 It's a strange animal, still a strange creature, this China. It has been for a long time. What I want to tell you tonight, today, is something I found that many people still haven't realized, at least in Germany, where I come from and in other parts of Europe, is that the China we actually grew up with and the China we have known for 30 or 40 years, the China of Deng Xiaoping, the China of reform and opening up the China that was curious towards the world and then the world was curious towards this country, like me, myself. This China doesn't really exist anymore. There's been a new China forming in the last six or seven years. But some things, here, this is a famous Reuters, actually a news agency picture from three years ago, I think it's from Chengdu. And what is this country actually? Is it capitalism? Is it socialism? Is it, I mean, calls itself a socialist country? At the same time, it's one of the most unequal countries in the world. There are more billionaires living in Beijing than in New York. You have Gucci stores, but always above all the commerce and the culture of shopping and is the Communist Party. It's always on top and it always has been there. Xi Jinping has changed the country in ways in these six or seven years that we really didn't think were possible. You know, there were a lot of optimists back then in 2012 who thought, yeah, everybody knew that China needed reform. There was a feeling of crisis. There was a sort of fan de siècle feeling actually, really, in the country. There was a lot of corruption. There was the inequality. The party was losing control and the party was losing its ideological core also. You know, nobody believed in Marxism anymore and all this stuff. And everybody knew that China needed reforms. But even in the party, many people thought those reforms, you know, people I spoke to at least, intellectuals, party members, think tank members thought, you know, maybe we need more of the sort of separation of powers, independent judiciary, these kind of things to get rid of corruption. And then along came Xi Jinping and made something completely different. He took back control for the party. With Xi Jinping, things are different anymore. Xi is not the new Mao. So Xi Jinping is the opposite. He's a complete freak for control freak and he loves stability and control. But he quotes Mao frequently. One of the quotes he uses most regularly is, doesn't matter whether the north or the south, doesn't matter whether east or west or the center, the party controls everything. Suddenly the party has to be in control of everything again, which was not the case for 30, 40 years. The China that we got to know was a China where suddenly civil society grew up, people had room, you know. Of course, the economy got more freedom, but society also got more space and more freedom. And there were niches for people doing things that people had thought impossible before. But all these niches are gone again. Xi Jinping is sort of bringing repression back. He's bringing ideology back. Not only does he have a little red book, he even has a little red app. This is the Xue Xi Jianguo app. Study Xi, study Xi Jinping and make the country strong. This is an app where you find all the works of Xi Jinping. Obviously you will find other revolutionary movies and things. But most importantly you can do quizzes on this thing. And the party wants you to do that. And they have competitions. They have quiz competitions. And the good thing is, you know, as opposed to sort of the Renmin Rebao, the People's Daily, which you were supposed to read at home or in your office. But nobody really can control whether you just threw it in a corner and went to sleep. With this app, they have complete control over you. And you get points and there are competitions. And you have to sort of, you know, compete against your colleagues. And you get double points, for example, if you do the quiz between 8 and 10 in the evening. One of the things Xi Jinping did was basically, I told you, he took back control for the party. But Xi Jinping is doing a second thing as well with his other foot. He's going straight into the future. Artificial intelligence, big data, the modern information technologies. You know, we were once told, you know, you remember, you know, Bill Clinton, Bill Glick, Bill Gates, all these people they told us already 15, 20 years ago. That starting with every single technology that came up, satellite TV, mobile phones, all these technologies were supposed to bring freedom into the last corner of the earth, you know. And of course it was the same with the Internet. And it was Bill Clinton who said, you know, good luck to the Chinese with your attempts to control the Internet. It's, you will be as successful as when you try to nail Jell-O to the wall. But here we are. We have the Great Firewall and the Jell-O is there, right there for everyone to see. You might have seen this picture. This went through a lot of media or pictures like this. There are, you know, with the facial recognition thing, they are doing the police in Shenzhen and Shenyang. They started, this is Shenyang in the northeast of China. When you're J-walking on the street, you know, immediately the camera will pick you up and the video screen on the other side will show your picture the moment you're still walking. And not only will it show your picture, it will show at the same time your name and your ID number. And this is the social credit system. This is the most sexy part of this whole new surveillance thing and it has been written a lot about. So you must have read about it, I'm sure. I just wanted to show you this picture. This is from the official credit China. I think it's the name of the website. So the official government website for the social credit system. And it shows someone who has landed on the blacklist of the social credit system. So he is a trustbreaker. What does the social credit system do? Maybe I should say this first. The social credit system is supposed to divide the people into trustbreakers and honest people, the trustworthy people. And if you are a trustbreaker, your rating goes down and you will land on a blacklist. And this is just a picture to tell you a cartoon to tell you what happens. If you are on a blacklist, this is a guy who wants a date with this beautiful girl. And he is sweating because he already knows probably what's going to happen. And she tells him, no, you are a trustbreaker. I saw your picture on the big screen of the neighborhood in the streets. Nobody will ever have a date with you again. The social credit system. Maybe this is where I start with the social credit system. What is this? First of all, it's important to know that the social credit system, all the things you've read about are from pilot projects mainly and certain pieces of the puzzle that are already nationwide. But the actual introduction of the social credit system is only supposed to happen next year in 2020. So what is this? It starts, actually, you know, rating systems we also had in our own societies. And in Germany we call it Schufer. I know in England there's something called, what's it called, Experian. It's like this where your financial credit history is. You know, when you go to a bank and you want to credit, your bank actually looks up whether you paid all your debts or your taxes and stuff. And then they decide whether you can have a loan and how high the interest is on this loan and so on. So the Chinese took that at a starting point. But then they said, you know, when I had my first interview with a professor from Beijing University, Professor Zhang Zheng, he's a high-ranking advisor to the system. He said, yes, Mr. Schufer, we studied all the systems. We studied your German Schufer and we find it very interesting, very good, and of course it says something about you, whether you're trustworthy, you know, whether you repaid your loans. Of course it does say something, but let me ask you something, Mr. Schufer, how you treat your parents and whether you pay for your metro ticket and whether you're jaywalking, you know, whether you pay attention to red lights on the street, doesn't that tell me much more? So we want to collect everything, you know. The professor then told me, Mr. Schufer, if you really want to see how this is working, you should go to Rongcheng. You should go to the city of Rongcheng in Shandong because this is the pilot project where we think the system is working the best. So go there and visit the Office of Honesty. The Cheng Si-man, there is an office of honesty and I was like, what? So of course George Orwell comes up very often, you know, in this context, and so the ministry, what is it? The Ministry of Truth, right? The Ministry of Truth. George Orwell, by the way, is not banned in China. You can get him in every good bookshop. So people do read George Orwell. You just wonder sometimes whether they read him as a warning or as a manual. So in Rongcheng I went there, I visited the Office of Honesty, the whole, they divided up, there's a neighborhood with 11,000 inhabitants, they divided up the whole neighborhood into cells with 400 families to each unit. They watch each other and they report inappropriate behavior and this is how at the moment this all is fed into the system because obviously in the end it's supposed to be algorithms. This is what the framework, the national framework from 2014 says, in the end we want artificial intelligence to record all your behavior, your financial behavior but also your social, all your social actions and your moral behavior and it's supposed to be recorded in real time. If possible by algorithms it's supposed to be evaluated in real time and sanctioned, so rewarded or punished but at the moment they're still doing it the analog way. So the social credit system was often made out to be sort of the, this is the future of the Chinese surveillance state but it's only one puzzle, one piece of the puzzle. It's much bigger so the whole artificial intelligence complex it's much, much bigger and clearly the Communist Party has fixed on artificial intelligence as the key to its own survival and the perfection of its rule and it has done so. The latest from the spring 2017 where they brought out their big next generation artificial intelligence development plan and ever since they have jumped into this field with a sort of, with a passion and with resources and with money unseen in any other countries on the planet. There is no other government on the planet that spent so much money and pulled so much resources into this field like the Chinese one and of course part of the objective is to jumpstart the economy to sort of catapult the economy into the 21st century because the economy obviously is one of the main pillars of legitimacy for this party, it's no longer ideology. Some people also in the past years and decades very easily they use the word sort of totalitarianism to bash China and that was nonsense because China was a totalitarian state for some years under Mao Zedong but it was no longer after that. A state that really knows no, where the party knows no boundary on its controls where the state actually really tries to slip into the last really cell of your brain and go into your bedroom and slip under your quilt and under your pillow. This was the China under Mao Zedong, but they did it with relatives. That was the time when the wife was buying on her husband and when children were bringing their parents to the execution grounds actually. This was the Cultural Revolution. China was a totalitarian state back then. It was no more after that. The party actually it went back, it let loose, it gave the people more freedom and it was a dictatorship always, it was an authoritarian state, it was not a totalitarian state anymore but now with this totalitarianism is actually making a comeback in digital guise and it's a much smarter totalitarianism than the ones we see because the old totalitarianism, the one from Mao, the one from Stalin actually had to rely on terror and fear as everyday instruments. When you were living in certain years on a Mao or Stalin, you would go to bed at night shivering with fear and you would wake up the next morning with the same feeling. Of course, China now is not like that anymore, you know? And it's not when you step out of the plane, it's not the Orwellian sort of socialist Maoist barracks that you maybe expect if you have never been there. It's a wild, colorful place. It's a lot where people consume more than in the United States and where people actually, it's in the end at least as much Aldous Huxley brave new world than it is. George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley, he has this very good quote. I don't remember it word by word, but it's something like, you know, if you're a ruler, if you're an authoritarian, you're a ruler, it's not enough to make the people slaves or it's very easy to make people slaves. The real art of the ruler is to make the slaves actually love being slaves, you know? And this is what they're trying to do in China.