For most of the 90s and early 2000s, the Canadian comedian Mark Rowswell was the most visible and best-recognized foreign face on China’s state broadcaster CCTV. Better known in the country as Dashan (“Big Mountain”), he performed comedy skits and hosted entertainment shows in fluent Chinese. Regularly pulling in hundreds of millions of viewers, Rowswell was a cultural ambassador between an emerging China and the rest of the world. As such, he was always careful to avoid making statements that could be seen as controversial by viewers or the authorities. 

“Even in the mainstream television work I’ve done in the past, I rarely felt pressure to comment on political issues,” he told me, via email. “I always treated that as a two-way street, that I would neither make disparaging remarks nor sing the praises of any political issue. In my view, that was one way we could try to broaden the conversation between East and West.”

China’s growing importance and its pursuit of advancement has brought an end to such diplomacy. Now, thanks to social media, a new generation of foreign personalities are finding large audiences on Chinese video platforms by feeding pro-Beijing narratives to young people.

American vlogger Nathan Rich, also known as Hot Pot King, is one of the most popular such figures. His unstintingly positive nationalist content has ensured frequent appearances on state media and millions of followers on the popular video-sharing platform Bilibili and Weibo, sometimes referred to as China's Twitter.