My experience with Chinese social media
My experience with Chinese social media
Over the past two years I've been watching a lot of Bilibili to improve my mandarin, and I wanted to share some of the things I've noticed in no particular order.
Chinese social media has a LOT of high quality resources to study marxism and you can find in-depth analyses of various Marxist works such as das kapital. However, there is generally a greater interest in nationalism rather than marxism, which has been pointed out here before. There is also some general hostility towards Vietnam. One of the reasons for this dislike seems to be that Vietnam is supposedly cozying up to the US, and had apparently hosted an american navy ship. There isn't however much dislike towards the DPRK, and people tend to think of it as a generally happy country although perhaps a bit quirky and closed off. Of course, Chinese youth is much more interested in kpop and south korean culture overall.
There is a lot of content from Youtube that will be reuploaded directly to Bilibili. They tend to have a title prefaced with: "油管百万播放量" (Basically meaning: "this video has millions of views on Youtube"). Even some very political Youtube videos will be uploaded to Bilibili, for example, I saw someone who reuploaded a debate between Infrared haz and Vaush with Chinese subtitles. The comments pretty much said: "This is how americans debate politics? Why are they screaming so much? Why is this vaush guy pretending to be a leftist?". I've also seen some reuploaded low quality 'social credit' memes (you can find it by searching 社会信用 on Bilibili) as well as some discussion around how westerners obsess over the social credit system.
弹幕 (Dànmù) is a feature on Chinese social media that allows users to leave comments on the screen of the video itself (so you will see comments going across the screen while watching a video). At first I hated these, so I turned them off, but I've actually started to really like this feature and now I kind of wish it was on Youtube as well. (Yes I know it makes my attention span even worse, since besides just watching a heavily edited video, I'm also seeing people's reaction at the same time to keep me less bored)
I've been consuming a lot of content relating to China's space program, and I've noticed that there are a lot of people who seem to believe that the US moon landing was fake. You'll never see content creators themselves say that it was fake, but whenever the US moon landing comes up, there will always be dànmù talking about how it's faked. I do think this is a bit weird, since Chinese social media will usually remove stuff that's non-scientific, but to be fair, there has been some funny jokes coming out of this. In the comments of NASA's Chinese channel where they showed off their plans for the artemis program, the top comment was like: "This time the moon landing will feature next generation 4k photorealistic CG, with revolutionary new filming techniques and special effects that will make you truly believe that the US landed on the moon"
Criticism of the government is quite normal but it isn't comparable to the way we in the west criticize our governments. People will usually focus on criticizing specific policies or socioeconomic developments rather than the ruling government, since people are generally happy with the government as a whole. I've found people criticizing the Chinese education system, how the society is afraid of sexual education, how household debt is rising, how youth unemployment is rising, etc.
As for some of my favorite content to watch, I'll start by highlighting the building sphere of Bilibili, where people build lots of cool stuff. For example look at this sci-fi desk thing. I also found this great video that does a really great job of summarizing the science of language learning.
Also, there are so many amazing free university lectures accessible through Bilibili, covering things like Das Kapital, Machine Learning, PID control systems, and more. Maybe its just my recommended page, but Chinese social media seems to be much more obsessed with educational/science/news content rather than the cheap try not to laugh content which floods Youtube.
The moon landing is funny, so many of my family members under 30 in China believe it was fake, not because they think we can't or couldn't but more because the US lies about everything so it makes sense they'd lie about the moon landing.
Whenever I hear people saying that moon landing was staged… Just go watch 2001: Space Odyssey, it came out the year before moon landing. The physics of Space Odyssey is good, but just look at the scene of people walking on the moon - they move nothing like the real astronauts.
Besides, if it was fake, don’t you think USSR, at the time the space rival would try to claim it, instead, you know, congratulating the USA?
The moon landing was meant to be faked. It's just that they hired Stanley Kubrick to do the photography, and he insisted on filming on location.
LMAO even their conspiracy theorists are better than western ones 🤣
I wonder if the tone of political debates differs because you don't have the tean-sport attitude of party affiliation and the fights over election.
"Policy X is problematic" is more relevant and actionable than "Candidate X is a (slur of choice)"
The Chinese have historically held learning in high esteem and it remains the case today, imparted from parent to child at all levels of society. (I am sick from hearing it nonstop growing up, lol.)
Comes from Confucian traditions and the historical meritocratic bureaucracy. Taking the imperial exams was how one ascended the social ranks, for millennia, or maintained one's current high rank. Titles in the bureaucracy was not heritable, and every generation that fails to get a similar high level job gets demoted some ranks down, until they are relegated to commoners, oh the horror. Hence studying has always been considered the best thing to do to develop one self and one's place in society.
As someone who can't read the language this is pretty fascinating, you should totally post more on this topic!
I completely agree, this stuff is fascinating to learn about. I have tried to browse Chinese language sites by using machine translation but the result on the whole tends to be quite poor, and of course anything like images or videos will not be translated. For those of us who have difficulty overcoming the language barrier these sorts of posts are incredibly valuable.
I've been on Chinese social media before since I'm a native Chinese speaker, and I personally felt everybody was a whiny ultranationalist, but I probably just have very unrealistic expectations from being on lemmygrad a lot.
Douyin, Zhihu and Weibo as well, they're full of whiny liberals that spread state department propaganda.
They've even done the reddit thing where they'd take a clip showing how clean and advanced a Chinese airport is and label it as Japanese lol.
One network that is easy to get into for westerners who don't have good Mandarin skills is 快手 "Kuaishou", it's just like TikTok with a few more features. It seems like it's a more rural/2/3rd tier city focused as opposed to Douyin. I also like 小红书 (little red book LOL) which is kind of like Instagram but not garbage. The aforementioned Bilibili is good, and of course WeChat. Accessing them in your browser, you can use translation plugins also for easier use.
Do you know how I might get English subs for the video on the science of language learning? Or maybe a transcript, which I can translate?
Edit: I second the view that this is fascinating and would enjoy further posts like this one.