Editor’s Note:

A growing number of foreigners who are living or have lived in China are now presenting the country’s real life to the outside world through their videos and tweets. Today, we present you the seventh of a series of stories about the social media influencers who are endeavoring to right the wrong of the Western perception of China.

Zhang Yu

JeniZhang13@163.com

“HERE we are at one of China’s crumbling ghost towns. You can see the empty building behind me. It’s been abandoned for almost 10 years. It could fall at any second and crush and kill everyone. There are warning signs everywhere, warning you of the building’s collapse any second.”

Saying these words in a serious and apprehensive tone peculiar to some U.K. media, Jason Lightfoot, a British vlogger on YouTube, shared with his fans a scene he saw when walking past a building under construction in Xingyi City, Guizhou Province.

With a tag that reads BSB News and sometimes dusty filters added to the videos, Lightfoot, calling himself BSB News correspondent Jason Burger, made fun of the BBC with derisive allusions and mocked the tricks of Western media fabricating untrue stories about China in his videos.

Lightfoot, 32, has lived in China since 2012. Born and raised in Britain, he met his Chinese wife in 2009. In 2012, the couple decided to move to Xingyi, his wife’s hometown.

According to Lightfoot, he began to make short videos and upload them to his YouTube account from 2015. His videos mainly showcase his everyday life in China — eating Chinese food, experiencing Chinese culture, visiting different scenic spots, and occasionally speaking up against biased views about China.

So far, Lightfoot has more than 142,000 followers on his account “Living in China” on YouTube and 299,000 followers on Bilibili, a popular Chinese video-sharing website. Most of his videos on YouTube garner over 100,000 views. In particular, his 10 videos under the section “BSB News correspondent Jason Burger” have gained more than 1.81 million views.

Recording life in China

“Don’t judge China until you’ve come here and seen it with your own eyes for yourself,” said Lightfoot in one of his videos, which reminds one of the well-known saying “Seeing is believing.”

“Before I came to China, I had heard a lot of things about China from Western media, which were all negative. They would say that there’s so much pollution in China, it’s crowded, it’s noisy and it’s dirty. When I first came to China, I was shocked because what they said is not actually true,” Lightfoot told Xinhua News Agency in an interview last year.

Lightfoot said he saw a lot of other accounts on YouTube talking about China. But there was a lot of negativity being put out.

In another interview with Southern Metropolis Daily, Lightfoot said that China’s infrastructure had developed quite well even 10 years ago. “My wife’s hometown, Xingyi, is a small city, but it has convenient transportation. When we go out, we can eat delicious food from all over the country and even other countries. I realized that this is the real China.”

According to Lightfoot, he had decided to open an account on YouTube to record and share his daily life and the unique Chinese culture when he first came to China. Now he occasionally expresses his feelings and views on China in the videos, prompted by the fake news stories conjured up by Western media outlets.

“You can see that my videos are mostly shot on the street. I would improvise to explain to the audience the situation I encountered on the way. In my opinion, taking Xingyi as the main shooting place is the biggest feature of my channel,” Lightfoot was quoted as saying.

Lightfoot’s videos have not only attracted hundreds of thousands of overseas fans, but also enjoy great popularity in China. His account “Mr有意思” on Bilibili has got more than 1.26 million likes from netizens, sharing their feelings and opinions on the comment section.

Slamming lies about China

Many of Lightfoot’s subscribers on YouTube and Bilibili would often be amused by his parody of the defamatory reports on China by Western media.

In some of his videos, Lightfoot imitated how Western media would report on China using voiceovers to distort the facts and employing grayish filters and background music to play up the atmosphere.

In Lightfoot’s opinion, many Western netizens including reporters have never been to China. The main sources for them to understand China is through Western mainstream media outlets. “When they watch the news channels and see all those negative reports about China, they will believe that that is the real China. But in fact, many Western journalists who report on China have not seen China with their own eyes,” Lightfoot said in the interview with Southern Metropolis Daily.

He thinks that one of the main reasons why Western media are hostile to China is that many Western countries feel threatened about the rise of China, as China has shown a different but more effective governance model from the West.

From Lightfoot’s observation, the living standards of the Chinese people and China’s economy have grown by leaps and bounds over the past decades. But in the United States, many people’s living standards are still the same as they were 10 years ago.

He said that many social issues in the U.S. have remained unsolved or become even more prominent. Therefore, they can only try to cover up China’s achievements by making up and presenting unfavorable views of China.

In several of his videos, Lightfoot sarcastically criticizes some Western media outlets’ distorted reports that allege the existence of “concentration camps” and “forced labor” in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Lightfoot gives examples of some outlets using gray filters that alter videos to discredit the real environment in Xinjiang. He also points out the practice of using Google Maps to randomly choose structures that look like prisons to back claims of “concentration camps” in Xinjiang with the aim of misleading the public.

“How many filters are you [Western media outlets] using? It looks like my BSB News. I guess they are kings of this kind of filter, the underworld filter,” Lightfoot said in a video.

He showed the viewers a satellite image from the city that he’s walking in, and that how easy it is to make the image look like some kind of “concentration camp.” “All these bullshit stories by Western media is a huge plot to try and destabilize China, to serve their own geopolitical interests. They’re afraid of China’s rise,” said Lightfoot in his video.

Truth prevails

Although some Western media are going to great lengths to smear China, Lightfoot said he feels glad that more Western vloggers like him are exploring and sharing the real China in their own ways. “Although our channel has not been able to get too much exposure in the West, our videos are gradually changing some people’s ideas,” Lightfoot told Southern Metropolis Daily.

According to Lightfoot, many netizens have sent messages to him, saying that they had never thought that life in China would be so pleasant, and thanked him for letting them see the real China.

His parents also changed their attitude toward China after visiting their son. “Never had they heard positive things about China. Once I invited them to Xingyi, they witnessed what I told them,” Lightfoot told Xinhua.

But defending China from the false allegations from the West also made Lightfoot hit the headlines on The Times newspaper twice, which accused him of having been funded by the Chinese Government to make his videos.

“In my last video, I was hanging around at Burger King. Do you think that the Chinese Government would fund me to just hang around at Burger King?” Lightfoot speaks up for himself in a video.

“Most of the time, in my videos, I’m just recording my daily life in China and try to show an unbiased view of China unlike Western media,” he added.

According to Lightfoot, he will continue to stay in China and record his life through videos. “They will never silence my voice, and they can never silence the truth. I believe more people are starting to watch channels like mine rather than listening to these kinds of fabricated, biased news stories that Western media is putting out,” Lightfoot said in an interview with China Daily.