Streamed on: Nov 22, 6:30 pm EST

Resistance is Fertile
Resistance is Fertile

Playback speed
1×
Subtitles
Share post
Share post at current time
Share from 9:37

0:14
/
1:20:19

Transcript

Search
It's working.
Hi, Benji. How are you?
I'm good. I'm going to try. I'm learning Mandarin, so I'm going to try something. I don't know if it will work. Okay, let's go. Which should mean, if I'm not completely off my rocker, something like we're going to speak about China and China. socialism with Chinese characteristics. I don't know if I managed to pronounce this properly.
I understood you. I understood you.
My Chinese friend, when my tones are all over the place, goes, it's strange. No, she doesn't go, it sounds like shit. She goes, it's strange. So, well, thank you very much for making the time to come on our fledgling podcast. We were on YouTube taking off, and then they banned us.
So now we're trying to do the same thing again on Substack. In addition to this, I wasted your time because I have this cognitive deficiency with time zones. And I imagine we were missing last night. So we're here.
Very, very easy mistake.

China-Pilled by Shitposting! w/Carl Zha | Open Mind on China Ep. 1.
In this first episode of OMOC, Benji welcomes Car Zha, whose shitposting on Twitter helped cut through the
Resistance is Fertile Podcast
Nov 23, 2025
In the debut episode of our new series Open Mind on China, host Benji talks with Carl Zha—a Chinese-born, Bali-based commentator and host of the Silk and Steel podcast—about his personal journey from internalizing Western media narratives to developing a grounded, pro-China perspective rooted in lived experience and historical literacy.

Carl recounts growing up in 1980s China, moving to the U.S. in 1990, and gradually realizing that mainstream Western coverage portrayed a “bizarro world” unrecognizable to anyone who’s actually lived in China as he had.

He emphasizes the importance of linguistic and political literacy in Chinese thought, critiques liberal “China experts” who project their biases without understanding China’s internal discourse, and dismantles key myths—especially the false claim of genocide in Xinjiang, which he refutes based on firsthand travel through southern Xinjiang last month.

Carl explains China’s development model not as capitalist or imperialist, but as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”: a pragmatic, outcome-oriented system that prioritizes poverty alleviation, infrastructure, education, healthcare, and equitable growth.

Subscribe to Resistance is Fertile Substack—it’s free! And if you choose to become a paid subscriber, we’ll send every cent to Gaza, add 50%, and publish the receipts on here.

Carl contrasts China’s long-term, people-centered governance with the short-term profit and electoral cycles of the West, and argues that China engages globally without regime change, coercion, or military aggression.

Our conversation also touches on China’s cautious diplomatic strategy—especially regarding Palestine—and the need for anti-imperialists to move beyond “saviorism” and understand China on its own terms, not through Western ideological templates.