Who is Seeing the Real America? - China Media Project
chinamediaproject.org
"Zero-dollar shopping" videos depicting America as a lawless hellscape where woke politics mean criminals now go unpunished have been going viral for years within China and on Chinese-language social media abroad. What lies behind this strange trend?

Even for Chinese people who live in Canada and the United States, where English is the main language, a mix of habits, cultural affinity, and other factors means that they continue to get most of their information from Chinese-language media, writes a Chinese in the U.S.

Chinese social media platforms are decrying the lawless state of American society non-stop. “Similar videos also turned up on the phones of my family members in China and they’d send them to me in WeChat groups or private messages,”

"I liked to chat on the phone with my family on the way back home from school, and my grandmother would urge me to get home as quickly as possible. In her imagination, nowhere is safe in New York after nightfall. When I talked to relatives on my way to work in the mornings, they warned me to be careful of Black people on the street, who, they cautioned, are “uneducated and savage.”

“In some videos, we also see violence meted out against Black people by US police, like the death by choking of George Floyd, which ignited the Black Lives Matter movement.”

In all of these cases, though, the time, location, and source of the clips are never cited. All of them seem to agree that the mere sight of a Black face on camera makes it self-evident that a crime is being committed.

“An elderly gentleman told me he doesn’t usually read the newspaper because ‘the characters are too small’ and he gets most of his information from WeChat posts and videos. He also doesn’t know how to find new WeChat accounts so he just reads whatever turns up in his groups. Most of the articles he showed me were exaggerated or misleading reports.”

"He told me he believes America is becoming more and more unsafe, and he deliberately avoids black people when he sees them on the streets. He said with absolute certainty that, since the Covid-19 pandemic, street crime has been skyrocketing nationwide. When I asked him where I got this information, he said, ‘This is what everyone thinks.’”

“Who is everyone?” I asked him.

“Everyone!” he said with absolute certainty.