With her white cane falling from her grip, a visually impaired 24-year-old woman, surnamed Jiang, tumbled on the tactile paving when a motorcyclist rushed past her on the narrow sidewalk.
"What are you doing? Have you got no eyes?" the driver yelled.
"I'm walking on the tactile paving," Jiang replied angrily.
Jiang is a vlogger with more than a million followers and goes by the online name Huggy Blind Bunny. She made the video to draw attention to rude and unfair treatment of visually impaired people when they are out walking and released it in early May.
However, on May 16, a few days after the video had gone viral, it was revealed the video was staged and had not been marked as such, according to Chinese law on online content. Sympathy for Jiang evaporated, and police took her and the bike rider, identified as a 26-yearold man surnamed Liu, in for questioning for possible future criminal charges. Jiang's account was banned.
Although people riding fast ebikes on pedestrian walkways and blocking sidewalks and tactile paving is a huge problem in China for all pedestrians, this staged video was the wrong way to draw attention to the issue.
According to the Law on Public Security and Notice on Strengthening the Administration of Self-Media issued in 2023, any unmarked staged videos which caused public outcry should attract penalties for the severe consequence it has caused. The video was reported by a number of online viewers who were skeptical about the authenticity of the scene.
The incident created a ripple effect within the online community of visually impaired vloggers, who have been documenting their lives, including walking with a guide dog or traveling by highspeed rail and plane. Many videos were recommended by short-video platforms, like Douyin or Bilibili, as first-person accounts detailing what life is like for them.
But Jiang's incident sparked immense skepticism over these vlogs' genuineness, with viewers less inclined to be sympathetic.
"Previously, viewers were curious about how we live. Now they immediately question the truth of our vlogs," a popular blind vlogger, whose online name is Xia Guo, told NewsChina.
This belief that content might be staged is seen in the comments below Xia's latest videos.
Comments posted under Xia's videos in the days after Jiang's controversial video included people asking if Xia was "truly blind," and how could Xia make their own videos without a team helping.
"What she [Jiang] challenged is not our traffic, but rather the ethical bottom line," Xia said. "If you shatter the trust, you never get it back. This staged video drained our public sympathy, so it's had a devastating social impact."
Xia is not the only one who has seen skeptical comments under posts.
"When you have to confront people who question the ethics of visually impaired vloggers like me, I can't respond other than to uphold my own integrity," a vlogger known as Ju Zi online, told NewsChina.
From Yinchuan, capital of Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Ju has 660,000 followers on Douyin.
In 2023, the Notice on Strengthening the Administration of Self-Media issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China stipulated that self-created content should not fabricate news, quote out of context, distort facts or spread unauthentic information with manipulative clipping and editing. Fictional and staged content should be clearly labeled as such.
Weng Zhihao, associate professor with the School of Journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai, told NewsChina that in some cases the creator can still be held liable for misleading content, even if it is marked as fictional. The fundamental principle is that short videos should not misguide the public.
"People scroll through posts on short video platforms so quickly they barely register if content is falsified, and not many viewers pay attention to any follow-up," Weng said. This includes whether videos have later been taken down for violations of the law.
"It's particularly important that creators shouldn't quote partially or piece together a video on critical agendas, such as education, politics, gender issues and social fairness," Weng said.
But the scrutiny may sometimes contradict with the pursuit of traffic.
According to Xia, to generate steady traffic, short videos by visually impaired people are often stereotyped with tags such as "first-person perspective of the blind," "guide dogs," "a blind person's first flight" and "abilities transcending eyesight."
Multi-channel networks (MCN), brokers that promote vloggers to platforms and advertisers, have seen the allure of this content.
An anonymous MCN insider posted online that with his operations, the number of followers of two visually impaired vloggers surged from zero to over one million each.
In the wake of Jiang's incident, a former MCN staff member who spoke to NewsChina on condition of anonymity said the content arena for visually impaired vloggers is saturated. Anyone who wants to stand out must buy traffic and post staged videos.
Xia agrees. "Viewers have watched all the videos we think we can film. They may feel it's fresh the first time they watch, but they'll get bored by the 100th." Getting views then means sharing misery, conflicts or extreme circumstances, he said.
Xia, an undergraduate of the School of Special Education, Changchun University, Changchun, Jilin Province, started posting videos in 2021. His first hit was a 13.5-minute video he titled "The daily life of a blind university student-having a good meal, despite small mishaps" in 2024. It showed him navigating his way into the cafeteria despite bumping into obstacles. It was viewed more than 29 million times and won him the Best Annual Work Award from Bilibili in January 2025.
But it is getting harder. "I work hard to think of catchy titles for my videos, such as ‘blind but not bland' or ‘China in the eyes of a blind person.' If you ask me what the best way [to gain popularity] is, I'd say it's still very much trial and error, and I don't really have a solution," Xia said. He paid platforms to promote his content, but there was no improvement. Now he feels traffic for visually impaired vloggers has peaked and their popularity is waning.
According to Weng, new entrants to platforms have no choice but to post much more frequently to have any hope of competing with established creators.
"They have two options, to stimulate the hot topics or what we call ‘riding the trend,' or to explore creative topics," the scholar said. "Obviously, the latter isn't suitable for most, because it is much more costly and risky," he said. Gambling on creativity might fail in terms of attracting followers or views.
With 450,000 followers on Bilibili, Xia said he edits and shoots all his content.
When he rose to fame, several MCN companies reached out. Xia said these companies have two basic models. The first is one in which they offer full or partial services. Full service means taking all responsibility for dealing with brand sponsors, and the MCN takes a 30 percent cut of the profits. Partial service involves the MCN attracting brand sponsors but leaving creators with all the profits.
Xia partnered with a partial-service MCN for a few months. But after it failed to bring in sponsors, he ended the cooperation, deciding to go it alone.
The other MCN model is similar to an incubator, aiming to catapult rookies to prominence. Creators are treated like full-time employees and should submit 80 to 90 percent of their revenue to the MCN. But Xia has never been approached by this type of MCN, probably because he was already an influential creator.
Ju also declined to partner with an MCN, saying "as a simple vlogger, I've never desired to be a top influencer."
"Annoying," Xia complained in his award-winning cafeteria video after he knocked into a metal gate. Comments were sympathetic, and he soon got millions of views.
"I was stunned, I just felt like an ark sailing amid torrents of traffic," he said.
But some viewers were still skeptical about who really produced Xia's videos, and it took time to convince them he was the only creator.
Other than his sports cam, Xia uses Reaper, a cross-platform digital audio workstation which has basic video editing functions.
At first, he spent much more time editing than filming because he could only make the video by sound. But now, it is a lot quicker, partly because his skills have improved, and partly because of AI tools he uses, especially for subtitles.
If Xia's success is proof of concept, Ju's popularity further confirms it.
Ju never thought her content would become so popular. Highlighting the utility of tactile paving and showing a journey in a new energy vehicle to experience autonomous driving, she said people have learned not to obstruct tactile paving and how not to "other" people who are different.
When people were confused about her interest in driving, Ju said: "When autonomous driving techniques are really developed well in future, I hope visually-impaired people will be able to drive. With hopes and expectations, lives can always be better."
She emphasized all her videos are made in collaboration with her husband and none of the clips are staged or manipulated.
Putting on makeup with the help of a screen read app, Ju heads to a supermarket after a yoga class, accompanied by her guide dog. With her vlog series on her daily life, viewers realized that blind people are just like them.
"We can make ourselves look pretty. But, can you imagine some blind people have been shut-ins for 20 years," Ju said. She said her videos are produced not only for her to be seen, but also for more visually impaired people to have the courage to go out too.
Through their vlogs, more people can understand blind people have different personalities and live in great diversity, Ju said. This goes beyond stereotyped images of blind people only doing jobs like massage therapy, or who have trouble walking along blocked streets.
China has about 85 million people living with disabilities, approximately one in 16 people, revealed Wang Jinhua, director-general of the Department of Social Affairs, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, at a press conference in Beijing on September 23, 2024.
By November 2022, 14.1 million videos covering a wide range of areas, such as fruit picking, playing the flute and giving massages, had been released on Douyin by people living with disabilities, Douyin said on December 2, 2022, a day ahead of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
"The internet has enabled more and more marginalized groups to become the center of attention or gain overnight prominence. Meanwhile, their content creation on platforms has brought them needed economic independence. This is too important to be drowned out by a few who have made mistakes in their conduct," Weng said.
"Content creation has granted a bigger say for people living with disabilities or other vulnerabilities. These groups can get straight to the heart of public discourse and tell their own history," he added.
Despite the recent flurry of suspicions, Xia refuses to stop. "Without voices from social media being heard, few realize they have actually lived in this world," he said.
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