For the American traveler who imagines he has a borderline healthy relationship with his phone, a trip to China is instructive. First, the Great Firewall cuts you off from the social feeds and algorithms that govern your media consumption back home. Without resorting to a VPN to bypass the blocks, there’s no access to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Gmail, X, or TikTok. As your digital world goes quiet, you realize just how much of your daily intake is noise.

But just as you’re starting to appreciate the silence, new portals open up. More than anywhere else on earth, to get by in China, you have to live through your phone. You pay for almost everything with QR codes on super-apps; public transit tickets come in blocky patterns in the same apps; and ordering at restaurants, that time-honored respite for the lonely, is via QR-accessed mini-programs in the apps. Living through Chinese apps, you start to get sucked into their social layers, which automatically translate into English. The hostel has a group chat that buzzes constantly. The guy who sold you spicy rabbit head keeps sending you memes. Even on the far side of the Great Firewall, there’s no escaping the noise. After two-and-a-half months in China last year, I started to fantasize about throwing my phone into a gutter.

At least one group of Americans is more intrigued than repelled by this thoroughly digitized world: streamers. To the biggest Western content creators and their managers, the business logic of building a Chinese following has long been apparent. There are over a billion internet users in China, and unlike anywhere else in the world, livestreams have already been popular entertainment for a decade. In 2016, it was recorded that more than half of those billion were regularly consuming the format. Because all American platforms are blocked in the country, it represents a massive untapped market for creators. In January 2024, MrBeast, the most subscribed creator on YouTube, dipped his toe behind the Great Firewall by posting his first video on the Chinese platform Bilibili. “Ni hao,” he greeted Chinese viewers.

Influencers’ excitement over the Chinese market runs against America’s abiding policy on China, which involves stoking a trade war and raising fears about a war-war. But a countervailing tendency was already emerging among left-liberal pundits who envy China’s solar panels, widespread electric car use, and high-speed trains, and among younger Americans, who’d started moving closer to their Chinese counterparts online. In January 2025, as their government threatened to ban TikTok, masses of Americans preemptively joined the Chinese social network RedNote. “Our generation and younger are so tapped into China in ways that an older person cannot comprehend because of RedNote and TikTok,” the leftist streamer Hasan Piker tells me. “There are spots that they want to go to.”

Last March, 20-year-old Darren Watkins Jr.—who broadcasts to more than 45 million YouTube subscribers under the moniker IShowSpeed, or Speed for short—became the first massive Western creator to go on a highly publicized tour of the country. He acted as another catalyst, changing attitudes on both sides, and inspiring boiling envy among fellow livestreamers. Piker was so jealous—so sour—over Speed’s trip that Chinese internet users started calling him “Lemon Bro.” “I’ve been wanting to go to China for many, many years now, but I think it was much easier to convince people,” he says. “Speed going was huge for a lot of people in our industry, because they saw how sick it was.”

Speed had dreamed of visiting China since he was a little kid. More recently, he’d seen snapshots of the country’s fast-blooming cyberpunk landscapes populating his feeds and sought out Chinese anime. So the People’s Republic wasn’t entirely unknown to him, and he in turn wasn’t entirely unknown there. His content had slipped through the Great Firewall, clipped from his accounts on the blocked international platforms and reposted on Chinese apps. Even before he launched his own Chinese profiles, Speed had gained so much traction on China’s siloed internet that fans had bestowed on him the nickname “Hyperthyroid Bro,” because of an expression he makes frequently, which features bulging eyes and neck, superficially resembling symptoms of the condition.