Israeli online influencer Raz Galor. CHINA DAILY
Israeli internet celebrity's short video clips give the world a better understanding of the country, He Qi reports in Shanghai.
As the country attracts increasing numbers of expats to study or work, local people are interacting more with them. Consequently, there is a unique group of foreigners living in China who are trying to show the world their understanding of the country in an innovative way. Raz Galor, 27, an Israeli internet celebrity, is one of them. Galor co-founded a new media company called YChina with three Chinese partners in 2017, to highlight expat life.
He and his friends are showing a vibrant nation to the world through short videos, in which expats chat about Chinese culture and the latest trends they've experienced or witnessed in the country. Apart from providing the short videos on 20 different platforms globally, YChina's prime video account now has more than 4 million followers on Bilibili, a leading video platform popular among China's younger generation, and in excess of 254,000 subscribers on global platform YouTube.
Galor moved to Beijing with his family in 2012, and studied at Peking University where he graduated. His entrepreneurial spirit was sparked, at first, by a simple idea. He just wanted to make a video of street interviews in 2016.
There were initially only six people involved in the project, including a video editor, a planner and a producer, and they didn't expect to draw much attention from internet users. "We just wanted to express our thoughts about China, foreign countries, and the expat life in China through street interviews," says Galor, better known as Gao Yousi.
However, they had a bold goal－to develop YChina to become a window for the youth across the world to understand the country more.
"We find there is an information gap between Chinese and foreigners, especially among young people. They have language and cultural communication barriers," he says. "Moreover, some foreigners' understanding of China is incomplete and biased, while some foreign media have prejudices against China."
As a short-video program, YChina began to upload videos of foreigners who live and study in China being interviewed to Bilibili every Thursday at 8 pm, each time focusing on a different theme.
To the team's delight, some of the interviewees even joined their team. One of them is an American woman named Lila, whose Chinese name is Li Xingyue, a graduate from the School of Arts at Peking University. She spoke fluent Chinese when she was first interviewed on the street by the team. In the video, her knowledge about China and ability to use internet language and online terms impressed many viewers, resulting in a single day rise of 100,000 followers for YChina on social media platform Sina Weibo. Lila is now a content creator with the company.
Galor points out that the group currently has about 50 content creators from more than 30 countries and regions. "What they have in common is that they like to convey cross-cultural related content, and all of them want to help China and the rest of the world understand each other better," he says.
Recording local lives
As for Galor himself, there were several factors that helped grow his love for China. "It was having a father who knows and loves the country; having a number of friends who enabled me to learn more about China; and my studying and startup experience here", he told the China Internet Civilization Conference held in Beijing in November.
At one of the events, where experts and guests discussed related topics themed on "telling Chinese stories well and contributing to the civilization of the internet", Galor showcased some of the videos YChina made that share his experiences in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.
"I've always wanted to travel to Xinjiang because of its beautiful scenery and delicious cuisine," Galor says. "However, such a high-quality and open tourist destination has been described in headlines with the words 'genocide' and 'forced labor' by some people."
To figure out the real situation in Xinjiang, Galor headed to the region in April. "Through my personal experience, I learned that the mechanization and automation of the cotton planting industry in Xinjiang has made a breakthrough in the past decade," Galor says. "Meanwhile, because of providing job opportunities and income, it attracts local farmers to voluntarily engage in cotton planting and picking. The accusations of some overseas media are completely contrary to the facts."
Galor has also talked with local children and recorded some of their stories, as China News Service reported. "Like most people, these children have dreams and the ability to think independently. This is their real life, and people in Xinjiang are not 'locked up' at all," he says.
The four Xinjiang-related videos, after being released on YouTube, soon went viral because of their authenticity and sincerity, which reflect the real life of citizens and cotton farmers in the region. They attracted over 10 million clicks on YouTube, and a total of 80 million clicks across all platforms.
Afterward, Galor became more popular. "I basically received interview requests from 10 different media outlets every day after the videos became popular, half of them from China and half of them from abroad," he says.
Like numerous followers, a Chinese internet user, Nashihuakai, comments under a video on Bilibili: "We support you! All Chinese and more international friends will be by your side. You can speak out true words. You are bold to reveal the true China to the whole world. You are doing the right thing."
Galor realized the great influence of the videos as well as great responsibility of content creators. "As a content creator, you should not only be responsible for your followers and channels, but also have a sense of responsibility for society, the country you live in, and the content you are talking about," he adds.
YChina updates a short video, five to 10 minutes in length, every week. Creators spend two days planning, three days filming and two days editing. Later, the video and the footage is reedited to meet the requirements of various platforms, for instance shorter videos of less than 1 minute for Douyin and Kuaishou, and longer documentary-style videos of over 20 minutes. It may take hours or months to finish a single video depending on the format.
Dealing with blue mood
Although making videos is no longer difficult for them, the team still faces many other challenges. One of them is being questioned, sometimes abused, by people online from all over the world.
"When we are involved in some sensitive topics, such as some cities in China like Wuhan in Hubei province, and the Xinjiang region, or special groups like workers or peasants that are not comprehensively reported or are negatively reported in some overseas media, many people view these issues with prejudice," Galor says. "Once these videos are released, a large number of people will question our motives, and some even use threatening language."
Such comments affect their mood. To avoid getting hurt by the negative comments, they learned to respond with two actions－to continue creating better content, more interesting or in-depth, and to ignore the negative voices, he confides.
When confronted with such things, he says, generally people may start to question themselves, but having a clear understanding of their identity, original purpose and vision will help them to overcome or ignore the negative voices.
And through this process, many such voices are gradually disappearing. "On one hand, many will give up when they see that YChina keeps providing authentic content while never responding to them," he says. "On the other hand, some of them have seen another side of China through our video content."
In addition to the difficulty of creating the content itself, the identity of foreigners also adds more obstacles to the team.
"Most of the challenges come from foreigners' understanding of China's online video platforms, Chinese context, online language, and special expressions," Galor says. "It will be more challenging to make content for a Chinese audience, so we need to constantly improve our language level and cultural knowledge, as well as increase the time spent watching videos on local platforms."
In the future, he hopes to include even more cross-cultural content creators, find new ways of expression, and create a TV series, perhaps even a movie.
"This is not a simple startup, nor something I only did when I was young," Galor says, adding that he hopes it will continue in the long term, and it's the only thing he wants to do in his life.
"I can only keep recording and learning and try to become a bridge between the world and China and a messenger of cultural exchange. This is the person I really want to be."
