Asian Boss planted deep blue YouTuber and pretended he was a 'man on the street'

I don't think it's one-sided at all. If you look at the 30 most popular stories in the past year then 5 of them paints China in a positive light (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...):

- China lands rover on Mars (581 points, 314 comments)

- China to supercharge uranium race with 150 new nuclear reactors (261 points, 354 comments)

- China on Mars: Zhurong rover returns first pictures (243 points, 66 comments)

- China releases videos of its Zhurong Mars rover (236 points, 167 comments)

- China unveils 600 kph maglev train (229 points, 433 comments)

You could even argue that whenever China does something positive that's note-worthy then it has a much higher chance to be promoted multiple times (e.g. 3/5 are about the Mars rover, all within a month) and less chance that it will be flagged (or at least remain flagged).

I think it's safe to assume the majority of HN support democracy, privacy, freedom of speech & press, and similar civil liberties that China have cracked heavily down upon and not just within their own borders. When you look at what they have done in the past few years with Xinjiang, Hong Kong, SARS2, Taiwan, etc. then it's only natural that there will be a lot of negative coverage, and this negative coverage is understandably and deservedly greater than the positive coverage. If USA or any other country banned under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week then it would receive the same amount of coverage. Same thing goes for for Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal, Steam being banned, cryptocurrency deals becoming illegal, blocking Wikimedia from entering World Intellectual Property Organization and every other story you might consider "anti-China". My submission doesn't even mention China so people are not blindly upvoting it because it's "anti-China", but more likely because it's interesting to see proof that one of the largest Asian YouTube channels (which cover a lot more than just China) is planting interviewees to push a certain agenda (keep in mind the channel put a lot of emphasis towards presenting themselves as being 'authentic' and sharing views of random and regular people they meet on the streets).

> Taiwan and Hong Kong refer to PRC China as ‘mainlander’

It's a general thing in the broad Sinosphere. Even the Japanese refer to (PRC) Chinese as "mainlanders" (大陸人/だいりくじん †) despite, you know, it being a completely different country for much of history!

†: You'll notice this sometimes in Anime. For example, in Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei's first episode the students respond to the teacher's unusual name with "must be from the mainland (=China)".

In modern usage, the "mainland" modifier is often used to get around the sensitive Taiwan issue. Different people may disagree on who is included in "China", but "mainland China" unambiguously excludes Taiwan even in the PRC.

Another fun fact is that English is woefully inexpressive when it comes to the cultural complexities of the broader Chinese cultural sphere. For example, a Taiwanese (or immigrant Chinese) person might identify as "culturally" Chinese (华人) but not "nationally" Chinese (中国人). A lot of this stuff gets lost in translation and ends up offending people inadvertently, because there aren't different English words!

> As a western for some reason I thought this would be the opposite.

Hong Kong split from the mainland in the 1840s and has been largely culturally (not necessarily politically) independent since. Modern Taiwan is the result of the KMT retreat during the civil war a _century_ later, in the 1940s.

A mainlander visiting Hong Kong will feel like an American going to, say, the UK -- it will feel familiar but distinctly foreign. A mainlander visiting Taiwan will feel like an American going to, say, Canada --- it will feel quirky but kind of like home. The mainlander might struggle to chat with a Hong Kong local as many won't speak Mandarin, whereas in Taiwan, they will have no trouble engaging in a conversation, with maybe only occasionally realizing that the other person refers to what they would call a "microwave" as an "electronic range" (this is not a real example. A real example would be something like a mainlander referring to "topping up (a transit card)" as "recharging" the card while a Taiwanese might call it "adding value" to the card).

I know this blog post is niche but title could be edited to simplify what "deep blue YouTuber" means here. For HN readers I mean.

"...planted pro-China advocate for 'man on the street' opinions on Taiwan"

> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.

Yeah, it's a figure of speech, specifically "puffery". It's not meant to be literal.

> butchering many of the complex characters without fully considering the historical, linguistic or aesthetic concerns.

There were committees of linguistic scholars that spent a ton of time on trying to reconcile the historical, linguistic and aesthetic concerns during the simplification effort.

Is it perfect? No. But it was also not an impulse move either.

Also one needs to consider the context of simplification --- the idea of simplification was quite a popular and progressive idea around that time in the entire area. It was widely believed that the complex Han characters were a big hurdle in improving literacy rates and bringing more opportunity to rural areas.

Both Japan and Korea engaged in similar simplification or de-ideogram efforts to varying degrees of success.