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"Culture Bureau" is an ongoing Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê×ÊÁÏÍø interview series in which we take long, meandering strolls down memory lane with pillars of China's cultural community.

Mr. R. is the mask behind China-focused news satire site . As the self-proclaimed "only news source visible from outer space", the China Daily Show is your one-stop bastion of fake reportage on the completely made-up news that is currently not captivating China's hearts, minds and computer screens. From blowing the lid off of made-up stories like and to the whole-sale fabrication of non-think pieces like and , the China Daily Show has time and time again show itself to exemplify an unparalleled eye for creating falsehood, making them one of China's most truly dispensable sources for news currently somewhat operating today.

On condition that we not reveal his identity, Mr. R. agreed to sit down with us to discuss topics like Twitter — what the fuck is that?; the news — why are so many people doing it?; and censorship — kinda looks like no one really gives a shit anyways, right?

Here's that link again. In the next couple weeks, the site is undergoing a redesign and they're also launching some new features and distractions. China Daily Show — all the news that fits on the internet. At last.

Bookmark it.

Do people still bookmark things?

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SmSH: So, when did it all start? You know, I didn't even realize the name "China Daily Show" was a mash-up of "China Daily" and "The Daily Show". That went right over my head.

Mr. R.: You just thought it was a part of the China Daily or…

SmSH: I thought it was just a random name someone pulled out of thin air.

Mr. R.: The name is actually one of the best parts of it, because if you get it, it has those two references so you'd know what you're getting into.

SmSH: What was the initial reasoning behind starting it? Did you see a lack of satirical and humor writing in Beijing and China and you wanted to fill that lack?

Mr. R.: No, it was more of a conversation. How many conversations a night happen in this city, "Hey we should do this. Hey, we should make this movie, this website" or whatever, and most of them are kind of gone with the fairies the next morning. I was with a guy who was great at starting things and then never finishing them. So, it started like that, as like a scrappy website thing, and I took it from there to get it done.

SmSH: So how many people do it? How many writers do you have?

Mr. R.: Well, let me ask you, how many people run SmartBeijing?

SmSH: Um. It's me and Josh. And a few freelance writers. And someone who handles the tickets. Like an office manager person.

Mr. R.: Who does the tweets?

SmSH: The office manager person. I used to do it but I fucking hate twitter. I can't fucking stand it. I don't even check our twitter. I think it's just links to our articles.

Mr. R.: Yeah, it's very sporadic. Why do you hate it?

SmSH: Oh, just because I'm not good at it. It's not that I don't like it, it's just I'm not good at the format and it makes me jealous of people who are and gives me feelings of inadequacy. I can't understand how to read it either. Most of my feed is just letters, numbers, codes, and blind links. But, yeah, I'm just not funny at it so I've given up.

Mr. R.: You'd want to be funny at it?

SmSH: Well, yeah, it's the way to be interesting on the internet. Being amusing is, at least, something. I understand you're big on Twitter, right? I guess it's a pretty valuable tool for journalists. I'm not a real journalist, you see.

Mr. R.: Well, I think it's a very useful tool, yeah. I still haven't got a personal account…

SmSH: To go back to your question. SmartBeijing is basically me and Josh, but we're closely connected to the Shanghai office as well, so there's a lot of back-and-forth. And the format to the website is something that developed out of a team in Shanghai. There's consistent back-and-forth between the two cities.

SmSH: How professional is China Daily Show? Do you have a staff? Do you do meetings? Do you have an office?

Mr. R.: I've got a laptop. Which receives email. I was initially working with someone who wanted to push it in that direction. But, basically, you can run out of steam if you're running something that's not-for-profit. No one wants to go to a meeting twice a week for something that's, you know, not directly lucrative.

It might make more sense now because we've got a reasonable amount of supporters.

SmSH: What's the traffic like?

Mr. R.: Don't know. I honestly don't know. I honestly don't look at it.

SmSH: You don't have Google analytics or anything?

Mr. R.: We used to but I lost the password two years ago and I couldn't be fucked to get the replacement. Honestly, the traffic doesn't mean anything to me. I'm not looking for advertisers.

SmSH: Is that like an ideological thing? You'll never try to get advertisers?

Mr. R.: Well, never say never, but, for now, I'd rather create a quality product.

SmSH: How do you receive feedback then? How do you gauge peoples' responses?

Mr. R.: Well, we don't have a Facebook, so that's out. Maybe we'll set one up. How do we receive feedback? Comments on the articles, which are infrequent. I guess we have to go back to your least favorite medium, twitter, which is the only place I see people writing about stuff — passing links forward. Generally, it's positive.

SmSH: What's the percentage of positive versus negative feedback?

Mr. R.: 98% positive.

SmSH: What's the negative feedback like?

Mr. R.: Occasionally, someone gets the wrong end of the stick, and that's foreign and Chinese readers. And, occasionally, I'll get some high profile writer who's writing in Chinese, they'll translate it, and send it around.

Negative feedback… I don't want to go down this route too much but there's Reddit. Stick a review of yours on Reddit and then you'll just see people go, 'oh god...'

SmSH: Yeah, I think, very rarely something at Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê×ÊÁÏÍø will end up on there, and then probably people would tear it to pieces. Seems a bit vicious. Reddit is another one I don't know too much about.

Mr. R.: It's rare to be receiving a lot of love on Reddit. I don't want to wail on it too much though. It's fun. People on the internet. They're like raw ids floating around slinging shit at each other like monkeys.

SmSH: But, not you, then. You don't sling any shit.

Mr. R.: Oh, I'm on there as well, of course. I'm out there. [Laughs.] Who really is not out there with a name like "Duckface012010"? And it's probably some friend of yours in real life. For all we know, we could be communicating with each other on there and we don't even know.

SmSH: So, what was the original aesthetic guidelines or boundaries of China Daily Show. A lot of people describe it as "China's ".

Mr. R.: That's fair to say. They did devise a template of modern news satire, couching it in the sort of standard AP style. They're very good at that. There's equivalents to that in Britain as well — . Those are the one's that come to mind.

SmSH: How did you adapt that style to China? Was there a process of translating the format of it to suit China readers?

Mr. R.: Well, it works because it's a format people already do understand. God forbid you start something completely new. You'd be fucked. But we're also trying to move away from too many news stories all the time to do new formats — Voxbox, listicles… Listicles is the way forward now isn't it?

SmSH: Listicles. Yeah, we've been fighting this ongoing war with trying not to do listicles but at the same time being able to tap into, as you say, this raw internet id that can't help but click on a solid list of items.

Mr. R.: Yeah, you see a lot of that within the China sphere of things — websites chasing other website's successes and trying to replicate the thing that worked for someone else. And when that happens, these website dilute their own uniqueness, their own brand by trying to become something else that appears to be successful for someone else.

Like, what's happened in the last eight months or so, it's clicked in the heads of all the English-language websites is that "news" is what people are interested in. Like, "news", is what people are interested in, but what they don't seem to get is that people don't want to see the same five news stories repackaged and represented as a link to something else, they want to see new news — something that someone has gone and uncovered. You don't get actual reportage, you get cut-and-paste jobs.

SmSH: This missing plane seems to have taken the English-language sphere by storm...

Mr. R.: Yes, exactly, and it's mostly a day old or so. Like thanks very much for this link, but I did already get this from a much more reputable source about a day ago already. And even now you've managed to fuck up your cut-and-paste job. Like, who is going to these sites for their news anyways?

But mostly that's because the people doing it are perhaps not journalists or the industry is not very developed.

SmSH: Where do you trace the origin of this trend towards news aggregation. Seems like was the ground zero for that sort of content generation scheme.

Mr. R.: Right, and then after ChinaSmack, you've got Smack, Bop, Twat, Rush, or whatever, and they're all over the place now — Korea or wherever. ChinaSmack was very unique in 2008 or so, tracking netizens' comments and then foisting all of it on to expats, but now that's basically everywhere. It's gone mainstream. With the exception of some very niche curated websites, there hasn't been a single bold new website in like two or three years...

SmSH: I know you don't want to talk about this, but you yourself, are you coming from a background in "expat media" and journalism writing in China?

Mr. R.: Yeah, but let's not talk about that. We all know the players involved…

SmSH: Fair enough. China Daily Show — What are some of the articles that have been most upsetting to people? What are, say, two or three that really seemed to upset people? You had something on there about …

Mr. R.: Yeah. Some people found that insensitive and inappropriate.

SmSH: Do you care if people get upset?

Mr. R.: Well, yeah, because if you misplace a joke, you turn from being a defender of values into a bully. With that one, it was more about all the conspiracy theories — the joke was at the expense of the speculators and the media frenzy to create content around this incident. Amateur detective work and amateur aviation experts coming out of the woodwork.

But that goes back to what I was saying before, and this problem with our traffic-based web. People just re-purpose items, give a little link to say thank you, and then claim it as their own. I just find that particularly boring. Is SmartBeijing going to start covering the news?

SmSH: I hate the news. I haven't read a newspaper since 1978.

Mr. R.: You should make that your catch-quote. "SmartBeijing: We Haven't Read a Newspaper Since Deng Xiaoping Came to Power".

I personally stopped reading anything after Mao died. What's the point?

SmSH: So, censorship. Getting in trouble. Is that a possibility? Are you worried about being tossed somewhere horrible? Are you worried about censorship?

Mr. R.: About as much as you are.

SmSH: Or getting blocked, I guess. Have you had any run-ins with... whoever? Nefarious forces? Is that something that could happen?

Mr. R.: You know, the government hasn't really cared about English-language blogs for about… well, the last one that got blocked was Danwei in 2009, but from what I heard of that, it was a commercial business thing. Maybe some sort of miscommunication.

How you probably get blocked these days is to somehow directly or indirectly target a person — a certain person — who sees it themselves and intervenes personally. I don't think the government even cares as long as you don't bring it directly to their doorstep. Don't mess with anyone's bottom line. Don't mess with people's bank accounts.

SmSH: So no one's been coming around to your house? Haven't heard any mysterious clicks when you're talking on the phone?

Mr. R.: I've had this guy in a beard following me around and I'll tell you what: he looks fucking dodgy. [Laughs.]

But, no, I'm not worried. The reason for anonymity has to do with the nature of the website itself. If it had a real name behind it, it would get associated with that person's personality — "hey have you read so-and-so's piece on this" — but with this it's more, "did you see that thing on China Daily Show" — it's its own entity.

SmSH: So the site's four years old now. How has it changed over the years?

Mr. R.: I think it's gotten a little more mature. More mature, in that in the beginning there was a tendency to do localized jokes. And there's still a place for that, but we're moving away from it. Like, I've still got all the jokes about English teachers and all that but when I go to post it, I'm thinking "hmmm". It's a bit like low hanging fruit. English teachers, they're the lighting rod for criticizing expat population in China. And I've actually met a lot who are actually sincere teachers. Some people have excellent qualifications and come here with a genuine motivation to pedagogery, and when it becomes their turn to say what they do, people always roll their eyes at least inwardly…

And I'm sure a lot of intelligent and worthwhile people have started off down the coal mine of English teaching or whatever. Wasn't [Peter] Hessler an English teacher to start off with?

SmSH: Is he an intelligent guy?

Mr. R.: He's certainly perceived to be so. I think he's just received a large endowment hasn't he?

SmSH: So, do you follow the literary writing that comes out of China as well? Think we've just been in the midst of a few literature festivals.

Mr. R.: Yeah, I went to a few of those. The thing about the expat writing festivals is that I don't think anyone's ever said anything that ever needed to be said. Like anything that you couldn't already find in a book somewhere or on a website. I don't know. It feels like they're there for a type of person who is very incurious and accepting of things, like "isn't this amazing, isn't this incredible" without questioning things. It comes across like, "isn't China cute", you know what I mean. It's like a tunnel vision. No self-awareness. Like middle-aged women talking about squat toilets. There is a vast reservoir of talentless schmucks writing about their "China experiences".

Is this the sort of thing you're referring to?

SmSH: Sure. Well, yeah, I think it was just a general waffling question about the quality of writing in China.

Mr. R.: What's lacking is good writing out in the sticks. You have a few. There's a few in Xinjiang. There's a bunch of guys in Yunnan, Szechuan — they're delivering some good writing about China. But what you don't have a guy in the provinces digesting what's happening out there and processing it for people in the major cities. Most of the talent gets sucked towards towards Beijing and Shanghai. It takes a specific kind of person willing to live out in the middle of nowhere, someone who posses spanking good Chinese, and willing to create thoughts and observations for probably no money — those people are like gold dust. But, you know, most of the people are drawn to Beijing and Shanghai.

What about you, what do you read?

SmSH: Oh, I just watch movies. I don't give a shit. I like movies with lots of explosions in them.

Mr. R.: [Laughs.]

SmSH: No, at one point, when I was living in Shanghai I was following some of the start-up fiction coming out of there from the foreigners. Think they appropriated this term "half-pat" to sort of differentiate their writing as something a bit more self-conscious. You know, they were hopefully doing stories that weren't about white men visiting prostitutes or squat toilets or whatever. Like "China" is in the writing but "China" isn't the focus. It's not the subject of the Western gaze or whatever.

Mr. R.: Sure. And it's hard to talk about that stuff without sounding like a huge knob.

SmSH: True. But this brings up another question I was going to ask you. There's a comment on your — one of the comments someone had — here's a bit from it: "it’s merely a spiteful reaction disguised as a good-natured criticism from a non-conformed Westerner related to a non-Western society."

Mr. R.: Oh yeah, I remember that one. What does he mean?

SmSH: I don't know, it was really convoluted. Something about spite. And maybe privilege. I think it's something about you being non-Chinese and being critical of China using a very Western satirical format — the "fake news" thing.

Mr. R.: But Global Times is fake news.

SmSH: Zing.

Mr. R.: I think they had an article on there recently, ""

SmSH: Damn. How do you even compete?

Mr. R.: Yeah, they'll always be one better.

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China Daily Show — here's . They also have a twitter.