TLDR: imo chuangCN is sketchy af and if forced to answer yes/no I'd say yes, it's run by white sinophobes if not outright feds, but I can't definitively say anyone there is doing digital yellowface, for lack of specific authors/persona attribution; for lausanHK: no, they appear to be legit diaspora, except when the specific author clearly is just a white dude, but similarly their content carries water for US/NATO New Cold War-aligned anti-China narratives. Because of course the last thing the imperial core bourgeoisie wants is anyone on the left in their countries sympathetic to China.
yellowface context: I think some adjacent xtwitter thread links to a grayzone* article regarding "kong tsung-gan" who was supposedly a native HK activist but turned out to be a white dude.
*grayzone is wonky and specifically, I think max blumenthal is a conspiracy theorist, but grayzone has had reporters I respect like ben norton work under him in the past. the exposé about kong tsung-gan appears to have legitimacy as the white guy behind the "pen name" has come out about it.
chuangcn has two separate outlets for their pieces: blog and journal.
On their blog, chuangcn does not publish who their authors are, but date their pieces. On their journal side, they might include some names of partial contributors but many articles again do not have author attribution, and their journals do not clearly demarcate publication date. The "authoritarian/big bad censorship" narrative, in which authors have to hide their identities for "safety", lends particularly well to this kind of authorship obfuscation.
Including publication date is important because it provides placing it in context. While time seems to move slowly in the west, where conditions under unfettered capitalism keep unceasingly getting worse for the average person at the agonizing pace of molasses, where the last four years didn't really change much from the next, I must remind people reading in English on the American anglophone webbed site that this is absolutely not the case for China. Comparatively, social conditions and policy in China moves fast, and unlike the political structures in the west at least, policymakers and enacters actually make efforts to course-correct (not that it is perfect. Yeah, China isn't perfect. Why do I have to keep saying this?); even so, the fruits of those efforts still take some time to see the desired outcomes. China's 5 year plan that included poverty alleviation was passed in 2016!! And that's not the current 5 year plan anymore, that was almost 10 years ago! To a westerner, seeing info published in the 2010s might seem fine and recent; but if you're talking about socioeconomics in China, say, the conditions of migrant workers, again, shit moves fast! So, depending on the topic, you might be working with info that is already outdated. If you are a westerner who mainly reads in English looking for info on Chinese migrant workers, and you come across a chuangcn article about it (because they publish in English), it might seem like you came across a mother lode of info you were looking for, but in actuality, chuangcn published a translation of a critique on a domestic situation that is dated to a decade ago, and of course, framing it as an alarming human rights situation.
Particular of note on their blog, their most recent XUAR atrocity propaganda piece draws "parallels" between difficulties of Chinese Uyghurs living in Xinjiang and the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. (I am not denying there are issues in XUAR, or that the chosen policies to those issues could have been better *somehow*, but eliciting direct parallels to the genocide in Gaza? to actual brutal occupation and systemic ethnic cleansing? Japanese occupation is within living memory of older Chinese people, and right now people are dying under Israeli occupation, so eliciting that comparison - I'm speechless. Who else's suffering are you willing to utilize as a tool to smear enemy number one as designated by the US empire?) The intro for this piece says that a "Chinese communist" who's written their previous blog article penned it.
This other blog post is titled "Against Pinkwashing 反对粉红清洗: Sinophone Queers and Feminists for Palestine 华人酷儿女权撑巴勒斯坦声明". Being against pinkwashing has made its rounds in the online anti-imperial/anti-zionist left in the year+ since Israel's brutal genocidal response to Oct 7; this is familiar pattern for chuangcn, dressing their analysis in leftist lingo. However, "粉红清洗" doesn't appear much in Chinese language internet, and where it does appear, is mainly around translations of Queer Palestine and the empire of critique., and other discussion that spotlights western progressive/leftism. Thing is, pinkwashing (or its reverse, I guess) isn't some isolated or crazy thing to Chinese people who care to look at what the west has to say. There's a whole human rights NGO industry pointed at designated 'enemies of the west', of which in this decade frequently includes China: all the accusations of mistreatment of women, lgbt, minorities -- sometimes they even pretend to care about workers! -- removed from prior socioeconomic or historic contexts. Funny I'm mentioning it, because for all intents and purposes it seems like chuangcn lends credence and launders narratives to that network, or rather, they've been at the forefront of anti-China atrocity propaganda for years. So IMO it's ironic given the circumstances that pinkwashing ends up in the title of that piece in Chinese. 》note: I am Chinese diaspora living in the west, those more familiar with this term '粉红清洗' usage please feel free to jump in or make corrections
My second docking against their "Chinese communist" authorship claim, or at the very least the intentions of translators if there were linguistic middlemen: "sinophone" has its origins in western-affiliated academia with sinophobic intentions with regard to Chinese diaspora. I made a messy and childish post about the origins and motives of the term "sinophone" a couple years ago. I'm not super proud of its presentation, it was partially a vent post, but I think the content, and subsequent discussion of attempts to scrub away Chinese-ness à la colonialism, still holds. "Chinese people" or even "Chinese both mainland and diaspora" for "华人" would have sufficed, okay yeah it's a mouthful in English, sure, but instead "sinophone" was used. I'm not saying a Chinese person would never use the term "sinophone", but to me this is suspicious; to me it is saying 'my target reader is a westerner'+'people would never willingly choose to be Chinese, they might just happen to speak a sinitic language'.
Speaking of linguistic middlemen, I doubt they exist. Publications that claim something was translated will usually link to the original document - not published or posted by the same group - if not post it as well; it's something I look for when evaluating credence, intentions, veracity, etc. There are a few chuangcn blog posts that link to a Chinese version, but they never link out of chuangcn: they are only ever hosted and published on their site. Even if "our contributors have to hide from the eyes of the draconian authoritarian Chinese state, so they limit where they can publish and speak their truth" were true, there are other places to cross-publish that aren't chuangcn. It's very odd.
Ah, back to the article in question, the 'oppression of Uyghurs and oppression of Palestinians follows the same shape!' atrocity propaganda piece. Sure, we can still read and critically digest the other stuff the article or chuangcn has to say, and they seem to even be cognizant that Adrian Zenz is not a trustworthy source, and even denote as such. However, this "Chinese communist" uncritically cites (uses as factual authority) Darren Byler no less than 6 times - Byler, who cites Adrian Zenz in his academic work. This article also uncritically cites (uses as factual authority) the Uyghur Human Rights Project, which calls XUAR 'East Turkestan' and is downstream of the Uyghur American Association, which is in turn in partnership and association with National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is funded by US Congress... the pattern of organizational ourobos of sockpuppets endemic to human rights industry-NGO circles (wait! and Falun Gong also). When this article appears to provide historical context, it truncates the history of the region to just the 1900s and particularly post-1950, eg, after PRC was founded, rather than including relevant ethnological history carried over from the late Qing dynasty. There's probably a lot more but this post is already really long.
I guess whoever authored this article thought that if they "clearly" sided against Adrian Zenz et al and dressed the narrative in anti-colonial, anti-imperialist verbiage, if they pull the idpol "this was written by a Chinese communist, trust me bro," it would pass under the leftism radar, and even some 'communist' westerners might even give it credence and further their "China critical [outsider, but I promise I'm nuanced]" positions. Hm, how odd that this 'China critical' stance rarely if ever spotlights anything that China does right or at least better than the west. As other comrades have said more succinctly, ultimately even if you're doing it leftist-ly or whatever, you're still just a westerner who's bashing China when bashing China is on US/NATO's agenda.
lausancollective/lausanHK on the other hand, seems to be a bit less shady, at least in terms of digital yellowface or dubious origin. Their contributors are primarily sino diaspora living in the west, but unlike Qiao Collective, who are also primarily sino diaspora, lausan are unfriendly to PRC as a whole, CPC, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Most of their content I skimmed labeled present-day China "capitalist (badism [sic])". And other frequent themes such as calling PRC 'imperialist' as well as other claims I would consider errors (somewhere between anarchist-liberal-ultraleft depending on the article/lingo used) but at this point I'm tired so I really gotta end this post quickly.
However they do have more variety of authors, contributors, and collaborators who permitted reprints, so their content is more varied and some of it might be worth gleaning info from, with a grain of salt and a heaping of critical sense.
For example I thought this article was interesting despite: 1. the original document (it's a translation) can't be found with link cited, even with waybackmachine, and searching for the original author with that context/title only results me in a China Digital Times article (CDT is sponsored by a slew of western orgs including NED) 2. calling present-day China 'post-socialist' 3. its error in prioritizing workers/unions over other matters, such as erosion of US hegemony. (However skimming one of their several Tiananmen articles, it was more full of both idealist-socialist and worker unionist drivel than revelations, at least to me. But I at least got a laugh from seeing someone spin the "massacre" narrative from a workerist angle rather than the student-centric narrative that is more prevalent in the west, ie, recounted to US Congress with more exaggerations and embellishments every year or so by Operation Yellowbird's benefactees now living in the west.)
But scrolling further, huh, that's weird, lausan published an article authored by Darren Byler...... The Adrian Zenz-citer strikes again.
Anyway yeah lausan's central theme is again anti-China, always going on about 'authoritarianism' or 'statist' etc; rarely mention things that PRC does well, or when they do, they always have some way to subvert it as "actually bad" or attribute it to other entities. So, even if they're the real deal and mean well (whatever that might mean) their overarching agenda matches with New Cold War, even if they might frequently publish articles regarding pushback against it or against "choosing sides" (lol).
