Well, here’s a little case where two things about which I’ve written in the past have intersected in real life. I’ve been a fan of Matt Galat and his Jayoe channel for quite some time. His recumbent trike “World Tour” is filled with fascinating footage and insights (I loved his tour of Korea) — and Galat helps it out immensely with his personality and skill in filming and telling a story.
As I’ve mentioned before, “Jayoe” is actually Chinese for “add fuel,” but it’s actually used as a cheer to encourage competitors or people facing a challenge. Galat uses the term well — his aim is to “add fuel to life,” to take on challenges and make them exciting and interesting — so it’s an excellent name that captures his approach, and he came up with it because he’s lived a good bit of time in China.
When COVID first hit he was living in Ningbo. Early in the pandemic, he chronicled his departure from his home there with his family to finally settle in Michigan just north of Detroit. When things started to clear up, he returned, and then, since he couldn’t continue his world tour (his trike was locked up in a Malaysian hotel), he took to travelling around China itself. He was a regular tourist ambassador for them.
And now we’re finding out that that was backed in part by the behind-the-scenes work of the Chinese government.
This is actually not entirely a bad thing, and I don’t fault Matt for it at all really. I’ve seen enough of his work to know that he’s an optimist who looks for the good in a lot of things throughout his travels. It seemed that every one of his trike-touring videos could’ve been used as an advertisement really, no matter where he was. So it was only natural that his videos within China would tend toward the positive side. But he took a lot of heat for it, and, unfortunately, I think some of his responses kind of pushed him into the political side where he had to stand up and defend the Chinese against some of the more aggressive accusations. I must admit, I really stopped following him when he went there.
But now he’s back with a new approach, and I think it’s brilliant. While COVID has shut off a lot of his international world touring, it hasn’t closed his access to the United States. So why not start at the end of his world tour and work his way backwards through the US while the pandemic settles down and maybe in a couple of years be able to get back to where he left his trike and pick it up there again? Things are getting interesting again for the person who simply followed his channel to travel the world vicariously. I look forward to it.
But now, about the Chinese…
The New York Times just published this article about how the Chinese government is using social media influencers to propagandize on their behalf. And I’m honestly not surprised. While I would be interested in how the US does the same thing, I can’t help but be struck by the main difference. In the US, we have organizations like the New York Times to point out the government’s embarrassments. There is no such thing in China. Opposition to the party line is always met with a swift and often severe response. Ironically, the very sites that China uses around the world for this propaganda are blocked or restricted within its own borders, so they certainly know how it works.
But here’s a nation that understands what it takes to not only survive, but thrive on the world stage. Their goal is to supplant the US as the world leader, and they don’t play by our rules at all. Thing is, the US is generally known as the “leader of the free world.” What kind of world leader will China be if they resort to obscuring the truth about their own record on rights and freedom with no one to hold them accountable? Can they be the leader of a “free” world while at the same time oppressing large populations with their own brand of government?
And for those who would try to turn it back again on the US (as the Chinese always do), I would remind them of this: How is it that you know of the faults of the US government? Because of a constitutional guarantee that a free and fair press may operate within its borders. Of course the US has it’s problems, but it’s because of the very system that falls under the attack of the likes of the Chinese government that I, as a US citizen, even know that those problems exist. Not so in China. Ask the typical Chinese citizen within its borders how the Uyghurs are doing and they’d at best tell us that everything is peachy, at worst would have no idea.
So I ask again — what kind of leader do we want in the world? A flawed leader that is working within a system of freedom that is in constant self-reflection and improvement for all of its citizens (especially recently), or a flawed leader that gives you all the freedom you want as long as you do what they say? I suppose it’s easy to go for the security of the latter — we’ve had a taste of that ourselves with the Patriot Act, and in Nazi Germany the trains ran on time, right? But we need the people who can stand up and say “Damn the trains!” without getting thrown in jail for it. I know one place especially where can we find them, and that place isn’t China.
