Joe: I never did. I never did. But Tracy will get it and 99% of our listeners will get it. Feel free to use the analogy. It will go over my head.

Yeling Louu: This analogy really hit it home for me. But you remember Dolores Umbridge?

Tracy: Yeah. Oh, she was creepy.

Yeling Louu: Yeah. You remember how she would like post these degrees

Tracy: and then all of the and she would just post them on the wall and then they would be kind of vague and then students would freak out and scramble and you know people like Malfoy would aggressively over and interpret and [clears throat] that I think that's the dynamic essentially.

Joe: Remember that. I think this is an underappreciated point sometimes, but like the vagueness in the decrees is done on purpose, right? It's so that like you're never really sure what is and isn't allowed and so you do start self-censoring and also, you know, if the government wants to go after you, they can do it because the rule is purposefully vague.

Yeling Louu: Yeah. And it also means that like each of these companies have these huge keyword databases of censored words and those are extremely valuable. They're like proprietary assets where you know they that is how they keep their company alive essentially, right? It if you have a better keyword database than the company down the road, you're going to have a better chance of surviving. So just on the keywords, this is one of the most fascinating things about the Chinese internet and I think a lot of people know about it at this point, but you know, internet users are very creative in bypassing the sensors. So they're always coming up with codes, some of which sound very funny if you don't know the context. Like isn't there one horse mud horse mud or mudgrass horse or something fighting a crab?

Tracy: Exactly.

Joe: Winnie the Poo. Yeah, there we go. Winnie the Pooh. All right. That one would be the obvious one. This is sort of tangential, but do you think that I guess do you think that kind of creativity or like code wording? Do you think that's related to the Chinese language itself and the fact that a lot of the words are very literal and also you have a lot of homonyms?

Yeling Louu: Definitely. Like a huge part of it is like each character can have multiple meanings. So for example, the most famous one that you mentioned that emerged as early as the early 2000s was this idea of the grass mud horse, right? And so grass mud horse in Chinese is ma and just depending on the tones you shift the tones, it becomes which means basically your mom. And so, you know, it became this like rally cuz ironic rallying cry pushing back against, you know, authorities who are being who are overstepping their bounds. But it's funny and punny at the same time.

Tracy: I do think even like on Twitter, you see certain communities, particular more extremist ones, like you see their esoteric communications and you see their code words, but it does seem like especially with the prevalence of very subtle homonyms etc. the creativity for esoteric expression probably gets taken to a whole new level.

Yeling Louu: Definitely. Definitely. Though an interesting dynamic that I'm now seeing is that a lot of the terms that are being used on the Chinese internet are actually, you know, echoing a lot of the sentiment that of the terms that are being used in the American internet. So more

Yeling Louu: one term that I've noticed come up, it's not hugely viral in either place yet, is this idea of the NPC.

Joe: Oh, yeah.

Yeling Louu: Yeah. Or the non-player character. And I didn't realize this was like resonating on both sides.

Joe: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Tracy: That's interesting.

Joe: Do you know that one the big chess party or have are you familiar with that term or the 3D chess party or something like that?

Yeling Louu: I'm I'm not sure.

Joe: There's one I like that I saw that I started using which is people who are so defensive of the leadership that every everything they say is like no no you don't get it. They're playing 5D chess or you don't get and so I think they the term was big chess party or something like that. I think we need to we need to start incorporating that more because that's a good one. Yeah, it's a fun one.

Tracy: But actually on this note, how difficult is it to keep track of all the different code words or to learn the new code words? Because, you know, on the one hand, if you're saying Winnie the Pooh in instead of shiinping or something like that, it allows you to perhaps bypass censorship. But on the other hand, if you're talking in code constantly, I imagine it means some people like just aren't getting the message. It's not resonating with a certain sector of society. So, how difficult is it? And what are the pros and cons of having to keep up with all these keywords constantly?

Yeling Louu: Absolutely. I mean, it's hugely difficult. It just means that these words become more and more obscure. You know, I'm someone who has made a career out of studying the Chinese internet and I'll often read social media posts and have no idea what's going on. And there are entire teams. There's actually this excellent team called China Digital Times, a nonprofit organization that literally studies. Exactly. Exactly. And I have to consult that because sometimes I'm reading stuff and I have no idea what it's referring to.

Joe: Huh. I want to get into more of the sort of like especially like how an American or internationally we might learn more generally about what's going on the Chinese internet. But before we get to that, I want to ask there is this trope or this thing that gets repeated a lot and you heard it a lot in the Tik Tok debates and it's smacks of a certain racism or exoticism or orientalism etc. where people say, "Oh, on American Tik Tok, they're all like it's all a bunch of garbage and rage bait and slob, but on the equivalent in China, it's they're learning mathematics and learning how to play violin and all these sort of stereotypical things." Can you talk to us just a little bit about like how similar dissimilar do these platforms feel from a sort of day-to-day content standpoint setting aside sensitivities about politics? Yeah, I mean I'm like kind of torn about that statement because on one hand it kind of like glorifies I mean it depending on who you're look who's saying those statements, right? You're either glorifying and kind of like projecting a lot onto the Chinese internet. It really reveals more about I would say like American conservative anxiety about what's appearing on their own internet and projections because the Chinese internet is full of like crazy slop too. Well, this is what I'm like, get it. My assumption is that the gap is like massively overstated, but I've never, you know, consumed whatever the Chinese version, the original Tik Tok is. So, I just have no sense like how real these stereotypes are, or whatever.

Yeling Louu: Exactly. Like when a young student, you know, in China is just like scrolling through, they're not just getting wonderful math content that's going to like help them excel at school. But what I will say is that definitely within the Chinese censorship context, there is this emphasis on what the party likes to call positive energy. So it is definitely much more sanitized than American social media platforms. Like you are not going to see quote unquote unhealthy marital values or like that is taken down, right? And so while on one hand I don't want to say like they're completely different, they definitely are different in terms of you know what appears there and what doesn't.

Tracy: Yeah. Since you mentioned students, have we seen any efforts by the party to, I guess, crack down on internet use in general? And I'm thinking back to, you know, the video game crackdown where there was, you know, a sense or a directive that kids were spending too much time playing video games and they should be learning important and useful things. Do you see a similar attitude towards the internet just out of curiosity?

Yeling Louu: not as much. But I would say the video game piece is the one that you know comes to mind when you bring it up. I think the issue being the internet is just such a vital part of daily operation and just getting around like you can't really tell a young person to get off WeChat if that's both how he communicates with his mom and his teacher, you know, and to buy basic goods. But you can say, "Well, let's get rid of video games for x amount of hours every weekday because that's clearly a net bad.

Joe: If I spoke Chinese, could I open up a Weebo account from here? Would it be easy to just start joining and posting with everyone?

Yeling Louu: Yeah, okay, definitely.

Joe: Talk to us about I should do that. That's a good reason to learn Chinese, which is one of my 2026 goals is to start taking lessons. So, we'll see.

Yeling Louu: Good luck. Good luck.

Joe: Thank you. Thank you. Talk to us about those that five minute period in history in which Tik Tok was banned in the United States and suddenly there was a flood of American users to that other Red Note or something like that. I forgot what it was called. What talk to us about that experience and whether anything interesting emerged from that

Tracy: there was 10 days where that happened or whatever.

Yeling Louu: Yeah, it was an incredible moment. I remember it very clearly, but essentially there was news, impending news that Tik Tok would get banned in the US and all these Tik Tok.

Tracy: It was banned for like a day, but one day wasn't accessible. Yeah.

Yeling Louu: But in the in the leadup to that, Tik Tok users were freaking out and they essentially, I think millions of American Tik Tok users started to flood Rednote or as it's known in China, Xiaoongu, which is, you know, people call it China's Instagram, but that's not quite the right equivalent. It's almost this Instagram meets Pinterest meets Yelp type social media platform mostly used by young urban women. Has a slightly more liberal bent to like catch up on lifestyle news. Now it's all kinds of news. But I was both on one hand struck by the irony of the situation, you know, that the American internet had somehow become so closed and siloed and controlled that the way to escape it was to then jump to

Joe: arguably sort of like it was sort of like a reverse Berlin Wall moment in which the West the West Germans were the ones flooding into the other side after this uh I don't know something like That it's very Yeah, it is irony, doesn't it?

Yeling Louu: Right. It's like

Joe: we were the ones that had the restriction placed on us in America and so then they suddenly like we spill up find a new hole in the wall to spill over onto the other side.

Yeling Louu: Exactly. Which is why they were, you know, like I think American users were looking for their Chinese spies um kind of ironically and Chinese users were teaching them how to get around Red Note sensors. But I think like key to that was just like I felt a lot of delight from that moment because it was the first time there was this like really sincere and earnest exchange between users on both sides of the internet and I hadn't felt that and seen that in years if not decades.

Tracy: So one of the debates that's constantly ongoing when it comes to Tik Tok is what the algorithm is doing and what content it's actually surfacing. What are the like parallels with I guess censorship in China or where do you see key differences in terms of what the algo can do to influence the general population?

Yeling Louu: So you mean like between the algorithm in China and the algorithm in the US? I would say that you know the algorithm it's it's always really hard to say to what extent the algorithm is playing a role in censorship censorship of the content right and I think that's one of the big issues or that the big criticisms that's playing out right now with this Tik Tok sale even though vast majority of the ownership is American the algorithm is still owned by bite dance so to what extent does bite dance still have influence over what American users are seeing that's up to question I think the difference is in China. There's just a lot more tools externally to kind of control what happens after that. It doesn't matter how the algorithm is dictating what appears on the feeds. You know, there are still content moderators who can come in and deal with the content that is posted online after, you know, it's it's already posted.

Joe: Joe, I feel like I need to uh make a public service announcement. actually a public service announcement recognizing someone for their public service which is Sam Row

Tracy: who does the dirty work of trolling through Tik Tok on a daily basis and then the only good ones cross-osting the good videos onto Instagram for everyone who doesn't actually have Tik Tok like me

Joe: people should follow him he genuinely a public service

Tracy: genuinely

Joe: I want to go back to sort of kind of where we started at the beginning but I think it's a question of some pretty significant stakes you Um so you talk about the rise of the sort of like very nationalistic impulse that you see on the Chinese internet these days which again very similar to here and I would say and many people would agree that if you look at the US government right now you're like the pathologies the dysfunctions etc. It's like almost downstream like the internet has shaped the US government in many respects. Max Reed, who we've had on the podcast, who has a really good newsletter, talked about how it's like the comment section is one. And all of the people who are in power in the US government, are the people who like 10 years ago were angry about having been banned from the comment section and now they have the last laugh on everyone else because now they hold the levers of power. Talk to us about the emergence of the sort of strong nationalistic undercurrent on the Chinese internet. when did that like start to emerge and how does that sort of like reinforce the political direction of travel within chi within Chinese politics?

Yeling Louu: Yeah, I would say similar to what has happened in the US that patriotic undertone has always been there as early as like the pre- internet period of like the [clears throat] 80s and 90s of people who you know perhaps were speaking of a patriotic China in a more illiberal sense. They wanted strong man rule. They didn't want, you know, a lot of the leftists in China, as we think about them in China and not in the US, wanted, you know, China not to be kind of swept up by liberal influence and needed a strong state to be in charge of the economy. But I would say similar to the US, that nationalist voice was very fringe. It was niche. It was kind of seen as radical. So you know as early as 2008 for example there were as you mentioned like the 50 C army but also what was known as like angry youths or fening. So 2008 was like a hugely pivotal moment for China in that the country was stepping onto the world on the global stage as this international presence and it wanted to present itself as super liberal. But at the time there were these like very angry youth who were online and being like look at how China is being presented by CNN. We're being kind of smeared by Westerners. But they were small. I would say today the Chinese internet is largely fencing. They're no longer called that. But you know I would say in 2016 there's a an emergence of what we now call little pinks or sophen home. And it's like you merged the fenting or you merged the patriot with the Stan or the online fan

Tracy: where you know like what they a softer nationalism.

Yeling Louu: Exactly. Or not even softer but they use the tactics of online fandom. So, you know, like they use the same tactics of like a group of Justin Bieber fans would do to take down Justin Bieber's nemesis where except they're doing that with maybe like Tyenwin who's the who was the leader of Taiwan. And so I would say there's this like fusion of online internet celebrity culture with online patriotism. And you know, it's not so much different from like the Reddit and Zelda.

Joe: Yeah, it feels very similar. I just want to just to go down this road a little bit further. Last year I read um Kevin Rudd's book about Xihinping and one of the points that he makes you know a lot of people think of okay she gets into power and then sort of takes this nationalist turn and he makes the point that actually the sort of more nationalist turn in Chinese politics some of the anti-liberal started under the late Hujanto years which makes me again wonder whether there was this brewing force partly cultivated by the internet that was starting you know that rather RA than okay Xiinping comes in and presses the button and turns the internet in a more nationalist direction that this was already an emerging thing and helps explain Xiinping's durability and ability to consolidate power and so forth that there's this sort of that it's a bottomup phenomenon as what as much as it is a top down thing.

Yeling Louu: Absolutely. And this is why I keep coming back to 2008 as this huge turning point. And Kaiser, who's one of your guests, has made this point a few times, which is, you know, in in 2008, I think the big thing that happened at the time was a the Beijing Olympics and b the financial crisis. So at this moment when, you know, Chinese people were standing up and for the first time a lot of like the great firewalls was getting taken down. So a lot of Chinese internet users in Beijing could see the news for the first time. They were seeing two things. They were seeing CNN, you know, posting news about the Tibet protests and not covering the Olympics. And they're also seeing eventually news of the financial crisis. So there was this sense of like, well, you know, we expected to engage with the outside world and instead the West is criticizing China and can't get its own ship in order. And so there is a sense both among kind of ordinary people of this growing patriotism but also the leader the leadership itself because they were thinking well maybe liberalization is not the way to go right maybe like liberalization leads to unruly financial markets and we need to steer this ship in a different direction and so we see both kind of a nationalistic turn but also in a liberal turn and that very much precedes Cinping's rise to power.

Tracy: I think people forget what a huge moment the 2008 Olympics actually were. Like actually physically changed Beijing and then also changed a lot of Chinese society. But I'm still I'm still annoyed that they got rid of all the uh fake DVD stores cuz those were fun. Anyway, we have to get in an AI question. So with the advent of AI, a lot of the technology which is coming out of China is very impressive. Does censorship become easier?

Yeling Louu: I would say yes. I mean the AI has always been or it has been long used in Chinese censorship capacity, not just with the advent of generative AI. So you know the sensor that I interviewed, he said that, you know, before he even goes in and looks at what's being taken down, a, you know, automated process first flags all of the sensitive words. I imagine that just makes that process significantly easier.

Joe: Is there any way to gauge sort of public opinion about the internet or like because I think there are a lot of people in the US again who would say like yes this would be great. I would love to make rage bait illegal. I would love it if people weren't flaunting their wealth. I would love it if there were not pornography easily available on the internet etc. I think a lot of people hear this and it's like yeah sounds pretty good. Is the is there discontent with the state of moderation? Is there discontent with some of the restrictions? Is there no like is there a way to like gauge some of these questions?

Yeling Louu: There's certainly discontent, but I think it's just very hard to gauge public opinion in China in general. I would say broadly speaking there is like embrace of technological change and embrace of technological progress that's more elevated in China than in the US. But you know there are people who are unhappy with the censorship regime and people who like having those controls. I will say at the heart of that kind of debate or that envy is just like what are the governance mechanisms that we can put in place at this moment with AI right? I think everyone's freaking out about this uncontrollable new technology and China at the very least seems to have a governance mechanism in place. So for example there is a algorithm registry where essentially every single company that has an AI tool needs to submit their algorithm to authorities and that is then listed in a public registry and no equivalent of that exists in the US and that's actually I think you know that's actually a pretty interesting form of governance and maybe something that other countries can learn from. Yeah, I mean people have criticized ALGO here for being essentially black boxes.

Joe: Just coming I guess full circle back to our intro. The surprising thing here is you know the US and the Chinese internet have followed a very similar evolution despite very different governance regimes. So I think to some extent you could imagine all right Chinese internet heavily censored obviously there's going to be a surge of nationalism right whereas in the US I guess maybe it's more surprising but what's your overarching thesis for why we sort of ended up in the same place despite having very different systems?

Yeling Louu: Yeah I mean that's a good question. I would say first we were pretty naive about the fact that technology even moves in the direction of freedom. Right? That's kind of like based on the assumption

Yeling Louu: that's just the direction that we're going to go in. I would say probably my overarching thesis is that we've allowed too much of technology to be centralized within the hands of a few people and it doesn't matter you know the US and American systems people often talk about the differences but actually they're remarkably similar. It doesn't matter if it is government that has centralized its you know the power of technology in its hands or as you mentioned like a handful of tech oligarchs right at the end of the day how different is Elon Musk's control over X or Twitter different from you know the Chinese government's control of way the whims of one man essentially dictates the way a platform plays out and I think that's the key problem is that we've taken this like decentralized technology budgy and make made it highly centralized and it doesn't matter under what political system that actually takes place.

Tracy: One thing that I think anyone who the again the word that always pops into my head is sort of the tribalizing effect of the internet. People start to they hate each other. They start to hate people who aren't exactly like them. Are there cleavages within Chinese society that are deepening or widening because of everyone in the mix together? Are there sort of demographic aspects or whatever in which you could see these sort of team tensions build and sort of domestic stability because I think you see that all the time on the American internet.

Yeling Louu: I think the biggest cleavage that I've observed is just along the lines of wealth and inequality. And that's like another parallel that I'm seeing today. And

Yeling Louu: the biggest parallel that I see is between those who are building the new technologies and those who are using and being used by it.

Yeling Louu: So you know funnily enough when I visit China I have a very similar experience of when I visit Silicon Valley where everyone who is talking about or building or investing in these new AI tools are really hyped or you know like there there's like an occasional doomer in the mix but they're very excited about it.

Tracy: They're still working to build it.

Yeling Louu: Exactly. [laughter] Like there's a sense of agency, there's a sense of competition like we are the builders and makers of the future. Whereas when you talk to just anyone who is just using the technology is not aware of how it's built or involved in that process, there's this kind of deep [music] sense of pessimism or a lack of agency, you know, which brings me back to this like NPC meme. There's a sense of, well, I don't actually have a role in this [music] process. like I'm a nonplayer character and you know I have no say [music] and so that actually is the biggest cleavage that I'm I'm seeing both in China and in the US.

Joe: All right, Eling Lou, author of The Wall Dancers, congratulations. Phenomenal book and uh really appreciate [music] you coming on out.

Yeling Louu: Thanks so much for having me.

Tracy: Tracy, I really enjoyed that conversation a lot and it really was not until

Joe: I know you like talking about the internet too.

Tracy: Yeah, I love talking about the I love the internet even though it is to your words and I would agree in many respects a cesspool but thinking about how similar the American and Chinese internets are despite ostensibly being very different in a in the legal sense is like probably one of the more fascinating threads I've thought about in a while I think. Yeah, I was thinking during that conversation, I was going to ask what's scarier, an army of little pinks coming after you or an army of K-pop fans? And it's sort of a facicious question, but on the other hand,

Joe: it highlights this point, right, which is the internet and the way people behave on the internet has been remarkably similar across geographies. It doesn't really matter like what group you're in.

Tracy: No, I I I think that's 100% correct. And you know, again, the K-pop stands as their own tribe, but probably one of the less harmful ones, right? Like probably like

Joe: they are vicious when they want to be Joe.

Tracy: Well, I never Right. I actually I think I tweeted about K-pop once and I was like, I'm going to mute this again.

Joe: I'm muting this thread right away. But this is what we do, right? I mean, it feels like we as people naturally are drawn to this sort of, I would say, mob behavior, right? when presented with these new technologies in which we can connect with like-minded people, whether they share our taste for music or whether they share sort of national impulses or whatever else. This is what most people a lot of people fall into maybe. And so I think it's like really interesting that for all Yeah. for all this like talk of different rules and so forth that these patterns just sort of propagate everywhere. The other thing that struck me, and this has come up before in other episodes, but it's the sort of, you know, people think about China as this big centralized entity, and it is to some extent, but the way that centralized entity actually executes policy ends up being very decentralized,

Tracy: right? And I think that's kind of underappreciated, how much scope individual sensors or individual local governments have to enact specific directives and how they go about doing it.

Joe: It's interesting that Waybo's competitive edge was essentially being the best at censorship, right? And that was the one that survived and sort of anticipating and so forth. And it's a little sad. I liked the decentralized internet. It was fun going to different people's websites and seeing what they're all about and you could theoretically still do it,

Tracy: but it takes effort in a way that doesn't feel worth it when you can just have an algorithm deliver straight what you're sort of id appeals to you like directly in the moment.

Joe: It was a great time. Late 1990s were the peak of humanity.

Tracy: Unironically unironically that.

Joe: Are you really going to learn Chinese?

Tracy: So yeah, one of my New Year's resolutions is to is to take Mandarin classes this year and I will do that.

Joe: I really liked learning Mandarin back way back in the day when I did it because there's very little grammar and I hate grammar because I had to learn German and German grammar is the worst. And also as you learn words, one thing I really like about it is it's very literal. So a lot of words have meanings that sort of reflect the thing being talked about. So for instance, if you're talking about America, so America is meo

Tracy: meo

Joe: which means beautiful country. So that sort of like

Tracy: oh interesting

Joe: meaning is embibed into these individual words or Austria because that's my other half is a which means eastern empire

Tracy: huh

Joe: which you know again very descriptive of what you're talking about.

Tracy: Well wasn't the German is ost right? So that also means

Joe: it's a literal translation. Yeah,

Tracy: that's interesting. You know, both of us have pretty big followings on social media, particularly Twitter. Wouldn't it be fun as a personal challenge to like let's start from zero again on Waybo and see if we could do it all over again? It's like we weren't just lucky, we were really good. Let's start from zero and make names for ourselves on the Chinese internet.

Joe: I think your definition of fun maybe differs from mine, Joe. It's like I need to prove to myself that it wasn't just luck and I need So I need to start from zero and try again.

Tracy: Oh man. Do it in Mandarin.

Joe: That's what I'm saying. Do a real challenge. Do it on hard mode this time. Yeah. Where I have to do it in a different language.

Tracy: All right. Shall we leave it there?

Joe: Let's leave it there.

Tracy: This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Aloway. You can follow me at Tracy Aloway.

Joe: And I'm Jill Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow Yelinglu. She's at Yelinglu95. Then definitely check out her new book, The Wall Dancer: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. [music] Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashelbennet at Dashbot, and Kellbrooks at Kellbrooks. And for more OddLots content, go to bloomberg.com/odlots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 247 in our Discord, discord.gg/odlots. And if you enjoy OddLots, if you like it when we talk about the internet, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast [music] platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely [music] adree. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcast and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.