Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: mo1567/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 2.0
A RECENT TRIP to China by US influencer Hasan Piker has been notable for, among other things, how banal it has been.
As part of the trip, Piker has marveled at Chinese smartphones and visited cities invariably framed as having high-tech infrastructure compared to the West. To be sure, America may lack high-speed rail, but China is not the only place in the world with a high-speed rail system and that has never failed to prevent Americans from seeing China’s rail system as a specific accomplishment of Chinese socialism.
In the course of his trip, Piker has made appearances with Chinese state-run media. Piker has mostly shrugged off criticism of his actions as whitewashing or papering over China’s genocidal actions in Xinjiang or its crackdowns against domestic dissidence. When criticized, Piker claimed that “Xinjiang is awesome.” Even more remarkably, Piker claimed that China is “hella gay”, never mind an ongoing crackdown on representations of “feminine men” in China.
Piker even defended when Chinese police intervened to briefly shut down his stream. Apparently, when Chinese police do something, this is praised as positive, whereas Piker might be more critical of actions by Western police.
Anyone familiar with the Chinese United Front knows that Piker’s trip to China follows a familiar script. This script has increasingly been trotted out at Western influencers in past years, who then produce content that depicts China in rosy terms.
Evidently, this works, otherwise China would not continue with such soft power efforts. Apart from Piker, one notes that the same approach was adopted for left Chinese diasporic nationalists as the Qiao Collective, who similarly came back from China with only praises of the Chinese government.
Of course, one notes to what extent these trips to China are vapid and shallow, coming off as mere tourist fare. It is improbable that such trips involve any visits to see the genuine sites of stark inequality that exist in China, one of the world’s most unequal societies. Would Piker or Qiao be permitted to visit an iPhone factory, for example? Or would the masses that toil to service the technological needs of the world in “closed-loop” factory systems simply be erased in the narratives constructed to whitewash contemporary China?
For Piker, the juxtaposition is always of China to the West. What is non-Western is idealized and extolled as superior. This is, in a word, Orientalism. Yet this worldview reflects an understanding of China that never takes China as a society, just as any other, or that Chinese people are as human. Instead, they are merely shadow puppets through which to construct a grandiose fantasy that is juxtaposed with Western contexts.
So much for internationalism, or attempting to genuinely understand a society. This reflects not only the narrow horizons and parochialism of western leftists, but their lack of internationalism–the only societies they care about are their own, and the rest is simply shadow puppetry.
Indeed, the parallel to obtuse praise of China by Piker and others is the adulation of America by Chinese democracy activists, who seem to fail to note that America shares many of the same failings of China. One could simply transpose the praises sung of America to China vice versa. The horizons of political projection remain as narrow as ever.