Foreign bloggers who praise China rapidly gain popularity and millions of followers on Chinese social media platforms. VOA examined the facts and spoke with experts to shed light on the government’s efforts behind the phenomenon.
"It is a long-standing tradition of the Chinese Communist Party to use foreigners to voice its propaganda for added credibility," said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
Foreign influencers cooperate with the Chinese government, the media and third parties to create and boost content that supports government narratives, Ohlberg said. One of the most common topics that foreign influencers focus on is whitewashing human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The U.N. Human Rights Office and groups like Amnesty International estimate that more than 1 million people – mostly Uyghurs – have been confined in internment camps in Xinjiang.
One of the most recent and maybe most popular foreign characters in China is a French national, Marcus Detrez, who became a media sensation in 2024.
Japanese occupation photos
Last year, Detrez posted a series of historic photographs on the Chinese social media platform Douyin that depicted life under the Japanese occupation in the early 20th century. He claimed the images were taken by his grandfather and said he wanted to donate them to China.
Detrez enjoyed a year of celebrity treatment from Chinese authorities, including touring across China, while state media outlets profiled him as a hero. In February, however, historians exposed Detrez as a fraud. The photographs he claimed were unique family heirlooms turned out to be publicly available online in various museums around the world.
But the thread of glorified foreign bloggers started much earlier.
One of the pioneers on Chinese social media is a Russian internet celebrity, Vladislav Kokolevskiy, known in China as Fulafu. He amassed 12.89 million followers on Douyin, where he posts short video clips praising life in China.
In November 2023, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute wrote that in China, Fulafu has “become a household name through his ostentatious displays of affection for China,” identifying him as a Chinese government propagandist.
Kokolevskiy does not make commercial ad disclaimers. However, CMGM, an outlet covering China news, reported in January 2021 that he received advertisement contracts within 15 days for NetEase's "Heavenly Oracle" mobile game and online retailers Pinduoduo and Tmall.
The companies paid about $11,000 for each ad, bringing Fulafu's advertising revenue up to about $33,000 for January 2021 alone, according to the report.
Like Fulafu, dozens of foreigners grew to stardom on the Chinese internet during the last decade, Ohlberg said.
Among them is Gerald Kowal, known also as Jerry Guo, an American who has risen to popularity in China after an interview with state-owned CCTV in 2020. At the time, Kowal had been posting series of short videos critical of New York City authorities’ handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also repeated debunked conspiracy theories, claiming, for example, that the U.S. military brought the coronavirus to China. CCTV broadcasted his interview from New York live.
The China Newsweek magazine profiled Kowal in May 2020 as “one of the most influential internet celebrities,” calling him a “war correspondent” for his videos from pandemic-stricken New York.
Third-party promoters
The success of a large number of foreign influencers is closely tied to multichannel networks or MCNs, which are third-party organizations that promote the growth of certain content creators, operating behind the scenes.
One of the MCN industry leaders is YChina, founded in 2016 by Israeli businessman Amir Gal-Or and his Chinese partner and former classmate, Fang Yedun, as part of Gal-Or's “Crooked Nuts Research Institute,” which focuses on documenting the lives of foreigners in China.
YChina started with the cross-platform sharing of short video interviews with Western expats living in China. It initially focused on cultural topics and soon accumulated more than 100 million followers among its internet influencers from over 30 countries, including Israel, the United States, Australia, Spain, Argentina, Japan and Thailand.
Chinese democracy activists in exile have accused YChina of supporting Chinese government propaganda about Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
In July 2024, the China Public Diplomacy Association, which is under the supervision of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gathered more than 30 foreign influencers from 25 countries to participate in a training camp and visit various cities in China. The bloggers were asked to record their experiences on video and share them online.
China’s state-controlled media outlets boost such bloggers, presenting them to domestic audiences within the narrative of a prosperous nation under the Communist Party.
For example, the Xinhua News Agency's series in 2024 on foreign internet celebrities in China showed videos of influencers from all over the world walking the streets of China's major cities praising their “cleanest streets in the world" and "efficient garbage disposal system."
In using these foreign bloggers, the Chinese Communist Party wants to show that life in China is not what rights groups and China’s critics abroad say it is. The government exploits the idea that unless “you come and see, you have no right to judge,” the German Marshall Fund’s Ohlberg said.
The core of this idea is “very hypocritical,” Ohlberg added, because “the Communist Party allows these people to go only where it wants them to go and see only what it wants them to see. And if you're critical, you certainly won't get the opportunity to go on a field trip.”