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A Chinese woman stood beside a canal and spoke into her phone. “This is New Delhi. Their homes are extremely dirty. This place is unhygienic, and the law-and-order situation is poor,” she told her livestream viewers. Behind her were tin-roofed homes.
But that was not Delhi. It was Tekpara, a low-income neighbourhood in Dhaka. Bangladeshi newspaper Prothom Alo found that Chinese nationals have been filming here for months, from morning till night, sometimes walking into people’s homes.
It looked like a bizarre one-off. We suspected it was not. So India Today’s OSINT team went looking at what Chinese video platforms show about India.
WHAT WE FOUND
We searched two Chinese video platforms, Bilibili and Youku, using India-related keywords, and hundreds of videos came up. We went through about a dozen of them closely, and the same five stories kept coming back: poverty and slums, an “unliveable” India, caste and garbage, Indian men as predators, and being Indian as a punchline.
The biggest of them is “Home on a garbage mountain”, which claims in its title that 3.5 million Indian Dalits spend their lives on 800 million tons of garbage. It has 1.4 million views and over 6,000 comments. Another video, uploaded in late October, warns that New Delhi will become so unfit for humans that even mosquitoes would disappear. A third promises “The secret no one dares to reveal”, which turns out to be a slum next to the Taj Mahal, and it has 56,000 views.
Then there is Born in India: A life experience, which invites viewers to “experience how terrible it is to be born into a life in India!” The entire video is AI-generated and imagined. The distressed boy holding the Indian flag is not a real child, and the life shown is not a real life, yet it is sold to viewers as what growing up in India feels like. It still has 163,700 views.
The reach is hard to ignore. Seven anti-India videos we tracked on Bilibili had crossed 2.06 million views by November 11, and “Indian pervert”, which paints Indian men as predators, alone had 388,000. On Youku, some videos are four or five years old, with titles like “1,400 people sharing one toilet”. This has been going on for years, not weeks.
NOT THE FIRST TIME
This is not a new playbook. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a defence and security think tank, and Doublethink Lab, a Taiwanese group that tracks Chinese influence operations, studied online campaigns on Manipur and India's northeast. They found that "most of the narrative had first appeared on Chinese social media platforms" before reaching Indian feeds.
During the May 2025 Indo-Pak conflict, Chinese influencers pushed a viral video mocking India's Rafale jets. The Asia Research Institute at the University of Singapore called it "a textbook example of memetic warfare."
WHO IS BEHIND IT?
No public proof yet ties these videos to the Chinese state. But the setting matters. Bilibili, Youku and Douyin all operate inside China's tightly policed internet, which Freedom House, a US-based freedom watchdog, scored just 9 out of 100 in 2026. Content Beijing dislikes disappears quickly. What stays up and reaches millions stays up under its watch.
India’s foreign ministry has already responded. Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said: “Such efforts to present a distorted picture of any country are unfortunate.” He added that “peddling of false narratives only undermines the credibility of the actors involved and those behind them.” The ministry has urged the authorities concerned “to take appropriate action against them.”
Every country has its struggles. India’s story is also one of the world’s biggest climbs: a democracy of 1.4 billion that lands spacecraft on the Moon and runs a digital payments system the world studies. Chinese videos show none of that. They pick the worst frame, repeat it millions of times, and call it India.
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