Advertisements of the Chinese dictatorship appear subtly on Tiktok

Ask your children what they think of China

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Like to try Pin the jelly candies to the wall.

This is how Bill Clinton described China’s attempt to censor the Internet in 2000. Good luck welcoming the then-president with a wry smile.

A little over two decades later, we haven’t laughed so much. The dictatorship has succeeded – and with flying colours. Not only is Chinese censorship tighter than ever, the communist regime is reaching out to cellphones all over the world.

I know, because I was stuck in the Tiktok morass myself. I’m lying on the couch looking out into a Texas kitchen, where a young mother cradles her newborn baby while speaking in a low voice about childbirth. I eat breakfast while a hairdresser in Australia shows how to trim an elderly woman’s hair.

The world is closer than ever. But the app has it Accused To spy and to establish relations with the Chinese state.

A week ago, a new type of video started appearing in my feed. An Italian influencer showcases Chongqing’s “City of Dreams,” modern skyscrapers dotted with nightlife and 24-hour shops. Another talks about how cool it is to be a woman in China – there are no men calling you on the streets, you can be alone at night and feel completely safe.

Tell that to Luo Daiqing, Chinese student who sentenced He was jailed for six months after photos were published comparing Xi Jinping’s appearance to that of Winnie the Pooh. “A provocation that has a negative impact on society,” the Chinese state believes.

I podcastin “Prince” The Economist’s China correspondent describes the country’s development under Xi. Among other things, I met Eric Liu, who has worked for more than ten years monitoring posts in Chinese social media. As an employee of Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, he was once given a list of 35,000 forbidden expressions associated with Xi Jinping.

In the years Eric has worked with censorship, it has gotten worse — he says posts could have been written about Xi, as long as they were positive. Today everything is forbidden, and the president should not be mentioned at all.

Eric Liu eventually became a whistleblower and fled to California.

Tiktok algorithm It’s a little late to succeed in swaying my image of China, no matter how many deceptive videos from Beijing nightlife I’m fed. but More than half Of all the children born between 2000 and 2010 use the app every single day. Almost all of them watch videos from people they don’t know.

China has not only succeeded in censorship. They made us part of the mechanism.

On the wall, somewhere, jelly candies fluttered.