Hu Chenfeng, a Chinese video blogger in his early thirties, had built a modest following by documenting the daily realities of life in his city. Unlike many creators who focused on entertainment or government-approved narratives, Hu captured the world that most people never saw: the struggle, the quiet suffering, the invisible cracks in society.
Early one morning, in a quiet old street of southern China, the streetlights cast a dim amber glow on wet cobblestones. The air smelled of dust, oil smoke, and fresh vegetables from the morning market. A seventy-year-old man bent over, picking through wilted leaves to find something still edible. Every leaf seemed like a fragile thread of hope, almost invisible.
Hu Chenfeng stood in a corner, filming. His assistant adjusted the camera. On a nearby construction site, a seventy-eight-year-old man lifted heavy bricks. At a street stall, an eighty-year-old woman counted her three yuan coins—roughly 0.4 U.S. dollars—a sum barely enough to survive one day, far short of a life with dignity.
Meanwhile, high-ranking retired officials in the city, living in distant office towers, received more than 20,000 yuan per month in pensions, enjoying a life entirely detached from the streets below. Sunlight poured through their floor-to-ceiling windows, mingling with the aroma of coffee, a stark contrast to the dust and smoke of the marketplace. These two worlds ran in parallel: one of struggle, one of protection and privilege.
Hu Chenfeng keenly captured these contrasts. He created slang to describe the divide: “Apple people”—those who no longer believed in communism; “Android people”—those conditioned to obey, the ordinary citizens who had been tamed by the system. These terms spread quietly among young people, like secret signals connecting the awakened to each other.
The state, however, could not tolerate such documentation. Within weeks, all of Hu Chenfeng’s accounts were shut down. His name vanished from domestic search engines; his videos were removed, erased as if they had never existed. Only his fans secretly uploaded clips from his live streams. At the same time, the government spent lavishly abroad, hiring European and American social media influencers to produce videos praising “China’s greatness” and denouncing “Western mPost too long. Click here to view the full text.
