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Comedian Uncle Roger Previews What A Future Under Chinese Commies Looks Like


BY: LANE KENDALL | MAY 26, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/26/comedian-uncle-roger-previews-what-a-future-under-chinese-commies-looks-like/

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Americans often wonder why they should care or what the consequences would be if China replaced the United States as the world’s most powerful nation. Surprisingly, a clear answer to this question can be found in the ongoing saga of comedian Nigel Ng Kin-ju. 

Ng, more popularly known as Uncle Roger, is a British-Malaysian comedian and internet personality who has become wildly popular over the last couple of years, thanks to his hilarious critiques of Westerners’ attempts at cooking Asian food. Even if you are not familiar with his name, chances are you have stumbled upon one of his videos while scrolling through YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, where he has a combined 20.8 million followers.  

Overall, things were working out quite nicely for Uncle Roger until he committed the gravest of modern-day sins: criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping and Communist China.  

In a recent upload clipped from one of his stand-up comedy shows, Uncle Roger asked an audience member if he was from Boston. When then the gentleman responded that he was in fact from Guangzhou, China, Uncle Roger immediately feigned a look of exaggerated concern and retorted, “China, good country, good country. … We have to say that now, correct?” The entire audience, including the gentleman from Guangzhou, burst into laughter. 

Uncle Roger continued taking shots at China, noting that the man’s Huawei phone was listening to everything he was saying and repeating, “Long live President Xi.”  

The comedian then really went for it, asking who in the audience was from Taiwan. Responding to the cheers of a few Taiwanese audience members, Uncle Roger brazenly quipped, “Not a real country, not a real country,” and, “I hope one day you rejoin the motherland. One China!” 

He ended by soliciting the audience to write the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and state that Uncle Roger is a “good comrade.” 

The clip immediately went viral and caught the eyes of some of Twitter’s more well-known critics of China, including Melissa Chan, Lele Farley, and former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby, who retweeted the video along with the caption, “This guy gets what it’ll look like.” The clip’s virality, however, was not limited to American audiences, and it swiftly caught the eyes of the censorship brigade in Beijing.  

On Saturday, Taiwanese news outlet New Liberty Times reported that China suspended Uncle Roger’s Weibo and Bilibili social media accounts. Between both platforms, the comedian lost access to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Weibo said the channel was muted due to “violations of relevant laws and regulations.” 

Uncle Roger’s social media blacklisting came just days after Chinese comedian Li Haoshi was arrested for making jokes about the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army. Li’s management company was also hit with a $2 million fine. 

“We will never allow any company or individual to wantonly slander the glorious image of the army on any stage in the capital city … or to make fun of serious subject matters,” regulators in Beijing said. 

You might ask yourself why censorship within China’s borders should matter to Americans, especially as the United States has serious internal issues. America has her share of problems, not the least of which are those dealing with First Amendment rights. And the rules Beijing regulators decide to enforce have no effect on the average American’s life — for now. 

Imagine for a moment, however, a hypothetical world where China has invaded and conquered Taiwan. It might not be readily apparent, but this world would look drastically different than the one you know today. In this world, American credibility in Asia will have been destroyed due to its inability or unwillingness to deter China. Realizing American power is on the way out, nations like Japan, South Korea, and Australia will hedge their bets and move away from Washington and closer to Beijing.  

China is now the hegemon, or dominant nation, in Asia. And that means China directly or indirectly controls about half of the world’s economy. If you want to do business in Asia, ship your goods through Pacific waters, or source any of your supply chain on the continent, you will not be able to do so without China’s consent.  

And if you think American autarky might be the answer, you may want to reconsider. As Colby noted in a piece for Time Magazine: 

America will be at best roughly 20% of global GDP, a far smaller base for competition, making it likely our economy would be outclassed and left behind by China’s much larger area over time. Even more, though, China will very likely seek to diminish the U.S. This is just basic power politics.

At this point, all Americans directly or indirectly work for Chinese companies that are themselves controlled by the CCP, and if you want to keep your income stream flowing, you will have no choice but to bend to the party’s will.  If you do not want to play along, well, look no further than what is happening right now with Uncle Roger. He made a simple joke at the expense of the party, and his ability to do business in China vanished.  

A China that has gained hegemonic status in Asia now has that same power and authority over all facets of the global economy, including right here in the United States. What suggests that China would not gladly wield such a weapon at its discretion? 

This is not the first time Uncle Roger has offended the CCP. In 2021, he angered Chinese social media users after he uploaded a video featuring outspoken China critic Mike Chen. Uncle Roger swiftly deleted the video and apologized to his Chinese audience, no doubt hoping to preserve his market share.  As the latest developments show, however, appeasement only lasts until you inevitably upset the party line again, for which you will promptly be punished. Hopefully, Uncle Roger can learn from his past, and Americans can learn from him.  

A future discourse dictated by Chinese power is not one that aligns with the preservation of American values or prosperity, and that is just the future Xi is hoping for.  

Lane Kendall is a graduate of Wichita State’s Elliott School of Communication and holds a Master’s of International Studies in Korean and East Asian Studies from Korea University in Seoul, South Korea. His research and writing focus on East Asia’s geopolitics and America’s power competition with China, Russia, and Iran.

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For $80 Billion (and counting) U.S. Taxpayers Have Bought a Bloody Stalemate in Ukraine


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | APRIL 13, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/13/for-80-billion-and-counting-u-s-taxpayers-have-bought-a-bloody-stalemate-in-ukraine/

Zelensky holds West Virginia hat
At some point the bipartisan Washington consensus in favor of funding the Ukraine war has to tell the American people what we’re buying.

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The trove of recently leaked intelligence documents related to the Ukraine war should prompt Americans to start asking tough questions about our involvement in that conflict, which one of the documents, a Feb. 23 overview of fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas region, describes as a “grinding campaign of attrition” that has reached a “stalemate.”

U.S. taxpayers have poured nearly $80 billion into this war over the past 14 months. At what point are we allowed to ask whether a “stalemate” in a “grinding campaign of attrition” is a good deal for Americans?

Above all, Americans should demand the bipartisan Washington consensus that supports indefinitely funding the war explain what our strategy is, define what the American interest is in it, and detail how they plan to achieve something beyond an interminable war of attrition that risks pulling us into direct conflict with nuclear-armed Russia. At the very least, the American people deserve more than inane platitudes from Antony Blinken about “Ukrainian victory” and “standing united with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” as if total Russian defeat and withdrawal is a realistic outcome.

The classified documents lend some urgency to these questions because they reveal, among other things, a severe shortage of air defense weapons in Ukraine — so severe it could mean the difference between an ongoing stalemate or a Russian victory in the coming weeks or months. Without adequate air defenses, Russian warplanes will be able to bomb Ukrainian positions at will, which in turn might make Ukraine’s planned spring offensive impossible. No wonder, then, that earlier this month the Biden administration pledged $2.6 billion to rush air defense systems to Ukraine. 

What the documents also suggest, as if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is that the war has not been an unbroken chain of brilliant underdog battlefield victories for Ukraine and crushing defeats for Russia, as the corporate media and the Washington political establishment have led us to believe. It rather seems like chaotic and indecisive butchery on both sides, with weapons and cash pouring in not just from the U.S. but from all over the world sustaining a large-scale war of attrition with no end in sight. Behind the scenes, according to the leaked documents, U.S. officials are predicting only “modest territorial gains” from Ukraine’s big spring counteroffensive, the recent surge of U.S. weapons and air defense systems notwithstanding.

One of the results of this slow, grinding warfare has been the rapid expenditure of munitions, at least on the Ukrainian side. U.S. weapons stockpiles are now badly depleted, and our defense industrial base is taxed to the point that we have been unable to deliver some $20 billion in promised military supplies to Taiwan. This of course raises the question of China, which the Biden administration, along with Republican leaders in Congress, refuse to talk about candidly in the context of the Ukraine war.

What is the plan if (and really, when) Beijing decides to invade Taiwan? No one seems to have an answer — or even seems willing to acknowledge there’s a problem. Nor do our political leaders have an answer to the increasingly obvious reality that U.S. sponsorship of Ukraine is pushing Moscow into Beijing’s arms and helping to accelerate a China-led coalition to challenge the U.S. dollar reserve currency status and usher in a truly multi-polar world. 

Meanwhile, economic uncertainty prevails here at home, with inflation continuing to hit American families hard, U.S. banks failing, and talk of an impending recession setting markets on edge. As mentioned above, since Russia invaded Ukraine last February, American taxpayers have given Ukraine about $80 billion — and counting. That includes nearly $50 billion in direct military assistance, many orders of magnitude more than we give even our closest allies like Israel, which got just $3.3 billion in military aid in 2020.

Setting aside the larger question of how this war will end (spoiler alert: it’s almost certainly going to end with a negotiated political settlement), there’s the narrower question of what, exactly, the American taxpayer has been purchasing with all this largesse. The Ukrainian state is famously corrupt, which hasn’t changed under President Zelensky and indeed might be far worse now given the sheer volume of U.S. dollars washing through the country. Is Ukraine going to emerge from this as a functioning democracy allied with the West, a reliable partner and not a dangerous welfare case? Is there any reason so far to think that will be the case?

And why isn’t there any transparency about the aid and cash we’ve sent? We’re told by White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby that, yes, there are indeed a small number of U.S. special forces operating inside Ukraine, but they’re only there “to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine,” and are not “fighting on the battlefield.” Presumably, that should mean we have more clarity about where weapons and cash are going inside Ukraine. But if that’s the case, no one in Washington will talk about it.

From where the situation stands now, it seems like the U.S. taxpayer has unwittingly bought nothing more than a bloody stalemate in Ukraine, one that increasingly runs a very real risk of ending in a nuclear showdown. Absent a hard push from Washington for peace negotiations — the one thing our leaders seem unwilling even to consider — we’re left with bad options all around: escalation and inevitable U.S. involvement on the one hand, or total abandonment of Ukraine on the other.

The only real question, at this point, is how many more tens of billions will American taxpayers have to spend to find out how this ends?

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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