The Problems with Real Engineering's China Space Program Video

It's racist, for one. It's sinophobic and orientalist. Oh, and it's imperialist apologia.

What do you do when most of the comments on your latest Youtube video are calling you out for spreading propaganda about China? Press the ‘tankie’ button.

Real Engineering is a very popular engineering Youtube channel with 4.5 million subscribers. It’s run by Brian McManus, an engineer who recently moved to the US from Ireland (not the cool one, the other one), and then coincidentally released a video whitewashing their imperialist crimes and the dangers of their own space program. It’s an interesting bit of propaganda, let’s dive in.

You know that this is propaganda straight off the rip, even by the title alone. Any video that focuses almost solely on the negative parts of the space program of a country that went from feudalism to space in only 25 years is pushing a certain narrative. Western libs love to compare China to the US for some reason. Those comparisons only work one way, in China’s favor. The People’s Republic of China is a young country, only 75 years old as of 5 days ago. The US is almost 250 years old, yet they still compare negatively to China by many factors.

The US, as a developed nation, was able to push everything aside to focus on their space program during the Cold War. Yet, they still made more mistakes than China and caused more fatalities than China, for both civilians and astronauts/engineers.

What I find most curious about this video is how it routinely mentions America’s imperialist actions against China and their technology/space program, yet still blames China for any errors that arise because of said imperialism. For instance, at 1:07. Here’s the transcript:

The weirdness of the Chinese space program starts with where they launch their Rockets from. China has geography on their side when picking a launch location. Launching East from their Southeastern Coastline would benefit from a launch velocity boost and allow them to safely land rocket stages in the Pacific Ocean. However, this is not where China launches most of its rockets from. Its most active Port, the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, is nestled in the middle of a mountainous region in the center of China. Why on Earth would a country with an extensive coastline choose to launch from the very center of the country? The answer is actually quite simple: to protect them from attack.

Emphasis mine. Who would attack them? Take a wild guess. If you picked either the US itself or one of its many vassal states in Asia, you would be correct. So the reason that China must launch rockets from inland and not on the coast is to defend themselves against US imperialism. This isn’t a China problem, this is a US imperialism problem. Yet Brian places the blame solely on China when boosters have to fall on the mainland instead of the ocean. Brian didn’t mention another reason for launching from the inland, which is the fact that the US dominates the Pacific with their watercraft and could seize/steal Chinese technology.

Brian focuses on the health hazards from these Chinese boosters and the fuel they use, yet conveniently ignores what the US has subjected its own citizens, its indigenous population, and even island natives on the other side of the globe to in the pursuit of military and space supremacy. It’s been referred to as Nuclear Colonialism.

Brian focuses on the handful of civilian deaths from China’s Space Program, yet ignores that the death toll from America’s space program is much higher. Once again, the US has the benefit of maturity, being thrice as old as the People’s Republic of China. Ignoring the horrors of their space program while crying about China’s is journalistic malpractice, especially considering China’s errors are a direct result of US imperialism.

Here’s another instance, at 5:07 Brian says:

It's insane that China continues to do this when there are perfectly viable alternatives. To be fair to the Chinese government, they do the bare minimum. They alert the villages in the path of the falling rockets with the following advice: “If you see any flying objects falling from the sky, please adjust your location quickly to avoid any harm”.

Brian shows the entirety of the message in Chinese characters, but only reads out a small excerpt out of context. This is the full message, after being translated via Google Lens:

Longguang Township Rocket Launch Area Evacuation Notice

To the general public:

According to notification from superiors, the Xichang Satellite Launch Center will conduct a launch operation at around 9 a.m. on November 23, 2019. Longguang Township, Longguang Bacun, Baqiu Village, Longlong Village, Longtuo Village, Nalian Village, Heji Village, Dawang Village, Nayin Village, Guojiao Village, Dongnei Village, Dugong Village, Tonghuai Village. The other fourteen villages are located in the area where satellite debris fell. At that time, please cut off the power 20 minutes in advance and go to a safe area to take refuge. If you see an object falling from the sky, please quickly adjust your position to avoid being harmed. If you find any debris, please do not approach or pick it up, as it may contain chemicals harmful to human health. If you find fire debris, please contact the village committee immediately and be sure to tell each other.

Contact number for rocket remnants: 0776-XXXX

Longguang Township People's Government

November 19, 2019

He quite conveniently left out the fact that this is an evacuation order. It’s a warning, in advance, of the possibility of debris falling in their vicinity. They are to retreat to a safe area, and if they see debris falling even from the safe area, they are to take cover. His out-of-context excerpt makes it seem as if the Chinese people are being told to watch this launch from their living rooms and run for cover if debris comes their way. It’s the little bits of propaganda that add up.

Next, at 5:28:

China's recklessness has made them a pariah in the international space community and it doesn't stop with their own citizens. In 2007 China destroyed one of its own satellites using a missile, a clear showcase of their military power. In response, the United States passed the Wolf Amendment. This amendment forbade NASA from direct cooperation with the Chinese space program. This means the International Space Station, the pinnacle of cooperation between space-faring nations, now excludes one of the world's superpowers.

Once again, Brian is framing US imperialism as China’s fault. Here is the US, excluding them from the international space program that they appointed themselves as the unequivocal rulers of. Only the US is able to showcase their military power. If their enemies do it, they must be punished. They must be international pariahs, in Brian’s own words. This is US empire apologia. As they say: they are the wolf, terrorizing the sheep, yet it’s the sheep’s fault somehow.

At 9:50:

While China has made some questionable choices in rocket design, their goals and achievements can't be ignored. They built their own positioning system in response to the US jamming a Chinese ship's GPS that was accused of carrying chemical weapon materials to Iran. Between 2000 and 2003, China sent four satellites to a geostationary orbit that covered only China. Then, when the European Space Agency pulled out of a positioning partnership out of fear that it would empower the Chinese military, China launched 65 more satellites between 2010 and 2020, making the Chinese constellation the largest global positioning constellation in orbit, twice the size of the USA’s.

Now Brian mentions another imperialist action of the US and the EU, jamming a Chinese ship’s GPS because they accused them of carrying weapon materials to an American enemy. Only the US gets to send weapons to the middle east, damn it! They have the monopoly on slaughtering brown children!

Of course, China doesn’t kill brown kids, that’s the favorite pastime of only the US empire. Is there a single middle eastern country aside from their puppet “state” Israel they haven’t bombed?

But wait, it’s gets worse, at 10:32:

And their system comes with a small upgrade that, in the hands of a totalitarian government seeking to collect data on its users, might ring some alarm bells. The satellites in the US global positioning system function with one-way communication. It simply sends out a signal that allows your phone to locate itself. The satellite does not know where your phone is. But China’s system uses two-way communication that allows the satellite to identify your location. In good faith this could be used to find a missing person's last location. In bad faith it could be used to track an entire country's whereabouts.

Ah yes, the People’s Republic of China, famously totalitarian. The US empire, famously not totalitarian, a perfect democratic society in which there is no spying, not on their citizens, and not on the citizens of most other countries in the world. This is egregious propaganda, and it only gets worse from here.

Brian is lying about the capabilities of these Chinese GPS satellites. Or, more accurately, he’s lying about the capabilities of the phones civilians in China use. They do not have the capability to beam their location to a satellite orbiting in space. The two way communication is only for specialized equipment, which wouldn’t typically be in the hands of a civilian.

He even continues on to say:

Currently this is a vague threat, after all, GPS is not the only way governments can track you.

Exactly. So why bring it up? Phones can be tracked by the cell towers that they actually use two way communication with. So what’s the point here? It’s propaganda. The US is the preeminent surveillance state, as Snowden revealed over a decade ago. China isn’t ‘totalitarian’, whatever the hell that even means, the US is. The US uses their surveillance empire to oppress their citizens and the people of the world. China’s surveillance, as a proletarian state, is exclusively to promote safety. American visitors to China, even black American visitors to China, say they feel safer with all of the cameras on Chinese streets. They’ve experienced what it’s like to be monitored under an oppressive capitalist regime and a people’s communist regime, and it’s clear which is better.

Brian is simply using the fact that this video is about China’s space program to spread vile propaganda about ‘totalitarian surveillance’; he brought up GPS satellites because he couldn’t bring up any other, actual surveillance technology because it would make no sense. It still doesn’t make sense.

Now onto the irony, at 13:19:

We don't receive a lot of news about China in the west, and when we do it's usually presented with some level of Western bias. Even when a journalist is aware of their own bias it's not always easy to eliminate it completely.

What are you on about, Brian? Are you aware of your bias? Why did you call China totalitarian? Is that a fact, or is that an opinion? Do you call any capitalist states totalitarian, or just the enemies of capitalism?

This is the beginning of the possibly the weirdest, longest segue to a sponsor that I’ve seen on Youtube. It continues:

I had to check my own biases several times while writing this video, weighing up whether it was worthwhile talking about China's global positioning system being a two-way communication system that has the potential to track its citizens, and deciding whether or not to balance that argument with examples of Western countries tracking their citizens. On the that occasion I decided my audience was intelligent enough to come to that conclusion by themselves, and it wasn't necessary to mention in a piece about the Chinese space program.

Did you check your bias, Brian, or are you just saying you did? I don’t understand the point here, what did you decide not to do? Because you did spread propaganda about China somehow tracking civilian cell phones that don’t have the capability of beaming GPS signals to space. And you didn’t bring up any examples of any western country spying on their citizens. You could have left that part out entirely, because it’s nonsensical anyways. Since you left it in, and left western criticism out, your bias is clear; even if you mentioned the logic of your actions or lack thereof. You are Pro-West, pro-America, pro-capitalist, anti-China, and anti-communist.

The segue continues, on and on:

The reason I included some positive developments about the Chinese Space Program was to achieve that balance. Writers are constantly making tiny decisions like this whether they are aware of it or not, and that's why sometimes it's good for readers to be aware of trends in writing. Today's sponsor Ground News helps you do just that.

Putting a couple examples of Chinese achievements after all of the propaganda doesn’t absolve you of spreading the propaganda. Every Youtuber has access to their statistics, and Brian knows that the majority of people don’t watch his entire videos. Most/many checked out before he even got to the positives. This was done intentionally.

Now, for his sponsor. Since I exist to debunk weird liberal propaganda, let’s talk about Ground News. Brian says at 16:00:

Ground News is a fantastic tool for sifting through the constant onslaught of misinformation and bias. They provide all the tools you need to be a critical thinker.

Is it though? Does it though?

Brian may think this as a western liberal, but the issue with Ground News is that it exists firmly in the American Overton Window. What Ground News calls ‘the Left’ is firmly right wing, as the entire political establishment in the US exists pretty far to the right of center. A pro-capitalist publication could never be considered ‘left’. For instance, Ground News considers CNN to be ‘left wing’.

My favorite purity test of any service that purports to identify bias is to see what they say about American state media, like Radio Free Asia for example. Here’s the Ground News page on RFA.

‘Leans left’. See what I mean? Radio Free Asia was started by the CIA during the Cold War to propagandize about America’s communist enemies in Asia. It was adapted into its current iteration by the Clinton administration, and is run by the USAGM, a project of US Congress. It exists to do the same thing, lie about communist states in Asia. It is firmly right wing, and anti-communist.

RFA exclusively uses anonymous sources in it’s propaganda about China, yet Ground News gives it a ‘High’ factuality rating. Huh? Capitalist state media that exclusively spreads negative news about communist states with anonymous sources is ‘highly factual’?

The problem is that Ground News uses Media Bias/Fact Check for the factuality and bias ratings. But what happens when your media bias fact checker is, itself, biased? Their Methodology page says:

Our methodology incorporates findings from credible fact-checkers who are affiliated with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)

The IFCN is run by the Poynter Institute. The Poynter Institute is funded/supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as well as capitalist mega corporations like Google and Meta, and US State Media organizations like Voice of America (also under the USAGM).

The NED is a regime change organization of the US government. Both founders admitted it is a CIA cutout, with one admitting that it exists to do overtly, what the CIA used to do covertly. They fund propaganda all over the world against their enemies, and they do it in plain sight. They list all of the organizations they fund directly on their website.

This is why Media Bias/Fact Check, and thus Ground News, calls Radio Free Asia ‘highly factual’. Because they’re funded by the US government to help them demonize their enemies.

And Brian from Real Engineering is also helping them do that.

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