The US Secretary of State FINALLY got his meeting in China - but doesn’t have high
hopes for it.
A Chinese kindergarten washes kids’ dishes in the toilet.
And Chinese netizens make fun of “white people food”.
That and more on this week’s China news headlines.
Welcome to China Uncensored, I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by Surfshark.
You should be using a VPN like Surfshark to protect yourself whenever you go online.
I’ll explain more at the end.
Speaking of going online,
“white people’s food” has been trending on Chinese social media recently, where it
has evoked laughter, mockery, and yes, some praise, from netizens.
This includes things like crackers with cheese or hummus and raw vegetables for lunch.
Or cold sandwiches with just meat, cheese, and a raw veggie.
Compared to Chinese meals, which are mostly cooked and take a lot longer to prepare, Chinese
people see western food as simple, lazy, and – let’s be honest—pretty tasteless.
One blogger called this the “lunch of suffering”.
Another wrote after eating a Lunchable of crackers with cheese and ham,“The point
of the white people’s meal is to learn what it feels like to be dead, but I’ve taken
two bites and it was so bad it made me realise how alive I am”
Well there you go.
There’s a silver lining to everything.
This Weibo user showed off her attempt at a white person’s lunch and said the “objective
is, of course, for it to taste bad but be healthy”.
Yeah, I would agree with the “taste bad” part.
That looks pretty unappetizing.
If you’ve ever eaten a salad around Chinese people, you’ve probably heard them call
it “rabbit food”.
That’s what they call dishes with a lot of raw veggies, which, as you can guess by
the name, they don’t see as human food.
This Weibo user wondered if westerners can generate their own energy after seeing their
western colleague’s lunch of just spinach and carrots.
According to the South China Morning Post, the “white people’s food” “stereotype’s
origins can be traced in part to an initial fascination with healthy eating in Europe.
A video posted on May 28 by a Chinese woman in Switzerland showed a European woman making
her lunch on a train with just a bag of lettuce and slices of ham.”
The reaction wasn’t all negative, though.
Some Chinese netizens said they had started eating white people food, or Bai ren fan,
because of how much time it saved them.
One Weibo user said they used to like watching cooking videos and preparing fancy meals,
but eventually it got too tiring, so they switched to cooking western food instead.
Especially for young Chinese who are part of the 996 work culture, simple meals are
appealing.
996 refers to working from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week, which is technically not allowed
anymore, but this is China.
It doesn’t matter what the law is.
What matters is what’s enforced.
And with that system, any lunch is a “lunch of suffering.”
Speaking of young Chinese,
The Netherlands is considering screening Chinese students over security risks.
The Dutch Education Minister said he was looking at curbing students who received scholarships
from the state-run Chinese Scholarship Council.
“Recipients of [those] grants have to swear allegiance to the Communist party, return
to China within two years of completing their studies and report to the Chinese embassy
in the country where they study.”
I’m sure this is all about the students’ well-being, though.
I mean, if they don’t have the embassy checking in on them, who knows what could happen.
Like what if they got turned around and ended up at a protest where they were told lies
about the Chinese Communist Party?
Reuters reported that some Dutch universities have already started rejecting Chinese students
that receive the scholarships.
The Dutch Education Minister is also drafting a law that would screen foreign PhD students
in tech fields.
The law doesn’t just cover Chinese students, it’s about preventing the theft of advanced
technology.
But that is one of the main strategies China uses to leapfrog developed countries.
Or, as Bloomberg put it, “the clear intention [of the law] is to prevent students from [China]
gaining access to sensitive material”.
And after the break, France doesn’t want NATO in Asia.
Welcome back.
Back to Europe,
Where France says it’s against opening a NATO office in Asia.
Japan had requested that NATO set up a liaison office in Tokyo to counter China’s aggression
in the region.
NATO’s secretary general seemed to be on board with the idea.
But a French official who asked not to be named said “’Nato [stands for] north Atlantic,
and both article V and article VI [in its statutes] clearly limit the scope to [the]
north Atlantic.”
He pointed out that no country has a NATO liaison office, and that any liaising that
needs to be done can be done through the embassies.
While this may be true, what’s also true is that France’s Indo-Pacific strategy seems
to be centered around not angering China.
French President Emmanuel Macron took heat earlier this year when, after visiting China,
he said that Europe shouldn’t blindly follow the US into war over Taiwan.
Wow, France is already surrendering to China.
Imagine that.
Speaking of war, that’s exactly what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is hoping
to avoid by traveling to Beijing this weekend.
He had a trip planned in February, but he scrapped it after China sent what Biden called
a “silly spy balloon” over the entire continental US.
The State Department says Blinken will be there Sunday and Monday, but as of Thursday,
couldn’t say yet who he’ll be meeting with or anything about his schedule.
China hasn’t said anything about who he’ll be meeting with, either, which is, I would
say, not a good sign.
Blinken has said he’s hoping to get a meeting with Xi Jinping after Joe Biden and Xi agreed
he would follow up on a meeting they had last NovemberWhether that’ll happen, though,
may depend on just how well the US grovels.
Meanwhile, Xi is reportedly going to meet with Bill Gates this week.
I’m guessing Gates was invited to come just before Blinken just to put extra salt in the
wound.
And all this is on top of the, shall we say, “frosty” phone call Blinken had with China’s
Foreign Minister this week .
He rebuked the US for meddling in China’s internal affairs,
Warning the US against “harming China's sovereignty, security and development interests
in the name of competition.”
The US is taking it pretty well, though.
The US Assistant Secretary for East Asian Affairs told reporters, “This is not a visit
in which I would anticipate a long list of deliverables coming out of it.”
“We’re not going to Beijing with the intent of having some sort of breakthrough or transformation
in the way that we deal with one another.
We’re coming to Beijing with a realistic, confident approach and a sincere desire to
manage our competition in the most responsible way possible.”
Gotcha.
So, basically, just talking for the sake of talking.
Well, at least they’re managing expectations for the visit.
And after the break, did a Chinese kindergarten wash childrens’ dishes in a toilet?
Welcome back.
As hard as I was on Blinken’s visit, the US *is* making progress in other areas.
For example, the US is slapping companies with export restrictions over their training
of Chinese military pilots.
“The US action over recruiting pilots follows reports last year.
. . that China’s military had sought to enlist veteran Western pilots to improve its
ability to fly planes from aircraft carriers, which could be useful in the event of a conflict
with the US.”
Germany has raised concerns with China over its former air force pilots sharing military
tactics with Chinese pilots.
And a Shanghai-based company associated with former Blackwater owner Erik Prince was also
put on the list for that reason.
“Frontier Services Group Ltd [was added] for training Chinese military pilots and other
activities that threaten US national security.”
Frontier Services has denied that it trained Chinese military pilots.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Prince was the vice chair of the board until he left
the company in 2021.
Companies were also added to the entity list for things like helping China with its supercomputing
and hypersonic technology, as well as human rights violations.
The US added 31 Chinese entities total, which means they need to get a license to be able
to purchase certain goods.
WHich, it’s usually pretty easy for them to get that license.
And if you’ve ever raised kids, you know that one of the biggest lessons they learn
when they’re young is proper hygiene.
At one Kindergarten in Jiangxi province, it appears the staff also needs to learn about
hygiene.
One mother complained after catching a staff member washing childrens’ plates in a toilet.
She took this video, which allegedly shows the staff member in the school’s bathroom
washing the plates with a hose and putting them in the in-ground urinal.
After the video went viral, local officials said they shut down the kindergarten while
they carried out an investigation.
AndTikTok is a US company, right?
That’s what TikTok executives want you to believe.
But the evidence is piling up that it’s more *Chinese* than American.
And when I say Chinese, I really mean Communist.
TikTok is owned by China-based company ByteDance, which means it has to abide by Chinese laws.
For those who don’t know how China works, all major companies there have to have branches
of the Chinese Communist Party.
As we’ve reported before, Bytedance is no exception to that rule.
Now, TikTok has claimed that, just because it has a Chinese parent company, that doesn’t
mean the Chinese Communist Party has access to American user data.
But surprise, surprise—a former ByteDance executive says that’s not true.
Yintao Yu was the head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. office between 2017 and
2018.
He said in a legal filing that he raised concerns about the company’s shady business practices
with his manager and was fired as a result.
He’s now suing for wrongful termination.
In the lawsuit, he says Chinese Communist Party members in ByteDance accessed TikTok’s
Hong Kong user data in 2018.
He also says Party members had a“ superuser” credential that allowed them to access things
like “network information, SIM card identifications and IP addresses” in Hong Kong, but also
in the US.
He said they even had a kill switch that could shut down apps entirely.
He claims Party members used that user info to track Hong Kong civil rights activists,
protesters, and those sympathetic to the protesters, including gathering data on their networks.
Party members allegedly did this in 2018, the year before mass democracy protests broke
out in Hong Kong.
So if you were looking for a reason to delete your TikTok account, I would say that’s
a pretty good one.
You may not think you’re a target for the CCP now, but just you wait.
The CCP has shown over and over again that no one’s really safe from its hit list.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell.
See you next time.