/r/China used to be a virulently anti-China subreddit that constantly posted negative articles from western propaganda outlets like Radio Free Asia and there would be hundreds of comments circlejerking over it. the top posts have hundreds of comments and 10s of thousands of upvotes. they have 525,000~ members. mind you, there was zero positive sentiment about China even a few weeks ago. it was very obvious no one in this subreddit had ever even been to China much less lived there.
despite this, since USAID cuts started, for some reason, the sub is totally dead and the top post right now has a score of 70, 88 comments, is basically “Deepseek bad” and the comments are shitting all over it. there’s virtually no anti-China sentiment in the community altogether.
weird…
I saw the same thing on a recent Wallstreet journal youtube video about another Chinese “ghost city” and the comments were 99% people calling out the propaganda for being obvious propaganda. And talking about how wasteful public spending projects are in their own countries. I genuinely think you’re right.
yeah, to be clear, i am not a person who believes heavily in conspiracy theories. but everywhere that i am used to seeing overwhelmingly negative sentiment re: China, it’s cooled off tremendously.
i am still seeing comments, but there’s a stark difference in how fast they shoot up in score on all of the platforms and how consistently they’re found at the top of the discussion.
i’m sure that there will still be organic, natural discussions about negative things going on in China because there are definitely things to discuss, but i’m not exaggerating when i say that the tone shift across virtually every social media that i use is very noticeable. it could also be because of the whole RedNote phenomena, but it seems like a pretty significant and sudden change to be just that.