What's the story with Xu Xiaodong?
What's the story with Xu Xiaodong?
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/210431
This has been bothering me for a long time. A lot of this sounds like the videomaker just watched a documentary that had it out for the CPC and parroted the content verbatim with relatively little research into counter-theses.
Obviously I support beating the shit out of fake martial artists who purport to turn you into a ninja god, and there are surely many snakeoil salesmen in China as there are in America who therefore should be beaten. It also seems perfectly plausible that a good con would be able to take cover under the CPC initiative for cultural revitalization in order to scam people, even if that went counter to the initiative's goals.
But, the video seems to ultimately be aimed at smearing the CPC. For example, vaguely saying Xu "was made" to wear that clown makeup, not saying who made him, and adding in that same segment that the CPC docked his "social credit score", preventing him from taking some methods of transit.
Who made him wear the makeup? Probably the con/dojo he was challenging or possibly the promoters of the fight, but by speaking in vagaries and not defining different institutions, the videomaker makes it sound like these cons are working for the CPC and it's the CPC that made him present as a clown. It's as though there's just some homogeneous "Chinese institution" that Xu is traveling around and fighting different agents of, like the plot of a weird martial arts film.
Some things, like wiping social media, are really par for the course, but shutting his gym down and fining him massive amounts of money are included with no critical investigation of why they happened or even if they did, and are mentioned in the same breath as purely socially-driven harassment like the Taichi students obstructing him. It's all just unsubstantiated hearsay.
It reminds me of how often western press will report on defectors saying they are being attacked by the government [of Bad Country] for speaking out when -- while they did speak out -- they also in many cases did horrible shit like chop their girlfriend to pieces or lead an ethnonationalist campaign. The treatment of Navalny by western press is probably the easiest example unless you want to go back to the "moderate rebels" or "brave mujahideen freedom fighters" eras.
That said, getting good information on this as someone who doesn't speak Chinese is difficult, so I was wondering if other people here knew more about the story.
If the timestamp doesn't work, the correct url is: ( https://youtu.be/gjbSCEhmjJA?t=1155 )
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Weili
Zhang is 2 time ufc champion and has even fought IN CHINA.
If the government is giving this guy a hard time, it isn’t for doing mixed martial arts.
@xiaohongshu@hexbear.net @Fishroot@hexbear.net @meth_dragon@hexbear.net
four years ago this guy was being flogged as a story of how oppressive China is. is there more info on the Chinese net about this guy or has anything happened with him since
Disclaimer: did not watch the video and have no intention to.
The guy has been blacklisted for a few years now. Most likely pissed off the wrong people who have connections with both the criminal organizations and the party officials, and was forced to issue an apology and back down from whatever he was exposing.
The story is simple. Don’t piss off people with powerful connections (both the black i.e. criminals/triads and the white i.e. police/officials) who have the means of beating you up and disappearing you.
Yeah I second xiaohongshu’s comment, i have heard about the dude around 2010-2012 which he was known for challenging martial art masters. His method was pretty novel since he became an internet celeb, but it was also controversial because it was basically him beating people who can’t possibly defend themselves.
What probably happened is that some of those martial art masters are selling some qigong related scam might have some connection with some local lower mid officials that probably has connection with the organized crime.
He probably got too much heat from it and try to grift his way to get a political dissident status somewhere.
I guess we’ll never know what is the true story.the CPC as a whole cannot vet every member’s profile who might have some less savoury connections (you know, too big of a country to do that), but i don’t think the CPC will ever come out clean and say there are embarrassing corruption scandal.