There is something deeply surreal about watching a young woman stand in the middle of a crowded, dusty lane in a Dhaka neighborhood, point her phone at tin-roofed homes, and tell her audience that she is broadcasting live from New Delhi, India. The houses behind her are not in Delhi; the language she is narrating in is not Indian; the streets she is walking through belong to Bangladesh. Yet on Chinese social media platforms, her livestream is presented as a window into India’s capital, and the message is as clear as it is malicious: India is impoverished, filthy, chaotic, and undeserving of respect. When reports of this strange campaign reached New Delhi, the government reacted with visible displeasure. On Tuesday, the Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson, Randhir Jaiswal, addressed the matter directly, calling the videos an attempt to present a “distorted picture” of India. His words were measured, but the underlying concern was unmistakable. He said, in response to a question about Chinese influencers filming in Bangladesh and pretending they were in India, that such efforts to present false images of any country are deeply unfortunate. He went further, adding that peddling false narratives only undermines the credibility of those who engage in such acts and of those who are ultimately behind them, and he urged the relevant authorities to take action against the people involved.
What had happened, according to investigative reports in the Bangladeshi media, was a quiet but persistent campaign unfolding in Dhaka’s poorest neighborhoods. For months, more than 150 Chinese nationals had been filming videos and livestreaming in Uttara and Tekpara, two densely populated areas that bear little resemblance to India’s capital but which, to uninformed foreign viewers, might seem convincingly South Asian. The Chinese nationals apparently hired local guides to walk them through narrow streets, filming everything from crumbling buildings to daily street life, all while claiming in their livestreams that they were in New Delhi. A report by the Bangladeshi daily Prothom Alo found that although the videos were recorded in Uttara, the Chinese nationals repeatedly said during their streams that they were broadcasting from India. In one particularly brazen example, on November 1, a Chinese woman pointed her camera at the tin-roofed houses around her and said: “This is New Delhi. Their homes are extremely dirty. There isn’t even a fan inside the tin-roofed houses. This place is quite underdeveloped, dirty and unhygienic, and the law-and-order situation is poor.” The clip was not a random tourist complaint; it was part of a broader pattern in which Chinese social media content has increasingly sought to portray India as a failed, poverty-stricken nation teetering on the edge of collapse.
The scale of the operation, if it can be called that, is difficult to ignore. People familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that there has been a significant surge in anti-India content on Chinese platforms in recent months. Much of that content follows the same template: India is underdeveloped, dirty, economically broken, and socially dangerous. The videos are often crude, but they are effective, feeding an audience that may have little direct knowledge of India and no reason to question what they are seeing. What makes the Dhaka episode even more suggestive, however, is the timing and the backstory. According to the same people familiar with developments, a large number of Chinese influencers had been seeking Indian visas in Beijing in recent months, hoping perhaps to film similar content from inside India itself. But the overwhelming majority of those visa applications were rejected. Unable to enter India, the Chinese vloggers appear to have turned to Bangladesh as a stand-in, a location that, to their viewers and perhaps to themselves, looked close enough to India to pass a false narrative. This is not just a random act of internet mischief; it is a calculated attempt to manufacture a narrative by using the geography of one country to defame another.
India’s response, at least on the surface, has been restrained but firm. Jaiswal’s public statement made clear that New Delhi views the videos as a deliberate attempt to distort the image of the country, and he asked the authorities in both Beijing and Dhaka to take action against the people responsible. The request to Bangladesh is particularly significant, because the events took place on Bangladeshi soil, and the local authorities have a natural responsibility to investigate what has been happening in their own streets. The request to China is more delicate, as it touches upon questions of free expression, state influence, and the open flow of information between two neighboring powers. But the underlying message is simple: this sort of falsehood cannot be allowed to stand without response. Jaiswal’s language—“peddling false narratives only undermines the credibility of those who are undertaking such actions and those who are behind them”—was careful, even philosophical, but it carried an edge. It suggested that India is not merely concerned about the immediate impact of the videos, but about the larger pattern of manipulation and misinformation that they represent. The credibility of those behind the campaign, he argued, is ultimately the biggest casualty, because once audiences discover they have been lied to, the lie begins to destroy its own authors.
This bizarre episode comes at a particularly sensitive moment in India-China relations. For more than four years, the two countries had been locked in a military standoff in Ladakh, a confrontation that drove bilateral ties to their lowest point in six decades. Troops faced off in high-altitude terrain, with clashes along the Line of Actual Control leaving casualties on both sides and poisoning the broader relationship. In October 2024, however, the two governments reached an understanding that brought an end to the Ladakh standoff, opening the door at least a crack for a gradual normalization of relations. High-level meetings have taken place, diplomatic channels have reopened, and both sides have spoken cautiously about peace and stability. It is in this context that the Chinese influencer videos in Dhaka feel so poisonous. They undermine the very spirit of normalization, eroding trust at a time when both governments have expressed a desire to move forward. If one country is actively allowing or even encouraging content that denigrates the other, or if such content is allowed to spread without check, then the rhetorical commitment to peace begins to ring hollow. The videos are not a formal act of state propaganda, but they operate in the gray space of information warfare, where unofficial actors create content that advances a narrative hostile to another nation while giving governments plausible deniability.
Yet amid all the geopolitics and manipulation, it is worth pausing to remember what this story really means for ordinary people. The Chinese influencers were not filming in empty streets; they were filming in the homes and neighborhoods of real Bangladeshi families, people who live in the tin-roofed houses and walk the unpaved lanes shown in the videos. By claiming these places were in India, the influencers did not only deceive their audiences; they also invited contempt upon their own subjects, using the poverty of some of the world’s most vulnerable people as props in a malicious political performance. The local residents who were hired as guides, paid a few taka to walk foreigners through their own communities, may not have known how their lives were being misrepresented. This is the quiet tragedy of such misinformation: it turns human suffering into spectacle, commodifies it, and then weaponizes it against an entire nation. The effort to normalize relations between India and China, which should be built on mutual respect and an understanding of shared interests, cannot be sustained if such propaganda is allowed to flourish. For ordinary citizens in both countries, this episode is a reminder that the digital world is full of images that claim to be truth but are often carefully staged illusions. What is needed now is not just diplomatic action, but an insistence on basic honesty in public discourse—a demand that the authorities in Beijing and Dhaka investigate what happened in the neighborhoods of Uttara and Tekpara, that those responsible face consequences, and that audiences everywhere learn to ask a simple question before believing what they see: is this really what it claims to be? In the end, the truth matters. It always does.