I went to China and everything was black and white. There is no color, there. The people eat their pet dogs and plain rice. They don't even need to eat the dogs, they just do it to fuck with westerners. Six men in a dragon costume threw firecrackers at me.

Hire me, NYT

The paucity of the examples of repression is very telling. Omg a handful of security checkpoints, I've never seen that kind of thing when I travel through airports or enter bars before, holy shit

when does any nation's media report on tourists having a bad time?

Videos by influencers documenting their trips have been widely promoted on Chinese media — if they tell a certain story.

Yeah I’m sure the NY government will promote vlogs where tourists complain about crime or dirty streets or getting scammed or robbed alongside tourists expressing joy over seeing theater and historical sites.

Xi I would very much love to visit China. I promise to take pictures and videos that show China in a positive light because it's an amazing country. Please just help me with airfare costs.

It's so unfair Chinese people aren't promoting foreigners shitting on their country on social media

What other place could have:

• Police on every corner
• Ubiquitous surveillance
• Systemic repression

what's that? it's new york city? whoops.

Is it just me or is CHYNAAA BADDDD propaganda from The Paper of Record™️ and Fourth Estate™️ getting dumber and sloppier? It feels like they all wore themselves out on Taiwan saber rattling shit and have just been phoning it in lately

By "Chinese Propaganda" they literally mean "Chinese Tourism Departments". The Chinese Government is big and there's a lot of agencies that just do innocuous stuff.

Here in the free land of America, we actively promote people taking a big, smelly shit on our country, our rights, and our citizens.

I was setting that up as a "nobody promotes negative stories about their country" sort of argument-by-comparison, but we also just had our government practically offer their assholes to Count Bibula, right after he insulted our nation and people while asking for money and demanding we do his laundry, so I guess we really are free.

So there are police visible walking around sometimes,

Security checkpoints at the entrances to densely packed areas,

And one time a hotel had to phone the local police to ask if they could accept foreign guests.

The horror.

I've watched a few of those videos, they just made me nostalgic. Hopefully someday I can go back for a visit, it's been a while.

Doesn't the New York Times, the most famous newspaper in the world, do constant negative reporting from China? I'm assuming they must have staff, or at least contractors there, considering how much they have to say about the place.

“You forget that you are on a massive movie set, seeing a facade of freedom.”

Yeah, it's all just a big Potemkin village. A really big Potemkin village with over a million people in it. Any minute, they can collapse it all down and go back to the barracks. They probably have really fancy machinery that folds everything down on its own, too.