Why This Video about Rich Kids in L.A. Got 80 Million Views in China

vocativ

Back on November 18th a video was published by website Vocativ which centered on the car collections of the “super-rich” Chinese students of Southern California.   While receiving 500,000 views on Youtube here in the U.S. is a great number, once an unnamed person scraped this video, and then posted it in multiple versions on a Chinese video platform called Tencent, the video has since received over 80MM views.  Yes, that’s 80 million, and the number is still climbing.

The video skyrocketed from the onset gaining over 5MM views in its first 10 hours.   But that begs the question: Why are millions of Chinese so fascinated with the super-rich lives of people from China, flaunting their phenomenal wealth in California?  Vocativ thinks it has a lot to do with the increasing disparity between the wealthy and the poor in China.

According to the World Bank, The income ratio of China’s richest and poorest 10 percent increased from 19:1 to 25:1 from 2002 to 2007, and China’s income inequality is worse than that of the U.S., by many indicators.

Another, and more scary reason is that some think that the Chinese are hiding this growing disparity by blocking its citizens from seeing particular content on the web.  It’s not a secret that China employs firewalls and consistently blocks people from particular websites in the U.S. (including Youtube which has been blocked since 2009).   Clearly there’s a growing population of people who want access to these videos, hence someone scraping this particular video and posting it to Tencent.   It seems that the more these videos are censored, the more the citizens of China are going to want to watch them.

See the video for yourself below:

Image via Youtube

Written by Worthly