"Doggy Dog": how an award-winning analyst uses a stuffed toy to target female China journalists
Laban Yu was once regularly quoted by Financial Times to CNN. Today he pretends to be a dog, "stalking" women he wants to 'train'.
What is a troll? Why do they do it..?
As Twitter’s descent to Musk’s inferno continues, I often ask myself that question. What prompts someone to take hours out of their day to anonymously push racist agendas, or sexually harass women?
In wrapping up the Peter Dukes/Tom Fowdy investigation there was one curioso I just couldn’t leave alone: “Doggy Dog”.
X is amok with trolls, but ‘Doggy’ felt different.
Yes, he displayed archetypal troll behaviour: a massive ego, attention seeking, permanently online. Yet in between the usual creepy misogyny, racism, and joking about ”having a Uyghur baby in his oven”, “Doggy” was also verbose. He was intelligent. He had a good grasp of economic theory. He felt older, with lived experience.
I could feel the identity would be interesting. Who was it?
So one night, just after Christmas, I set aside some mulled wine and tackled it like a crossword puzzle.
The answer, disappointedly, took surprisingly little time. Perhaps 20 minutes? If I’d have known of the person before I started, or been plugged into the Chinese finance world, it might have been five. It took longer archiving all these links. The wine was still too hot to drink.
I’d underestimated Doggy’s narcissism, or need to tell faceless trolls personal information. As you’ll see, it’s almost as if Laban wants to be discovered, leaving clues, acknowledging his alter-egos, building up self-lore. And in writing about him, I’ve no doubt given him some of that craven attention. Goodness, the internet can be a weird place.
Warning. Everything here is from public sources. I’m not repeating anything that “Doggy” etc hasn’t. Merely drawing lines. There’s also plenty of uncomfortable language.
Also kids, reminder… watch what you post online.
Meet “Doggy”
If you’ve not stumbled on Doggy, or his alternatives. Well, lucky you.
Over 3000 followers do, many oft interact with him, including some usual suspects from a certain part of the Chinasphere. A few meet Doggy in real life, such as Ben Norton who he posed with last summer in Beijing.
Mostly, Doggy can be found commenting under articles of writers he perceives as damaging to China. Economist Michael Pettis is his particular bête noir, devoting hundreds of comments to him.
Mostly, though, Doggy’s interests lie in young female journalists, activists.
These, he outwardly lusts over, and directs patronising or sexually aggressive comments towards. From CNN’s Isobel Yeung, to Vicky Xu, to asking one woman “What are you wearing?”
“Oh me likey…. meeee liiiiiiikey…” he begins in one post to the FT’s Ivy Wang.
Only to follow it with: “Yeah she kinda cross eyed… but advice to the young’ens… lower your standards. Life is better that way.”
If he has a favourite victim, it’s the FT’s Eleanor Olcott, who he calls “his young Padawan” that he “wants to train”. More than a hundred comments have gone towards her.
Eventually, Eleanor called out his behaviour, tweeting “Gosh, the internet really is filled with some rather odd blokes.”
Doggy didn’t take the hint. Spamming the replies, including one saying: “What Don don’t unnerstans iz dat Eleanor wants to slap and kiss Doggy at the same time.”
Doggy is often suspended. At least one account has been permanently blocked. To circumvent this, he runs a “plushie gang” of accounts including “Blue Bear” and Taotao Dog, which he “tags in when Doggy gets put in Twitter jail”, or to continue harassing users when blocked.
“I knew that was you,” says Nik Stankovic.
“Mostly to stalk young lovelies who blocked me…” Doggy replies.
If there is a second favourite topic: it’s race.
Doggy happily admits to being a racist and routinely promotes Asian supremacy. His posts are peppered with phrases like “nigga” “Jew” and “wypipo”. In fact, he seems very hung up on race, as a whole. China, he asserts, “will one day have to clean up the mess left by barbarians”.
Meet the evidence
Doggy is prolific, over 36,000 posts in a year and a half — an average of more than 70 per day.
He also has an almost pathological need to share.
Quickly, I learnt he’s of Chinese ancestry, born in Jiangxi, grew up in the 1970s, is American, but has reclaimed Chinese citizenship (—dual nationality? If so, that would be illegal in China), had lived in Hong Kong and New York, worked in banking, has a wife from Harbin, and today lives in Beijing.
So far, so thousands of people. What really narrowed it down however, was they said they had lived in West Africa, specifically a francophone country, specifically Cameroon; went to two Ivy League colleges; and had been in the US Peace Corps.
That is maybe all of — one — person. But who?
And then, there it was: the hook. In one reply to another, ‘Doggy’ admitted they had worked for Macquarie. Bingo. From start to finish, 20 minutes.
Meet Laban Yu
My hunch was right. The answer was interesting. Though, in hindsight, obvious.
Laban Yu is a “semi-retired” blue-chip financial analyst, from Lehman Brothers and Macquarie, whose career moves were once covered by Bloomberg, Reuters and more.
Most notably, Laban spent nine years at Jeffries Financial Group as Head of Research for Hong Kong-China and Asia energy and commodities.
Historically, he has been quoted from much of the mainstream business press, from (deep breath) the Financial Times, CNN, Globe and Mail, Forbes, Bloomberg, SCMP, Fortune, Economist, Wall Street Journal, China Daily, USA Today, Daily Telegraph, and many more.
As an analyst, he was known for a “penchant for Hawaiian shirts on Fridays”, to peppering his reports with song lyrics. In a Bloomberg profile, he explained this as “an attention-grabbing technique to help his work stand out in a crowded field”. It’s also a gimmick he still pursues today — more on that in a bit.
The behaviour helped him to win Asiamoney Brokers Poll ‘most popular energy analyst in Asia’, three years running.
For all the thirsting over young female journalists, Laban Yu is actually in his late 40’s and married, with a grown son at Tsinghua University.
Career wise, things have been much quieter since leaving Jefferies in April 2020. According to his LinkedIn — which Laban has satirically rewritten — first he was a “Failed Novelist”, writing a 113,000 word book which was rejected by ~150 agents.
Today, he lists himself as an “Online Influencer” who’s “wreaking multi-media havoc in cyberspace” — possibly the first time I’ve seen “troll” listed on a CV before.
In November 2023, Laban joined the outlet Asia Times as a columnist, mainly thanks to his friend the Deputy and Business Editor: David Goldman, a man he interacts with frequently online, yet nearly always only ever refers to as “Jew”.
“Just warning Jew… if there were a billion of Jew, Jew can commit all sorts of horrors and brush it off. But there are so few of Jew… Jew might not survive the atrocities Jew commit,” he says to Goldman in one mind-numbing exchange.
“Jew are turning into a desert tribe. The humiliation of Hamas catching Jew off guard has put Jew on tilt. C’mon Goldman… Jew are either not as smart I thought or Jew think we’re morons,” he says in another.
To date, Laban’s written 22 articles under the pseudonym “Han Feizi”. They all open with a song lyric.
Reaction has been… muted. Most hype has come from Doggy himself, who’s faithfully tweeted Han Faizi’s name more than 100 times, and linked the articles nearly as much.
A couple of comments on the Sino Reddit thread was enough to prompt an excitable ~1700 word Asia Times article called “Who is the mysterious new AT writer ‘Han Feizi’?” Again, the furthest that got shared was a Reddit thread with eight comments.
Han Feizi, also presents a YouTube podcast called “Mozi chats with Han Feizi”.
Curiously, the first upload is a test of the Riverside software, and features Doggy himself.
I very nearly didn’t publish this. Especially as the number of times Laban/Doggy/Han Feizi sought to draw attention to himself, mounted. I felt myself falling into the trap of providing exactly what he wants.
I feel dumber for having written this. And no doubt, while enlightened on a needless topic, you perhaps feel dumber for having read it.
So in an effort to draw some sort of meaningful conclusion — at least for my own sanity — why?
I believe in a right to privacy. I also — more so — believe that women should be able to perform their professions without older men publicly reducing them to a meat auction. I also believe those who are harassed, have the right to know who is stalking them.
Laban claims he only hides behind these personas as: “an experiment to see if I can overturn long standing erroneous consensus on economic analysis on China… without using my real life reputation”.
If anonymity is what he truly wants, he may as well use his actual Twitter account. It has four followers.
If Laban Yu fascinates me — and it’s a stretch — it’s in how he represents three things:
Troll culture; how it is allowed to permeate online, is promoted by social media platforms, and has warped society’s acceptance of intolerable discourse.
How anonymity encourages individuals to push narratives they wouldn’t in person, for shock or awe.
What happens to an individual’s psyche, when a modicum of success or attention is taken away.
I’m not going to ruminate on, nor investigate the steps that took Laban from an award-winning darling at blue chip firms, and a quotesman in broadsheet profiles pieces; to becoming a “semi-retired” anonymous troll, pumping out 70 tweets a day — many directed at women in their early 20’s, with the sole aim of making them feel deeply uncomfortable. That’s for him to mull over, or explain.
Perhaps he can even do it under his own name.
Interesting questions to be asked as to why most China bulls end up being unpleasant in many ways. I follow a lot of the less tabloid chaps (Fishman, "Lei Gong", Glenn, the Gavekal lot) because it's worth not being in an echo chamber. For a group who claim to be unbiased, fair-minded, etc, often the dialogue seems to shade into triumphalism and fairly mean-spirited anti-Western sentiment.
Of course, China bears/analysts in general aren't immune to sniping on social media. I'm including myself here. And there's certainly more than the fair share of nutters and polemicists. But worth thinking about!
Oh silly wyboy… the problem with this analysis is that you somehow think being an “award winning” analyst at a hoity toity investment bank quoted by broadsheets is *all that*.
I supposed it might appear so for those with their faces forever pressed against the window.
But I assure you, it’s nothing special. Rots the brain for those who stay too long. Just be happy your CV goes straight into the rubbish.