> It seemed to me that he was interjecting with arbitrary comments
No, he's having fluent and meaningful exchange of words with those interviewees.
> Chinese speaker here
You're definitely not a native speaker.
> almost like mocking the Chinese staff
I'm not sure why you interpreted it that way but there's absofreakinglutely no mocking people in there, hey.
All of those whom he interviewed were speaking Mandarin with different degrees of accents and apparently the guy has some pretty decent level of command of the language so he can still converse with most of them no problem. The last one he interviewed (starting from 03:30) spoke with a heavily accented version of Mandarin so even I had to pay attention to understand like, 80% of what he was saying; the reporter probably had issues understanding him as well so he just smiled and nodded. Overall I found the reporter's usage of Mandarin as well as his interaction with others to be very natural.
Hey, I never questioned his fluency, just not being able to speak in a professional/serious tone to match the other people. If you liked it, great. Also, you're assuming too much about a 鄉民 on the Internet. :)
Another way of looking at it: respect. In the past, translators were always used on news stories from China. Now, English speakers are going through the effort to learn Chinese because they know it is in their best interests as China ascends to the spot of the(!) world superpower.
No, he's having fluent and meaningful exchange of words with those interviewees.
> Chinese speaker here
You're definitely not a native speaker.
> almost like mocking the Chinese staff
I'm not sure why you interpreted it that way but there's absofreakinglutely no mocking people in there, hey.
All of those whom he interviewed were speaking Mandarin with different degrees of accents and apparently the guy has some pretty decent level of command of the language so he can still converse with most of them no problem. The last one he interviewed (starting from 03:30) spoke with a heavily accented version of Mandarin so even I had to pay attention to understand like, 80% of what he was saying; the reporter probably had issues understanding him as well so he just smiled and nodded. Overall I found the reporter's usage of Mandarin as well as his interaction with others to be very natural.
I am a native Mandarin speaker.