German influencers: cultural mediators on the verge of trivialisation
> The original article on China.Table read
With his extremely likeable videos about his life in China, Thomas Derksen has become the most important German cultural ambassador in the People's Republic. The trained banker from Marienheide was allowed to accompany Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on his last trip to China. He led Lothar Matthäus through his hometown of Shanghai as part of the "FC Bayern Legend Trophy Tour" campaign. Hardly anyone recognized the football legend. In contrast to Derksen, who now smiles at us from billboards as an advertising ambassador for German brands.
His stage name Afu 阿福 can be roughly translated as "the lucky one". Derksen has 21 social media channels in China. A total of around ten million people follow him here. The 34-year-old also has 665,000 subscribers on YouTube, many of them overseas Chinese or citizens of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Malaysia.
From Buddha-bellied comedian to well-trained entrepreneur
His Chinese wife Liping convinced him to start vlogging around ten years ago. At first, it was just slapstick videos in which Afu, wearing a wig and with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, parodied his Chinese parents-in-law. Since then, the Heinz Erhardt reincarnation with the Buddha belly has become a well-trained entrepreneur whose videos cover a wide range of topics, from raising children to the energy crisis. He is now also well-known in Germany. Derksen has published two books about life with his Chinese parents-in-law. He gave everyday language lessons on Markus Lanz, such as how to speak to a woman in Chinese.
Derksen, who is experienced in the media, answers questions in a jovial and relaxed manner like a football coach. "If you had asked me six years ago what I would do with my life, I would never have thought that I would become an influencer," he sums up in an interview with China.Table. He worked for the German medium-sized company Rothstein Metallfördergurte in China for six months. Then being an influencer became his full-time job.
Today, Derksen and his team of three employees try to publish at least one article a week. At the moment, he is filming mainly from Germany. During the pandemic, he left Shanghai to celebrate his father's 70th birthday - which brought him a lot of criticism in China. Even before the pandemic, Derksen defends himself by saying that he had already spent two months in the People's Republic and two months in Germany. It would be nonsense to say that he fled to Germany to escape the hard lockdown.
Emigration is a huge issue
For one of his most recent contributions, Derksen visited a hidden champion from Baden-Württemberg who specializes in paint spray guns. The video did particularly well, with one to two million views on almost all channels, says the self-proclaimed bridge builder. "Many Chinese are fascinated by the fact that in Germany you don't have to go to university to have a career." There is currently a high level of youth unemployment in China. New concepts are therefore welcome.
Michael Bochmann-Tao, alias Deguomixia, a vlogger who offers German language courses on Chinese channels, has observed a similar trend. "Many Chinese are currently very interested in jobs and vocational training in Germany," says the business sinologist and certified German teacher. "Emigration is a huge issue." Many of his students come from the lower middle class and are interested in jobs as nurses or cooks. "They see my language courses as an investment," says Bochmann-Tao, who worked for three gaming companies in China between 2011 and 2016. Today he works as a localization specialist in Berlin. He makes the videos for his around 600,000 followers in China on the side. His first went online in 2018, an improvised attempt at Chinese cooking, which quickly attracted thousands of clicks. "The video platform Douyin was still relatively new, and I, as a Chinese-speaking foreigner, was still an eye-catcher," says the 37-year-old.
Shadow banning instead of open censorship
"As a foreigner who speaks Chinese, you have completely different opportunities," confirms Melina Weber. "But you also act on behalf of your country. You have to be clear about that." Weber has been in the influencer business since 2019. In one of her videos, the 29-year-old business graduate describes herself as a "German-East Asian cultural ambassador who wants to make a positive contribution to international understanding." She learned Chinese as an exchange student and intern in Malaysia, Taiwan and Beijing, where she attended an acting course taught in Mandarin at the Beijing Film Academy, among other things. In theory, she is still enrolled there, she tells China.Table. However, the pandemic has blocked her way back to China for the time being.
Weber's videos now mainly take place in her home on Lake Constance, where she gives yoga and cooking lessons, for example, or shows her 652,000 Chinese followers what you can buy in a German supermarket for 350 renminbi, just under 50 euros. "People are interested in everyday life," says Weber. She is still feeling her way around live streaming, which is the most money-making method in China. Entire media academies here have now specialized in training salespeople and advertising ambassadors for e-commerce platforms such as JD.com. Weber also works with Chinese marketing agencies on a project basis. However, she emphasizes that she retains control over the content.
Every site has its own guidelines. These include that smoking, drinking alcohol or showing off a decadent, luxurious lifestyle are frowned upon. "In Asia, you're generally not allowed to show any cleavage, whether that's in India, Japan or Korea. But showing your midriff is OK," says Weber. Videos that violate these rules are not necessarily deleted, but their reach is reduced. Content is then no longer recommended by the system and is therefore virtually impossible to find. This is referred to as "shadow banning". The comment function is also sometimes switched off in order to control political discussions and hate messages.
“The image of China in Germany is very negative”
All three influencers are doing well in their business. They have already been asked for collaborations by Chinese state media. In his early days, Derksen appeared on a talk show on Shanghai TV. Weber took part in an expat discussion panel on the CGTN channel. Bochmann-Tao shot a cooking video in Berlin with a Xinhua reporter, but in the end it only appeared on his own channel.
None of them felt they had been exploited, like the Israeli vlogger Raz Gal-Or, for example. He paid for trips to Xinjiang (China.Table reported) to report on the carefree Uighur farmers there. "I didn't feel cornered," says Weber about her appearance on CGTN. "You always have to represent the values you grew up with. And you can also be a friend of China without betraying those values." Weber would like to see more Germans interested in the topic of China. For her liking, she is asked about political topics too often. Derksen sees it similarly: "The image of China in Germany is very negative, that has to be said, because it's always just about politics. When friends and acquaintances visit me in China, they often say: This is a country where you can live well." There are extremes on both sides, says Derksen.
Christoph Rehage is a sharp critic of this kind of soft international understanding. "As a citizen of a democracy, you can't just say that you're not interested in political issues. Especially since, in the end, a lot of these videos are political." For a short time, Rehage was himself one of the most famous Germans in China. Around 2015, Lei Ke, his Chinese name, had around 800,000 followers on Weibo. The Hanover native became famous after he walked from Beijing to Urumqi in 2007 - a challenging 4,500-kilometer journey that he condensed into five minutes in a time-lapse video that was celebrated around the world. A Chinese publisher translated the book and illustrated volume about the journey. But in 2015, things came to a head after Rehage made fun of national heroes Lei Feng and Hua Mulan. He was openly attacked in the comment columns, and Weibo eventually deleted his account.
Self-censorship by avoiding topics
Seven years later, Rehage still posts videos, often in Chinese, but now mainly on YouTube and Twitter, where he has a combined following of almost 250,000 people. His posts are often provocative and political, and he regularly criticizes the Chinese state. He leaves malicious comments for foreign influencers like New Zealander Andy Boreham, who proudly presents himself as a friend of Beijing. "There are people who are committed to conviction, like Andy Boreham. But they are not the dangerous ones, because they have no market abroad for their open propaganda," says Rehage.
"People like Afu are much more perfidious because he travels around with Steinmeier as a so-called bridge builder and explains with his wife on Lanz how funny and sweet things are in China." At the same time, someone like Derksen knows exactly what tragedies are taking place there. "While people in his hometown of Shanghai were jumping off their houses during the pandemic, Afu made a video of how full his refrigerator was. I find that cynical."
But Rehage does not believe that influencers like Afu or even Boreham are paid by the state. "No cadre comes along and puts them on their payroll, it would be far too embarrassing if it came out. Direct payment is not what drives these people - what drives them is that the channel grows, the money comes all by itself." And to do this, the influencers accept simply not speaking out on certain topics, says Rehage. The dictatorship is trivialized by this self-censorship. "People say, I like the people there, I like the food. At the same time, I pretend not to see all the bad sides."
One thing is clear to everyone: the influencer business model does not work in China with open criticism of the Chinese state. This makes their situation similar to that of VW and Co.: Anyone who wants to have a presence in China must remain vague in public - and avoid political statements as best as possible. "I don't want to be a propaganda tool, for either side," says Derksen. "In the end, the viewers will form their own opinion anyway." He is simply Afu, who talks about his life.