A growing trend of Chinese vloggers descending upon Dhaka to film poverty, poor living conditions and untidiness and disseminate it as if from some Indian neighbourhood has been observed in Bangladesh. Dhaba-based outlet Prothom Alo has revealed a pattern where around 150 Chinese vloggers have been found passing off the content as scenes from New Delhi.
The investigating report published by Prothom Alo on November 6 found the Chinese vloggers filming in the narrow lanes of Tekpara and Uttara neighbourhoods in Dhaka, particularly the slums. These vloggers do livestreaming on Chinese social media platforms while misleading their audience with a claim that they were standing in India.
A sudden and a large scale Chinese disinformation campaign on social media carries implications for India as the country, as part of larger Asian subcontinent has long been portrayed in the west as poverty-hit country with substandard living conditions.
Campaigns like these reinforce the negative stereotype against India. The vlogging to vilify Indians has been going on at an industrial level in Dhaka neighbourhoods. The report stated that there was no fix number of vloggers making videos but locals say at least 150 have been doing rounds with their cameras in the locality for months.
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The report cited a resident named Akram Hossain saying, "It would be understandable if this were just a matter of a day or two. But they (the Chinese nationals) have been making these videos for months. They start filming before we even wake up. When we go to bed, we still see them filming. But we have no idea what they do with these videos."
The vloggers record the videos in Chinese during the livestream and so local residents couldn't understand the exact words. However, watching them describing the subject made it easy for them to get an idea of what was going on.
Some of their livestream commentary was translated using Google Translate and was verified by four Bangladeshi nationals with knowledge of Chinese. The analysis of these videos revealed that despite recorded in Dhaka, vloggers were misleading the audience with claims of filming in India.
On November 1, a Chinese woman named Mianmian, introduced herself as being from China's Sichuan province. She recorded the video beside the canal in Sector 12 of Uttara but said on her video that it was New Delhi.
"This is New Delhi. Their homes are extremely dirty. There isn't even a fan inside the tin-roofed houses. This place is quite underdeveloped, dirty and unhygienic, and the law-and-order situation is poot," she was quoted as saying in her livestream.
Another Chinese vlogger, named Wang Wei, was filming at tea stalls at a small bridge in Tekpara. During his livestream, he could be heard saying, "Look, they are drinking tea. Do you know what kind of tea this is? This is cow urine tea. They drink cow urine tea."
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The growing trend of the disinformation industry has become a headache for the locals. Rozina Khatun, a local resident told the outlet that the vloggers sometimes enter their houses and start filming. She said, "Sometimes they enter our homes and start filming. We are not always properly dressed inside our houses. Imagine how it feels when someone suddenly walks into your home and starts recording."
"Some of them even enter bathrooms while filming. Even if we say something to them, they don't understand. They just smile, say sorry and leave. This kind of nuisance continues throughout the day. Nobody takes any action either. If we confront them, they leave, but then come back again," another resident Papia Begum said.