Video shows interview with Chinese dissident, not 'Chinese Communist Party cadre'

"Chinese Communist Party cadre risks his life by revealing everything in a video that was deleted within five minutes by Chinese authorities," reads the Korean-language title of the video, which was shared on YouTube here on June 28, 2023.

The video, which has been viewed at least 20,000 times, includes snippets of what appears to be an online interview with a Mandarin-speaking man who is criticising the Chinese Communist Party's policies towards China's youth.

At the one-minute, two-second mark, the video appears to start lagging, and Korean-language captions say the interview was "suddenly cut off" as a result of interference from Chinese authorities.

"Immediately after the cadre conducted this interview, the broadcast was taken down, but by then many people shared the video and it spread quickly," the captions read. "The cadre has not been heard from since."

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Screenshot of the false YouTube video, captured on July 13, 2023

The video was also shared in Facebook posts here and here, as well as on South Korean forum Naver Blog here.

Comments on the posts suggest many users believed it genuinely showed a Chinese Communist Party cadre's tell-all interview.

"Will he be alright after making such comments under the Communist Party's rule? I am worried," one user wrote.

Another said: "Is that cadre still alive? His property was probably confiscated and his family members executed. There goes another noble soul."

But this video corresponds to an interview aired by the Voice of America (VOA) with a Chinese dissident -- not a Chinese Communist Party cadre -- in May 2023.

VOA interview

A combination of reverse image and keyword searches on Google led to a video interview published by VOA on their verified Chinese-language YouTube channel on May 5, 2023 (archived link).

The three-minute VOA interview features the same figure commenting on youth unemployment in China being a result of the Communist Party's policies. Parts of the interview have been spliced together in a different order in the Korean-language false post.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the individual in the false video (left) and in the VOA interview (right):

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Screenshot comparison of the individual in the false video  (left) and in the VOA interview (right)

The Chinese-language caption in the VOA interview, as well as its title, says the man is "Wang Juntao, chairman of the Democracy Party of China".

The description reads, in part: "Democracy Party of China chairman Wang Juntao tells Chinese youth 'either die in the silence or speak up' and seek survival in the extreme, change the system that has caused this hardship."

Wang is a prominent Chinese dissident who was jailed on charges organising the mass democracy protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, which ended on June 4, 1989 with a brutal crackdown by the country's Communist rulers that left at least a thousand people dead.

According to Human Rights Watch, as well as articles from New York Magazine and CNN, Wang was released on medical grounds in 1994 and made his way to the United States (archived links here, here and here).

The false posts claim the interview was cut at its one-minute, 21-second mark, as Wang was speaking about people wanting to flee the country.

But an analysis of the VOA interview shows the interview was not abruptly ended, although there were some connection issues that caused the feed to stutter.

The corresponding section of the VOA interview, seen from its two-minute, 36-second mark, in fact shows the feed briefly buffering as Wang continues to speak. He goes on for a further 30 seconds, urging Chinese youth to "take action and save the country".

Wang is a frequent guest on VOA's Chinese-language channel, appearing in multiple interviews, including here, here and here (archived links here, here and here).

The claim that the individual was "never heard from again" after this interview is also false, as Wang appeared in another VOA interview on June 30, and has posted multiple times on his Twitter account (archived links here and here).