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Notes -
Do you guys have any takes on this Professor Jiang guy making the rounds recently?
I guess it's interesting to see which conspiracy theories are tacitly backed by the CCP. Apparently the duct tape holding American society together is OnlyFans.
I'll caveat that relatively small no-name accounts get smacked for often more-arbitrary causes than hitting a big business; the tea leaves for this point pretty heavily to the powers that be getting their collective panties in a twist over some queerbating.
That doesn't mean the CCP necessarily cares about Jiang, but it doesn't mean they're ignoring him.
There's a lot of weirdness around her if you read her thread on Kiwi farms. It's pretty clear she was to some degree a booth babe and front for her white boyfriend Timaz. It's pretty clear he wrote a lot of her tweets and is responsible for a lot of her persona. She hides him because it makes her look like what she is eye candy with a white tech savvy male pulling her strings.
She also used westerners ignorance about China to hide some of her weirdness like saying she needed him as a beard when no one in Shenzhen would care if you were a lesbian as long as you didn't blast it on social media. Or saying she was censored for having a Uighur girlfriend when nobody would care about that unless you announced it. As well as her being a persona entirely focused on Westerners and having virtually no presence on Chinese social media. Anyway she's shady enough the government could bring the hammer down for any number of reasons. Or she could just be lying I wouldn't rule it out. She hides behind the veil of "Chinese censorship" when it's convenient.
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Wu was a popular persona in the physical electronics space from 2016-2022. Some of that's downstream of her... assets, but she also provided a decent amount of hardware, software, and general guidance work, and while a lot of the actual hardware stuff she did was more focused on getting attention than genuine novelty, it at least passed the poc || gtfo test. Her biggest impact was explaining the cultural and social touchstones of a lot of Shenzen's lesser-known or 'obvious' bits, to the point she was doing semi-regular talks on the matter. Since this coincided with a lot of casual and hobbyist electronics people starting to trawl Shenzen, she got a good boost or two from 'bunnie' huang, and that
No idea. As you say, it could just be 'slutty' outfits, the lesbian Ughyr partner, or saying naughty things, although she'd been doing all those long enough that the censors would be pretty late. It could be that the norms changed. It could be that she'd been talking them up as ways to criticize Western governments more than China, and that was being read differently by her censors; it could be that her wording had changed in ways to subtle for me to recognize that they did; it could be any of a thousand other things.
But I think it points to the ideology mattering more than the private business, at least in her case. She does still give the pro-Shenzen writeups, even if that's the only social media she does now.
She's also a bit of an op. with a white boyfriend/husband pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
https://kiwifarms.st/threads/naomi-wu-sexycyborg-realsexycyborg-timaz.65719/
People proposed this theory back back when Wu came up on the Old Reddit, along with the theory that she was an intentional CCP op. It's plausible, in the sense that it could happen, be hard to prove, and would have some explanatory power, but there's basically no attempts by those KFers to consider what would disprove it. I'm not going to say either has to be false, but I remain skeptical.
Sure it's not proven but I think it incredibly likely. There are a lot of connections and she has photos of him and her in Egypt and in his apartment promotes his printers and has admitted they live together and called him her "beard" which I don't believe because she posts about being a lesbian on twitter. She says a lot of things that are designed to appeal to westerners ideas of China but fall apart if you have knowledge of Chinese society. For example Chinese police do not care if you have a Uyghur girlfriend. They do care about personalities posting about homosexual relationships on Twitter. So her excuse for Timaz being a beard makes no sense. It does make sense if she's a character designed to appeal to thirsty redditors though because having a boyfriend ruins the fantasy. These influencer type girls are always hiding their boyfriends. Have you ever seen a lesbian look like her? She's very much had surgery to appeal to the male gaze. She obviously does have some knowledge of 3d printing and tech but she's a manufactured product and I think there's essentially 0% chance she's actually a lesbian. Whatever she is she's not a CCP plant they'd be horrified by hald the things she says.
It's less that you haven't proven it, and more that it feels like people started with the conclusion and then tried to look for any data supporting it. It's not just that this evidence sometimes has other alternative explanations (hell, some of the alternative explanations are a little sketchy themselves!); it's that there's no real 'okay, what falsify this' or even a 'okay, what would explain the same data with fewer epicycles'.
That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it makes it hard to feel any level of confidence.
Uh... yes, actually. There's even one at the FRC environment I support, albeit caucasian and taller. For all the Subaru Flannel stereotypes are founded in reality, there's a lot of people outside of the stereotypes still. I have known (cis!) femmes who glorify the Barbie Doll look, obvious implants and all. I'm way too androphillic to get it myself, but different strokes for different folks.
Maybe things are different in China -- meyerlemon's response here seems like it was viewed from a literal funhouse mirror to Western Perspectives. But I don't have good sources clearly saying that it is different this way, either.
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I think it’s broadly known that hardline Chinese nationalists and the far right are censored on Chinese social media. They are a potentially large opposition group to the CCP’s vaguely Marxist post racial broadly liberal future vision of Chinese society. Communism itself is, after all, an imported ideology invented by two foreigners whose statues sit in many major Chinese cities and CCP assembly halls, and in the name of which much classical Chinese art, architecture and civilizational infrastructure, from the elite Chinese court cuisine (reportedly the most complex and elaborate in the world) to forms of media was destroyed or severely damaged as decadent, backward and reactionary just a few decades ago by the very party still in power.
I wouldn't describe the CCP as wanting a post racial or liberal future, I don't think even their propaganda says that much less the reality on the ground. The cultural revolution is usually seen as a product of Mao and madness so the current party doesn't have too much of that sheen on it and allows criticism of it (most notably recently the three body problem). The modern party is fairly nationalistic itself and has presided over a revival of Chinese culture so it's hard for a nationalist opposition to get too much steam. If anything I think the biggest point of tension is Mao, rather than Communism being "foreign" but all the Mao iconography is symbolic these days so most people just ignore it but it definitely shows the contradiction of modern China.
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