 Welcome to the Lowy Institute. My name is Michael Fooley Love and hello to some friends I see in the audience. And I'm here really just very briefly to welcome Jim Fallows and also Sam Roggeveen to the stage, which I'll do so in a second. This event marks the fifth anniversary of the Lowy Institute's blog, The Interpreter. The Interpreter has played a terrific role in the development of the Institute. It has provided a forum for us to add to the national conversation and to thicken and deepen the national conversation in a nimble news-driven lively way. When we started The Interpreter we saw it as a place that would host commentary by Lowy staff. What we did not, and it still fulfills that role, and if you look at the commentary by Mark Thurwell and Steve Grenville and others it's terrific stuff. But where I've been very pleased to see The Interpreter go is in hosting discussion and conversation from outside the Institute. We've hosted commentary from foreign ministers, from prime ministers, from serving military officers who've seen it as a place to discuss defence strategy from overseas experts like Walter Russell Mead and Jim Fallows today. It was the locus for the discussion recently about Australia's position in between the United States and China with our colleague Hugh White responding in detail to some of the critiques of his paper that were put by his critics and so on. So it has really changed from being a blog for Lowy staff into the best one-stop shop for lively international blogging discussion on all the issues that Australia is interested in, which are all the issues that the Lowy Institute is interested in. So I'm a huge fan of the blog and I'm delighted that we're celebrating this fifth anniversary. I'm also delighted that we're doing it with Jim Fallows. Jim is an old friend and a good friend of mine. He is, I think, the best long-form journalist in the United States. If you look at the articles that he's published in The Atlantic which has to be, well, is perhaps the best magazine of its kind in the world. If you look at the articles he's published from the time of the Iraq War and all those incredibly important long-form journalism he did right up to the recent cover story on Obama which I think got closer to explaining what sort of a person and what sort of a president Obama is, closer to explaining that than anybody else has done, he is just a complete class act. So Jim, we are delighted to have you in Australia. We are delighted to have you, to have an author and a journalist of your distinction here. I know that you have played a bit of a blogging role on the blog with Sam in addition to your absolutely indefatigable work on theatlantic.com and now on Twitter. So I think Sam's done a wonderful job in persuading Jim to come. So without further ado, can I invite Jim and Sam to come to the stage and I'll leave you in Sam's hands. Thank you very much. Well, Michael, thank you and welcome to all of you and welcome to you, Jim. I'm really honoured to have been given the opportunity to edit the interpreter for these last five years and I'm very proud to say in the present company that the model I've always used for how to build a lively and intelligent and engaging and even a playful online presence has been the Atlantic online and I'm referring not only to your blog, Jim, but Andrew Sullivan of course, who's now left the Atlantic and moved to the Daily Beast and the site as a whole. It's a constant source of ideas and inspiration and I thank you for it. So I won't spend an awful lot of time and introduction to you, Jim. Michael's already done a great job of that and thank you for being here. Let's kick on. 2012 is a year of political transition in two countries that matter most to Australia, the US and China. The US presidential elections due in November and of course, China's ruling communist parties due to have its party Congress in, well, nobody knows exactly when, no date's been set and that's part of the intrigue that we'll be talking a little bit about. So what we hope to discuss today is are the various ways that media, old and new, I should say rather traditional and new, are influencing those leadership transition. It's a huge topic and we won't cover everything. Please start thinking of your questions now. We'll open this up later on. And can I ask you also please just to turn your phones to silent, although in the spirit of the event, it's quite alright to tweet. So let's begin with America, Jim. And first of all, congratulations on your latest cover story for the Atlantic and this audacious cover. I don't know if any of you have seen it, but it shows two actors, lookalikes of Romney and Obama boxing, the sweat and the punches of flying. It's a terrific cover. And I wanted Jim to start with a, I guess a historical overview here of the way media and politics interacts in America. I often get the sense that there's an almost perpetual sense of moral panic about the media in America and what it's doing to politics. I'm not talking about the rise of the internet here and the decline of newspapers. That's a real crisis. But what I mean is the near constant sense that standards are slipping. And for me, it reminds me also of the education debate. I think we have it here in Australia and yours as well, that people always talk about as if students are never, you know, not learning as much as they used to. Standards are slipping. You know, teachers aren't what they used to be, et cetera. So you wrote a book in 1997, Breaking the News, How the Media Undermine American Democracy. Tell us about the argument you made in that book and tell us also what's gotten worse since 97 and what's gotten better. Good, I will do that. First, I'll say a few words of pleasantries about the honor of being here on the occasion of the interpreter having its fifth anniversary of Michael, taking over the Lowy Institute. I'm only in Australia for a couple of days on this trip, but I wanted to be sure I welcomed the opportunity to come here because I've so much admired what Sam has done with the interpreter. I think it's been a wonderful venue for international discussion, as Michael was saying. Michael, I have admired and liked for a very long time. So I'm glad on Australia's behalf and Lowy's behalf that he's taken the role he has here. So thank you for letting me join you on this occasion. The media argument, one of the things I've learned about American life in general is media politics, almost anything else. And I think there are reflections of Australia that's particularly pronounced in the US is that throughout the course of American civilization, things have been just about to go to hell. Yes. The very first sermon ever given on US soil about decline from past greatness was in 1627. And there was one of the Congressionalist Ministers saying, oh, back in 1620, we really had our fine standards. But now in these recent years, this has gone down. And there has been to a really pronounced degree, I think more than most other countries, this sense of impending doom in the US. Sometimes doom has been serious. We did have a civil war. And it is possible that at any given moment, the warnings of decline could actually come true. But I am impressed how that the cycle of American culture is things about to get to an emergency in the last second, pulling back. When it comes to the media, I've come to believe that that there is a genuine sense of decline, just decline from a historically aberrant period that the time when people of my vintage, the hated baby boomers in the US when we were growing up, there was an artificial post World War II sort of centrality and consensus of media. We had only three TV networks. Everybody saw them. There were for market reasons, there were dominant newspapers in metropolitan areas that could have the kind of consensus I think Australia still sort of has. Australia has much more sort of authoritative central media than we now do, than we do in the US. 15 years ago when I wrote this book, Breaking the News, it was in the dawning era of what's become the odd slot now of both the internet driven economic pressure on newspapers in particular, and the fragmentation of attention in the United States. I think that there is something that is better in the media political environment in the US and something that is idiosyncratically much worse. The thing that's better is I do think the overall quality of people's knowledge about the world is better now than say 15 years ago because of the internet. For example, the Arab Spring uprisings were better covered in the US than they were, I think, than any previous international that was because there were so many different ways people could get information. And you know that whole argument the interpreter is part of it. What is worse is Australia's fault. And because of your man, Rupert Murdoch with his Fox News, that I think that this really has it is fair to say that Fox News has had a grossly distorting effect on American public life because it's created a self enclosed fact universe. And the most striking data point for this is that something like 48% of people who identify themselves as members of the Republican Party believe that Obama was born outside the United States. You know, that is false, but it's something that almost half of Republicans believe. And so I think that I know that Murdoch is now ours instead of yours. But but his I think that you can somebody will do a study sometime of how a network with only 3 million viewers, which is like 1% of the US population can have such enormous ripple effect, but it does. Now I want to follow up on this question of facts and people picking their own facts. On your blog in recent months, you've charted what I think you would characterize as a bit of pushback among journalists and editors against what you call false equivalents. Now I think if I'm reading this correctly, this is a similar con concept to what the media critic Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere. This is this this idea that journalists in order to maintain their objectivity should avoid making factual claims where the facts are in dispute. Instead they should just quote people who are on different sides of the argument. So the classic example is climate change. Despite the fact that the scientific debate about climate change is for all intents and purposes over it's happening, journalists feel the need for the sake of balance to quote both sides of that argument. Now tell us what you have seen recently that that's getting that perhaps reversing that trend. So the the background here is I'm sure most of you are familiar with this but slightly different from the Australian tradition where the US journalist tradition in this the false the momentary Eden of the Walter Cronkite age with with all the things that they were they were defective then to still there was a sense that journalists could best fulfill their duty simply by quoting each side that you just be sort of courtroom stenographers Republicans claim X Democrats claim Y and we are doing doing our duty to inform the public we just lay out both sides of the argument. If the political discourse reaches a point where one of these two traditional sides is is willing just to keep saying something that objectively is not true, then then journalists are really torn because they don't want to step beyond this traditional one party says acts the other party says why type of objectivity because they feel as if they are then intruding on the story but they are misinforming their readers or their their viewers if they if they don't do something more. So in the past year, I think we've seen maybe the sort of impetus for this debate was when one of the public editors in New York Times are kind of on busman about a year ago were to call him saying, should reporters be fact vigilantes and his argument was essentially well, maybe they should because this is a role we don't want to be in checking the truth of political claims. And there was a lot of negative response to his claim there saying, of course, you should be a sense of a fact vigilante should try to tell your readers what what is true. And so more and more, you will see headlines in major papers saying things like advertisement falsely claims Obama has done X, Y and Z as opposed to advertisement claims that Obama has done this and Democrats deny it. So I think we are seeing the mainstream media feeling more empowered to say that their duty is to tell people this is this is actually true as best as we can determine. All right, let's move on to the current campaign in the United States. Now, am I right in saying that you you followed the Romney campaign for a short time? Yes, I did. Just tell us what it's like for a journalist on the road with a campaign. What's what's daily life like? I will tell you the delightful part of this is it was part of one of Romney's bus tours through the industrial heartland in the summertime. And I got to I'm an avid small plane pilot. So I sort of went from from little airports, little airport meeting the bus each one of the stops, which was really fun. I could see people as they reacted to them because there was not a lot of room on the actual bus. Although I did interview Governor Romney and some other people there. What was striking then this was not maybe two months ago was one was the at that point, very pure discipline of the Romney message, which was an attempt to turn what had been so effective for Ronald Reagan in 1980 against Jimmy Carter against Barack Obama, where the argument was simply President Obama said he would fix the economy. He didn't. Therefore, it's time for a different approach. And that seemed you know, that's been harder for him to maintain in that since then, for reasons we wouldn't get into the other thing that was striking to me in the many, many tens of thousands of people I saw in the rally. I saw a total of two black people. It was was I think the the and it was a guy who was looked like a sort of older military veteran wearing a you know, a veteran type cap saying Governor Romney protect our military tensions and that guy's white. And they were the only people I saw that this was in the part of uses in Pennsylvania, Ohio, where where there actually are a fair number of black and Latino people, but they just weren't showing up at these these events. So that was interesting in the racial polarization of the electorate. A poll I saw two or three days ago showed that among African American likely voters, the spread between Obama and Romney was 95 to zero with five undecided percent of the size. So now I brought a book in with me. This is a new book by an Australian blogger by the name of Greg Jericho. If you follow blogs, you'll know him as Grog gamut. That was the name he went under for many years until he was outed by the Australian a couple of years ago. And Jericho, or at least Grog's gamut came to widespread attention when he wrote a blog post during the 2010 election campaign, in which he basically told the traveling media pack that was going along with the two candidates to simply come home. He said to the to the editors of the media providers, you can save yourself a lot of money by just getting off these buses and coming home. You're not doing anything to contribute to the conversation about this campaign. We're not learning anything about the policies of the two parties. And the parties themselves are leading you on a merry chase in order to in order to generate photo ops, essentially. So I'm guessing that something similar happens in the United States. And I just wanted to get your perspective on what it's like on those media buses and what it's like to follow the candidate around. Let me let me make a side point and I'll come back to answer that directly. This is when I think of the media buses, I think of an endless sequence of four 15am wake up calls in the holiday in Canton, Ohio, you know, and heading off. And it is, I think there's probably less so in Australia is an underappreciated crucial reality of American politics, how much physical stamina it takes to be a national candidate that just most normal people would crack after a few months of this. So the fact that there is that kind of Darwinian selection of people who could just stand that the rigors of the campaign, it includes that the press to there has been a, a, I was going to say evolution, but that implies an improvement. There's been a change in the way this has worked since when I was when I was in my mid 20s, I was working for Jimmy Carter and on his campaign and spent six months just just living on a bus with an airplane that way. In those days, there were almost every regional paper at somebody on the bus, Boston Globe at somebody in the Wilmington Delaware paper at somebody in the Dallas Times Harold had somebody that that's not the case anymore. You now have the traveling press is really the AP Reuters, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the TV networks, and then local people or whatever because it's just become that it's so expensive to do. So it is it has its own fascination because you have no decisions to make. You just get on the bus, go to wherever the bus lets you out, you watch, you type up what happened, you get back on the bus, you have the photo op, you have the day story. And now of course, you're doing 20 stories a day, as opposed to one story a day. So it is, it has a kind of idiot fascination. I say that in a respectful rather than than disrespectful way of just, you are entirely focused on just making sure you never miss the bus, you never miss the boarding call for the plane. Everything is laid out for you, you see how things are going. And it's worth having somebody do that, because there is still some value to seeing these people interact with crowds. But it does, you do paint a picture of a very enclosed world. And that does imply, doesn't it that group think will develop among the reporters. And it's been said, for instance, that reporters who follow around particular candidates just begin to dislike them. So for instance, the media is this is a set of Al Gore, for instance, that the media just didn't take to him. I wonder, is something similar true of Mitt Romney? I've got a couple of points here. One is, everybody's least favorite airline is the one they take the most often. So there is sort of that, you know, that the air travels can basically unpleasant to you hate the one that you're exposed to. And so too, if you recognize that being a campaign correspondent means hearing essentially the same speech, 20 times a day, because there's only so many things that any candidate can say. And all the reporters I've seen this, you just start chanting in unison what you know, the guy's going to be saying, and you can do kind of dramatic readings. And it just is, there's that kind of dark humor. So you naturally view with a certain distance, this person, because you see that he's just a bit of process meat being moved from place to place and the ways in which that they they they act, animated one meeting that the public, etc. I think, however, there are differences in in how in the dynamic of the press and the politician, Al Gore, for various reasons, really was disliked by people in the press. And that had an effect. There's a lot of very hostile coverage of him and the race that was so close in 2000 probably made a difference. Most Republican candidates in general are more separated from the press, because Democrats, they are assumed to be natural allies of the press may mix with the more Democrat Republicans are assumed to be the press is suspicious of them. So I think with Romney, it's not so much they dislike him as that objectively, apart from anybody's partisan sentiments here. He's a really bad politician. He just you know, just in terms of athletic skills, if you see somebody who is a good ball handler or not, he is not a good athlete politically. And so the reporters are seeing this 20 times a day and seeing him like yesterday. Did you hear that the the Ryan cheer? So this was yes, so the footage. This was just painful. There was a crowd. And he was saying, isn't this Paul Ryan, a great guy in the crowd, Ryan, Ryan, and poor Romney says, No, it's Romney Ryan, Romney Ryan, and that he had to say it was sad, and that they didn't take up was was sad. And this is so I think there is a kind of there's a kind of death watch that can can develop some of these campaigns. So anything can happen in this campaign. I'm just saying, at the moment, the traveling Romney press corps has a what's going to go wrong today? Well, yes. And on the on the question of anything can happen. We may have time to talk about the debates in a moment. I do want to ask you a question about new media, and in particular, a question that came from some from one of our readers on Facebook. And let me read out the question. It's a slightly long one, but it's worth reading out. According to a study conducted by Pew Research in on 15 August, the digital gap between Obama and Romney is significant when it comes to Twitter. Apparently, Obama posts 29 times a day and Romney only once. However, it seems that their approach is still a top down one way method of communication, for example, that unanswered messages on Facebook or don't retweet. To me, it seems that their administration, their media advisors simply don't differentiate between old media and new media. Their understanding of new media doesn't get beyond old notions of media that shoots magic bullets to the audience. Why is this so? And how has the use of new media changed presidential campaigns? I think it's it's changed because the profound change was four years ago when Obama was able really for the first time over to raise a huge amount of money through social media. That was a very important networking and fundraising tool for him. I think on the the observation or complaint about it not being interactive. People have no idea how busy people in politics are. They just are swamped with, you know, if I feel overwhelmed by email or you do, it's five orders of magnitude worse for anybody who's a national figure. So I think if they actually try to engage anybody, they would just be bailing out the ocean. They couldn't possibly do it. So it's a scale matter, I think. And the people, this guy, Macon Phillips, who you may have met, who's Obama's social media guy, he is, I'm sure he's thought about all these complaints too. He is a hip, young guy and he's thinking, how can we make our social media scene engaging. It is a problem for, there isn't asymmetry here, which is that fewer people who are tech savvy are natural Romney constituents. There's a natural democratic bent among people, young tech world people. So there certainly are enough of them to help Romney. And I know, I know some Republican Twitter people who are feeding stuff out all the time. Yeah. It's also worth saying, I saw a presentation about this last week that the demographics, I mean, just because the social media business is higher on the Obama side, isn't necessarily a measure of how the two campaigns are doing. It's simply, as you say, the demographics of the two parties are different. And there also is, one of the things that, that struck me most when I was doing this relatively brief Romney bus tour. And it's, I just wanted to have some, I've seen these tours and various campaigns of the earth, want to have an idea of what it was like, is somebody with a very senior campaign advisor to Romney was telling me in just a background conversation, he was saying that in a way, they spend 23 and a half hours per day thinking of little tricks of campaigning. But he said, in the end it probably doesn't matter. If the economy improves, Obama's going to win. If the economy doesn't improve, Obama's going to lose. And I think that the fundamental C tides probably are what drive things, although Romney has hurt himself a lot of ways, and Obama has helped himself. Now back in 2008, in fact, almost exactly the same time of year in 2008, there was, I saw a presentation here in Sydney at the US Consulate General, in fact, by an experienced New York Times reporter, Matt Bay, who said, and I noted this down, I wrote a little blog post about it at the time, this is the last election cycle in which TV advertising will dominate campaign budgeting. That's false. I mean, at some point that prediction will be true. But if you're, if you have the misfortune to live in Ohio or Florida or Colorado, you can't turn on the TV without having just wall-to-wall ads. So it's, but I interrupted. No, no, not at all. That was really the gist of my question. What I'm getting at is, are we overstating the shift from traditional means of reaching voters to the new methods that, you know, we now spend so much time thinking of that. I think that, that part of the, again, part of the desperation feeling that happens on a political company, and I don't know, have any of you worked on a political campaign, so probably something you've had, you sense with every passing moment what more could you be doing. You know, because there's a very fixed period of time, you're thinking there's always something else you could be doing, so every new avenue of approaching people is going to be used. So there's, there have been TV ads before and there are more of them now, and there's social media, and there's fundraisers, and there's everything, everything people can think of they will do. So because people, as long as TV is there, it will be used because there are still, still more of the population gets news from TV than any other way. So it's, it's still the sort of blunt instrument that can have the biggest effect. It occurs to me too that Matt buys categories, the distinction between say TV and online, that's starting to blur. It's now simply a matter of screens. Yes, yes. So what appears on TV also appears on the internet, and you can watch television on, you know, on your tablet or on your laptop, so. And a lot of the videos, like this very recent 47% video that Obama's threw out in the last 24 hours, which is it's just, it's just quotes from this 47% tape, which I'm sure you're aware over, overlaid on sort of pictures of the American working class, you know, of some retired veteran who is now a taker, because he's, he's getting benefits opposed to hanging contacts, or some woman who's trying to manage her household, you know, a single mother type of it. So that's running on TV, but it's also spreading on the internet. So it is all blurring. And there's also the phenomenon of campaigns essentially creating, making ads, but then barely bothering to release them on TV. They know if they're controversial enough online, then journalists, the TV networks, will air them for free. Yes, and that spares you the, the, the toll boot that the kind of this toll booth penalty of having to pay all these TV people. Somebody has figured out that the biggest windfall fortune in America in the last six months is going to be TV owners in the corridor of Florida, between like Orlando and Tampa, because that's sort of, that's the swing vote section of Florida. Anybody who has a TV station there is just printing money now, because they're running ads all the time. So let me take a slightly different tech now, just to ask you about the intersection of traditional and new media, and just get a personal perspective from you. How has blogging changed the way you do your job? The Atlantic, which is the oldest magazine in the United States, founded in 1857. The only presidential candidate we've ever endorsed was Abraham Lincoln, that retired from the field after one successful endorsement. The Atlantic was, was actually the first mainstream publication to have a serious online presence. In the early 1990s, we started to have what we call the Atlantic Unbound. And so for me, it's been a natural adjunct for a long time. And because the Atlantic is a monthly, and because it's like three or four months lead time, when you have to think of an article and get it, I'm working on an article now for the January issue. That's how we have to sort of, so I have to do something not knowing who the president's going to be then or what else, what would have happened. Having a real time outlet has been, has been a wonderful supplement. I think what's, when I moved to China six years ago, it became useful to me as a way of sort of making other kinds of connections. People I, I wouldn't otherwise have had any way to reach. I was able to be in touch with lots of people in China and Asia and in the US. So for me it's been a, a useful extra kind of tool in, in the, in the armory of this way. If there are things that I'm not going to write a, a magazine article about, or that I have a sort of a lead arm that I don't have the energy to go report for the next two months. I can say here's something interesting. I wonder what this means. And then here from other people who know. All right. Let's, let's turn now to China. You, you said you're not going to know who the, who the next president is going to be. We've got a fair idea who the next leader in China is going to be, but as you just alluded to, you spent what is it five years living in China and traveling all around. You produced books, cover articles for the Atlantic. And recently you and I did an extended email exchange for the interpreter on your new book, China Airborne, for which thank you. Thank you for taking it so serious. Yeah. No, no, not at all. I recommend the book to everybody. I just, I wanted to start talking about China by reading just a couple of paragraphs from a blog post that was recently written by our own Linda Jacobson here at the, our China expert here at the Lowy Institute who has one of the most experienced and distinguished China experts around who was writing at the time a few weeks ago about the mysterious disappearance of Xi Jinping who's the heir apparent in the China, in China's Communist Party. He's since reappeared in public life of course, but we know he's alive. Yes, we do indeed. He could probably take over. His back seems okay. There were rumors of back problems and strokes and worse. Yeah. So rumors everywhere about his health and Linda wrote at the time about the way China has changed. Just a couple of paragraphs bear with me. I recall that in 1993 then Premier Li Peng was not seen in public for seven weeks, leading to similar gossip and rumors of an impending political crisis. In those days, this all took place via word of mouth. There was no internet and no Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter. Today, more than 300 million Chinese have social media accounts. Xi's mysterious disappearance is a hot topic. Neither I get serious. The ongoing Xi debacle is one further sign that the contradictions of China's political system are reaching a crescendo. Senior Chinese Communist Party officials, especially those in charge of propaganda and communication, are completely out of touch with reality and the aspirations of Chinese citizens. China is today a vibrant, multifaceted society in which people discuss, probe, and have opinions. But the Communist Party leadership clings to its rigid and secretive ways and plays deaf. So we've just finished talking about the way that media impacts on American politics. And yet Linda here describes this hermetically sealed political system. So tell me, in your experience, does media, in particular the new social media in China, impinge at all on that decision making world? Yes, it must. And so let me say first, I basically agree and agree very strongly with the perspective that that's in from Linda Jacobson. Second, I think it's worth stressing that in Australia because in my observation in the last few years when they're coming frequently about Australia, there's a tendency here to way overestimate the certainty of China's ascent to the top. And that China has no problems than everybody else is declining. And it's natural for Australia to overestimate China because it's such a huge commercial partner of Australia and the scale differences are such. But I think there is that that's a useful message for an Australian audience. As you know, Sam, the subject of that, what you just read is essentially also the subject of my book, how these contradictions are going to be worked out in China. And you would think that the leadership in China would be confident enough to recognize that the main threat that China's continued success is their nervousness and defensive overreaction. If they could continue to sort of relax control, that would be the best way for them to stay in power. But there are such, I'll finish these such sentences as I come back to this anecdote. During the Arab Spring uprising, my wife and I were back in Beijing for a couple of months and I was actually finishing this book. And there was the sort of the very short lived Jasmine revolution in China, which was really suppressed, just not with violence, but with everything short of violence in terms of trying to make sure that nothing like the Arab Spring happened in China. And what was strange to most observers was why was the government so nervous about this? Compared with Arab societies, China is a roaring success. Its economy has all the things that we know about the economy. There's no reserve army of unemployed teenage males, et cetera. So why were they so hyper reactive? And so either they knew more than the foreigners did. They had reason to be afraid, or they knew less. And we're sort of being hand handed in their overreaction. And I think probably both of those things are true. But I think the drama that she lays out there is one that is unfolding and there is, there are hundreds of millions of Chinese people finding ways every second to get around the constraints. And yet the constraints still make a difference. Something I argue in my book is that a proxy for whether China is going to really make it is when average internet access speed there becomes as fast as it does other places. Because the simple tax of censorship makes the average internet page take about three times the long to low because of those in North America. And that just sort of lobotomizes things in the long run. So I think that's a tension. Well, let's just go down the path a little bit because I know there is a perception that Chinese internet censorship is sort of monolithic. But you've written for the Atlantic on the so-called Great Firewall. And you describe something very different to that, don't you? What was so effective about the Chinese censorship system is that it's not a complete North Korean type iron curtain. It's just intrusive enough that most people don't bother to try to go outside of it. So people who are foreigners or university professors, they can easily, most time they can easily buy a VPN service or some other way to get around the firewall. And it costs a little bit of money. But it's just enough that most Chinese people won't bother. A difference, however, is over the last year and a half there have been several episodes of actually interrupting VPNs and having a kind of absolute control, which is different from what it had been in previous years. But it is a, I think the Chinese leadership is impressively sensitive to how things are developing within China and so that they know how to control it just enough. So let's take an example the dispute with Japan at the moment on the islands in the East China Sea. Can you imagine, for instance, that members of the Politburo in Beijing would be getting briefings from staff about trends on Weibo, for instance? I'm sure so. And there is a, there's a blog that comes out of Berkeley, California. And I forget the word, it's not the China media project, some other thing from Berkeley, California, where they have, every day they have a source who gives them the instructions from the censorship ministry that day about what terms are, what stories would be reported and not reported. And so there obviously is real-time decision-making going on of what people are saying, of Weibo and other places and how they should be steered or controlled. I read recently that one of those, I'm sure those key terms change all the time, but one of them is gathering. Yes, right, right. And the whole Japanese situation, one of the things that surprised me when we first moved back to China six years ago, compared with the 80s, is how much higher the level of manufactured anti-Japanese sentiment was than it had been 25 years closer to World War II. And I think it's, it is obviously a useful nationalistic tool, but it really is playing with fire. I read a nice little account on a blog recently about the demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy, where an observer, the observer who wrote this on his blog, described the fact that he was encouraged by police to join the demonstration. And then he asked innocently, well, can I chant against corruption? And he said, no, absolutely not, you can't. Just following up on Weibo in particular, which as a shorthand is often referred to as the Chinese version of Twitter, but it's a little more than that, isn't it? Because you can say much more in 140 Chinese characters than you can in our alphabet. So it's a, it's a proper blog platform, not a micro blogging platform. And I know one observer of Chinese new media who you respect very much, Kaiser Kuo, recently was quoted in an article that I saw. This is, I thought really stuck with me, this description. He was talking about Weibo and he said, this is unprecedented in Chinese history. There's never been a time when there's been a comparably large and impactful public sphere. It is now driving in many ways the entire national dialogue. That is very interesting and that rings true at Kaiser Kuo, if any of you don't know him, he's a very rich guy, he's an American citizen. Yeah, I think he was raised in Arizona or someplace like that, his parents were from China. And why his name Kaiser, I don't know, but his original blog in Beijing was called Ik Bin Ein Beijinger, using his name as Kaiser. He's a very worthwhile guy. And my wife, who's a linguistics person, wrote a book a year ago called Dreaming in Chinese about what you learn about China by learning a Chinese language. And one of her points was until just simple literacy is relatively a recent phenomenon for anybody beyond the tiny fragment of the Chinese population. So to have large, to have hundreds of millions of people both able to write freely and have ways to exchange as they are during a web ball is a huge thing. Yeah, and on Kaiser Kuo, he now runs a weekly podcast series on a website called Cineca, I believe, with another really good, I believe South African observer, a Chinese Jeremy Goldcorn. So I plug that into a search engine, Cineca, I'm sure you'll find it. And it's a wonderful weekly radio show, effectively. I've got one last question for you, Jim, and then I'm going to open it up to everybody. I just wonder, what are the things in the lead up to the big party Congress? What are the kind of things you're looking for in Chinese media that sort of give you signals about what's going on? And I'm talking here about the established media as well as what goes on in new media. Do we learn anything at all? I find the official media always useful as sort of guides to what the government is concerned about. Yes. So you can see all the campaigns of talking up this or that trend. And so it was interesting to me that there was a time when, for a while, Xi Jinping was not being mentioned very much. This was before he disappeared with his bad back or whatever. So he wondered, is there something, there's some question about his succession. And so I guess I mainly rely on the people who have better antenna than I do into the Chinese media. I will see what Kaiser says and what Jeremy Goldcorn says and what Xiaochang says and Berkeley and others. So they're the people I rely to say, OK, this is different from what we've seen before. But I guess I am, on the one hand, I really am a fan of China. I love being there. I have a lot of friends there. And I think that the US-China relationship is actually more robust than people think. On the other hand, I think there are a whole lot of problems that especially in political process, political legitimacy, one other point here. The Atlantic ones in Aspen Ideas Festival. And so about three months ago, I got to be the emcee at a really interesting debate. On the one side was Minxin Pei, who was originally from Shanghai. He's a professor at Claremont-McCannanow. And his argument is, really, the contradictions of the system are reaching an unsustainable crisis. And essentially, just it can't go on with the current governing system. The other was a guy named Eric Li, who was a young venture capitalist from Shanghai. He doesn't often discuss this. He has a gigantic farm in Sonoma, which he spends the most of his time, but he presents himself as a Chinese venture capitalist. And he was saying, no, the system has withstood so much. It's achieved so much. Chinese people know how to persevere and withstand. So it actually is going to keep on. It's a lucky way. So there are really heated first order discussions about what it'll be like five years from now. It reminds me of that great Adam Smith quote. There's a lot of ruin in a nation. Yes. Let me open this up. Michael Flewell has a question. Jim, thank you for showing your trademark mix of knowledge and insight and humility. I am aghast to hear, though, that the Atlantic was agnostic about the presidential election in 1932. I'd like you to revise that perhaps and perhaps a retrospective endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt over Herbert Hoover in the middle of the Great Depression might have been good. I agree with you that Romney's ball skills are poor, and I enjoyed the anecdote earlier in the campaign about how his sort of standard way of introducing himself to people on rope lines was to try to guess their ethnic origins, which led to all sorts of faux pas. But can I ask you to project forward and assume that Romney defies the odds, defies the polls and wins? I'm going to publish a paper in about 10 days on the likely foreign policies of Romney and Obama. And can I ask you, based on your personal experience with Romney and what you know about his campaign, to chance your arm on that side? My intuition on the Romney side is that essentially I don't believe anything he says on foreign policy in a good way. I think that the very muscular unilateralist, almost neocon, visage that he presents to me is at odds with the real Romney. There are certainly forces around him who are representative and who are feeding into that and there are different reasons why he's making that argument and presenting himself that way. But when I look back at Romney's character, the way he performed in other jobs, albeit not on foreign policy, but in other areas, I see him as a much more cautious, evidence driven, careful decision maker. And that's how I see he would be, that would be the outline of his foreign policy with caveats about events and personnel and all those sorts of things. So does your experience back that up or have I got it wrong? I would basically agree with that and I'll start back with the anecdote, actually two of your anecdotal introductions. One is it probably is good the Atlantic didn't endorse anybody in 1932, was owned during the teens, 20s, early 30s by a real reactionary guy, Ellery Sedgwick who was a crusader against immigrants and so he would have been, I think he would have been on the Hoover bandwagon about Romney and his age-guessing skills. I mean just think for a second about the potential for disaster if you're default mode of meeting anybody is to guess how old they are. I mean it's just is there are 90 ways that can go wrong and maybe half of one way can go right and it's really amazing to see. I won't say more on that. On the foreign policy, I basically agree. I think especially in this half of the world I think there would be very little change in foreign policy depending on how this election turned out. Romney says that on day one he's going to declare China a currency violator if he's not. I mean there is zero chance of his doing that in other than just some speech type way. And I think that everything about Romney's own personal bearing suggests as you say caution, data-driven decisions, risk aversion and things like that. The macro challenge for him is that he is that way but he's a nominee of the party that at this moment is not that way at all. One of his problems is trying to straddle that gap. The other sort of micro issue is that his advisors are your old friends, the neocons who have been very, very aggressive especially about Iran rhetorically and in some other ways wanted to kind of refight the neocon battles the last 15 years. So I think that he, temperamentally I entirely agree with you and the question is whether he would be the relationship between him and his advisors when it comes to them. But I agree with your defense. Yes, we have a question here. First of all, China Airborne is fantastic. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. And feel free to go on. I lived in China the last couple of years. I'm American. The thing I sort of saw was that the people in my generation, I'm 31, people in my generation, very into social media, you ask them about the government, they sort of roll their eyes. Obviously I only saw a small portion of it, the urban upper middle class I guess. But my thinking was that eventually they could sort of, as they become powerful they've been so used to these things that the system will sort of disintegrate over time as they get into power because they've had these tools, they've had this exposure to foreign countries, foreign education, what have you. Do you think that's possible? I think that certainly is possible. Let me give you a counter example and then why I think it is possible. A counter example is for about three years in the mid-80s I was living in Japan. And with our then little kid, they went to Japanese school and the argument then was, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's this rigid bureaucratic Japanese system but these young people, when they grow up it's going to be way different and it's not. It's essentially that they're the power of the inculcating system is strong enough that it doesn't really change. I think in China it's a different situation. I mean that the generational differences in China are so stark as you know because people live through such radically different historical experiences and I am a huge fan of every kind of exchange program that you can name because the more I think foreigners are in China and the more Chinese people are outside just the better it is all around. So my expectation is like yours as you have a larger and larger group of people who are at ease in the outside world and that it just is going to be a more normal modern society. The question is whether the people who still have the controls believe that too and whether in particular the ones who arise during the communist selection process are opened up in that way. One other theme here, it struck me that during the financial crisis of the last four or five years it was relatively easier for the rest of the world to deal with Chinese financiers than to deal with their political leaders because the financiers they all studied at Berkeley or at Cambridge or the Sylvone or whatever for better and worse but they were used to dealing with the outside world and the political leaders were not. So I hope the process you're describing will continue. Jim is that also true of the next generation of political leaders? Aren't many of them being educated in the United States? Their children are all being educated in the United States and so the question is whether those children go back into politics. I was at a lunch maybe six or eight months ago when Xi Jinping came to DC and he had a lunch with Joe Biden and most of the talk that Xi Jinping gave was the impression it made on him 30 years earlier going to farm in Iowa. Just how his life was transformed by going to Muscatine, Iowa and having these nice exposures to farmers there. So I think probably the next generation has more international exposure. The question is, is it enough? What difference does it make? And we'll see, I hope so. Yeah, any other hands? Just on the funny, could you wait for the microphone? I'm going to take a poll of all of you after this. My question that John West takes for an excellent presentation. My question is a bit of a follow-up on that. Sure, people are becoming more international but the corruption in the system is so enormous that you may have worldly people but have massive vested interests to block change. Yes, the reason to me China is so fascinating is not simply its importance and not simply the fact that, as I think all of you know who have been there, that everything you can say about China is simultaneously true some place in China. You know, every observation true or false you can find some data point for. But the tension between all the things that are hopeful, maturing, civil society developing all the things that are corrupt and brittle and bad. And so far it's been a race between everybody's life on average, most people's life on average getting better but then the people atop really getting out of control. A worldwide phenomenon but more pronounced in China than other places. And so how those two vectors net out is what we'll see. And so what we hope is that this is a era of gilded age excess that will then be sort of reined in we hope it's not some kind of plutocracy that just shatters things. Because I think it's worse for everybody if there's some kind of real collapse in China or any kind of violent disruption. I've spent a lot of time in the factories in southern China and I got a message from somebody there to go who is this person I've been in touch with is the main linkage point between the high tech industry in the US and the manufacturers in China. They said there's been a huge change in the workforce dynamics just in the last year because fewer and fewer young women want to take these jobs and more and more men are taking them. They said it's a real disaster when men take these jobs because a man with a production line job for some reason is not considered marriageable. So these are much more sort of cranky people and there's much more kind of labor unrest like this Foxconn protest a couple of days ago. So he said there's much more of a sort of tinder box or powder keg told just a lot of these factories now just because there's more men doing jobs that want to I'm going to go there in two weeks and see some of these factories. So yes that's one of the dynamics. We hope that it works out in a positive way and that's what we'll keep watching. And Jim next time we have you here at the Lowy Institute we must get Hugh Watt sitting in this chair. That would be one I would pay to say. I like and respect Hugh Watt. I think he's profoundly wrong. And I did a blurb for his recent book that was on the terms of agree or disagree with this president you know a worthwhile perspective. So now you have a poll question. Yes my poll question is going to be so this is I'm going to ask about our two subjects of conversation the U.S. and China. So on the U.S. how many of you this is now a preference poll and it'll be choice will be Obama or Romney. How many of you would prefer to see Romney win? And how many would prefer to see Obama win? How many expect to see Obama win? How many expect to see Romney win? Interesting now that the poll will be five years from now in China basically more. So the choices are going to be basically more of the same or something really different in terms of things not having worked out. Basically more of the same in China five years from now something really different in China five years from now. Interesting. Okay thank you very much. On that note can I ask you to thank our guest James Fellows.