Left-wing streamer Hasan Piker called China a “normal country” and said he was visiting to debunk “rumors” and “misunderstandings” during an interview with China Global Television Network (CGTN), a state-controlled propaganda outlet that works to cover up the Uyghur genocide through on-the-ground propaganda videos in Xinjiang.
“I also wanted to show my audience and the Western world in general that there are a lot of rumors about China, there’s a lot of misunderstandings and also just outright lies,” Piker told CGTN’s Li Jingjing. “It’s just another normal country, just like every other country is.”
“I talk about China quite a bit, as far as, like, lessons to learn and what America could adopt and emulate, and seeing it in real time, I think, is a lot different,” Piker added. “This has been a dream come true for me.”
Hasan Piker sits down with Chinese Communist Party state media in Beijing to condemn “Western lies about China.”
He says that America and the West have much to learn from the one-party Marxist-Leninist dictatorship pic.twitter.com/Em3hnXkY7M
— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) November 13, 2025
CGTN in a Thursday report touted Piker’s 4.5 million followers on Twitch and YouTube, describing his reach to young Americans as something “mainstream media could only dream of.”
“A recurrent topic of conversation on his platforms is China,” the report reads. “From analyzing China’s governance and development to the international vloggers’ travel boom the country is experiencing, he shares dimensions of the greater China story that Western audiences rarely get to hear about.”
The “greater China story” Piker tells is apparently a gushing take on the communist nation. Earlier in his visit, Piker fawned over the ceremonial sunrise flag-raising near Mao Zedong’s portrait at the Tiananmen gate.
“This is awesome,” he said. “Like, like, I just don’t, like, I, I’m not—I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart … for America.”
Moments earlier, Chinese authorities stopped Piker, who described himself as a “swagged-out white boy,” during a livestream after Will Neff, a banking scion turned anti-capitalist influencer, held up his phone to show off an AI-created meme of Piker’s face on Mao’s body.
Piker has become a darling among liberals, even after facing criticism for zapping his dog with a shock collar and saying, “America deserved 9/11.” During New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) November 7 victory party, he hugged Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), the former congressman, and Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Semitic protest leader.
It should come as no surprise that Piker appeared on CGTN. The propaganda network has repeatedly tried to refute the Uyghur genocide orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, which has faced accusations of mass arbitrary detentions, forced sterilizations, involuntary organ harvesting, and unethical medical experiments. A July 2021 CGTN piece said those reports “dampen the lives [Uyghurs] are living now and aim to hamper the region’s peace and stability.”
CGTN has at times painted a contradictory picture of Xinjiang. In May, it portrayed it as a “revitalized” and booming region where people are “smiling” and “happy.” Four years earlier, however, it detailed “horrific stabbings and bombings” that “rocked the land” as “violent terrorism continued to plague Xinjiang.”
The interview this week was not Piker’s first time praising China. In a video titled “TRUMPS VENEZUELA GAMBIT AND WHY CHINA IS JUST BETTER,” Piker said, “China gets to make decisions at the top that are, one, beneficial for its own working class and, two, China can dramatically restructure their economy almost overnight if they choose to do so. This is not something that the decentralized system of capitalism, the decentralized system of governance that Western liberal capitalist nations have.”
“I might have to move to china [sic],” Piker wrote in October after watching a video of a Canadian claiming to detail her health care experience in China.
