I mean, I do not disagree that Oliver's pieces are shallow and purely meant for vulgarizing a few topics...
https://www.resetera.com/threads/xi-jinping-last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver-hbo.49839/What did we learn? China has censorship, silencing of dissidents and Xi has no term limits. What a shocker.
Oh, and also Winnie the Pooh. Hilarious.
can't be as bad as the Venezuela smearjob, can it?
Oliver should stick to American issues. focus on Trump.
Fuck American Exceptionalism. Also pls focus exclusively on America.
I pretty much stopped watching after the Venezuela thing though so maybe he can never get me back.
This felt like a piece that was born out of the Winnie the Pooh thing, a John Oliver joke that wrote itself. Then they had to flesh it out to fill the time.
"New silk road is all the talk down at the water cooler at the Walmart I work in."Yet in the very same thread of esteemed sinologists you have RastaMentality (isn't he a PoliGAF regular ?) going...
Any good articles on South China Sea?
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Google on something like "The geopolitics of the south china sea". Hopefully that will give some neutral long form articles describing both sides view

Some good other bits
The "average person" probably isn't watching Last Week Tonight. His audience, I'm sure, expects a little depth.
that's exactly what the average person is watching. its always trending on youtube and gets millions of views.
He has some videos with very respectable numbers but

relative to YouTube it's not indicative of much (a quick check seem to suggest PrankInvasion boasts similar view counts on its most popular videos...)