"We Were Told to Register on Every Website That Can Be Registered"

Giles: You work for the government. Why are you still going around registering accounts?

Tourist: The office requires it. Whatever can be registered, we register. Bilibili, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Tieba, Douyin, Kuaishou, and the foreign ones the same, YouTube, Quora. These websites and apps around the world, as long as there are simplified-Chinese users, there's a place to do the work. You think switching to a foreign platform gets you some peace. They're there too. It's not as if only those few comment sections inside the country are theirs to run.

Giles: Once you've registered, what do they have you do?

Tourist: Praise China, curse America and Japan, and if you run into someone saying Britain or Australia is good, go and answer them too. You can post in the comments and under the answers. You carefully explain why you think what you think, and the person across from you may have no interest in listening at all. You're chatting with someone online. He's finishing something for the office. The more serious you are, the less work it is for him. The topic gets carried off by him anyway.

Giles: Even how to answer, someone has that ready?

Tourist: For some things they give you the lines. What the other person asks, how you answer, which bits to stress, how to push back, it's all there. So you switch a few platforms and you're still seeing those same claims. Sometimes even the sentences are about the same. You think this many people each thought it over and all came to the same conclusion. What they may be holding is just the same sheet.

Giles: If someone rebuts you with evidence, you don't care about that either?

Tourist: If he wants to go look, let him look. I'm not here to research it with him. He searches for ages, writes a long chunk, I switch the question, and he has to keep explaining. Anyway, a Chinese person's time isn't worth anything. I use up a bit of his time online and the task is done. In the end he gets annoyed and stops talking. What do I lose? He leaves, and what I posted is still sitting there.

Giles: A place like Wikipedia, where people go to look things up, you go in and edit that too?

Tourist: Sure. Change a word, change a source, put the wording you want in there. You see it in a comment section and you might not believe it. Once it's on an encyclopedia, it's easy to take it as material. If someone wants to change it back, he can go find the evidence, look at the record, and argue with people himself. I do this as my job. Correcting me costs his own time off. You tell me, who can spend every day wearing someone down?

Giles: So if you go and read overseas media, you might also be looking at something that was arranged?

Tourist: Yeah. The CCP spends money to buy some overseas outlets and feeds them copy. Sometimes even the foreign author on the byline is made up. Then they bring the article back into the country and say, look, Western media all report it this way. Put plainly, you write the news yourself, put a foreign outlet's shell on it, and bring it back to fool Chinese people. And you still think this time a foreigner finally checked it for you.

Giles: So several sites citing each other isn't necessarily several independent sources?

Tourist: Right. One sentence goes from this outlet to that one, then someone translates it, someone screenshots it. You see several sites all saying it and you feel they can't all be fake. But they may never have checked it themselves at all. If you want to get it straight, you have to walk it back layer by layer. You search for ages and it's still that earliest sentence. They copy it a few times, and you have to check a few extra times. The time that gets spent isn't theirs.

Giles: Do you yourselves actually believe these lines?

Tourist: Some do, some don't. What's that got to do with me? Whatever those above tell us to post, we post. I'm not paid to judge the great affairs of the country. Finish what you've been told to do and that's enough. Today's wording, tomorrow's wording, you follow the requirement. If you really pick a fight with every sentence, how are you supposed to keep showing up for this job?

Giles: You do this for the Communist Party. If tomorrow it falls and another lot of people are in charge, will you feel these years were wasted?

Tourist: Wasted? The wages weren't wasted. Whoever pays me, I work for them. This party, that party, what do I care. The people change, and whatever the new bosses tell me to say, I say. You don't really think that because I posted those things, I have to stand guard over it for the rest of my life?