Conversations

You [ChatGPT] recently helped me articulate a list of ideas, based on Jiang Xueqin, about the US versus Eurasia and world influence and conflicts. I posted this to my conversations blog and received about 1/3 of my visits from China (never happened before). What do you think is going on?

ChatGPT said:

I think there is a very good chance that the China traffic is not primarily Chinese readers discovering your essay. There is an unusually relevant phenomenon occurring right now.

In February 2026, Wired reported that small websites, blogs, U.S. government sites, and other sites had suddenly begun receiving large amounts of unexplained traffic apparently originating in China—often Lanzhou—and Singapore. In many cases, what initially looked like a new Chinese audience turned out to be automated traffic. Some researchers suspect scraping, possibly connected with AI/data collection, although the actual operator and purpose haven’t been established. Google Analytics users have reported the same phenomenon; a Google Analytics community expert described the China/Singapore surge as spam traffic associated with an issue Google was addressing.

That said, the timing with your Jiang article makes this much more interesting.

Jiang Xueqin has become quite prominent this year. The South China Morning Post reported in March that his geopolitical lectures had developed a large audience and that translations and reposts had appeared on Chinese social media, generating discussion there. So an English-language page containing combinations such as Jiang Xueqin + China + Russia + Iran + U.S. world order + Eurasia + dollar hegemony + Hormuz/shipping chokepoints could plausibly be picked up by search engines, aggregators, social-media monitoring systems, AI crawlers, or other automated systems interested in precisely those topics.

I’d therefore put the possibilities in roughly three buckets—not as probabilities, but as explanations worth testing:

• Automated crawling/scraping. Given the documented 2026 China traffic anomaly, this is the first thing I’d investigate.
• Chinese discovery/aggregation. Something indexed or reposted your piece, producing actual readers or a mixture of readers and crawlers.
• Monitoring/indexing because of the subject matter. Possible, but there’s no basis from the country statistic alone for concluding that the Chinese government—or anyone in particular—is monitoring you. Country-level analytics simply can’t establish that.