As many of you know, between the end of 2024 and few first months of 2025, a few events involving China shook the western internet: The release of Black myth: wukong, the red note/xiahongshu debacle, the release of Deepseek, the release of Ne Zha 2 and IShowSpeed’s live-streamed visit to China.
Since then, the attitude of western social media users toward China seems to have shifted. There are still the omnipresent propaganda of course, but now there is a pushback against it that just didn’t exist before.
A consequence of that has been the rise of pro-China content on social medias, notably youtube and tiktok. The peoples who went on red note and got outraged by how bad their standards of living are in comparison to China are not falling for the authoritarian surveillance credit score scare tactics anymore. I’ve straight up seen multiple peoples say that censorship and cameras are acceptable if it mean having cheap healthcare, groceries and rent, safe streets and high standards of living and that the US had surveillance and censorship too anyway.
Here are youtube channels that do compilations of pro-China tiktok videos and commentaries related to them: global impulse Comfort for life Unique
This is especially interesting because it is a new pipeline for us to exploit. Peoples having good opinion of how China is managed will make peoples look at how it is governed, which seeing as China is explicitly governed by a communist party, will inevitably translate to interest about communism. In fact, it’s already starting to happen in the case of some of the Channels I talked about: Unique published a pretty good video about Chinese socialist democracy and Comfort for life just a few hours ago, out of the blue, published a video straight up promoting communism.
And the funny thing is that the US state accidentally opened this new pipeline for us pretty much all by itself. 
This is especially interesting because it is a new pipeline for us to exploit. Peoples having good opinion of how China is managed will make peoples look at how it is governed, which seeing as China is explicitly governed by a communist party, will inevitably translate to interest about communism.
100%. We definitely need to be promoting this type of content. Not overly, so as not to oversaturate the media space, but at least occasionally. It is especially effective because it doesn’t have an overt political message. It just shows normal, everyday reality and allows the viewer to form their own opinion. People don’t like being preached to or feeling like they are being told what to think. They like to believe that they arrived at their views independently, and then those views become much more solidly rooted.
This is especially interesting because it is a new pipeline for us to exploit. Peoples having good opinion of how China is managed will make peoples look at how it is governed, which seeing as China is explicitly governed by a communist party, will inevitably translate to interest about communism.
Yugopnik said in a stream, when directly asked about China, something along the lines of that if Average Person sees the PRC doing something great and sees that as communism, then good. Even if they look at the Nordic Model and think their good choices are “socialism”, great, we can let them get a good impression and correct it later once they’re properly interested in socialism.
I’m not certain to what degree I align with that position, but the PRC’s online rediscovery is undoubtedly great PR for the socialist movement. For various reasons, and despite all its achievements, even the Soviet Union never reached a level where a typical Western citizen would glance over the fence with envy or longing. Now, we have somewhere any country can point at and say Communism Works™, any gotchas about poverty and famine are more and more outdated.
I notice a shift as well, I think another part to add to it is the visible technological progress from China. For example, Astrum is a great channel about space, but tends to be very focused on the west. He recently did an episode about Tiangong where he was blown away by China’s achievements. Meanwhile, he expects he’ll be doing less coverage of NASA because of the huge budget cuts.
DeepSeek and other open source models are another thing that was very visible. Not only are these models comparable with the top tier ones coming out of US, but they’re open too. This has been hugely appreciated by the tech community, and even places like reddit that have been traditionally extremely hostile to China, now have more and more positive discussions about it. People like the tech, they like the fact that they can run it locally, and that’s far more tangible than any amount of propaganda.
Clean’s lead in energy tech is also becoming very visible. A lot of people realize that we’re in a climate crisis, and that the west has largely been doing greenwashing without any meaningful progress. China is putting their money where their mouth is, and they’re now an undisputed global champion in clean energy. Not only domestically, but they’re actually helping the rest of the world move off fossils by exporting dirt cheap solar panels.
Finally, the fact that western economies are visibly failing is becoming impossible to ignore. People see their standard of living being eroded every single day, and with that the faith in the system itself erodes. It was easy to believe that you were living in the best system possible when your life was generally good. Now that people see their prospects shrinking, and thier life getting harder, it becomes easier to see past the propaganda. And that leads to what you’re talking about where people actually starting to genuinely learn about China instead of uncritically swallowing the swill the mainstream media shoves down their throats.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Link 3:
I think those are great and valid points. But same as the westoids do with china, in the case of america accidentally doing anything we must ask at what cost. In germany we got the 8 hr workday just to avoid a soviet republic which was the actual debate at the time. Now with chinese content piercing the western propaganda shield, they are definitely letting something through. The reason I dont know. Maybe the donald really is a 4d chess puppet just to bring down the fascist empire of america.
I’m agreeing with Parenti that assuming the leaders of the ruling class are stupid is foolish, but we must also remember that mistakes and blunders are a thing. If a socialist state can take terrible decisions and damage itself like the late USSR, so can capitalist states.
And in this case I just don’t see what else it could possibly be.
I’m not yet in the period after stalin but until after the war at least, there have been pretty much zero mistakes. There have been circumstances and they have been dealt with. Some things were tragedies though.
Mistakes of the size of china gaining this much soft power just makes me suspicious of the US failing response. The only thing I can imagine is that same as the combination of the raging psychopath hitler and the red army as the searing swort fileting the reich, trump may have been one step too far into barbarism and xi knows it.
Mistakes of the size of china gaining this much soft power just makes me suspicious of the US failing response.
Well, we must remember the US empire is not magic. Much of its capability in the decades following WWII came from its favorable positioning in that post war landscape. It has since become overburdened under the weight of its own growing contradictions. It can’t sustain itself like this forever, especially when pillaging from its own domestic makeup is part of the model. Too late, they want to undo that with the stuff about re-industrializing. The time is just not there and the model won’t allow it; the only way I could see the US rapidly re-industrializing is if it had a truly socialist model and that would require the empire class giving up power, so instead, what we’ll likely see is some minor attempts here and there that are warped by corruption and that enrich the already rich further while producing nothing of value.
I don’t think China getting positioned as it has was a strategic mistake on the part of western powers exactly, so much as it was a consequence of China engaging with the dialectics of the global capitalist landscape and working out a tightrope to become enmeshed in it as supplier, without succumbing to it as dependent and without succumbing to it as exploiter. Something I don’t think they could have done if they’d either been too strictly idealist about being as socialist as possible, or if they’d been too loose with capitalist characteristics and allowed it to grow into out of control corruption that could undermine the CPC. While the US was financializing its economy, cashing in on the empire tendrils, China was becoming a production powerhouse and gradually building interdependence with other countries as an alternative to exploitation.
It’s not all said and done, of course. But how we got to this point, I guess what I’m trying get at it is, some of it’s strategy and planning, some of it’s the conditions themselves and the consequences of empire.
CHINESE CENTURY 🥳
Didn’t the Trump Admin also defund most of the US’s propaganda/psyops because he bought into the lie that it was “woke”? Does that factor into all of this too?
