How Beijing wins friends and influences the influencers

Millions have watched Lee and Oli Barrett’s YouTube dispatches from China. The father and son duo visit hotels in exotic locales, tour out-of-the-way villages, sample delicacies in bustling markets and undergo traditional ear cleanings.

The Barretts are part of a crop of new social media personalities who paint cheery portraits of life as foreigners in China — and also hit back at criticisms of Beijing’s authoritarian governance, its policies toward ethnic minorities and its handling of the coronavirus.

The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organisers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers — all part of the Chinese government’s widening attempts to spread pro-Beijing messages around the planet.

State-run news outlets and local governments have organised and funded pro-Beijing influencers’ travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

With official media outlets’ backing, the creators can visit and film in parts of China where the authorities have obstructed foreign journalists’ reporting.

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

But even if the creators do not see themselves as propaganda tools, Beijing is using them that way. Chinese diplomats and representatives have shown their videos at news conferences and promoted them on social media. Together, six of the most popular of these influencers have garnered more than 130 million views on YouTube and more than 1.1 million subscribers.

Sympathetic foreign voices are part of Beijing’s increasingly ambitious efforts to shape the world conversation about China. The Communist Party has marshalled diplomats and state news outlets to carry its narratives and drown out criticism, often with the help of armies of shadowy accounts that amplify their posts.

In effect, Beijing is using platforms like Twitter and YouTube, which the government blocks inside China to prevent the uncontrolled spread of information, as propaganda megaphones for the wider world.

“China is the new super-abuser that has arrived in global social media,” said Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Chinese social media. “The goal is not to win, but to cause chaos and suspicion until there is no real truth.”

The State behind the camera

Raz Gal-Or started making funny videos when he was a college student in Beijing. Now, the young Israeli brings his millions of subscribers along as he interviews both ordinary people and fellow expatriates about their lives in China.

In a video this spring, Gal-Or visits cotton fields in Xinjiang to counter allegations of forced labour in the region.

“It’s totally normal here,” he declares after enjoying kebabs with some workers. “People are nice, doing their job, living their life.”

His videos do not mention the internal government documents, firsthand testimonials and visits by journalists that indicate that the Chinese authorities have held hundreds of thousands of Xinjiang’s Muslims in re-education camps. They also do not mention his and his family’s business ties to the Chinese state.

The chairman of Gal-Or’s video company, YChina, is his father, Amir, an investor whose fund is backed by the government-run China Development Bank, according to the fund’s website.