Debunking anti-China propaganda
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We are joined by prolific analyst, podcaster, and YouTuber, Daniel Dumbrell. Welcome to The Bridge, enlightening conversations on world cultures, life, and everything in between. Hey everyone, this is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. Oh yeah.

Hey, everyone. My name is Jason Smith. I'm originally from sunny California, and now I'm living in beautiful Beijing. Today's guest, Daniel Dumbrell, is host of the Dumbrell podcast available on Amazon.

as well as a prolific YouTuber at Daniel Dumbrill with 170,000, probably more by now, because I wrote this, some of these questions a couple of weeks ago, more than 170,000 followers, where he has interviewed Ben Norton, Arnaud Bertrand, Danny Haifeng, and many more. Daniel has been a guest of CGTN's The Point and other programs. He lives in 5D Chongqing, China,

where he makes critical content about China and geopolitics. Welcome to the Bridge to China. Thanks. Thanks. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, certainly a

A lot of people know where you are from already, and they know a lot about you. But for some of my fans, maybe they don't. Where are you from originally? Actually, a lot of my even my own fans don't realize I'm originally from the UK. And when I was five years old, I thought you were Canadian. I am more or less because I moved there when I was five. And Canada is all I know. I mean, I'm a Canadian passport holder. That's where I grew up. If you were to ask me about life in the UK, I would have no idea, no connection at all. So Canadian is accurate. I mean, especially since

I mean, it's a land where so many people come from so many different places. I think that's the most appropriate nationality to use as Canadian. But yeah, I am from Canada. So you're born in the UK. Wow. You never went back to visit grandpa or something? No. I went back once when I was, must have been about 14 or something like that. We don't have too much family there and they would come over and see us in Canada. I've had them...

come over to China. I've met them in other places in Europe before, but that's it. I just went back once. I mean, it's a nice place and everything like that. I think my parents made the right move to go to Canada. I think it was a more suitable place for us. Okay. Well, a real quick question before we get to some of the more interesting content.

At what point in your life where you're like, you know what I should do? I should move to China. It was kind of random. It was, I mean, I was running a business and a lot of it relied on developing product in China and sending it to Canada. And I could have continued running that business from Canada, but I just felt kind of bored.

And I just was like, you know, I'm ready for something different. So I went over to a trade show in Hong Kong, the Global Sources trade show. And then I went on a day trip. It was either a day or two days over to Shenzhen. And I was just like, this is this place is kind of cool.

And I said, you know what, I'm just going to base myself over there. And I still have my house and everything like that. And it was just sitting there empty in Canada. And I came over and I just started living here for a while. And then slowly, I was just like, you know what, I'm going to be here long term. I went back, sold my house, and I just kind of made China my place. I mean, I was always kind of on the go and wanted to kind of go to different places. And I think being from many different places...

Born in the UK, raised in Canada, from a multi-ethnic background. I think maybe I was, you know, a little bit more open to the idea of just kind of going with the flow and locating anywhere. So that, I mean, that's how it started. Wow. I'm kind of wondering now because I haven't spent much time in Canada, maybe just a few days.

Like if the media bubble in Canada is similar to the one in the United States, because when I was telling my relatives, I'm going to move to China, everyone was like, oh, no, Jason, don't go there. They're communists. So like when you were talking to your family and saying, oh, you know, I think I'm going to move to China. How did your relatives, your mom, how did they feel about that? You know, in 2008, it wasn't as bad back then. The

the coverage, but still it was kind of a head turner, but not, not to the point now where people have been propagandized to the level that they have now.

And because I've been out of Canada for over 16 years, I can't really comment on what it's like now from a firsthand perspective. But I can from anecdotal, you know, when my parents came over to visit me, my parents' neighbors would say to them, oh, wow, you better be careful there. You're going to China. And they come every single year. So they're kind of laughing at it. And they said, I think you should be telling us that if we were going somewhere in the U.S., but not to China. So I think it's problematic.

It's probably gotten worse since I was living there, but I would imagine the bubble is kind of more or less similar. You mentioned coming for business, maybe exports, imports, but now you're a very famous vlogger. What got you into vlogging and talking about China-related issues? The catalyst for me was the 2019 kind of timeframe, Hong Kong riots.

That was what really pushed me to say something because I just saw how disconnected the reality on the ground was from what Western media was reporting and how effective Western media was at just selectively telling the story and painting a picture that was just, like I said, so disconnected from reality.

So I had to say something. I mean, all my kids were born in Hong Kong. I spent a couple of years in Hong Kong too. I still have a Hong Kong ID card. And so I thought, you know what? I got to say something. Now, the interesting thing is, is that had I still been living in Hong Kong with my kids, I probably never would have said anything. But by that time, I was already back in Shenzhen. But the thing is, what a lot of people don't realize is the rioters were really violent. And they were beating up civilians. And they were beating up people who didn't agree with them. They were burning down shops, you know,

And so if I had to consider the safety of my kids, I just would have been like, no, that's not worth it. But I was able to do that from Shenzhen.

It was really annoying a lot of people, but it was also getting a lot of praise from my, for example, my kid. He went to school in Hong Kong before. His classmates' parents, who I hadn't been in contact for a long time, born and raised in Hong Kong, they're Hong Kongers. They reached out to me when they saw some of my videos go viral, and they thanked me for telling them the other side of the story. Because they said, you know what, we can't do this, so thank you so much for doing this.

And then they would feed me information as to what was going on. Like they'd film stuff even from their own balcony. And then they would send me a message saying, whatever you do, don't post this video because I'm afraid the rioters will kind of triangulate my location and figure out which balcony it came from. Like that's how scared they were of the rioters, not the police, the rioters. So that pushed me even more. I'm like, I've really got to tell the other side of this story in Hong Kong. They don't have a voice. And so that's what really pushed me to start initially.

To continue, though, like the reasons why I continued after the Hong Kong protests evolved, and we can get into that a bit if you wanted to, but that's the starting point. Actually, first, I did want to ask you about that, but I also wanted to reflect that my time getting into media is about the same time, about 2019, 2020. It seemed like a lot of the media internationally just turned suddenly.

on China in a really vicious and malicious way. Actually, I never wanted to be a media personality, not interested. It was not on my agenda ever. It wasn't even in the range of the top 1,000 things I might do. And then when all of this just malicious media about China started coming out, I was like,

As an American living here, I feel like I have ethical, moral responsibility to respond to this and to say why some of this information is not accurate. So that's the only reason I got into media at all. Yeah, let's go back. I haven't spent a lot of time in Hong Kong except visiting a few times. So...

What were the riots like? How did the general Hong Kong population relate to the violence that was going on at that time? Yeah, I mean, that was a turning point for a lot of people in Hong Kong. There were so many people in Hong Kong that were kind of not really interested in politics.

And actually, maybe even a little bit on the anti-China side, but actually what the rioters ended up doing was they turned so many ordinary Hong Kongers into pro-China people. They were like, you know what, I can kind of see what happens when you just let things run loose or you let these overseas NGOs run amok here. This is the result of it. This is what they're trying to do to our society. They're not here to help us. They're here to just, you know, kind of just tear us apart.

So there were so many Hong Kongers, that was a moment of awakening for them. And actually, it's not just me and you, there were so many other people who got active around that time in terms of online and things like that. This was kind of a transformation moment for a lot of people. So their sentiments are, you know, very similar to ours. Now, of course, there are some youth that were

really bought into it. And they thought that they were these freedom fighters and things like that. I'm sure so many youth were brainwashed into that. Some of them went to the UK now and are reflecting on, you know, there's some videos even posted by British media where there's this one guy named Enoch. And he says, you know what, when I really think back to it, I had a pretty good life in Hong Kong. And now I'm kind of stuck here and I'm struggling and things like that. And a lot of these people who were brainwashed into this movement are kind of regretting it now.

I mean, so many families were torn apart, too, because it was very divisive. And there were people who were, you know, the younger generation arguing with or family relationships being split up with their parents or grandparents or uncles and aunts. It just, it kind of tore families apart. So, I mean, it was a sad thing that happened. And there were, I mean, there were absolutely were outside forces involved. Of course, we're seeing more and more of that come to light now with USAID.

in terms of what types of things that they do overseas. Well, there were all kinds of other NGOs. It's not just USAID. I mean, obviously, it's the National Endowment for Democracy, the NDI, the National Democratic Democracy Institute. I can't remember all the abbreviations, but they had- RFA, Radio Free Asia. Oh, yeah. On the media side, USAGM media outlets like RFA, they were all influencing people on the ground. And when you think about it, this is kind of

It was hard to illustrate this before, like how dangerous it is when you do have a hostile foreign force that's just allowed to operate freely within your society.

But now the U.S. government kind of validated that train of thinking when they said that, you know what, we need to ban TikTok or we need to do something with TikTok because there is a risk. There was no proven interference or brainwash or anything like that just because there was a risk that the Chinese government could use it as a tool of propaganda against the Americans. Just because there was a risk that they might use it the same way that they use their social media.

So that was kind of an admission saying that, yeah, you know what? This is actually a valid issue. And when these countries or these territories say, we got to be careful with what we let in, there is a valid argument to be had there. Now, if TikTok really was doing what they were saying, it would make sense. But instead, it just becomes this really funny example of hypocrisy. I think there was money being received. Some of the research done by journalist and author Nuri Vitace Hongkonger, he shows that

actually U.S. organizations were giving money to the rioters to agitate. So I think it's not just a matter of media or influence or talking about democracy, but actually paying people to go be destructive in Hong Kong. I think it's just a lot more literature needs to be produced about

the United States' involvement in agitating in Hong Kong. My own hypothesis, I have no real evidence of this, I think it was really trying to create chaos to have the people in Taiwan look on and say, well, we don't want that kind of conflict and sort of frighten them. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Hey, everyone. This is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. You're listening to The Bridge.

I want to switch gears because there's a lot I want to ask you about because you are a talent in many fields on China. But before we get to some of those deeper issues, I wanted to ask you about Xiaohongshu because I'm not sure how it's been taken on in Canada, but in the United States, it was like fighting an uphill battle with a lot of Americans for a very long time about

No, China's really developed. It's not just like this big, giant countryside like you imagine. You know, I was just posting videos of cities all the time for so many years, just trying to convince Americans that China was this developed place. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, millions of Americans joined Xiaohongshu. And now it's really easy. And this is...

a lot easier getting Americans to understand what China's really like because they're having their own dialogue with millions of Chinese people. And it's actually made the fee. It's completely changed the landscape. What is your opinion been of the phenomenon so far? I mean, it's amazing. It's so much propaganda was undone in such a short period of time because of that. I mean,

When you look at, obviously, Trump seems to be taking a little bit of a different approach with China. But I think, you know, in the end, it will be back on track, especially if Marco Rubio gets his way. But if you think about the ways that you can convince a population that you need to fight with a foreign country or that you need to go to war with a foreign country,

There's many ways to do it, but there's two predominant ways that come to mind. One is you demonize the people as a whole. That's the approach that Israel took with Gaza. You know, we're dealing with human animals. We're doing this like so for their society to keep it going and to just to go to the lengths that they did. They dehumanized all Palestinians.

Well, that's going to be impossible now because now they've been speaking to Chinese people and building a relationship and a friendship with ordinary Chinese people through Xiao Hongsu. The other possibility is saying we need to go and save those poor people from their government who is oppressing them and who they're living so terribly under. That's not going to work anymore because now they see how well Chinese people are living, how fast their society is developing, how much, you know, how good the

the public transit infrastructure is. On both of those fronts, their propaganda has been undone because they shot themselves in the foot. They tried to take TikTok away from them and they said, okay, you're afraid that this might be controlled by the Chinese government. We're going to download a full-on Chinese app because of you. And I mean, like I said, it's epic when you think about...

How much effort, how much propaganda has just been undone by this process? You know, I was really concerned about it, actually. And that's one of the reasons, again, going back to our previous conversation about you joining this struggle in 2019 and me in 2019 and 20, I remember right before the second U.S. invasion of Iraq, the

the year or two build up towards that where everyone was being told all of these terrible things about the Iraqi people, about the Iraqi government, about all of the weapons of mass destruction that they turned out not to have. And I remember that feeling of like, we're being prepared for this. You know, the population is being engineered for this through the media. And it felt like

it was happening again. And that was one of the things I have been fighting against for the last several years, trying to say, no, no, no, you know what? It's really nice here in China, like to my American family, to my American friends, to just anyone in the West at all who will listen. No, no, no. You know, people are just outside having a walk. There's an elderly people are down the street stretching and exercising. It's a lovely place to be and trying to convince people of that. You know, there's a father in a

his daughter walking to school right now, holding hands. Like it's just a normal place with normal people trying to humanize China for people. And the Xiao Hongshu thing made, did take a lot of pressure off.

To some extent, because...

would it have been for them to go in and carpet bomb cities like they did it would have been immensely more difficult now i'm not saying that was ever in the cards that the us would carpet bomb chinese cities but i mean there was an attempt to to drive up aggressions towards china and so we can see how that's been undone you can just imagine if the same thing happened back then for iraqis it would have been a totally different ball game it would have been so much more difficult you know i want to talk about you personally you mentioned you sold your house in canada

And you mentioned you had kids that were born in Hong Kong. Now you live in Cyber City 5D Chongqing. In terms of helping people understand what China is like, may I ask you, are you planning on raising your kids here in China or are you planning on returning to Canada? Yeah, I mean, I am raising them here. My eldest is 13 years old now. You know, he's been here the whole time. And he was thinking of going. He's really interested in the sciences and physics and

and this kind of stuff. And he was convinced that he needed to go to the US to kind of access the best programs for that. And historically, he's right. I mean, there's really, especially on the East Coast, so many great programs, even in high schools, for his interest. And we would have supported him, even though I have my reservations about the US and things like that. If that's what he wanted to do, I would have totally supported him. But he's changed his mind. I

and he's thriving here. Obviously, the rate that China is improving in terms of technologically, I had an interview with Ben Norton where he was pointing out that the top 10 list is dominated by Chinese universities in terms of hard sciences and the publications in respected global journals. And

I think China is going to play a more and more important role on the global stage. So I think this is a great place to raise my kids so that they're familiar with China. Even if they end up seeking opportunities outside of China later, the fact that they can still interact with China and cooperate in whatever projects there are that involve China, I think is great. And then just from a practical perspective too, from...

And the safety aspect here, you know, you don't have as much of a, you know, kind of, well, I don't think there is any in high schools here, like a kind of a drug culture, like you do at least how you do in the West, and just the kinds of things you can get yourself into the in the West.

Not that that isn't obviously a learning opportunity also for kids, but I just prefer them, especially if they are academically inclined, that they can focus on that kind of stuff without those distractions. It's just a very safe place to be. You know, my kids, six, seven years old, they ride their bike, you know, whatever, down across to different neighborhoods and things like, I don't worry about them. And yeah, it's just, it's a good place to be. I mean, even as an adult,

living here, you don't get hassled by the police like you do in the West. You're not sitting at the bottom of a hill where a 60 zone turns into a 40 zone just to give you tickets. They're not looking for opportunities to kind of just get you whenever they can. When you see a police car on the road, you don't all of a sudden feel nervous and tense up and make sure, oh, am I indicating? Am I doing all this? Honestly, this is such a hard concept for a lot of people in the West to understand, but I just feel way more free here than I ever did in the West.

And I know, I know that's not going to compute for a lot of people, but it probably will for somebody like you. But a lot of people, they're going to be like, what is this guy talking about? That's really bizarre that you mentioned the police thing, because normally when I see police in China, like no big deal. But for some reason, my American fear of the police in a car still revs up. My wife drives. I don't in China. And she we're on the highway sometimes and she's

flying at 130 or whatever kilometers per hour. And I'll see a police car and I'll say, it's a police car. We need to slow down. And she's like, no, we don't. What's wrong with you? And it was just like, I can get that fear that American fear of the police is still built into me from my all, you know, 30 plus years in the United States. But in China, the police don't care. It's like, it's, they're not looking to give people tickets. So, I mean, it's a completely different kind of perspective. No, no, no. And if anything, yeah. I remember, uh,

who is it who told me that that story they were talking about in in shanghai they were riding their e-bikes and then they they crossed a road and then there was a police officer there stopping saying that you're not supposed to go straight on this lane during this time or something like that and he was he was going to give out tickets because sometimes they have stops to make sure you know say okay we're going to be focusing on this today not very often but then they started yelling at the police officer saying obviously there's a lot of people making this mistake

Obviously, you know, we didn't see, we're not deliberately trying to break the law here. Why aren't you over there helping people and guiding them saying, guys, no, no, no, don't go straight. You're not supposed to go straight here. And he ended up canceling all the tickets. He said, you know what? You got a point. And he didn't give any tickets to them. And he kind of wrapped up his job there. And this is the thing. It's like you have this phrase in the West to serve and protect.

It really actually does feel like that that's what they're doing here. You know, that's a really interesting point, because if you started yelling at cops in America, it's not going to end well for you. No, I've done it twice, two or three times here. And I caught myself. And I remember after I was thinking, shit, if I move back to the West, I have to remember I can't do this anymore.

I told this story, I think it was to Ben, yeah. They had this traffic stop where they were checking all the motorcycles to make sure you hadn't made any illegal modifications because they had some issues with motorcycles racing at night and having these modified exhausts that were making a lot of noise at night and make sure you had your motorcycle license and all that kind of stuff. But they were camped out at the same spot every morning.

And so I kept getting stopped every day and showing them. And obviously everything's fine with my motorcycle. But then the fourth or fifth time, whenever it was, I took my helmet off and I started, I got really annoyed at him. Like, what are you doing? I said, why are you here every single day? If you're here every single day, you're going to get the same person every single day. And they're like, oh, I'm sorry. Thank you for your understanding. It's just, you know, there's a cover here. It's a good place to stop and things like that. I said, yeah, but you know, this doesn't make any sense.

I haven't seen them since then again, but I would never have challenged them like that. I just would have complied. I would have shown them what I needed to show them. I wouldn't have even shown any sort of protest whatsoever, but I felt comfortable doing that here. Hey everyone, this is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like the show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. You're listening to The Bridge.

let's switch gears to a different topic usaid has been what do they call it independent media they're sponsoring independent media which clearly isn't independent if they're being paid by the united states government but we see that a lot of that being rolled back and a lot of people in the china sphere they know that a lot of media headlines for the last forever have been very negative on china i have a question do you think

that this is going to really change? Do you think that the BBC and the New York Times are suddenly going to be less aggressive towards China now that U.S. has cut funding for journalists who are doing negative reporting on China? No, I don't think so. I think it's built in. I think that they've cultivated a staff within these news organizations who already think this way.

I think this acted as an additional incentive or whatever. But I think the people who are in mainstream media have been specially selected because they have this kind of mindset to begin with. And I don't think they're really going to... If you look at what things like Marco Rubio are saying about the USAID...

he doesn't seem like he really wants to get rid of it. The only thing that he really takes an issue with is more of kind of the woke stuff, if that's what you want to call it, funding trans activists or whatever it is overseas, these kinds of, I can't remember what it was, a trans performance in South America, LGBT books in different global South countries. And that's what he was against. Now,

But when you listen to his language, he talks about how this was always about forwarding U.S. interests, doing things that align with U.S. foreign policy interests. I think they would like to rein it back in and then kind of just focus on the kind of stuff that they've always done with China and Russia and whatever it is. It may take a little while. It may be rebranded just like they did with the School of Americas. But I think it's going to continue. Yeah, that's been my concern. I've seen a lot of people online celebrating China.

finding out all of these journalists were secretly being paid by the United States to do negative journalism against China, Russia, other countries. And people are like, yeah, it's over. It's not over. It's not over. Yeah. There is reason for celebration, though, because it brought an awareness to the table where they can see the stuff going on. They know it goes on. So even if they rebrand it, there's no coming back from this. Everybody has been woken up to how the game is played. So when they rebranded School of America's,

people who were paying attention, they knew, oh, this is what we do. And even if they rebranded it, there was still probably a larger awareness from more people who still knew that they, okay, they still do this under a different name, had there not been as much exposure on School of Americas to begin with. So I think the exposure to what

USAID does is going to have lasting benefits in terms of promoting this awareness of, like I said, how the game is really played. I felt that way when many articles were put out about the $1.6 billion that U.S. Congress started providing for journalism, the negative journalism on China, which

A lot of regular people, despite this information existing, despite people knowing that the United States was funding this kind of journalism, still buy into a lot of the anti-China story. So I wanted to address some of these a few at a time with you because I've seen your programs and you're extremely excellent in your analytic ability at dissecting these. So let's take on Xinjiang and the Uyghur minority group.

what the reality is and what people are saying. So I see some of the things that people are saying are that there are two to three million interned Uyghurs and many of them are being used for slavery. Do you think that's true?

Of course not. No, I mean, that's not true. There's no actual evidence of that. They use these satellite images and things like that. There was recently a really good post on El Salvador when they were showing this prison, which holds a capacity of 30,000 people. And when you looked at the scale and the size of it, then you translated that into, well, what would it mean in one region to...

to house this many people, it just doesn't align with these satellite images that they have. And if you really had a group that was persecuted to this level, you would have a massive exodus of refugees along the border. They would find a way to get out. And all these people who are telling the stories, who are, you know, on these...

US NGOs and things like that, they didn't even have to sneak across the border. They left illegally. They were saying, I was a concentration camp survivor and then China gave me a passport and allowed me to leave so I can tell you all my story. I mean, it even went to one point where

This one person that they were carting around like Naira 2.0, which was Tursanay Ziawadim. Her story kept changing. The first story that she had when she left was with BuzzFeed. And she said that she didn't experience any abuse whatsoever, but she was in detention. And then it got upgraded to, oh, I was tortured. They did this to me. Obviously, they said she said terrible things were done to her. And the story kept getting upgraded and upgraded. And then when BBC aired her story, they showed her passport.

And her passport was renewed during the time that apparently she was under arrest. It's like, well, how do you do that? How do you renew your passport? They showed the renewal date there. And there was a huge, on change.org, I think it was, a petition. Thousands of people signed it to say, why did you uncritically push this story with this massive hole in it? The petition got deleted for some reason. But then when the CNN repeated the same story, they were at least smart enough to blur out the passport renewal date.

to make it appear as there wasn't a hole. So it's almost like an admission by their editor saying, okay, we know this is a giant hole and we don't want to address it because we just want to push this story. So they blurred out her passport renewal date. And her story continued to change after that. The latest version of it was that...

She was about to die from her injuries. So China wanted to send her outside of China quickly so that she would die outside of China. So she would not only leave China with all these stories, she would have all of the evidence of being physically abused, but we have nothing from her. No evidence of abuse, no medical reports, no nothing. I mean, it's just, it's completely ridiculous. So, I mean, I guess the obvious question is what is actually happening. So there was a massive terrorism issue in Xinjiang.

And it wasn't this battle against Uighur versus Han. They were killing Uighur people also. You know, the imam of Idkha Mosque was murdered by these terrorists because he wasn't a follower of their more strict interpretation of Islam. That was when the actual cultural genocide was going on, when these extremists wanted to change Uighur culture into a more extreme interpretation of Islam. And Islam is in so many different countries and it expresses itself in different ways. But full head covering were not that.

strictly forbidden from consuming even a little bit of alcohol. Uyghur culture has a history of over a thousand years of winemaking. So that already doesn't fit the bill. And during that time, I mean, I have so many friends, stories from individual friends also from what they encountered. You know, I had this one friend, he was Muslim from Xinjiang and he went to university in Arumachi and he made friends with a lot of Han Chinese. And he

The first time he ever tried pork was with them. And so I know a lot of Muslims will say, OK, well, that's, you know, was he coerced into that? No, he really just wanted to say, you know what, I just kind of want to see what the flavor is. And then finally, he met some friends from his own ethnic group and they invited him over to like a house party, over to their apartment or dorm, whatever it was. And he was like, oh, finally, I've got some local friends like me. And he went over into their apartment and they beat him up.

They beat him up because they were hanging out with Han Chinese. I think they knew he tried pork too, and they beat the crap out of him. So he didn't have the freedom to choose that on his own. So the Chinese government had a responsibility to step in and fix this. There's probably no perfect way to fix this. But if you look at, for example, they had these de-radicalization programs from people who were on this side of wanting to morph Xinjiang into something that it wasn't. And even...

Even if you thought that in these de-radicalization programs, that there might've been some people that got caught up in it that didn't deserve to be in there. It's not in the millions. Nothing supports this number of millions, but let's say there were a few thousand people or tens of thousands of people and whatever, a hundred or 200 people who didn't deserve to be in there went in there. I don't know if that happened. I don't have any evidence of that happening, but I feel like in my mind, that's something reasonable that you could imagine that that's something that could have happened, but

But then when you look at, for example, how the U.S. deals with terrorism in territories that they don't even have jurisdiction over, it's not even terrorism in their own countries, they go and they bomb people. So the risk with using the U.S.'s method of de-radicalization is that you lose your life, not that you spent six months in a de-radicalization center. Now,

That same friend who realized that something needed to be done, who got beat up by his peers, he has an interesting take. I don't think I've ever mentioned this on my channel before, but he has an interesting take where...

He has a love-hate relationship with Western media. Because during that time, there was intense scrutiny. If you were from Xinjiang and you were traveling to other areas in China, you were checked way more. You were questioned. You were having your documents checked. I mean, it's probably not too dissimilar to what happened after 9-11. Every time I was traveling in the U.S. after that, for some reason, I was chosen to, you know, sir, can you please take your shoes off? I'm like, hmm, I wonder what it could be. Why me? Everybody else is fine. But

You can imagine that that happened too. And so my friend, he said that he has a love-hate relationship with Western media because he says he knows that Western media is not out to help them. They're out to exploit them. They don't actually really care about them. But he said that because there was so much attention on it from Western media,

So maybe it caused China not to go as far as they usually would. It doesn't mean they would go as far as Western media saying like genocide or anything like that, but the controls would have been even more strict and life would have been even more inconvenient than it would already was while they were trying to fix this issue had there not been so much scrutiny and had there not been so many eyes on Xinjiang. So that's something that I'm reluctant to concede.

because I don't like Western media also, and I know their intentions aren't pure, but it's an interesting angle that from the perspective of somebody on the ground had in terms of how they processed what was going on and how they were being used. Could we switch up? Because there was a, for some people in the argument that,

They rolled it back and they said, okay, there is not really a genocide, but there's a cultural genocide. So what about the use of Uyghur language and Uyghur culture in Xinjiang? To your knowledge, is that being erased? I mean, there's so many people in Xinjiang who don't even speak Pudonghua, don't speak Mandarin, and then they only speak their own language. I remember going through a checkpoint and some of the checkpoint people there were

was, when was it, 2020, 2021, when there were more checkpoints along kind of highways and stuff like that, they could barely speak Mandarin. They have Uyghur script all over the signs on the menus. They have Uyghur language shows on WeChat. Like, wouldn't that be the first place you would eradicate Uyghur language?

and it would be so easy to do, is to ban all Uyghur language shows on WeChat channels. That would be a logical place to start. This is probably the exact same reason why the US government actually proposed a ban from people going to Xinjiang. They proposed a ban to stop Americans from going to Xinjiang and seeing it for themselves.

So the country that's... Because they didn't want them to know. Yeah. It's absolutely bizarre. I was actually there very recently and I brought a radio. I don't have it with me. I actually brought an analog radio, one of those old radios. And in the hotel, I opened it up, made a video, turned the radio on, scrolled around. Oh, what's that? That's not Mandarin. Then we turned the TV on in the hotel. Oh, wait. You know what I found?

Uyghur television shows. What do you know? That would be the easiest thing to get rid of if you really wanted to get rid of the language. The country that is apparently trying to, first of all, genocide, now it's been downgraded to a cultural genocide, is saying, come and see it for yourself.

And in the country that wants you to believe that this is happening, saying, no, no, no, no, don't go and see it for yourself. Just trust me, bro. Because they know if you come here and you see it for yourself, it just is so disconnected from what they would like you to believe. And the interesting thing, too, is if you look at actually ethnic cultures in China, they are preserved better than they are in other countries. So, for example, when you have ethnic groups like Kazakh and Kyrgyz, where they have people who are in another country also, their cultures are actually better preserved here.

You know, the Kazakh people in Xinjiang speak pure Kazakh, but the people in Kazakhstan, a lot of them, they mix Russian and Kazakh together. I have a friend who works at the international school here and she's from Kyrgyzstan. And she said when she observed Kyrgyz people in Xinjiang, she was blown away. She was like it was like looking at whatever a history documentary or something. Their culture is so pure. They're still using Kyrgyz words that they don't use anymore.

And so she was just blown away at that. Inner Mongolia, they're still using the original Mongolian script. In Mongolia proper, they're using something different, and they're actually starting a national campaign to try to bring back what they've lost, but Inner Mongolia has kept.

So it's actually the complete opposite of what they say. Cultures are preserved here. I saw in Tibet firsthand the government putting millions of dollars into programs to bring back hidden and lost Tibetan cultural art and things like that, different kinds of styles of painting. There was even a BBC documentary about Uyghur people in the UK trying to keep Uyghur dance alive in the face of...

of cultural genocide in Xinjiang, that these are the people who are going to preserve the Uyghur culture. And they referenced the fact that a style of traditional Uyghur dance that they were practicing was put on the UNESCO's World Heritage, whatever it is, Protected Cultures.

But what the BBC didn't mention was that it was actually China that worked tirelessly to get that on the list to begin with. They couldn't mention that because that would completely undo the entire propaganda campaign that they were working on. It was a group of people from China that said, we really need to get this on the list.

So, I mean, everything is completely at odds with what they're saying. I've seen funny arguments also where they showed, you know, there was this one time where they were dancing. Muslims were dancing in front of Idkha Mosque in Kashgar, in Kashra, as they call it in Chinese. And...

Radio Free Asia said that they were being forced to dance. And so I remember getting in an argument with somebody about this or a debate. I was just kind of like, how does this make sense? And this person who I was debating with, Christopher Rehaj or whatever his name was, he was like,

because he had been there, whatever it was 15 years before or something like that. I said, when you were there, they were dancing in front of the mosque. Like, yeah, yeah. Before the cultural genocide, they were dancing in front of the mosque. So they're dancing in front of the mosque still now. He said, yeah, because they're being forced to dance now. I said, so what's the difference? They're still dancing. He said, well, you know, they're coming out and they're training them and things like that for the camera. And I said, so the CCP is forcing them to dance better than they normally would anyway. It's like, like,

How desperate do you need to weave these stories that just fall apart, even the slightest examination? I wanted to reiterate what you said because I've been to Inner Mongolia. I've been to Xinjiang a couple times. I've also been to Tibet Shizhong as well. And first thing I do is look for script. And I always find it. In Inner Mongolia, I've filmed all of these hotel signs and restaurant signs, menus, everything.

it's bilingual. You know, you have Chinese text and Mandarin being spoken on the radio and you also have Mongolian and you have Mongolian script everywhere. And the same thing in Xinjiang and the same thing

thing in Shizhong. I just remember first arriving in Tibet and I'm like going from the airport to downtown Lhasa. And it's just every single billboard, even ones for like, you know, Baijiu. It's like the advertisement is in two languages. And one of the things I noticed when I was in Xinjiang is I didn't actually see some of the signs bilingual. Some of them were in three languages. It would be in, you know, Chinese text, and then it would be in...

Uyghur, and then it would be in another Arabic text. And I was like, looking around, what is this? And they said, oh, maybe that's Kazakh or something because there's another ethnic minority in the same area. So the signs have to be in three languages. And it was just...

Yeah. Was it in northern? Was it northern Xinjiang? I've only been to the south. Oh, okay. Actually, one of the things I wanted to point out also for the people listening who haven't heard me say this before is I went to the cotton fields of Xinjiang to look and I've spent days driving through cotton fields and stopping off and checking with people and looking at the big machines. There's no forced labor to be found anywhere, by the way. And I was there at harvest time as well when they're actually harvesting the cotton.

So, no. Yeah. In terms of the trilingual, I've seen that in Qinghai before, and it was in Chinese, in Tibetan, and Mongol script. Because that area had all three of those ethnic groups. Wow. And the cotton, the same thing. I know people... Because...

The thing is, is that a lot of Uyghur people, they own their own land. It's kind of like just like everywhere else in China. The people have a hometown, they have a homeland or a farmland that they harvest themselves or they rent it out to other people to harvest. And cotton is a really important part of their income. So...

When the U.S. is sanctioning cotton, it's ordinary Uyghur people who are losing out, who are losing their income. But I think that's part of the point because they know that one of the biggest drivers, and this has been studies that have been done by the WTO and many other organizations, one of the biggest drivers of terrorism and extremism is poverty. So if they wanted to undo what...

The progress that China has made in ending terrorism in Xinjiang, impoverishing the people in Xinjiang would be one of the most logical things to do. And sanctions is your best bet at doing that. I actually saw a UN special rights rapporteur who went to Xinjiang and called on the United States to lift its illegal sanctions on the people there. I've shared the link several times on my ex account and other places. So it's the United States that is...

hurting the people, the Uyghur people, the Hui people, the Han people, all of the different people, the Kazakh people of Xinjiang and not China. Let's switch gears. We have a lot to cover and we're not going to, we don't have infinite amount of time. What about China's economy? Teetering on the edge of collapse, yes? Well,

I mean, I don't really pay attention to that. I mean, you just look at the situation on the ground. I think one thing is certain that the level of growth that they had before is not what it was before, but it's still in numbers that a lot of nations could only dream of happening in terms of year-on-year growth. And I think that for a lot of people, there has been an adjustment where COVID zero and that shook things up a bit, where you had a lot of traditional businesses that took

took a hit. And also, even after COVID zero was over, it changed kind of spending habits. So I mean, I own a brewery and a brew pub and some tap rooms and stuff like that in Guangdong province. And the level of business didn't reach back to what it was before COVID.

But people have been kind of reinventing themselves and doing new things. There have been kind of a shift. And I think that happens no matter what, whether COVID is around or not. Economies change, opportunities change, and people are finding new things to do. So for example, I have friends who they're focusing on trade with Russia, and they're bringing lots of Russian specialty products into China, and they're doing quite well. Or, you know, people are shifting into different industries. Obviously, you see

a huge creative element coming here too, like high tech, high value stuff. Obviously with Deep Seek, you saw the Nerds Out 2, the movie coming out. You saw, obviously, Xiao Hongsu really took off on the international market. And I think there's just this technological and cultural renaissance happening right now. So the opportunities are still there, but the nature of the opportunities are sometimes changing a bit. So you can definitely find some people that are having difficulties because they need to adapt

But if I compare it to people back home who are starting businesses or who are maintaining their businesses, it's a tough time globally for a lot of people. I want to switch gears to Canada a bit because I don't know a lot of Canadians. I get to hear the relationship of China and the United States too often. So given that the CEO of Huawei, or sorry, the former CFO of Huawei, the daughter of the CEO, Meng Wanzhou,

Wanzhou was detained in her own home in Canada for a couple of years. What is the relationship like between Canada and China now? Is it improving?

I mean, the short answer is, I don't know. I haven't been there for a long time, but I can see that, you know, there were Canadians who knew about the Xiaohongsu kind of situation. And you can see kind of more of a grassroots awareness as to, you know, China not being what they've been told it is. And I think that there's a really unique opportunity happening right now with Trump kind of being more antagonistic.

antagonizing Canada and putting tariffs on them and things like that, I think it's creating a really big opportunity for them to reevaluate their relationship with China and saying, you know, we got to kind of diversify. We can't rely on just the US and China. One of the other major economy in this world is somebody that they need to start kind of working more closely with. So the conditions are ripe for change.

I don't know whether they'll take that opportunity or not. So, I mean, if I just look at the kind of online, the sentiment and things like that, I don't think things have changed much. Again, that's just my kind of theory. But again, I feel like the conditions are ripe for change. Given that China trades more with the developing world than it does with the EU and the United States combined, and that

the United States seems like it is starting a tariff war with everyone. So what do you think that the relationship globally is going to be like moving forward among China and the rest of the developing world, Belt and Road Initiative and so forth? It seems like another incentive to diversify toward China when

When they know that the relationship with the U.S. is so unstable and just, you know, who knows what happens four years later? Four years later, is it the Democrats that come back in and it just swings back in the other direction? How can you build a long-term stable relationship with a country like that?

And it's long been known that the US has kind of weaponized their dollar as well. When they seized the foreign assets of Russia, even their allies who agreed that Russia needed to be penalized somehow should be taking a look at that and saying, well, that's a serious kind of vulnerability. If we're all of a sudden on the wrong side of the US, they could just arbitrarily free

freeze our assets like this as well. It's not a safe place to be. So with China not taking sides in conflicts, it is something that is a little bit more reassuring. I mean, even people who are supportive of China and who are upset that China still works with Israel, for example, I mean, this is one of the unfortunate things that goes hand in hand with this. China does not get involved in

in foreign conflicts. It doesn't get involved in foreign politics. It's like, we can make a deal. We can make a deal. And more and more people are seeing that. When you looked at Mile from Argentina, before he got elected, he was saying, we have to cut off all ties with China. We're not going to deal with commies and things like that. And then whatever, a few months after he's in, he says, wow, we need to do more business with China. They just buy our stuff and they don't ask for anything else. They just buy our stuff. And

And so I think this tariff war, once again, will just act as an additional incentive to push people towards building more relations with China. It doesn't mean that they'll necessarily rely on China as heavily as they did in the U.S., but at least there is this chance to diversify now. You live in Chongqing. For question number one.

You like spicy food? I love it. I always did. I mean, even when I was in Shenzhen, I used to like Sichuan food, Hunan food, and it's... Yeah. I've been to... I had a lot of Sri Lankan friends in Canada as well, and they eat really spicy food. It's a different kind of spice, but no, 100%. Let me change the question. Chongqing has been on fire lately on...

Western media, I'm on Instagram a lot. And on Instagram, I practically never stop seeing Chongqing. Chongqing has been called, by Cyrus Jansen and others, the world's most Instagrammable city. What's it like living there? What are some of the places to see? I mean, so I came here for a number of reasons. And it is just such a cool city. I mean, to just...

walk around downtown and you end up in these different tunnels or these different levels. You enter a building on the first floor and then you go up six floors and then by the time you get to the back of the building, you're still on the first floor somewhere else. It's like something out of your imagination from when you're a kid.

you know, caves and all this kind of stuff. It's like whatever you could have possibly imagined as a kid on a cool like cyberpunk city with all these secret passages and tunnels. This outdoes that. So there is that cool factor. We like to RV. We have an RV here. And so setting out from Chongqing compared to Shenzhen, there's so many more interesting places you can go. You can go up to Gansu. You can go to Western Sichuan, the Tibetan Plateau. You can go down to Yunnan. And

It's just a really great place to be based for camping and RVing and things like that. And then also the price to value ratio out of all the major cities in China, in terms of

fully international cities. They've got all the international brands, everything you could imagine. We've got a Sam's Club here and everything like that. The living cost and the property prices are really, really affordable. So we can get... I mean, we got a house here that I've got five kids and we've got more than enough space in this house because it's extremely affordable here. If we were to still be based in Shenzhen and try to get a property of this size...

I mean, it's just, you've got to be a multi, probably even a billionaire to afford a house this size there. So there's that aspect too. And of course the food, we like the food as well. So it's all these little factors that went in. There was a school that we really liked for our kids too. That was a big factor as well, because actually Kunming is a city that I really like, the

The weather is beautiful there all year round, more or less, but it didn't have a school that we liked for our kids. So that was kind of taken off of the list for that reason. So it's not really one specific reason, but it's all these different reasons put together. Five kids, China must love you. You're single-handedly helping the demographic issue. Yeah.

Yeah, we're going in the opposite direction. There's a crisis where we're making up for it. Well done, sir. Next question. So a lot of visa-free travel, let me put it this way. It's never been easier to travel to China ever in the history of the modern era, ever. So like-

if people can come from the united states the uk for 10 days and most people from many other countries can show up for 30 days where should they go there's just so much choice there's so much diversity in china that it really depends on the individual person what kinds of things they're interested in if they wanted to see kind of history great wall obviously you go up to beijing if you wanted to see kind of the cyberpunk city if you've seen pictures and videos of chongqing definitely this is a place to go

If you wanted to see somewhere that had a mix of kind of beach and city and things like that, I mean, Shenzhen, Hong Kong. If you wanted to see something that you just totally wouldn't expect and just a rich cultural experience, Xinjiang or Tibet, all these different places. There's just so many choices. It would be hard. It would be based on the individual. No matter what you're interested in, there's something for you here, though. Last, last question. Given the media bubble that people in the West live in,

If you had to tell people outside of China, one thing that they may be misunderstood about China, what would you want to tell them about China? That's a really tough one because there's just the negative connotation, the negative feeling towards China isn't made up of one single item. It's kind of a culmination of all these little things. It's like there's this thing called the gish gallop where you just overload somebody with so many different arguments or so many different things that you've

couldn't possibly debunk them all. Because that would be too easy also. If they just focused on one single thing, it would just be easy to say, well, no, we can prove this wrong. There's just so many little misconceptions about China. So I would just say in general, just clear the canvas, just completely open-minded and be ready to just take in everything. I don't even need to tell them specifically to look out for any one particular thing, because as soon as you hit the ground here, as soon as you start talking to people,

you're going to realize on your own that it's completely different from what your governments would like you to believe. That's all the time we have. You know, I want to thank you, though, because I think your work is different from a lot of other people's work because you have a lot of...

basically the people who are the opposition to some extent. You have a lot of guests on who are the ones telling these tall tales about China and you confront them one on one and give them time to say everything that they want to say before you start to sort of unravel their discourse. I just want to thank you for all of the amazing work that you do, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. And it's a pleasure.

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