 the complications of Zoom. Thank you, thank you. Okay, we'll start again. So yeah, China is a very big place and very complex and complicated and deep and rich and old and beautiful. And beautiful. And so I wanna start out with my last day because I was concerned with my experience because it was so vibrant and so nourishing and so eye-opening. And I was like, am I having, am I seeing with blinders on? Am I missing the force for the trees? I was doubting myself. So, and, you know, I started out that way because when I first got there, there were dozens of visitors from around the world. So I started by asking them, what is your experience of China? And every single one of them, you know, the first thing was I've been lied to that the experience of China and what they had been told about China didn't relate to each other. And these are from many countries in Africa, Ghana, Zambia, South Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, Brazil, Argentina. So, you know, for them, it was even more profound than for me because I come from the US. But, you know, for organizer in the outskirts of Zambia, to experience what it's like to witness because they went to different places where people had been pulled out of poverty, for someone like that to live, what that is like, what is possible when they live somewhere where that just feels impossible. And there was this one woman who was going to the United States and she said, you know, there's one woman who was going around with her iPhone filming for eight hours a day for her eight-year-old daughter to have hope. Also, I'm just wondering if we could mute. So there's no background noise. Thanks so much. So it started out seeing it through these visitors' eyes. And they're just open-eyed wonder at possibility, which is why I wanted to go to a place where it had been very impoverished and the work to get people out of poverty had 10 years, so I could kind of experience that. But the last day in Shanghai, in the old French Quarter, which is a lot where a ton of Westerners live and have lived for a long time, I walked through the streets for five hours of Shenzhen Di, which is, I don't know, Madison Avenue, I guess. I would compare it to in New York. So it's upscale. And I asked the Westerners why they were there and then after they said, oh, I'm just here for a big holiday or I live here, asking them why they stayed. And every single one of them said quality of life and safety. So from the beginning to the end to be there until the very end and really be in a space of the quality of life that is a commitment. Not like, but it's a commitment of everyone. It's not one person's task. And I think as I learned while I was there, where does this come from? So there's a 3000-year history that if you look at it has a commitment to life, has a commitment to beauty, has a commitment to stability. And even if you look at Confucianism, what that is is about stability and you can feel it. And it's baked into the culture. It's baked into the DNA. And I look at that, like after dissecting our work as peace activists and coming up with that war economy, peace economy analogy and recognizing that we live in a war economy culture and what that does to us, it was really refreshingly being in a peace economy culture and what that does to people. And so in the beginning, just skimming off the top, being in Shanghai and taking my son for a walk, his own experience of what it feels to be in a place where you'd feel safe, where there is no menace, where he can leave his iPhone somewhere and go back a half an hour later and it's still sitting there. My husband left his backpack somewhere, went back a half an hour later, it was still sitting there. No anxiety going back to pick it up. I think also just the attention to beauty, where things work. But I think it's interesting, Gage, like where things work, but I wanted to get to the why. Why is this like this? Because it's not, there's no separation of who's responsible for it. Everyone is responsible for it. There's no other thing around it. It's everyone. And it's, so I mean, it's hard to describe like what it's like to walk in a city for five hours and run into like 17 gardens with manicured and lawns and ponds and every single one of them has like a cultural gathering of some sort happening and I understood from my friend that like there's like a lot of matchmaking that was happening in this one. And then in the afternoon, the women are dancing and tons of different people show up and dance with the women. And in the morning is Tai Chi. And then the men come with their bird pages and trade birds and there's the game playing. And then there's the exercising. There's like exercise things everywhere where they come in the park and there's things to serve the exercising. There's, so you're in beauty, but you're in culture and community all layered on each other. And I went to very, very different neighborhoods and I would say out of my neighborhood it even gets more intense as you get further out into the different neighborhoods. So the first experience I want you to have is just this generosity, joy, I was in like tons of airports because I was flying between Shanghai and Beijing and Sanya and Dali and then back to Shanghai. And then I just was in the LAX for an hour and a half yesterday flying up North. And I can tell you the difference is palpable. First of all, the color, first of all, the dress that there's a sense of feeling that somebody got up happy and wanted to share that happiness. There's tons of color and flow and life. And in the LAX airport, it was browns and blacks and grays and tans. And everybody was sitting down on their phone when you're in a Chinese airport, it's a yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. And lots of like little communities talking to each other, sharing. It was like literally the difference of culture was palpable. So I kind of wanna start there of not just myself, but the friends that we're visiting and my own son who's not too generous with, he's very critical as an artist, really recognizing there's a different culture. So starting with that we in the West try to impose ourselves on another culture and decide what's good, even though the number of people is five times larger and the culture is, I mean, it's 3,000 years old compared to 300 years old. So just to witness that for a start. Also while he was there, the woman from Zambia was there and Kamala Harris had just gone to Zambia. And she was telling a story about how Kamala Harris had gone to Zambia. She landed on a Chinese built runway in a Chinese built airport, the car drove on a Chinese built freeway to the center where she presented and suggested to all the Zambians that they needed to separate themselves from China. But the conference center that they were in was a gift to Zambia from China, not paid for anything, just a gift which had a little tiny plaque on the outside that said a gift to the people of Zambia from China. Noting that when the US gives anything, it's a press release, it's three days of ribbon cuttings and lots of media attention. So she was also describing the different relationship from being, you know, from a Westerner coming to Zambia and lecturing instead of gifting. So then there's the different, then it's like besides saying that it's a huge country and everything is different in every community, even being in Shanghai and Beijing to feel going from one to the next. One very clearly still a bicycle city. Beijing is still a bicycle city. There's bicycle lanes, there's bicycles you can pick up anywhere, just pick up the bicycle and ride. My son picked up bicycles and rode all over the city. And in Shanghai, it's the electric motorbike. So also I just wanna say that air quality while I was there range somewhere between 26 excellent to 43 good. So that just as everybody says, oh, but it wasn't a bad air quality. I just wanna describe the air quality was excellent, very good. And except when I was in Dali, it was like excellent, excellent, excellent, which is up in the mountains. And the thing that really struck me in Beijing was they're entering high there's that moving between park like every few streets you're in a park. Also the commitment is every 800 meters, there's a metro station. So that nobody has to walk that far and that the metro's interconnectivity of the subway system is that you don't have to walk more than 800 meters to get into your subway system that interconnects with your longest walk would be 800 meters to work or to wherever you're going. So both the electric scooters and the metro system have been the commitment to take cars off the road. And that's been very effective and very quick. In Beijing, it's the boulevards are bigger. It's, I call it the Washington DC compared to the New York city. It's where I learned that there's a commitment that's been around for about 10 years called clean waters, lush mountains. And it's that commitment to this beauty. So every highway, every road, every major thoroughfare that you were on had roses, like more roses than I have ever seen on the highway. So you're on a major thoroughfare, but there's a wall of roses to the side that are going down the middle. There is that, it's like, there's something real that happens like almost physically to be delighted in this way in a busy city, a very busy city. I think that definitely the traffic in Beijing is worse than that traffic in Shanghai. One of the places, the first place that we went was a museum that it's a story of the wars, mostly the, it's basically a story of the war, the Japan war on China. And it's devastating and I knew so little. And to go, it's profound to go through and witness what, when you know the Chinese humiliation, like when you hear those words, what, I hear those words a lot, but to go through and what it looked like and what it was and how much it cost. And they don't call World War II, World War II, they call it the war to infashism. So it was both the Japan war on China and the war to infashism that were on display. And to see the profound courage, resilience, commitment to China, of the people that you see there and also the prices that were paid and how extreme they were. And the rape of Nanjing is unbearable, even it's unbearable to witness. It reminded me of going to Germany and going to some of the Holocaust sites. It's, but it's a site that we're not, we don't see and our empathy has not been engaged around that. You know, or the 20 million Chinese lost and the word infashism as they call it. So then it was off from Beijing to Sanya, which is the on the island south of China, the same latitude as Jamaica, my husband's Jamaica. So it's kind of his second home there. And there is a huge Uyghur community on the island because a lot of Northern China, a lot of the communities in Northern China were moved down to Sanya because it was too cold. It was part of poverty alleviation because there wasn't ways to release support and bringing them to a warmer climate in Sanya, which is one of the environmental restoration zones that China's committed to. So they have their own community there, their own mosques. And yet on the, in the community of Sanya, where there's big, like in every city, big community spaces at night, you get to come and watch their dancing. And that is interwoven with some of the Han communities dancing and some of the other minority communities that do their dancing. So there's this also interconnecting of cultural sharing that happens in this community space in Sanya. Hainan, H-A-I-N-A-N, I think is the name of the island. Hainan there, thank you, An-Lin. Hainan is three times the size of Jamaica and three times the population. So it's the same number of people and it's the population. So it's the same population density and the same kind of mountain rangey, you know, very agricultural and super old communities. The red brigade of women comes from Hainan. It was one of the really early uprisings of the peasants against the landowners and they were all women. And four years ago, I was able to meet one of them who was a hundred years old. She since died, who had been those that had risen up against the landowners in Sanya. It's about a couple hours north of Sanya. The village still exists, but it was women's peasants that had been really badly abused raising up. So it has also a really beautiful history. So there it's, I call it Miami Beach because it's beautiful, beautiful waters. But I think one of the things I learned there this time is there's what you see in Sanya but there's just like community. It's kind of like going to the weird community. There's tons of communities that have taken over like up the beaches where the airport isn't and created communities and cultures and vibrancy. And so there's a little bit of everything on the island and it's committed to creating how do we live together? Everyone there also has been taken out of poverty and there's still some inside of the, you can go and see inside of the jungles what that did look like and what it looks like now because they haven't totally destroyed what was before. You can visit structures and living conditions before they're raising out of poverty. And there's a certain, and the way I was saying the beauty isn't coming, it's coming co-created. There's this sense of co-creation that I was witnessing in Shanghai and in Sanya but that really expressed itself to me the best in Dali and that's where I wanna take you all. First of all, I just think everybody needs to go to China because I'm trying to tell you, but it's like a picture. It doesn't, I can't tell you because it's a feeling. It is a visceral experience. It's quite profound. So Dali, I wanted to go where a community hadn't been raised out of poverty. This is a community that is, it starts at around 7,000 feet high. It's thousands of years old. The old cities that we went to were 1,200 years old. It's an agricultural community for millennia. It had really been taken to the edge of destruction. So the big lake there was toxic. People were dying from drinking out of it. There had been no controls. Agriculture was dumping in it. Everything was dumping in it. Western tourism was coming to climb on the mountains. There was no concern in the way that I said there's all this concern that made the beauty. So there was a commitment 10 or 12 years ago that this had to change and it meant. So around the lake, there were the wealthy farmers and they owned the whole area around the lake and they were just polluting it. And so you had to stop the pollution and you had to learn what could clean the water. So around the lake is a global study on how do you clean these waters? And it's done by your remediation of the plants that are planted and they're planted beautifully. So one day we rode for 25 miles around the lake. I mean, halfway around the lake. And what you see is again intentional, planned, organized, beautiful and accessible. So you are not separate from it. It's all been created so that you can be in relationship to what is being created here. But it meant they had to move 10,000 rich farmers off the water. So when I talked to people locally it's a city of about 500,000 people. They said, everyone's happy but the 10,000 rich farmers who are still screaming and yelling. But the rest of the people are happy and the commitment to the plan was both to clean up the waters, to make it, to create a capacity for everyone to earn money and to raise the level of income from everyone. And this is a community of nine different Chinese, indigenous groups, ethnic groups. And so it was also taking into account each of their needs so that it would be created around their needs and not have them feel alienated to this place that has been there. So all the architecture that has been rebuilt has been rebuilt with a commitment to the by people. So everything is white and blue. Every, everything that has been recreated is recreated in the colors of the by community. And it's beautiful. Flying over I felt like I was gonna land in Greece because it was just all white. And then this is beautiful glue designs that go around. So by women that I was able to speak to there standard of living has risen six times in the last 10, 12 years. So in 1970, when I came of age, some workers in the US are still making at the same level of 1970. So imagine what your state of being would be if in the last 10 years your standard of living had increased six times, but not over others, but in relationship to others. So it's like the boats all rose together. And for two days I was walking around in the old city where you just have an enthusiasm which is hard to describe of joy and celebration and where's to be had from vegetables to fruits from vegetables to fruits to roses to needlework to tea. I mean, this is also the tea region where the poor tea comes from. So about the second day I realized I was having an emotional experience that I couldn't quite name. And when the words, when somebody asked me like, what would it be? I said, I feel liberated. And in that sense of when someone's free, everyone's free, but I was experiencing some sense of liberation, but it was a couple of days later where I felt like it was having for the first time in my life in a place like this and a relationship that wasn't codependent. And as I tried to dive into what had created that, it goes back to this co-creation of beauty. So Beijing had delivered a ton of money to make the transformation, but the people had made the transformation. So Beijing didn't own the transformation, the people own the transformation. It had been a partnership and a relationship that included all the voices as it was happening and co-created. So there was this, it's like to go down a street and not feel like anyone needed anything from me. But because what I realized was, is I wasn't where they got their sustenance. They created their sustenance with this support that having the experience helped me go into the why and learn what that was. And so they had been living in abject poverty and toxic waste dump and they felt that sense of accomplishment. It was theirs. So even when you're walking down the street, there's a sense of joy and pride and relationship and it wasn't coming from somewhere else even though Beijing had made a huge commitment of money. You need the infrastructure, you need infrastructure capital support to make it happen, but it wasn't Beijing's, it was theirs. And I have to say it was a very moving experience to have. And it also took me into the complexity of how things happen there. That they happen locally, which then sent me back to Shanghai to try to understand how things happen. Now, a lot of you I know have seen the take them out of poverty, trying to take in everyone out of poverty film. So you've seen that ground up decision making under the structures of the five things that have to change. But I think being inside of it made me think about it in different ways. So first of all, Beijing is a long way away from Dazhi and they don't actually, that's not their relationship. That's like a long way away. And our idea that China is authoritarian is, I mean, one of the things is like, I've been with, I know what it's like to be with people who are oppressed. That was, I think, my first thing walking down the street is like, there's no oppression happening here. And so trying to understand authoritarianism in relationship to this. So the governing structure of China is such that, I mean, I understand, after learning it, realizing like, she has way less power than Biden. I mean, like, there's like, what he does, what the prime minister does, the connection, what a party is and what the government is are very separate things. And in the community, those are experienced separately. But what a person does have, both in Thali and in Shanghai or in Beijing is that finally I get to see everywhere you go, there's a phone number. If something's not working for you, you pick up the phone and you make a phone call and you say, this is broken, this needs fixed, this isn't working or I saw something. And there is someone that responds. And that is where the power is. It's locally in the relationships between those who need and those who can help. And if we, we teach this at the local piece of economy, it's like where most stuff happens that affects us is locally. And that's where the citizen of a country experiences what irritates them, what they need to change. So I think about that in relationship to the U.S. foreign policy, that we have a foreign policy that is alien to most people's life experience, not relational, I would say, not understandable and not relational, but it's affecting the planet that we live on. It's affecting people's around the world. And it's kind of, I think they get away with murder because where we have relationship is where we know things and where we make decisions and where our aggravations are. So it was interesting to be in all these places and talk to people about, well, what happens around this? I met with a professor to talk about women's issues that there's concerns of women and it's like, well, but the concerns are the same concerns and every country around the globe, how is it addressed here? And one of the concerns that she said had arisen like 15 years ago had been a spousal abuse, which happens in poverty around the world. And one of the desires to raise everyone out of poverty, one of the driving forces around that was the need for women. And a lot of the driving forces around the decisions that have been made since in the last 10, 12 years have been related to women. And what had to happen, not as a band-aid, but as a change in structure that could then therefore affect how women could be served in this problem. And that was super refreshing, both on the poverty level, it's like on the poverty level and then on the commitment to women going to university and how that is uplifted. And also the commitment to the ethnic minorities making sure that they get into university and the same local thing about being able to pick up the phone and you know what Sheila, I'm not gonna take that on, I call it a weed and I have lots to say, but it's not mine to take on. And so I'm not gonna go there much as everything in me would like to. I'm gonna tell you my experience of China and just say that there's no greater human rights disaster than war. So let me see, I wanna leave room for time for questions. So I just wanna say like interviewing this professor around women's issues, what was interesting was the conversation around feminism. And it was, if we wanna see what happens when US light imperialist feminism makes it to China, it's pretty messy and ugly. And so trying to unpack what they got as feminism to what I understood as feminism was a fun conversation. But what it did remind me of is like China as a society is in a curious, growing, understanding, creative space. And that's part of the culture that what I learned is like, this isn't working, this broke, this broke, that watching decision-making over the years, it's failure, failure, failure, failure. And it's not only internal failures, we're trying to create something that's never existed before. How do we do that? Decisions are made, they fail, but the learning process around it and it's not just internal failures, it's external failures. Like how did this fail out here? How did this fail here? How does this fail? And how are we making new decisions on an experiment? Given those failures, how do we try something else? And maybe it will fail. And one of the things in learning that whole process from these professors I was talking to was to deeply understand the resilience of their commitment to socialism, the potency of that, the power of that, their commitment to their roots as a Chinese culture that they think is beautiful, their commitment to being able to make, at all levels, being able to make mistakes, but address them, talk about them, find new solutions. I mean, one of the things they do is like, okay, there's a mistake and how do you address it? So five cities were locked down under COVID. So I just wanna state everyone, five cities were locked down under COVID. China is a country of a billion, 500,000 people. Those five cities maybe had a hundred million people in it. So when we say China locked down, let's just be careful like what that looks like. And it was like five different cities, the heads of those cities were trying to figure out what could this look like? And they did it at different extremes and it was also enforced locally. It's not up down, it's from the bottom up. And the mayor of Shanghai took one for the team to really fail and he's now the prime minister of the country. So it's like, are you taking one for the team to do an experiment that might fail but teach everyone else? So if they're trying to figure something out, they do try it out in many different places to see what succeeds and then move in that direction. The refreshing thing is that actually shit changes. That everybody, like we can't have this air quality, okay, we're gonna fix it. We can't do this, okay, we're gonna fix it. We can't live in this community because we're dying. Okay, investment to fix it. And it's also interesting, you go to these places like well, Beijing invested in so that people are clear that it's like that Beijing makes a commitment to them but it's them that needs to make it happen. It doesn't top down on how, it's bottom up on how and I mean, and that bottom up is fricking messy. And I got to hear lots of stories about how messy it is and how leadership has to happen and where it happens and who makes decisions, it's local democracy. It's really direct intimate relational democracy on the ground and it's messy. So I think the other thing that I could learn and feel was the commitment to stability and what that feels like and then talking to a bunch of women and I did a ton of interviews and made friends with this awesome group that does media, not state media. They have a, she's the most shared on TikTok, eight million shares on lectures she does with professors to the teacher around history of China and things like that and Professor Weiwei, Wang Weiwei and it's, it's, there's, it's just, I don't know, it's everyone's growing and learning and exploring and hopeful and creative and I mean, I guess the sense of hope and also then what I asked about, are you afraid of what the U.S. is, is, you know, planning a war on China? And most of them, that's unthinkable. That's just like, that's not a concept that they can have. And I, in this, with this women's group there, so it was like, you don't understand what it's like to live in the United States, that there's a sense of trauma just living in the United States, that there's trauma and PTSD that's just under, under running and they, they, it's like to witness that space that we know it's a space that happens, it's like in the, could pink like creating home sweet home and a local peace economy, we want to create that so that we do have the capacity to live and be free and be creative and they have that. And I don't, it's so interesting because it's like when you have something, you don't know you have it. So to be able to witness that back for them was, was an interesting moment of, do you know what it's like to just be in the choice and the creativity and the inventiveness of their lives? I don't, I don't think they understand and the professor was saying, she said, we're the last to understand where we are because we're so busy building the country that, you know, when, when people say, oh, look how big China is, we were not, that's, we're still building, we're still in the building. So there's also, how does it look from the outside? How does it look from the inside? How does it look like when you're somebody who's helping make it happen, who's been through the sturm and drum of failures and duplicities and corruption and all that has happened in a very short period of time, your lifetime, I met a woman who knew her grandmother and she saw her bound, her grandmother's bound feet. So like in your lifetime to go from bound feet to who she was, which was the head of a department of the university. So really to kind of rock that also. There's so much to say, but I feel like I should let some questions happen. Sorry. Okay, thank you, Jodi. Do you have a question, Anne? Well, I just will comment on my trips to China. I've found many of the same things, although I didn't go to the same places that you went, but certainly going to Nanjing and all of the massacre of what happened during the 1930s and 40s with the Japanese, brutalizing the Chinese people, it's really important for people to know, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and understand, like when you wanna understand a personality of a country and instead of projecting yourself on it, being able to listen and know, yeah, thanks. I'm not seeing any more questions. If not, I can... Jodi? Yes? I wanted to ask you about the youth unemployment situation. They make a big deal out of it. And then I looked at the records. I mean, Taiwan has very high youth unemployment. So there's the rest of Asia and it's actually Spain, Portugal is much worse. Portugal is 28% and but they make a big deal out of it. But I was just wondering, how China is handling it because Chinese, like you said, they serve the people. They believe that the success of the Communist Party, leadership, believe that their success is based on their adequate service of the people. So I was wondering how they're dealing with that. So yeah, I did talk to someone about that and they're working on building new capacities. So one of the ways they're working on it is, which is an interesting thing because I just went to an eco conference, which was the opposite and I was worried about it, is that they're building infrastructure in rural areas where they're seeing there's a problem. The separation of the rural and the city hasn't been that, they look for things that are healthy long-term, like they're building for the long-term, right? And so they're gonna start building more infrastructures in the rural and that's gonna be able to suck up the youth unemployment and they're on a process for developing that. And I think a little bit, she likes that because it was so informative and his youth. One of the things I wanna say is that all the, I really like to understand the government as these two separate threads, the government and all its ministries that are responsible to deliver to the people. And then the party and what that responsibility is and what it delivers. And also that, I mean, I was a little jealous in learning like, Cheese's job is ideology. It's just vision. It's like he doesn't implement anything and it's really to be thinking and visioning and coming up with like, what are the problems, how do we solve them? And long-term, like, you know, it's like that youth employment problem is not don't put a band-aid on it. What are the long-term problems that then the youth employment can serve? Like taking a more holistic view of it. And so you have that and then you have the ministry, which is the theory. Okay, so we have the vision. How do we turn it into theory? And then you move down to the municipal level which is working with the directors for the strategy of like, what's the strategy for getting the vision implemented? Then you go down another level, which is a lot of people and that's the logistics and the plans. And then you have the very bottom which is the functional and relational. I mean, not anything like what we have in the United States, no plans, no vision, no commitment, no long-term strategy, no addressing the problem with what you're thinking. I mean, I think being in Bali, being inside a plan that was holistic about the people, the planet, the different communities that you had to serve, that they all had to work in conjunction with each other, not, you know, managing complexities. Oh, these are the rest of the two. Sorry, if we could just mute. So anyway, the managing of complexities, I think is really important. And so, yeah, that's not being done with a Band-Aid, it's being looked at. And I think they're seeing that the problem with everybody moving to the cities and they need to move a little bit back and the richness of having smaller places. So, Dawn. I want to ask, well, is there homelessness? There's no, have you seen any homelessness in poverty at all? No. How's that even possible? And the second question, are the young people stressed from school? I know that like in South Korea and Japan, the students are all terribly stressed from the competition of competitiveness of school. What did you see in South China? Okay, so I did ask about the unhoused. I said, why, I've been like, and especially because of both major cities, I went like everywhere I could. So yes, there occasionally is someone that falls out of the fabric of society, but they are immediately found, brought in, and taken to what's needed, whether it's mental health support, whether it's job training, you know, whatever, if they fall through the fabric of society, they're supported. So it's not like they're on the street. The longest somebody says somebody's probably on the street is 24 hours because you have that thing, you pick up a phone, somebody's suffering. You know, one time in New York City, I picked up my phone, I called the police and I was like, somebody's dying. And they said, I don't know, it's just a homeless person drunk. And I was just like, take them to have them. You know, it's like, they were like, nah. So here is just like, you call somebody, they're pulled back into the fabric of society. So it's not that people don't fall out of the fabric of society or, you know, go on a drunken binge or, you know, whatever, but there's this phone number and there's the community that comes in to support. What was your other question? Sorry. It's about students, the stress on students. Oh, so I don't know if you know, but she did this thing, I think it's a year and a half ago. He was like, we can't do this to our children. He said, you were a child. They have to have a childhood. You must give these children a childhood. And so there was this whole thing that was happening where the rich could afford to pay for tutors and they were paying. So he made it illegal to tutor anyone. So there can't be after school tutoring because he said, that is not what we're here for. We're here to be alive. We're here to live. This is life and you cannot do this to your children. So tutoring has become illegal. There's school of the education system works and you can't be telling your kid to get above another kid. You know, like that's just not the way to be. So that happened, I think a year and a half or more ago. Linda. Hi, Jodi. Can you hear me okay? Oh, great. My computer breaks down a lot. I put my question in the chat if we can find it and read it. And then I'll just, yeah, I don't want to disrupt this webinar, but thank you so much. This is amazing. Yeah, mostly I have a question about recommendation for materials to learn more about how the Chinese system works. Yeah, I was just blown away by some of your comments that just totally upend everything that we're taught. Yeah. So Mika, who's my co-writer on the China's Not Our Enemy book has done a video on how the system works. And as a response to those who were here, I'll ask Wei to send it around to everyone. And I was thinking of doing one myself. Also just because hers is, you know, it's kind of high level, but I mean, just from the places that I find interesting because both from being inside of it and then witnessing how that works and going to, you know, the way the party works where it's from the bottom up like where you are local and three people get together and you create a little hub and it gets to 150 and then, you know, you become another hub and somebody serves 150 of you and then, oh, and I mean, like, you know, there were elections and 800 million people voted in the elections in China that it's no different than the United States. There are elections that then put you, it's elections to selection, but that's the same way we select our president is elections to selection. So, I mean, like, I didn't know that. I was like blown away like, well, so, and also I just think that fragility, I don't think people understand the fragility of the political system is the same as our own fragility, that there's a bunch of liberals. There's a bunch of, you know, people that like get enough money and they become liberals and don't care about other people anymore, just like the United States. There's infiltration of the United States into the universities on steroids. There's infiltration into the foreign policy system by the United States on steroids. It's like the idea that it's the authoritarian system that controls everything is like so crazy, what a crazy notion that we've been sold, but it's a much more alive, vibrant, I would say it's got space for fragility. I mean, clearly why some of the things are the way they are, some of the structures are the way they are is to not let that fragility take over, you know, like not move things into a situation where the stability ends. So you can see that struggle between the fragility, the openness and how you keep stability and it's like, it's a dance that they're always dancing, I'm sure, but yeah. Also, just like to witness a color revolution moment, one of the girls in my husband's office told me that her apartment was right outside where there was that ruckus around the shutdown in Shanghai and she said, it was 200 people outside, then a bunch of other people came in and it was really shut down by the neighbors who shamed the protesters and that it wasn't actually closed down by the government, it was closed down by the community of which she was one that said, you selfish, you know, breast, go home was the message. So that wasn't in the, I said, well, that was in the US media. So, you know, it's so naive of us to think that a country of 1.5 billion people could have enough cops to have an authoritarian government and a country that is so far out, that is so hard for people to get to, that there's, you know, that they just don't, it's just impossible, it's like an un-conceived notion in the same way people in China said, really the United States thinks China's gonna bomb itself, you know, that the United States has been sold the story, that it's gonna bomb itself, there would be an uprising in China, if China bombed itself. So it's the naivety of the stories we're told that we're willing to swallow is interesting. Bob. I'm curious, did you talk with anybody about the stories we were always hearing here in the media about the drastic lockdowns during COVID? Yeah, I think, I don't know if you missed that part. I guess I did, I thought. Okay, so the lockdown happened in five cities and this is the way they do experiments, is they pick five cities and five mayors who are really like top, you know, because the people who get to the place to be mayors of the five major cities are pretty seasoned, you know, tempered, think about leadership that has to learn how to be leadership. I think of Ursula Guan and, you know, how you become the magician, you've gotta understand power and they have a relationship with power. And I also just think on power, every, the leaders in China are reluctant leaders, you know, it's like it's a service, not a desire for power over, it's a service for and like Julie said, it's like their job is to serve the people and you have to have been toned to get there. So it was five cities, they did it in five very different ways. Shanghai was the most severe and yeah, I know the whole team that lived through it. I mean, I talked to the whole team that lived through it as it was happening. And so, yes, it happened too fast and for seven days, as they figured out how to make it work, some people were, it was really uncomfortable for those seven days were people that didn't have three days of food and you have Chinese going, what are you doing with not three days of noodles? You know, like, so there was that. And then afterwards, like a lot of the women that I talked to, mostly women about this, they said what was beautiful for the first month and a half was the community building. And like a lot of the things that happened out of COVID have continued. Like they now buy other groceries, wholesale and they get them all delivered together and then they pull the wholesale groceries out was nothing, something they'd never done before and that that's continued. That, you know, it was uncomfortable for people who are middle-class liberals, who are individualists. It was uncomfortable more for them than it was for people who are committed to the, you know, if you're committed to a set of values, you're like, okay, here I am. I'm committed to these values and it's uncomfortable for a while. They're used to being way more uncomfortable than a COVID lockdown. So it depended on the spectrum. We got the stories we got were the spectrums of the individualist middle class that we can identify with. But that's not what China's fully made up of. And so we miss the stories from the people who are, wow, this is interesting and fun and how do I make this work? Yeah, I guess I'm referring to stories in the media here that were much more drastic sounding than that. Like people locked in their homes for 30 to 60 days, stories like that. And I was a little skeptical as to whether that was really true, but. You know what, I'm sure, like these are, by the way, it's all bottom up, right? So every single one of them told me a different story from the neighborhood they lived in and my husband lives in three different cities and he had a different experience, all three of them. So that your community decides what that looks like. I'm sure if you're a brat, Pete, you're locked in your apartment. I'm sure that's true. You know, like you're not taking it seriously and we don't trust you, yeah. And you're not locked in by the cops, you're locked in by your neighbors. Yeah, okay. So yeah, I'm sure it looked different everywhere. It just, I mean, just the 40 people I know, every single person had a different story. So I think what happens for us is the US finds the darkest story they can tell and we get told that story. We don't get told the beautiful human stories that that's the opposite. So what China is steeped in are the beautiful human stories of, you know, care and support and like, so we get one story and they get another story. I'm sure in between there's another thousand stories but what they're living on are stories of resiliency and support and care. Got it, thanks. There's an iPhone with a hand up and I don't know your name, sorry. Hi, it's me, Medea. Hey, I had a question about the, you know, what we hear about the surveillance state, how much of that seemed true when you were there? This is the whole thing of facial recognition and do you get points for being a good person and a bad person and that kind of thing? And I don't know if that's the thing but is there one thing you could say that you don't like about China? Thanks. I did actually try to pay attention to that because somebody had said they'd been there and don't you, if you've been there, you don't, doesn't the surveillance bother you? I didn't feel surveillance. I mean, I did start to do some research. London has more surveillance cameras than any city in China. So I also talked to people around COVID. They're not tracking everybody because they couldn't figure out who was where and you could get anywhere and not be in the thing and they didn't know whether you had tested or not tested. So if there's availing everybody and it was COVID it was failing. So I think, you know, Ed Snowden kind of let us know, we're all under surveillance. The US, everybody like social media has this all under surveillance. Did I feel it? I did not feel it. It was not obvious to me. I did not feel surveilled. I think certainly they must know what they hear about. I wanted to tell a story about my son's friend. So my son's friend's there, he's gay and somebody went to the cops and said that he'd raped him. And so the cops came over, took him in and questioned him. And, you know, he said where he was and that was impossible and just was super sorry but that it hadn't happened. And the cops believed him and said that, you know, the other guy's story didn't sound feasible and he was let go. So I do want to talk about the cops a bit. They don't have guns. They've been trained in the opposite way of the cops in the US. So it's a very surreal experience. They're supportive. They're also like so tiny. I mean, just, I assume sometimes some of them are so thin. I think they're, you know, I could break them. They're always, it's like, how can I help you? And or just non-attrusive, just standing there. We live across from a police station. So I'm kind of just seeing them hanging around. You don't actually see that many cops. Now, I didn't see any PLA and I'm sure that's the cop of China but I have not in all my time seen one. And I'm sure they're armed and have a different demeanor but it's interesting to be with someone whose job is to serve the community and the different physical presence and mindset and relationship to the community. And everybody loves, there was this one guy in Dali. He said, I want my daughter to be a cop because they're the ones that serve the community so beautifully but no, didn't feel surveilled on. And I'm an activist. So they're not gonna like me. I mean, I'm not, you know, I don't think the Chinese government is thrilled with probably activists because they're trying to have stability and I create instability. But did I answer all your questions, Medea? Oh, no, I didn't have any big signs on. I asked if there was something negative you could tell us about China. I can't for the life of me think of anything right now. I have one. Oh, I know. They keep picking on the United States, those Chinese do. And going after our military out there in those Taiwan straits for God's sakes, geez. I know one. Everything happens on WeChat. And so my biggest frustration was I was there for a very long time and I couldn't ever get my WeChat, the money to go into my WeChat. So everybody just pays with WeChat. So, and they don't take American credit cards. So I was very limited in what I could spend and too lazy to go to a bank to change my money. So that was my frustration. They do use cash. I did actually change a little bit of money but it's not a big thing cash. It's a very rarely used. And American credit cards, it's at American chain hotels. So, and hotels don't change. I mean, the only place you can change money is banks and it takes a bit of time. So that was my frustration. And I do not speak Chinese. They know, I think there's more English speakers in China than any other country in the world. I don't know, that was a rumor I heard. But the thing is, is that everyone's very adept at these things they have on their phones. So if someone doesn't understand you, they just speak into the phone, tell you what it is and then you speak and say the answer. There's the translation relationship is baked into their, I mean, first of all, I just wanna say the baked into the culture stuff is really interesting. Things happen really fast and efficiently and they're baked into everyone's, I mean, things go fast and easy and short-cutty and I mean, just like in the building we live in, like the people that come to deliver the food, they like hang it on the post and the elevator and people just come out whenever they want and get their thing off the elevator post. You know, the WeChat thing is just like, it's for everything and the conversations and TikTok and, oh, and the conversations on TikTok. If you wanna think of the amazing conversations that happen around issues, it's vibrant and huge and rich and you're inside of some, I tried to get inside of some of the conversations so I could understand what people were talking about but that's a lot. And I only had interpreters when I was doing interviews with the professors because I wanted them to speak in their original language and hopefully I will be able to get those videos and we'll put them up on YouTube soon. So I think we're over time. Thanks so much for joining me and caring about China. China is not our enemy, is not your enemy. I just wanna encourage everyone to go because we need more people to come back and share their experience. My experience is mine and it's a super tiny sliver of what experiences there could be like. So please, I'm hopefully planning a code pink trip for October. Stay tuned, October, end of October. The team there is, we're trying to figure out, like you came for two weeks, where would you go to get the biggest breadth of experience? There's so much to see and experience and it's vast and different and beautiful. So thanks for joining. Thanks for being peacemakers and peace lovers. Thanks, Wei, for your support. Bye. Thank you so much, Jody. Have a good day, everyone. Thanks, Jody. That was great. See you later. Thank you so much. Super Jody. Thank you. Thank you, Jody. Thank you. Jody, can I ask real quick? You said people should come back and share their stories. I'm going for a month, like 26 days, to be exact. If there's some ways that that can be of utility on the sharing stories front, I'm happy to have you chat beforehand about how I might be able to structure this trip in such a way to help facility. Obviously, there's certain things I have to do with regarding family stuff, but otherwise, I have relatively open schedule as well. So, I would say I went with an open mind. I went with like, I just wanna have a personal experience that then helps me go into the rabbit hole of what questions I should be asking instead of like coming from like, what do I think and what do I, you know, what do I want? I just went with, oh, why did that happen and what's that? And why do I feel this? So, I think more of us that come back as our own personalities sharing how we experienced things and then what it taught us because then letting that feeling, every time I was just like, okay, so why is that that way? And then it would send me off on an exploration of what I needed to learn so I could understand that. And I think that's, because we're so indoctrinated with bullshit and notions that are false and destructive and actually, you know, like militarized, you know, it's like talking about human rights abuses, wars of human rights abuse on steroids. So let's just like all in that, you know, stop the war. But I think it's like no one has a relationship to China. So if you came back with what your relationship to China was and what it taught you, for me, it was profound. I mean, to have that experience where I could finally unpack what I was feeling as a sense of having no codependency, which then led me back to understanding like why did I have that experience? So I could go back and go, oh wow, nobody here gives a shit whether I buy from them or not, I am not their sustenance. Their sustenance is their government and their community. And essentially isn't that what all governments are supposed to be, but we in the West don't have that experience. We have an experience of fighting with. And one of the things I didn't say that I, I'm sorry I didn't, because it was also something that I really got talking to the women, was that if I look out and, you know, like I just finished a board meeting and I was suffering through it because the movements, the staff, election cycles, the staffing, everything that goes around pretending we can change a structure that is violent, that doesn't really care what we think, like that our lives are dedicated to that, to be in a place where no one's life is dedicated to changing. It's dedicating the living out of their, I mean like, I know that my life like got uprooted and I became a peace activist and that's what I dedicated my life to. People in China's lives are dedicated to fruition, to fruiting, to creating, to living. I mean, it made me, I cried one night. I was just like, imagine if all that energy that is being churned and chewed because it's not changing anything. I've been doing this for 50 years and it's getting worse. So it's like, lives that are chewed up by this militarized machine that is violent and destructive and oppressive in trying to change it that it just really doesn't care what we think. You know, we'll continue to story and oppressive and this, you know, so I don't know that. Like, what that was like, that's what, but what was hopeful about it was like, that's a billion and a half people living out of creating, living out of relating, living out of a beautiful commitment that's actually for real. It's not a line that you then have to, you know, you have to narrow your focus and lie to yourself so you can live and tell yourself stories. And I mean, like all, trying to unpack that in my psyche was intense. So you'll have an experience like that, I'm sure, because when you're in, it's like being in a healthy organism when you've been coming from a dysfunctional organism. As they start to talk to each other, you learn things. And I think you'll learn things as a young man that you'll share different than me as an old woman. Well, you know, Jodi, I appreciate that and, you know. And we'd love to have you on and have an online report back as soon as you're back. If that's helpful, definitely have you to do that. Oh, that would be awesome. But that's what we need. We just need to make it relational. I think everybody gets lost in the weeds that the State Department throws at us to distract us. And really what this is about is relationality and people. It's like a war on China. No, it's a war on the people of China and they are beautiful. And that is a sin. That is a crime against humanity. And by the way, I'm going to Washington next week for three days, anybody wanna join me in going at all those members on that horrible China competition committee and tell them they are a crime against humanity is my goal. I am in DC from the 16th to the, I think early 18th by kind of doubt that interact that you're sexual. It does, it does, I think it does. Oh, it does. Doesn't it? Or do I leave on the 15th? I'm on 16th and 17th, but that's Friday, sir. Oh, damn, I leave on the 15th. Damn, you can't come a little early.