Thanks. I can't read Chinese, is it the 5<something>10<something> at the start? That would make sense.
I very much doubt it's DeepFaked. Why bother? If the CCP were holding Ma and wanted him to make a generic video like that for putting up appearances I'm sure they have ways to make him do that. I suspect the OP is correct and it's simply that the author of the article doesn't know how to search Chinese social media.
Summary: guy tried to team up with his Chinese internet celebrity friend to also become an internet celebrity in China, but the Chinese gov ended up blocking him because he was foreign. It was a very long article for that point to be made, and some of it sounded not plausible.
> It’s easy to make mistakes. One article about Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady, mistakenly used the photo of a famous singer rumored to be linked to another leader. It was caught by someone else before it went out, Mr. Yang said.
I’m betting this is the lameizi (spicy girl) singer Song Zuying who was rumored to be Jiang’s mistress. She is in the process of being purged as Xi is doing to many of Jiang’s supporters ATM. Xi’s wife is also a patriotic song singer from the same era, it makes sense young people might get confused.
It’s not a contradiction, there is political cancellation which has happened to celebrities in China. Look up Zhao Wei. This is the type of thing GP refers to.
> It's always entertaining to read the FUD stories about China.
Can't tell if you're deliberately being disingenuous or if you just don't know, but here are some statistics straight from the propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party:
> "Since 2003, 72 billionaires in the Chinese mainland have died an unnatural death (...) Among the 72 billionaires, 15 were murdered, 17 committed suicide, seven died from accidents, 14 were executed according to the law and 19 died from diseases." - http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-07/22/content_129594...
Everyone who achieves a certain level of influence at some point submits to the CCP in China. It doesn't matter if it's bloggers, vloggers, actors, billionaries, or some other type of influencer. If you don't actively cheerlead and support the corruption of the current CCP faction in power, you lose your privileges, your audience, and - if you're powerful enough - your life.
Didn't he provide classified documents to the South China Morning Post? Certainly a clever way to create plausible deniability, but anyone with Google would be able to see how closely related that paper is to Beijing[1].
It’s worth pointing out that it was dangerous for him to highlight the bad parts of China while he was still living there. In one of his videos he mentioned that during his time in China he had recorded a lot of footage but he was understandably afraid to publish it (I believe he partly addresses it in this video unless my memory is failing me: https://youtube.com/watch?v=rbHxeOQA1Mc).
I personally like this video a lot: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ImmRjT74i-c. It talks a bit about why the rest of the world had no masks or other medical equipment when the Wuhan Virus spread outside of China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_Xiaoyu
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-01/23/content_742298...
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