [27:19]
Yi Ling Lu
Exactly. Like when a young student, you know, in China is just like scrolling through douyin, they're not just getting wonderful math content that's gonna like help them excel at school. But what I will say is that definitely within the Chinese censorship context, there is this emphasis on what the party likes to call positive energy. So it is definitely much more sanitized than American social media platforms. Like, you are not going to see, quote, unquote, unhealthy marital values or like that is taken down. Right. And so while on one hand I don't want to say like they're completely different, they definitely are different in terms of, you know, what appears there and what doesn't.
- [27:59]
Tracy Alloway
Since you mentioned students, have we seen any efforts by the party to, I guess, crack down on Internet use in general? And I'm thinking back to, you know, the video game crackdown where there was, you know, a sense or a directive that kids were spending too much time playing video games and they should be learning important and useful things. Do you see a similar attitude towards the Internet, just out of curiosity?
- [28:25]
Yi Ling Lu
Not as much. But I would say the video game piece is the one that, you know, comes to mind when you bring it up. I think the issue being the Internet is just such a vital part of daily operation and just getting around. Like you can't really tell a young person to get off WeChat if that's both how he communicates with his mom and his teacher, you know, and to buy basic goods. But you can say, well, let's get rid of video games for X amount of hours every weekday, because that's clearly a netbad.
- [29:15]
Joe Weisenthal
If I spoke Chinese, could I open up a Weibo account from here? Would it be easy to just start joining and posting with everyone?
- [29:23]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, yeah.
- [29:23]
Joe Weisenthal
Okay.
- [29:23]
Yi Ling Lu
Definitely.
- [29:24]
Joe Weisenthal
Talk to us about. I should do that. That's a good reason to learn Chinese, which is One of my 2026 goals, is to start taking lessons. So we'll see.
- [29:31]
Yi Ling Lu
Good luck. Good luck.
- [29:32]
Joe Weisenthal
Thank you. Thank you. Talk to us about, though, that five minute period in history in which TikTok was banned in the United States and suddenly there was a flood of American users to that other app, RedNote or something like that. I forgot what it was called. Talk to us about that experience and whether anything interesting emerged from that. There was 10 days where that happened or whatever.
- [29:55]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, it was an incredible moment. I remember it very clearly. But essentially there was news, impending news that TikTok would get banned in the US and all these.
- [30:04]
Joe Weisenthal
It was banned for like a day. Yes, but one day it wasn't accessible. Yeah.
- [30:07]
Yi Ling Lu
But in the lead up to that, TikTok users were freaking out and they essentially, I think millions of American TikTok users started to flood RedNote or as it's known in China, Xiaohongshu, which is, you know, people call it China's Instagram, but that's not quite the right equivalent. It's almost this Instagram meets Pinterest meets Yelp type social media platform, mostly used by young urban women, has a slightly more liberal bent to like catch up on lifestyle news. Now it's all kinds of news. But I was both on one hand, struck by the irony of the situation, you know, that the American Internet had somehow become so closed and siloed and controlled that the way to escape it was to then jump to arguably the most repressive.
- [30:58]
Joe Weisenthal
It was sort of like a reverse Berlin Wall moment in which the west, the West Germans were the ones flooding into the other side after this. I don't know, something like that. It was very. Yeah, exactly.
- [31:10]
Yi Ling Lu
Exactly right.
- [31:11]
Joe Weisenthal
It's like we were the ones that had the restriction placed on us in America and so then suddenly like we spill up, find a new hole in the wall to spill over onto the other side.
- [31:19]
Yi Ling Lu
Exactly. Which is why they were, you know, like, I think American users were looking for their Chinese spies, kind of ironically, and Chinese users were teaching them how to get around rednote censors. But I think key to that was just like, I felt a lot of delight from that moment because it was the first time there was this really sincere and earnest exchange between users on both sides of the Internet. And I hadn't felt that and seen that in years, if not decades.
- [31:48]
Tracy Alloway
So one of the debates that's constantly ongoing when it comes to TikTok is what the algorithm is doing and what content it's actually surfacing. What are the, like, parallels with, I guess, censorship in China or where do you see key differences in terms of what the algo can do to influence the general population?
- [32:09]
Yi Ling Lu
So you mean like between the algorithm in China and the algorithm in the U.S. i would say that, you know, the algorithm, it's always really hard to say to what extent the algorithm is playing a role in the censorship. Censorship of the content. Right. And I think that's one of the big issues or that the big criticisms that's playing out right now with this TikTok sale. Even though vast majority of the ownership is American, the algorithm is still owned by bytedance. So to what extent does bytedance still have influence over what American users are seeing? That's up to question. I think the difference is in China, there's just a lot more tools externally to kind of control what happens after that. It doesn't matter how the algorithm is dictating what appears on the feeds. You know, there are still content moderators who can come in and deal with the content that is posted online after, you know, it's already posted.
- [33:07]
Tracy Alloway
Joe, I feel like I need to make a public service announcement, actually a public service announcement recognizing someone for their public service, which is Sam Rowe, who does the dirty work of trawling through TikTok on a daily basis, and then the only good ones cross posting the good videos onto Instagram. For everyone who doesn't actually have TikTok.
- [33:29]
Joe Weisenthal
Like me, people should follow him.
- [33:31]
Tracy Alloway
Genuinely, a public service.
- [33:32]
Joe Weisenthal
Genuinely. I want to go back to this sort of kind of where we started at the beginning, but I think it's a question of some pretty significant stakes, you know, so you talk about the rise of this sort of like, very nationalistic impulse that you see on the Chinese Internet these days, which, again, very similar to here. And I would say, and many people would agree that if you look at the US government right now, you're like, the pathologies, the dysfunctions, et cetera. It's like almost downstream. The Internet has shaped the US Government in many respects. Max Reed, who we've had on the podcast, who has a really good newsletter, talked about how it's like the comment section is one and all of the people who are in power in the US government are the people who, like 10 years ago were angry about having been banned from the comment section, and now they have the last laugh on everyone else because now they hold the levers of power. Talk to us about the emergence of the sort of strong nationalistic undercurrent on the Chinese Internet. When did that start to emerge? And how does that sort of reinforce the political direction of travel within China, Within Chinese politics?
- [34:41]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, I would say similar to what has happened in the US that patriotic undertone has always been there as early as like the pre Internet period of like the 80s and 90s of people who, you know, perhaps were speaking of a patriotic China in a more liberal sense. They wanted strongman rule. They didn't want, you know, a lot of the leftists in China, as we think about them in China and not in the U.S. wanted, you know, China not to be kind of swept up by liberal influence and needed a strong state to be in charge of the economy. But I would say similar to the us that nationalist voice was very fringe. It was niche. It was kind of seen as radical. So, you know, as early as 2008, for example, there were, as you mentioned, like the 50 Cent army, but also what was known as like, angry youths or Fenqing. So 2008 was like a huge leap, pivotal moment for China in that the country was stepping onto the world on the global stage as this international presence, and it wanted to present itself as super liberal. But at the time, there were these, like, very angry youth who were online and being like, look at how China is being presented by cnn. We're being kind of smeared by Westerners. But they were small. I would say today the Chinese Internet is largely fencing. They're no longer called that. But, you know, I would say in 2016 there's a, an emergence of what we now call little pinks or xiao fenhong. And it's like you merged the fencing or you merged the patriot with the stan or the online fan, where, you know, like what they.
- [36:25]
Tracy Alloway
Softer nationalism.
- [36:26]
Yi Ling Lu
Exactly. Or not even softer, but they use the tactics of online fandom. So, you know, like, they use the same tactics of like a group of Justin Bieber fans would do to take down Justin Bieber's nemesis where. Except they're doing that with maybe like Tsai Ing Wen, who's the, who was the leader of Taiwan. And so I would say there's this like fusion of online Internet celebrity culture with online patriotism. And it's not so much different from the Reddit incel.
- [36:59]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, it feels very similar. I just want to, just to go down this road a little bit further. Last year I read Kevin Rudd's book about Xi Jinping and one of the points that he makes a lot of people think of, okay, Xi gets into power and then sort of takes this nationalist turn. And he makes the point that actually the sort of more nationalist turn in Chinese politics, some of the anti liberal started under the late Hu Jintao years, which makes me again wonder whether there was this brewing force partly cultivated by the Internet that was started, you know, that rather than, okay, Xi Jinping comes in and presses the button and turns the Internet in a more nationalist direction, that this was already an emerging thing and helps explain Xi Jinping's durability and ability to consolidate power and so forth. That there's this sort of. That it's a bottom up phenomenon as much as it is a top down thing.
- [37:52]
Yi Ling Lu
Absolutely. And this is why I keep coming back to 2008 as this huge turning point. And Kaiser, who's one of your guests, has made this point a few times, which is, you know, in 2008, I think the big thing that happened at the time was A, the Beijing Olympics and B, the financial crisis. So at this moment when, you know, Chinese people were standing up and for the first time a lot of like the great firewalls was getting taken down. So a lot of Chinese Internet users in Beijing could see the news for the first time. They were seeing two things. They were seeing cnn, you know, posting news about the Tibet protests and not covering the Olympics. And they were also seeing eventually news of the financial crisis. So there was this sense of like, well, you know, we expected to engage with the outside world and instead of the west is criticizing China and can't get its own ship in order. And so there is a sense both among kind of ordinary people of this growing patriotism, but also the leadership itself, because they were thinking, well, maybe liberalization is not the way to go. Right. Maybe liberalization leads to unruly financial markets and we need to steer this ship in a different direction. And so we see both kind of a nationalistic turn, but also in a liberal turn. And that very much precedes Xi Jinping's rise to power.
- [39:18]
Tracy Alloway
I think people forget what a huge moment the 2008 Olympics actually were. Like, actually physically changed Beijing and then also changed a lot of Chinese society. But I'm still annoyed that they got rid of all the fake DVD stores, because those were fun. Anyway, we have to get in an AI question. So with the advent of AI, a lot of the technology which is coming out of China is very impressive. Does censorship become easier?
- [39:50]
Yi Ling Lu
I would say yes. I mean, AI has always been, or it has been long used in Chinese censorship capacity, not just with the advent of generative AI. So the sensor that I interviewed, he said that, you know, before he even goes in and looks at what's being taken down, a, you know, automated process first flags all of the sensitive words. I imagine that just makes that process significantly easier.
- [40:17]
Joe Weisenthal
Is there any way to gauge sort of public opinion about the Internet or, like. Because I think there are a lot of people in the us Again, who would say, like, yes, this would be great. I would love to make rage bait illegal. I would love it if people weren't flaunting their wealth. I would love it if there were not pornography easily available on the Internet, et cetera. I think a lot of people hear this and it's like, yeah, sounds pretty good. Is there discontent with the state of moderation? Is there discontent with some of the restrictions? Is there. No. Like, is there a way to gauge some of these questions?
- [40:52]
Yi Ling Lu
There's certainly discontent, but I think it's just very hard to gauge public opinion in China in general. I would say, broadly speaking, there is, like, embrace of technological change and embrace of technological progress that's more elevated in China than in the U.S. but, you know, there are people who are unhappy with the censorship regime and people who like having those controls. I will say at the heart of that kind of debate, or that envy is just like, what are the governance mechanisms that we can put in place at this moment with AI? Right. I think everyone's freaking out about this, this uncontrollable new technology. And China, at the very least, seems to have a governance mechanism in place. So, for example, there is a algorithm registry where essentially every single company that has an AI tool needs to submit their algorithm to authorities, and that is then listed in a public registry. And no equivalent of that exists in the US and that's actually. I think that's actually a pretty interesting form of governance and maybe something that other countries can learn from.
- [41:59]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, I mean, people have criticized Algos here for being essentially black boxes Just coming, I guess, full circle back to our intro. The surprising thing here is the US and the Chinese Internet have followed a very similar evolution despite very different governance regimes. So I think, to some extent, you could imagine, all right, Chinese Internet heavily censored. Obviously there's going to be a surge of nationalism. Right. Whereas in the us, I guess maybe it's more surprising. But what's your overarching thesis for why we sort of ended up in the same place despite having very different systems?
- [42:44]
Yi Ling Lu
Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I would say first, we were pretty naive about the fact that technology even moves in the direction of freedom. Right? That's kind of like. Like based on the assumption that's just the direction that we're going to go in. I would say probably my overarching thesis is that we've allowed too much of technology to be centralized within the hands of a few people, and it doesn't matter. You know, the US and American systems people often talk about the differences, but actually they're remarkably similar. It doesn't matter if it is government that has centralized the power of technology in its hands or, as you mentioned, a handful of tech oligarchs, Right. At the end of the day, how different is Elon Musk's control over X or Twitter different from the Chinese government's control of Weibo? The whims of one man essentially dictates the way a platform plays out. And I think that's the key problem, is that we've taken this decentralized technology and made it highly centralized, and it doesn't matter under what political system that actually takes place.
- [43:54]
Joe Weisenthal
One thing that I think anyone who. Again, the word that always pops into my head is sort of the tribalizing effect of the Internet. People start to. They hate each other. They start to hate people who aren't exactly like them. Are there cleavages within Chinese society that are deepening or widening because of everyone in the mix together? Are there sort of demographic aspects or whatever in which you could see these sort of team tensions build and sort of domestic stability? Because I think you see that all the time on the American Internet.
- [44:30]
Yi Ling Lu
I think the biggest cleavage that I've observed is just along the lines of wealth and inequality. And that's like another parallel that I'm seeing today. And the biggest parallel that I see is between those who are building the new technologies and those who are using and being used by it. So, funnily enough, when I visit China, I have a very similar experience of when I visit Silicon Valley, where everyone who is talking about or building or investing in these new AI tools are really hyped, or there's an occasional doomer in the mix, but they're very excited about it.
- [45:07]
Joe Weisenthal
They're still working to build it.
- [45:09]
Yi Ling Lu
Exactly. There's this sense of agency, there's a sense of competition. We are the builders and makers of the future. Whereas when you talk to just anyone who is just using the technology, is not aware of how it's built or involved in that process, there's this kind of deep sense of pessimism or a lack of agency. Which brings me back to this NPC meme. There's a sense of, well, I don't actually have a role in this process. I am a non player character.
- [45:37]
Tracy Alloway
And.
- [45:38]
Yi Ling Lu
And you know, I have no say. And so that actually is the biggest cleavage that I'm seeing both in China and in the U.S. all right, Yi.
- [45:46]
Joe Weisenthal
Ling Liu, author of the Wall Dancers. Congratulations. Phenomenal book. And really appreciate you coming on Outlaws.
- [45:52]
Yi Ling Lu
Thanks so much for having.
- [46:06]
Joe Weisenthal
Tracy. I really enjoyed that conversation a lot and it really was not until I.
- [46:11]
Tracy Alloway
Know you like talking about the Internet.
- [46:13]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah, I love talking about the Internet. I love the Internet, even though it is, to your words, and I would agree in many respects a cesspool. But thinking about how similar the American and Chinese Internets are, despite ostensibly being very different in this in the legal sense is like probably one of the more fascinating threads I've thought about in a while, I think.
- [46:33]
Tracy Alloway
Yeah, I was thinking during that conversation I was gonna ask what's scarier? An army of little pinks coming after you or an army of K Pop fans? And it's sort of a facetious question. But on the other hand, it highlights this point, right? Which is the Internet and the way people behave on the Internet has been remarkably similar across geographies. It doesn't really matter, like what group you're in.
- [46:58]
Joe Weisenthal
No, I think that's 100% correct. And you know, again, the K Pop stands as their own tribe, but probably one of the less harmful ones, right?
- [47:07]
Tracy Alloway
Like, probably like they are vicious when they want to be.
- [47:10]
Joe Weisenthal
Joe, I never. Right. I actually, I think I tweeted about K Pop once and I was like, I'm gonna mute.
- [47:15]
Tracy Alloway
Never again.
- [47:16]
Joe Weisenthal
I'm muting this thread right away. But this is what we do, right? I mean, it feels like we as people naturally are drawn to this sort of, I would say, mob behavior. Right. When presented with these new technologies in which we can connect with like minded people, whether they share a taste for music or whether they Share sort of national impulses or whatever else. This is what most people. A lot of people fall into, maybe. And so I think it's, like, really interesting that for all. Yeah, for all this, like, talk of different rules and so forth, that these patterns just sort of propagate everywhere.
- [47:51]
Tracy Alloway
The other thing that struck me, and this has come up before in other episodes, but it's the sort of, you know, people think about China as this big centralized entity, and it is to some extent, but the way that centralized entity actually executes policy ends up being very decentralized.
- [48:11]
Joe Weisenthal
Yeah.
- [48:11]
Tracy Alloway
Right. And I think that's kind of underappreciated, how much scope individual censors or individual local governments have to enact specific directives and how they go about doing it.
- [48:25]
Joe Weisenthal
It's interesting that Weibo's competitive edge was essentially being the best at censorship. Right. And that was the one that survived and sort of anticipating and so forth. And it's a little sad. I liked the decentralized Internet. That was fun. Going to different people's websites and seeing what they're all about. And you could theoretically still do it, but it takes effort in a way that. That doesn't feel worth it when you can just have an algorithm deliver straight what your sort of ID appeals to you, like, directly in the moment.
- [48:56]
Tracy Alloway
It was a great time. Late 1990s were the peak of humanity.
- [49:00]
Joe Weisenthal
Unironically. Unironically, that.
- [49:02]
Tracy Alloway
Are you really going to learn Chinese?
- [49:04]
Joe Weisenthal
So, yeah. One of my New Year's resolutions is to take Mandarin classes this year, and I will do that.
- [49:09]
Tracy Alloway
I really liked learning Mandarin back way back in the day when I did it, because there's very little grammar, and I hate grammar because I had to learn German, and German grammar is the worst. And also, as you learn words, one thing I really like about it is it's very literal. So a lot of words have meanings that sort of reflect the thing being talked about. So, for instance, if you're talking about America, so America is meguo, which means beautiful country. So that sort of, like, meaning is imbibed into these individual words. Or Austria, because that's My other half is Aurilie, which means Eastern Empire, which, you know, again, very descriptive of what you're talking about.
- [49:57]
Joe Weisenthal
Well, listen, the German is Osterreich, right? Yeah.
- [50:01]
Tracy Alloway
So that also means it's a literal translation. Yeah.
- [50:03]
Joe Weisenthal
That's interesting. You know, both of us have pretty big followings on social media, particularly Twitter. Wouldn't it be fun as a personal challenge to, like, let's start from zero again on Weibo and see if we could do it all over again. It's like we weren't just lucky, we were really good. Start from zero and make names for ourselves on the Chinese Internet.
- [50:22]
Tracy Alloway
I think your definition of fun maybe differs from mine, Joe.
- [50:26]
Joe Weisenthal
It's like I need to prove to myself that it wasn't just luck and I need. So I need to start from zero and try again.
- [50:32]
Tracy Alloway
Oh, man. Do it in Mandarin.
- [50:33]
Joe Weisenthal
That's what I'm saying.
- [50:34]
Tracy Alloway
Do a real challenge.
- [50:35]
Joe Weisenthal
Do it on hard mode this time. Yeah, where I have to do it in a different language.
- [50:39]
Tracy Alloway
All right, shall we leave it there?
- [50:40]
Joe Weisenthal
Let's leave it there.
- [50:40]
Tracy Alloway
This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
- [50:46]
Joe Weisenthal
And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart, follow Yi Ling Lu. She's at Yi Linglu 95. And definitely check out her new book, the Wall Dancer Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at CarmenArmen, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, and Kel Brooks at Kellbrooks. And for more Oddlaws content, go to bloomberg.com oddlaws we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes and you can chat about all these topics 20 in our Discord, Discord GG oddlots.
- [51:18]
Tracy Alloway
And if you enjoy odd lots, if you like it when we talk about the Internet then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.
- [51:39]
Joe Weisenthal
Sam.