[US Trending] China's "Overseas Propaganda" Impersonates US Voters to Influence Election Public Opinion | Joining the Party Requires Checking June 4th History, but Asking AI About It Becomes a Forbidden Zone! | Domestic Phones Exposed for Surveillance: Useless to Turn It Off? | Embassy Says It's a Wine Bottle, Police Say It's a Shell?
This episode mainly covers the U.S. midterm election results and their impact on policy toward China, the Chinese Communist Party's overseas propaganda operations posing as American voters exposed by the Associated Press, universities requiring inquiries into parents' behavior during the June Fourth crackdown triggering censorship controversies, former journalist Cheng Wanjun seeking asylum in Taiwan and being deported, domestic smartphones exposed for pre-installed surveillance and pop-up ads, interspersed with events such as the A-share market crash being blamed on external factors, suspected Chinese artillery shells mistaken for wine bottles in Papua New Guinea, and a history teacher's profound reflections after observing in Taiwan.
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As the U.S. election day ends, Beijing is likely the one losing sleep. Voice of America published an analytical article on November 3 stating that the outcome of the midterm elections could change the political pressure President Trump faces when dealing with Beijing, but will not necessarily fundamentally alter the direction of U.S. policy toward China. In other words, if the Democrats recapture either house of Congress, Trump's negotiations with Beijing may face stricter oversight. Brookings Institution researcher Qin Jiangnan believes that U.S. policy toward China will not fluctuate drastically. Former Acting Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Shedd emphasized that both parties in Congress share a high degree of consensus on the Chinese threat. Both believe that arms sales to Taiwan are a concrete indicator for observing congressional influence. The latest vote counts show that the Democrats have secured 54 seats in the Senate and at least 228 seats in the House of Representatives, meaning the Democrats have won majorities in both houses and regained control of the U.S. Congress. Over the next two years, the Democrats will have greater power to oversee the Trump administration, promote their own legislative agenda, and block parts of the Trump administration's policies.
Shen Dong, author of Red Roulette, also analyzed what this means for future U.S.-China relations. Shen Dong believes that Trump's first term changed the views of the U.S. and the world toward China, but his second term has increasingly courted Beijing, even hindering U.S. and European joint responses to China's economic shocks. According to Shen Dong, many Republicans are dissatisfied with Trump's policy toward China but dare not openly oppose it. He also mentioned that insiders within the Trump administration secretly contacted Democrats to help draft legislation concerning China. The NVIDIA incident precisely exposed Jensen Huang's massive influence on Trump's chip policy. As Trump's political power is weakened following the midterm elections, will the hardliners on China in both parties of Congress and within the administration finally step forward to challenge the so-called brotherhood between Trump and Xi Jinping? Fellow viewers, what changes do you think will happen to U.S. policy toward China over the next two years? Welcome to leave your views in the comments section.
The U.S. Congress also brought up the votes of the Chinese people on election day. According to Voice of America, the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party of the U.S. House of Representatives posted on Twitter on November 3, comparing the political rights of the people of the United States and China. The post stated that voting is a right enjoyed by all Americans, while the Chinese Communist Party deprives the Chinese people of this right. The Chinese Communist Party is afraid to let the Chinese people vote and live freely. Netizen Sydney Idle said: "The whole world is counting votes, yet the CCP dares not even give its people a single real vote. Those who dare not let people vote are not the people, but those who are afraid of being voted out of office. Beijing does not let its own common people vote, but pays extraordinary attention to other people's votes."
According to an Associated Press report, the U.S. network analysis firm Graphika released a report on October 30 stating that a China-linked network known as Spamouflage has been using Twitter accounts to impersonate American voters. Ahead of the midterm elections, they spread content inciting political division and questioning the fairness of U.S. elections and the democratic system. For example, one account with about 200,000 followers, which originally shared Filipino culture, stopped posting and began retweeting CCTV content commemorating Mao Zedong. Later, it transformed again, impersonating American voters and posting both pro-Trump and anti-Trump content. Some English posts even contained punctuation marks common to Chinese input methods. However, the effectiveness of this CCP overseas propaganda force is hardly impressive, as most interactions are just their own people liking each other's posts. The AP cited researchers saying that this network's methods of impersonating Americans are notoriously clumsy and unlikely to sway U.S. political discourse, though they may be more effective at attacking and harassing overseas Chinese and suppressing information.
Speaking of overseas Chinese, Chinese-American voters in the U.S. also face their own difficulties. On the eve of the election, Voice of America interviewed Liang Qilian, an assistant professor of political science at Santa Clara University, who pointed out that the flood of misinformation on WeChat and Weibo, as well as language barriers, are invisible obstacles hindering Chinese-Americans from participating in politics. Many Chinese immigrants to the U.S. receive their ballots for the first time, yet the phones they use to read the news are still loaded with WeChat and Weibo from behind the Great Firewall; they have arrived outside the wall, but their information remains trapped inside.
Yesterday, Americans were busy queuing to vote in the midterm elections, while news about elections also emerged from China over the past two days. East China Normal University issued a notice on November 2 stating that to cooperate with the district-level People's Congress representative elections, the school would suspend classes for the entire campus on November 16. It is worth noting that according to China's Election Law, district and county-level People's Congress representatives are supposed to be directly elected by the people. However, according to long-term external observations, the selection of candidates is strictly controlled by the organization, and independent candidates are often persuaded to withdraw through various means. In other words, you cast the vote, but the organization picks the person. Another issue is that for the sake of an election, the whole school suspends classes for a day, but how many students know who the candidates they are supposed to vote for are? Suspending classes is still considered polite. According to netizen submissions, students at many universities across the country have recently posted complaints online that their schools are forcing them to participate in the district and county People's Congress representative elections. Netizens joked: "This student, the state requires everyone to act in a play to increase voter turnout, please cooperate."
When voting in the U.S., no one asks what your parents did in the past; in China, if you want to join the CCP, you must first have your parents' backgrounds thoroughly investigated. A netizen recently posted that their roommate needed to submit political review materials for their parents to apply for party membership, and one column required filling in the parents' performance during the 1989 turmoil. The problem is that the roommate didn't even know what the 1989 turmoil was, so they had to ask the domestic AI Doubao, but Doubao's reply was simply, "I cannot answer this question." The party wants to investigate what your parents did 37 years ago, but does not allow AI to tell you what actually happened that year. This is truly a case of "the magistrate is allowed to burn down houses, while the common people are forbidden even to light lamps." The party can dig up your family's old accounts, but you are not allowed to ask about the country's old accounts.
What is forbidden to be asked inside the wall is still clearly remembered by those outside. On November 2, The New York Times Chinese website published a memoir about June Fourth by journalist Nicholas Kristof. He wrote that after the 1989 crackdown, Chinese state media named and shamed him for spreading lies, saying that what he wrote was not news reporting, but fiction. The day after he was named by state media, Kristof was eating at a Sichuan restaurant in Beijing when several waitresses walked up to his table. One of them asked, "Are you the lying reporter they talked about on TV last night?" Just as Kristof was about to explain, the waitress smiled and interrupted him, saying, "It's okay, you don't have to pay. This is on us. We are all 'thugs' here." Kristof also recalled that after the gunfire started, the bravest were the laborers pedaling tricycles, who risked their lives to take wounded students to the hospital. Kristof said these laborers might not have been able to define democracy, but they were willing to give their lives for it. 37 years ago, ordinary Beijingers jokingly called themselves thugs; 37 years later, college students cannot even ask what happened that year. This is why our U.S. trending topics share voices from outside the wall with everyone every week. Please help us by subscribing, liking, and forwarding, and help us spread these voices from outside the wall even further.
In the United States, cursing the president is a daily occurrence, and people still go to vote the next day. In China, commenting on a leader can cost you six years in prison. According to Radio Free Asia, Cheng Wanjun, a veteran Chinese media professional and former editor-in-chief of the magazine Law and Life, arrived at Taiwan's Taoyuan Airport from Thailand on November 3, seeking short-term humanitarian protection. Reports state that Cheng was sentenced to six years in prison in 2019 after being reported for commenting on Xi Jinping at his workplace. After completing his sentence in 2025, he left the country for Thailand. However, he says his personal safety in Thailand is not guaranteed, and he fears the long-arm jurisdiction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Hello everyone, I am Chen Huanjun, former editor-in-chief of Law and Life magazine and a lecturer for the CCTV program Legal Lecture Hall. I am now speaking out publicly at Taipei Taoyuan Airport to seek help. In 2019, because I commented on a 'ruler of a doomed nation' during a staff meeting, I was recorded and reported. The CCP leadership ordered a thorough investigation, the entire unit was purged, and I personally endured six years of imprisonment. In 2025, I was released after serving my full sentence. In order to publish my prison writings, I was forced to flee overseas. I have now been accepted by the UNHCR office in Thailand as a high-risk case. However, the office also informed me that they cannot guarantee my personal safety while I wait for resettlement in Thailand. Given that my prison confession has already been published in overseas media, in order to avoid secondary political persecution by the CCP authorities, I had to transfer to Taiwan to seek short-term humanitarian protection and assistance with resettlement, so that I can continue to create for the rest of my life. I wish to speak freely, to contribute my part to ending the world's public nuisance—the autocratic man-made disaster in China—and to let the mainland and Taiwan share in the family of the free world. Thank you all.
However, the latest news states that Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council indicated that Chen Wanjun could not provide specific evidence meeting the criteria for assistance, and lacked a valid entry permit; therefore, he was sent back to Thailand early that morning. Americans can vote to remove people they don't like. Chen Wanjun just privately said a word about a 'ruler of a doomed nation' and sat in prison for six years. After his release, he still has to drift overseas. I hope this veteran media professional can soon find a place where he can speak with peace of mind.
Next, we enter the 'Looking at China via Mobile' segment. What apps are installed on your phone? The Party knows better than you do. In the last episode, we reported on Xiaomi phones pre-installing anti-fraud components, and now, the matter has escalated. A netizen tweeted on November 2 that the pre-installed China Unicom device management program, System Helper, is not only in Xiaomi phones but can also be found in public records for OPPO and vivo, and using a non-Unicom SIM card may also trigger data reporting. According to the analysis report he cited, this program can collect which applications users have installed and used, as well as usage duration, data traffic, and mobile identification information. Furthermore, the program only checks if the user has completed the initial setup, without checking if the user has agreed to the privacy policy. Simply put, once the setup is complete, it counts as your consent.
On November 4, netizen 'care equal' took apart a Xiaomi 13 Pro and found something even more severe. He claimed that relevant programs in the phone might record the application names, start times, call durations, and whether the system flagged them as fraud-related for WeChat and QQ voice and video calls, and even when the user takes a screenshot might be recorded. The monitoring system also has settings to avoid being discovered; screen recording consumes power, so it stops automatically when the phone heats up to prevent the device from getting hot and making you suspicious. If you are on a call, it won't record audio to avoid noise that might give it away. Kirill Yk also claimed that even if the user turns off the anti-fraud or security protection switches in the settings, some background recording functions may still continue to run. One netizen said, the switches are just for show, the work gets done regardless.
Domestic phones are responsible for watching what you install, and domestic schools are responsible for teaching you what not to install. The Foreign Language Department of Jinzhong College in Shanxi went a step further by holding a 'Youth League Day' activity themed on 'anti-circumvention,' where students pledged not to install, use, or spread circumvention software. The school reported that after study and discussion, the students' ideological attitude shifted from 'it has nothing to do with me' to 'proactive defense.' Netizens mocked this, saying, if students in the foreign language department aren't allowed to look at foreign websites, then what is the point of studying a foreign language? To read the People's Daily to foreigners?
At noon on November 2, the Nanchang University Student Union held a meeting to remind everyone not to circumvent the Great Firewall. That afternoon, the Student Union's official WeChat account posted a tweet about a ticket lottery for the Lushan Music Festival, but the IP location displayed as the United States. The submitter suspected that the operator forgot to turn off their VPN, and noted that the original post was subsequently deleted. The same tweet was reposted at 4:50 PM, with the IP location showing Jiangxi. Netizens said, it's just like the 'Destroy the Four Olds' movement back then, inciting Red Guards to smash and burn cultural relics and historical sites everywhere, while high-ranking CCP officials privately embezzled and hid exquisite calligraphy, paintings, porcelain, and rare thread-bound books. They know what is good; they are just rotten to the core.
The results of the US midterm elections have not yet been fully announced, but the Chinese stock market became nervous on behalf of the Americans first. On November 3, more than 3,300 stocks on the A-share market fell. The official media China Fund News immediately published an article stating that the reason for the collective correction of A-shares had been found, and listed factors such as the decline of the South Korean stock market, the drop in US technology stocks, and the US midterm elections. This topic even surged into the top ten of Weibo trending searches. When A-shares rise, it is an institutional advantage; when A-shares fall, it is the fault of South Korea, US stocks, and the US elections—taking the credit for themselves while shifting the blame to foreign countries. The stock market is China's, but the responsibility belongs to the whole world.
In fact, on that very day, the central bank personally entered the market to conduct a swap facility operation, with a quota exceeding 100 billion RMB. Simply put, it allowed institutions to exchange stocks for government bonds, then convert them into cash, and then specifically buy stocks. Netizens mocked this, asking: "Can one hundred billion fill the gaps between teeth? It hasn't even lost as much as life insurance." On November 1, a financial blogger complained online that his article from the previous night was suddenly deleted, suspecting the issue might have been the photos of netizens' Halloween costumes attached at the end of the article, which touched the censorship red line. In the photos, someone dressed up as a giant green K-line symbolizing a drop, someone held a sign saying "help me buy the dip," and someone wrote "stay away from the scam market" on a mobile phone screen.
Media inside the Great Firewall blamed the plunge of A-shares on the outside world. Let's take a look at how overseas financial media view the miserable state of China's A-shares. In a word, the CCP achieved nothing after all its rescue efforts. Bloomberg's commentary was very blunt, reporting that Chinese authorities are signaling to investors that they are still very actively manipulating the market, yet at least in the stock market, these efforts are falling flat. Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported that the CSI 300 Index plummeted by 8.5% in October, marking the largest monthly drop in over 10 years, with a cumulative drop of about 14% this year. However, over the same period, the US S&P 500 rose by 10%. With one side dropping by more than 10% and the other rising by 10%, I am afraid this account of the Chinese stock market cannot be blamed on the US midterm elections. A netizen inside the wall said: "I only have a growing conviction that no matter how the central media shouts, I will never believe them again. I want to stay away from A-shares and vote with my feet for Nasdaq."
One of the most absurd things in international news today has to be a Chinese wine bottle in the South Pacific. According to an exclusive report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on November 3, last Friday, a suspected artillery shell weighing 32 kilograms was found in a container at a major port in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. Afterward, four Chinese citizens were arrested and remain detained. The suspected artillery shell was hauled away for analysis by bomb disposal experts from the police and military. However, the Chinese Embassy in Port Moresby posted on social media on November 3 that, according to on-site verification by the company involved, what was reported as an artillery shell was actually an artillery shell-shaped wine bottle with zero danger. The embassy also emphasized that China's gun control is among the strictest in the world, and it is almost impossible for military artillery shells to be smuggled from China to PNG. However, citing high-level sources, ABC reported that a report completed by PNG police that day concluded that this was an unexploded Chinese Type 59 130mm artillery shell, containing chemical explosives and a fuse. A wine bottle loaded with explosives and a fuse—the proof of this wine must be really high. Is this the police seeing things, or is someone calling a deer a horse?
Next, let's look at a few absurd videos. China's formalism has surpassed safety awareness. A video forwarded by netizens showed a primary school student in Hebei suddenly stopping in the middle of the road and saluting on the way to school after hearing the national anthem, until the anthem finished playing. Netizens commented: "The evil of this organization is not just destroying the present, but mainly destroying the future." Every time I see this kind of news, I feel sorry for those children. In China, there is a wisdom called watching advertisements first when making a phone call. On November 3, a netizen posted a video demonstrating that when using a domestic Android phone to dial the 120 emergency hotline, the screen not only failed to enter the call page, but immediately popped up an advertisement that was difficult to close. Netizens joked, hoping that person will also use this kind of phone to dial 120 the next time they have a stroke.
At the end of the program, we enter the netizen interaction segment. Sun Minmin commented on the shared needles of students at Liaoning Kangping No. 1 Middle School, saying that seeing the parents of these children makes her glad she made the decision to immigrate and bring her children out. Lu Changjiang commented on the Fifth Plenary Session opposing a single voice, saying that only one steamed bun is allowed in the steamer, while everything else must be steamed rolls, flower rolls, or cornbread. Rob said, only the emperor is supreme, how can slaves be allowed to grow too big.
I have been a history teacher for 20 years and always thought I was teaching the correct history, until I had the chance to visit Taiwan last year and realized that for these twenty years, I had merely been a tool for brainwashing. Last year, I joined a teaching seminar and exchange delegation to Taiwan and visited a history class at a junior high school. I remember that when I first stepped into the classroom, I even felt a bit of condescending arrogance, thinking, how profound could their class possibly be? But those forty minutes sitting at the back of the classroom completely overturned my entire perception of life. The teacher was not standing on a podium delivering one-way indoctrination of standard answers, nor were they forcing the students to rote-memorize which great achievements happened in which year. On the blackboard was an open-ended question, allowing these eighth and ninth-grade children to freely discuss the conflicts and traumas of this island during different historical periods. The students below were chattering away; some stood from the perspective of indigenous peoples, others from the standpoint of immigrants and outsiders. They debated fiercely, yet they listened to each other's ideas very earnestly. Seeing the light and confidence in those children's eyes, and that atmosphere of free expression without fear of saying the wrong thing, was something I had never seen in my own classroom. Throughout the entire class, no one was labeled because of their different positions, and no teacher defined who held the sole justice. Everyone was learning how to understand the past and future of this land. Sitting there, I truly felt a chill down my spine, and even felt ashamed of myself. Looking back on my twenty-year teaching career, what exactly did I teach my students? I made them memorize a long list of historical hatreds filled with emotion, simplified complex historical events into black-and-white hostility, and even deprived children of their ability to think independently. When history is reduced to nothing but standard answers and vengeful emotions, education has lost its soul. I had been deceiving myself, thinking I was cultivating their patriotism, but at that moment, I painfully saw clearly that what I had been teaching was not love for the land and life, but a whole generation's paranoia and hatred toward the outside world. A healthy educational environment teaches how to face the real past, how to learn to respect diversity, and how to find consensus amidst different opinions, rather than mass-producing a group of machines that only know how to hate and cannot tolerate dissent. As I walked out of that classroom, my heart was filled with guilt. For these twenty years, I thought I was lighting up the eyes of the children, but until that moment, I finally understood that the one who was truly blindfolded and the one who most needed to see the world clearly had always been me.