This China Trilogy is intended to explain China: What is it? Where does it come from? Where is it going? What does it want? On the one hand, this is motivated by my own interest in the subject, but I also think that for Finns in general, China is a bit of a mysterious country, even though it is increasingly in the news. So there might be a demand for something like this.

In this first episode, I'm adventuring on the Chinese internet and trying to find out how Chinese people at grassroots level see China. In Chinese social media, memes, politics and censorship are intertwined into a multi-leveled whole.

After the Ukrainian war, there was a lot of deep analysis in the media about Russian culture, history and Putin's background.

People wanted to understand what was happening.

The war also revealed more of China's existence.

And China is constantly in the news, regarding the economy, Taiwan, micro-siru, the control of the machinery, Xi Jinping, Uighurs, they have everything.

But where Russia has started to be a neighbor country, at least in Finland, to better understand, I feel that China is a weird country.

And it involves a lot of beliefs, and above all, questions.

At least these kinds of questions amuse me.

And in this video series I would like to find answers to these questions, or at least a part of them.

And I warmly welcome you to join me on this journey of learning.

I'm now in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.

I've come here to study Chinese and make this video series.

Right now I'm on the roof of my apartment building, in the heart of the city.

Taipei is a compact and homely capital city.

You can find the heart of a big city, but also a place to breathe.

In general, Taiwan is something that pulls me to its side and I have spent the last 15 years here together.

China considers this a private area, but in practice Taiwan is an independent country.

China is located, can you see the hills over there?

would have been great to do the China trilogy in China and go there to get answers to these questions.

But this time it was not possible due to the difficult corona situation, the visa application process and other challenges.

I'm thinking that there is a border between Taiwan and China in the Kyber space.

I've been thinking that by going to the Chinese internet, I could meet Chinese people at a level close to the Earth and try to understand how they experience China and the world.

I needed Chinese help, so I started asking friends for tips.

Then I ended up meeting Illa Betonaula at the Comedy Club, who wanted to help.

I'm at the comedy club and the presentation is about

after I made everyone believe him from China everybody got a question from me it's like a press conference most commonly asked question would be

do you know Do you know there's no democracy

I feel it's quite a mean question because I can feel they don't really want an answer from me They just really want to point that out

You know, it's kind of like asking an orphan.

Yeah, I'm just really tired of this kind of shit.

I mean, I don't see Taiwanese do this to Germans.

I know this is the first time we meet each other, but do you want to talk about Nazi and Hitler?

She is a Chinese from Shanghai who studies philosophy in Taipei.

I think being Chinese, you are inevitably politicized all the time.

The only thing people focus on is me being Chinese and they have a lot of stereotypes against me.

We then agreed to meet again and prepared for a big research trip deep into cyber-China.

The Chinese internet is different from our western internet.

It's use began to increase a bit after the west in the late 90's.

wondering if the Internet would weaken the Chinese government's control over the people.

Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet.

That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

It was censored all the time, but at first it was a joke.

But then in the 2010s, the rope tightened.

According to the Chinese government, this is not a waste of time.

We lived in times when the internet was no longer a thing, but we were there all the time.

Smartphones were getting popular and Arab Spring memories were getting popular.

At the same time, there were also revelations like Wikileaks and Edward Snowden.

The Internet was a significant threat to the Chinese government, which allowed for more counter-action.

Unlike some in the 90s, instead of the Internet taking control of the Chinese government, China managed to own the Internet as a means of governance.

Today, the Chinese Internet users are the largest in the world, and the Chinese Internet is the most monitored in the world.

When countries are listed by the freedom of the Internet, China is always the last on the list.

But what does the inside of China's Great Wall of Fire look like?

Some Chinese do everything to climb the wall to this side.

But we were walking inside the fortifications.

In a way, in China, too, a lot of the internet use is focused on a few social media sites.

And To get to know them, you have to start with WeChat.

WeChat is a king-size app that doesn't have direct access to the West.

It is used for a little bit of everything.

The Chinese use a lot of stickers like this.

In addition to messaging, WeChat is used for sharing everyday life, getting event information, following groups, etc.

Is this kind of like Instagram and we Instagram and What's up?

and then also combined with Maybe Facebook or Reddit or something.

But the user is definitely not yet because wechat can also pay for purchases, transfer money to a mobile payment method, book a doctor, buy train tickets, book hotels, all kinds of things.

This is like, this is Tik, this is the same.

It is the same, it is TikTok but we have the Chinese version.

just funny videos or Just I think it's just like tick-tock.

Then we have the little red book, but I think it's more on the phone.

It's very popular and it's kind of like an Instagram and also like a Pinterest.

It has a light content, but you can also find some study tips.

It is the most famous public sauna called Louisville.

Yeah, so they're sharing, she's sharing experiences.

In addition to this, 1 of the major features of the app is also shopping.

Taobao is not a social media platform, but a shopping site, but a significant page in the Chinese internet sphere, if online shopping is

interesting that there are so many interested users, about a billion, that the library of contents is huge.

And there was also a company that started selling a bit of everything you can imagine.

And who also sold a lot of other Finnish products.

Yes This is Taiko Taiko means like he lives in Europe and he Buy things for you, and then he should be to China.

What like a quick gas I need your sign right?

much a lost Jamie could come with a model.

The content of Chinese netizens' comments is the same as in the West, but it's hard to find critical content unless the critics are right.

For example, there was a YouTube hostess, Billy Billy.

The content there is mostly basic vlogging, game content and other nonsense, but the content creator who ordered the service is very smart.

She is a law professor at MU, who deals with philosophy and social themes with a sharp

In this case, a man at a restaurant had invited a woman to join the party.

When the woman refused, the men beat the woman to a pulp.

We cannot see any humanity on these people.

The other kind of acceptable criticism of society was also expressed by the American Chinese-speaking woman who was very disinformatively insulting the US.

Her videos also received comments about how it was okay to remove pressure and antipathy from the US.

The comments on these videos are 1 of the concepts that are not in the West, and I'll explain why.

These are comments written in the video in a certain place.

And these often generate a crazy, deep, meta-level humor that, to understand, requires a huge amount of internet humor's meme references and such.

And, as I've heard, participating in this is a very community experience.

This is just an example that there is a very strong internet culture and meme culture in China.

And this can also be disconnected from the main screen.

China's Twitter-based Weibo is also very important.

As a public discussion platform, it could also be compared to a Reddit-like page.

As a public forum, it could be compared to a website like Reddit.

In the West, people like to criticize their government's COVID policy

But it just doesn't last very long and it will get censored.

The content of the social criticism that Jamie Picasso found was related to the low number of corona cases, which was suspected.

But the suspicion hit the lack of testing and the passivity of the people, not the governance.

The most common way to see this criticism is in Baidu, which is China's Google.

As you can see, it has the same layout as any other search engine, and the same map features.

The classic test is to search for information on Google and Baidu about the smuggling of blood-sucking, misused identification documents in 1989.

Google provides the relevant information, Baidu doesn't.

The test can be repeated by searching for information about other rare things, such as Uyghurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, Falun Gong, democratic movements, Nalle Puhi, and so on.

It may be a bit difficult to make out from this presentation, but you can test this at home.

I think it's very interesting that in the West, the Internet is seen as a port of freedom of speech, but in China, its basic ethos is very different.

The official explanation behind this censorship is that China's Communist Party doesn't even think about Internet sovereignty.

The idea is that the Chinese Internet is Chinese, and what happens there is China's internal affairs, and that under the Kyber Security Act, China can be in the name of national security in the event of what happens there.

The Communist Party says that the restricting of the Internet is in order to create a healthy and safe Internet, as Xi Jinping says in his speech.

Like in the real world, freedom and order are both necessary in cyberspace.

Freedom is what order is meant for, and order is the guarantee for freedom.

In the meantime, greater efforts should be made to strengthen ethical standards and civilized behaviors in cyberspace.

The question arises, who is right, who is in charge, and who is valuable is the question.

In practice, it is seen that the Communist Party is supported by pleasant content and the unpleasant content is removed from it, and the perpetrators are as much as possible punished.

Of course, even in Finland, the law must be obeyed, but the law is relatively solid and clear.

And the law is relatively acceptable and clear.

It is interesting to see what is and what is not against national security.

This interpretation is contrary to many international law, and that's why many of them no longer work in China.

I think many people use VPN in China which is illegal but people still do it.

Many people, 1, they don't really care I feel Because many content in the Western media are in English or other languages.

Some Chinese people don't speak English, so they don't really care.

And also there are a lot of influencers, they would carry those Western content into Chinese media and they translate it.

All the trendy things never get delayed in China actually.

According to the 2010 half-time survey, most Chinese are okay with censorship in the name of national security.

The question of this doesn't rise up in the list of people's importance.

means like you work from 9am to 9pm and you work 6 days a week.

Like overwork culture is like, I mean Asia it is very big so.

Chinese people are really focusing on their well-being in life so sometimes they would say just take care of yourself and don't mind other people's business.

How do Chinese people think that the rest of the world sees China?

I think Chinese people are aware that they don't have a good image in Western people's eyes because they can still see how news describes what's happening in China.

I think Chinese people are not very happy about it.

So we are silenced and we cannot have our own narrative.

See all Jaakko Keso – Yle Kioski transcripts on Youtube

I made a research trip to the Chinese internet