 say one word cell phones please turn them off we have a trip on May 9th and the bus we have enough people on the bus to make the trip break even but there is more room on the bus if anyone has a friend and would like to join us the annual meeting is the 27th the week of the not next Friday the Friday after they are printed list of the candidates so remember there is a slate of candidates people who come to the meeting can offer other members to that that are just dying to be on the board and can't wait to be treasurer or president or something like that so you can certainly make a motion but I encourage you to come to the annual meeting because you will hear reports from our committees and how well the committees have done and whether this organization is going to be viable or fall apart so come and find out there is also a sign-up sheet because one of the benefits of the annual meeting is that you get to eat goodies prepared by some of these wonderful cooks sitting out here so if anyone is willing to make some lemon bars or chocolate chip cookies or brownies or something to share because after the annual meeting we will have time to socialize have some something to drink and have a sweet and then the lecture will start at 2 o'clock and now Patty March will introduce our speaker Orion Lewis received his undergraduate degree in international studies Phi Beta Kappa at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and his PhD in political science at the University of Colorado Boulder he's an assistant professor of political science at Middlebury College and the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey he works on integrating the two institutions and developing new learning models via experiential learning both in on campus and in country such as fieldwork in Asia he's interested in questions of state society relations under conditions of authoritarianism the role of information technology and changing social organization and foreign policy he's the author most recently of four related works published in Chinese and Asian political science journals on one authoritarian evolution in the controlled Chinese press to incentive to innovate question mark the behavior of local policymakers in China three the political economy of non-compliance in China in relation to industrial energy policy and number four net inclusion the new media and deliberative democracy in China he's currently working with a colleague from remnant University in Beijing on the role of personality and media choice in shaping political ideology in China today's presentation is authoritarian evolution how commercialization and the internet are fragmenting the Chinese public sphere Dr. Lewis okay well thank you very much for having me thank you patty for organizing this talk that I'm gonna give today is based off of two projects I've been working on one is an article I published last year on kind of changing media and commercialization and how that impacts what's going on in China and the other looks at both personality and media choice and tries to understand the evolution of political ideology in China so lights or presentation so when I when I lecture or talk I like to try and involve the audience so I may ask you questions they told me that you're supposed to have microphones but we'll do our best to make this as interactive as possible you have any questions feel free to interject at any point I think this work is interesting if you think about say what's going on in American politics today we talk about kind of political polarization and a lot of that is an argument about the internet and how it's created kind of different information environments within the United States and China is really an interesting test case right because China is a strong authoritarian regime it spent a great deal of resources on censorship media management and control and so it's what we would call a hard test case for the role of media or the internet and kind of creating political fragmentation right people grow up in an education system that's heavily indoctrinated there's a big push to get people to think in the way that the government wants them to think and so if we see diversity of viewpoints within China under that system then we can be pretty sure that those kinds of processes are certainly taking place elsewhere so I think I want to you know paint a picture of you for you in terms of China today and everybody knows about economic development China's rise but I think most people don't really fully understand the complexity that exists within Chinese society that we think of everybody wearing Mao suits and singing Mao songs and you know looking similar and kind of communist archetype and China today is really very different and this is a good example of these pictures of these kids does anyone want to venture a guess as to what they're doing they're protesting right and this is an online protest the signs that they're holding up say Nan Zhou Jiao which means let's go Nan Fang Zhou Mo which is a major newspaper in southern China and they had written a editorial for the Chinese New Year that said that they wanted to make an editorial called the dream of constitutionalism they're really making an argument about rule of law and the idea that China should move towards more of a rule of law and that editorial was actually censored by the publicity department also known as the propaganda department and the journalists basically went on strike and made a protest about it and got this information out there and you saw kids all over the country kind of basically doing this right online social movement in support of free speech and free thinking and the rule of law right and so this is something we don't often realize exists it exists a lot within China so what I want to do today is I'll give you a little bit of background about media commercialization I'll try and not make this to social science see but hit the key points I can talk about the implications for political pluralism within China if we have time I'll say I'll say a little bit about how the government itself is responding to this political pluralism and then we'll open it up for some discussion so the core question that I'm asking here is essentially what is the role of commercialization and new media which I define as all forms of media that usually exists online and are not part of kind of traditional broadcast or print media and how are these things reshaping state society relations in China so let's start with media commercialization technically all media organizations newspapers television stations etc are controlled by the state the party always has the editor or the head of those organizations is always a party member and so it still exists under this process of kind of state control there is a propaganda department that doesn't censor everything beforehand but it does provide some kind of post publication censorship at times so we think of Chinese media as being heavily state controlled but what has happened over the years is that instead of the state subsidizing all of these organizations they now have to rely on the market right the government told them you have to make money and be profitable so what does that mean for what a news organization is going to do how might that impact their behavior well if you think about what them think about your own market how does marketization and commercialization drive changes in our news media it means you're going to get a lot of different types of models different types of behavior people are trying to become profitable in doing so and China means a couple of other things too it means that you now have two masters right you have the state and you have the market and it may not be that those things are always in total congruence right there sometimes there is a profit motive to doing things that maybe the government doesn't want you to do and so you see attention in these two kind of logics of media production within this public sphere what I argue is that essentially what has happened is that traditional kind of party propaganda you know the people's daily where everything is highly choreographed and there's a bunch of kind of Orwellian you know party speak in it that that is not really viable from a market standpoint most people see through that and consumers really don't they don't buy it right so most people say like if I don't read people's daily I only read it if I want to know what the government is thinking right but that kind of traditional propaganda doesn't play in a marketplace of ideas people want sometimes more accurate information sometimes they want more entertaining information and so what you see is a diversification of media models that exists that on the one hand you have a number of people that are trying to fix the propaganda system and move away from this kind of very stultified language very formulaic to have more of a kind of professional orientation but still manipulate it in a way that it's considered what I would consider to be party propaganda so that's what I call party minimalism I've interviewed editors where they say you know my goal is to you know help explain policy in a way that kind of average citizens understand right make it more relatable more professional etc there are sensationalist models right so one way to navigate this is to engage in tabloid tab you know tabloid news you know national inquire type sorts of things and that's basically avoiding political risk but still being kind of commercialized and entertaining and profitable there are other models here where there is an effort to kind of become more professional and push the boundaries of what professional journalism can be within China and that really falls into two categories one I call shielded professionalism which is you want to kind of be critical of policy you want to kind of push change a little bit but you're going to use the party's own rhetoric and ideas to kind of shield yourself from criticism right so you frame your argument as being consistent with policy x y or z and so you can't be punished for that there are others like the southern weekend that I started off with that have really been known for kind of pushing the boundaries of critical journalism and professionalism and very often their editors get fired I think that one organization has gone through like 17 editors in the last you know decade or so so they punish but they're still an idea of professional journalism that continues to to move forward so my basic point here is that commercialization creates a diversification of media models and a diversification of content and it creates some degree of choice in terms of media and this is just an example of a content analysis that I did in my article last year these are five different newspapers where I sampled editorials kind of coded them based on the topics that they were covering and these are what I consider to be sensitive topics either kind of highly political topics or international foreign relations sorts of topics what you see here is that there's significant variation across these different newspapers right you have some Beijing papers that are considered to be more kind of boundary pushing sorts of organizations you see that the this is a paper in Jiangsu province which is known as being more tabloid right and so you basic point here is that there's differences between these organizations and I think that's one thing to take away we think of China as this kind of very monolithic sort of place like everybody is the same every news organization should be the same and it's really not second point here is about the internet and how the internet is changing communications and social organization and there's a lot of questions about the implication for control and authoritarian control right that the internet was designed to be this radical decentralized network to facilitate information and actually organizationally if you look at how the internet is structured it was designed to be resilient to control right there's not one master switch that you turn on and off but it was designed to be an open decentralized network so there's a lot of questions about this right if you have an authoritarian country that's based on top-down hierarchy and control why would you ever embrace the internet well if you're North Korea you're not right but what we see is that for most countries other than North Korea they have embraced the internet to a certain degree and China very much so one of the reasons is economics right that the internet is not just communication but it's also technology it's an economic platform as seen as if you want to be successful in a modern globalized economy you have to have this infrastructure in order to do so but there are implications for control and this is what we would call the autocrats or the dictators dilemma right that on the one hand you want the internet and new media for economic purposes but on the other hand you don't want the kind of political liberalization that might come about because of it so the question is how do you kind of manage that and I would say that there isn't autocrats dilemma for good reason right if you look at say the Arab Spring the role that new media played a lot of times it's talked about as Facebook revolutions I think that's a bit overplayed but it certainly does play a role in undermining authoritarian control at times but people like Mirazov have noted that this is also based on kind of liberal utopianism right that we have this idea that if you just give countries the internet that they'll all free themselves and become vibrant democracies right give give the Cubans the internet and social media and somehow the regime will collapse and he wrote argues that this is really you know not a totally accurate picture of the world right that governments are able to use the internet as well and they are able to control it as well so China is a really good case in that regard that the Chinese have always structured the internet in a way that they can control it right there's only a few points of entry in and out of the country they can shut down certain parts of it if they want they have keyword filters on all the data that's sifting through their networks made by Cisco systems the best that money can buy right so the Chinese are an exercise in trying to maintain control over the internet and they spent more resources than any other country in doing so China's also had rapid growth so they were late adopter for the internet if you go back to like 1990s they had hardly any internet connections at all you see here about 50 million internet users in 2002 but starting around the middle of the last decade you see this kind of rapid upward trajectory in terms of growth you fast forward to even just a couple years ago this number right here is 731 million people in China have internet access right so that's the penetration rate of about 53% if you have a country of 1.4 billion people you still have some ways to go right so China has grown dramatically in terms of its access to technology but there's still some room for development yes ma'am pretty reliable so in my experience it's pretty much pretty easy to get internet access anywhere you go like all the coffee shops and hotels and everything actually most people access internet on their on their cell phones now and so they have very fast cell phone networks and and it's pretty reliable if you're saying how easy is it to access there are some constraints there so now for example it used to be that I could go to a coffee shop and just get on a network now they always want you to have some kind of ID number so they're trying to do a lot with kind of registration and identification of users so that they know who the end users are right that's one way of overcoming the anonymity of the internet talk about this quickly you know that there are a lot of when you think about what we would call the great firewall or the net nanny people think that this is like one one certain thing but really the whole system of control is based on kind of multiple concentric circles of control and a lot of it's about kind of the technical enforcement right so the keyword routers that would automatically filter out content that they don't want there's legal regulations so all internet service providers like internet cafes or other internet service providers are also responsible for regulating their own content so internet companies themselves our internet sites themselves go in and regulate content right it's not just the government doing this all of the time there's human enforcement so you have a publicity bureau propaganda bureau that monitors things and sensors content and you even have other aspects to this so it's not just about preventing discourse but now it's also become about shaping discourse so there's actually a whole army of people that the government pays to post content on their behalf in various social media sites and we call them the 50 cent army because they get 50 cents for every posting that they make online right these are not people that work for the government they're just getting paid by the government and so you see that China has been very savvy and kind of adapting these new methods of control and public opinion management I would argue that it's also because you know as much as we like to say that they totally control public discourse online it's very complicated thing to do when you talk about the total amount of information that's out there 731 million users and so a lot of times what I would argue is a lot of the things that the government is doing is a reaction to kind of political liberalization that has occurred because of the new media and new technology so in terms of our study we asked two questions here that relate to what I've been talking about the first is about individual personality so some of my work is focused on kind of evolutionary biology and theories of cognition and personality one of the questions here is about how personality might impact the choices that you make in terms of what type of information to consume and what type of information you're going to believe in right and one of the things that we found in political psychology is that there is an kind of inherent individual level distinction that explains your political ideology in the Western context we talk about differences between liberals and conservatives and the different types of cognitive patterns that they have we would say that conservatives tend to want a certain degree of certainty and liberals want have a need for cognition right they want more ambiguity and and discussion etc so this has been shown to have clear correlations with political ideology just based on who you are at a basic individual level is going to shape what your political beliefs are what we argue today is that it also shapes the types of media that you choose and the types of information that you're going to believe in so our methodology I'm not going to go into this too much but we did an online survey of internet users in China we distributed this to multiple different forums we're trying to get as representative of a sample as we possibly can so we tried to send it to more conservative leaning forums more liberal leaning forums etc we have more than 10,000 observations from internet users in China which is a pretty good number so first slide here really looks at kind of the distribution of ideological placement I'm not going to talk too much about how we measure this but we have kind of a battery of questions which we use to plot ideology we also have respondents kind of self-identify themselves and in China the extreme left the extreme left is the conservative position right so the government is communist that and so that we consider the left to be conservatism whether it's more adherent to the state whereas right is more kind of reform oriented right so the right are the people that were protesting for openness and free speech etc one of the things that we find is you see a greater proportion of internet users are on the liberal side of the spectrum as opposed to the conservative side of the spectrum we have some explanation for why that might be but it is important to note that we have consistently found more respondents to be liberals than conservatives in our studies we had a battery of questions to measure what we call authoritarian personality right so this is really thinking about what types of personalities facilitate authoritarianism and generally this is about kind of deference to hierarchy right that you're not kind of questioning authority you're going along with authority you can see the questions that we ask in order to measure that government leaders are like the head of a family we should all we should all follow their decisions even if a parents demand is unreasonable children should do it it's taken for granted that subordinate should submit to a higher-ranking person right so all of these questions are kind of different ways of getting at kind of deference to hierarchy so we measure kind of personality how authoritarian is your personality versus how reformist or liberal and we also look at kind of media consumption right so the different ways we look at media consumption are between official media so do you consume kind of official party mouthpiece sorts of media like the people's daily or the nightly news on television is also highly controlled and official in nature or do you consume what we call unofficial media right the more commercially oriented the more aggressively professional sorts of news organizations and information online right so this is a multivariate regression model basically what this shows is the effect that these different factors have on one's ideology and so the negative numbers here means that it is having more of a conservative effect on their ideology and anything over on this side means is having more of a liberal effect on someone's ideology and the OME is official media exposure right that's how frequently and how often you consume official media and the UME is unofficial media exposure so the two things that are notable here is first of all official media exposure has a very large and significant effect on a person's ideology less so than unofficial media exposure and secondly that authoritarian personality is also highly correlated with a more conservative ideological position right whether you're a party member age gender some of these things also matter but our test variables here the things we're really interested in are all significant so you see these are kind of confidence intervals none of them touch the zero here that means that they're considered statistically significant factors in explaining ideology we also looked at this a different way this isn't a kind of political science research methods talk but one of the things we did was we use a different way of modeling which not only allows you to look at the relationship between your test variable and your outcome but also the relationships between your different explanations right so we can look at the correlations not just between personality and ideology but also the interaction of personality and media choice what this shows here is as we saw before authoritarian personality is strongly correlated with a more conservative ideology but you see a couple of other things so there's a direct correlation here but there's also an indirect effect as personality is channeled through media choice right and what this says is if you're more conservative you're much more likely to consume official media and that has a significant additional impact on your leftward leaning trajectory ideologically conversely you see a similar pattern on the other side more anti authoritarian personalities are more likely to choose unofficial media and that again correlates significantly with a more liberal leaning ideology so these are our findings and what I argue is that there's basically a siloing effect which means that people segment themselves into different information silos when we talk about the increase in political polarization within the United States or other Western countries a lot of times it's an argument about the diversification of our media landscape and this idea that people are now self selecting into different information environment so that it's not just that you have differences of opinion but you also have complete differences in terms of the information you're exposed to and how that impacts the opinions that you have and what's interesting about this is that this is not in a liberal Western democracy this is under a system of control where there is a state that is trying to push everybody in a conservative direction for the most part so this is important right because it explains increase in kind of what I would call political pluralism right the Chinese society is not monolithic like we often assume there's actually a diversification of political viewpoints within China and that under conditions of media choice it may be that that diversification is actually growing right that because you now have greater information choice there is this kind of greater divergence in public opinion within China so what does this mean well it means that the government has to really think about how it reacts to this so I want to give you a couple of examples in terms of authoritarian responses right so if the government now faces a much more kind of complex information environment much more complex ideological environment what does it do right how does it respond how does it decide to exert its control there's a couple of studies out that help to explain a few things so the first one is by Gary King at Harvard this is a pretty well known study at this point but they look at online censorship within China they have very complicated algorithm that they use to look at content but they really ask this question what does the government censor and why and I think by looking at what the government chooses to censor you can get a sense of what are they really concerned about and what are they not so concerned about and one of things you see is that they don't always censor criticism even criticism of the government that the idea that you can't criticize the state or that you don't have freedom of speech in that regard is really not entirely accurate right if you have a very complicated public sphere online you have to pick and choose what you censor and what you don't sometimes there's an argument that for an authoritarian government actually giving people a voice online letting blow off steam is a good thing right they feel like they have more freedom they have more voice but it doesn't really necessarily have any kind of you know real impact on your ability to stay in power what we call a release valve right a release valve on the pressure cooker what they do choose to censor is things that can lead to social unrest and social mobilization right and that tells you something that what they're really worried about is kind of you know disgruntled actors going into the streets right they're worried about the point where online criticism becomes offline criticism in the streets right and I would argue that when you look at what the Chinese government does across the board really their main concern is regime legitimacy and staying in power so anything that is seen as a central threat to their ability to stay in power is what they really censor so we talk about Tiananmen Taiwan Tibet and there's an X which is Xinjiang Xinjiang province so those are like you know if you go search for Tiananmen Square on the Chinese Internet you're not going to find it right you're gonna find like tourists looking at maps in Tiananmen Square you know so that tells you something those are all things that would fundamentally threaten the government's legitimacy and its ability to stay in power you can see this elsewhere so I have this is actually a student of mine I think she's now at the MIT Sloan Business School but she wrote this really great senior thesis where we also did a study of what the government censors and we looked at Sino-Weibo which is essentially the Chinese version of Twitter kind of microblogging site very popular here you see a picture of Xi Jinping on Wei Wei wall the current president or emperor and basically what she did is she did a kind of geographic analysis of what's going on in terms of censorship so we looked at I think something like sixty five thousand these are all this is a database of posts that had been deleted by the government right so we were only looking at things that we knew had been deleted I think there are sixty five thousand of them and you see some interesting trends here right first of all that they're concerned they're very concerned about Beijing obviously it's your capital you know of course you would be very focused on what's going on there but you see kind of that this is also a development story right Shanghai Guangdong the richer provinces have a higher degree of censorship that makes sense too because they also have a significant number of users but you also see places like Tibet obviously is a core concern for them that they're worried about if you look at topics what are what are they censoring questions about freedom and democracy occupy a large portion of this ethnic grievances environmental grievances and grievances about corruption right once again mostly things that relate to either government legitimacy or could potentially threaten the government in terms of kind of social unrest so we see a lot of protests about environmental problems if you've ever been to Beijing you would understand because it's like walking through a small claw small cloud every day right so like I don't I don't want to take my five-year-old son to Beijing because of the pollution so you see a lot of unrest over environmental issues corruption and also these ethnic these potential ethnic mobilization campaigns in Tibet and Xinjiang you see some different patterns in this too one of the things I think is really interesting right so you see like Hainan province is the Hawaii of China they obviously have more kind of environmental concerns but you see some differences between say the Uyghur movement in Xinjiang which is really has a high proportion of kind of ethnic identity claims as opposed to Tibet which is has a high proportion of kind of freedom and democracy claims so those two movements in and of themselves are talking about their movements in different ways right that the Tibetans are framing this as freedom and democracy whereas the Uyghurs are really making this about kind of ethnic identity so there's some interesting patterns there so what the final takeaway here is that authoritarian repression in China is much more kind of multifaceted and is different than the kind of authoritarian repression you might think about during the Cold War right that it's not quite as heavy-handed as it used to be that there are avenues for free expression right so really focus on this kind of core issue of regime durability if you can't censor and control all information you have to focus on what's you know the core issue for you as a state but what we what we see is kind of expanding opportunities for expression and I've done a lot of interviews with journalists you know they always say I'd always ask you know do you feel like your freedom of expression is more or less than it was 10 years ago and it's always universally like we have way more opportunity for expression as journalists and editors right that we can talk about issues that we couldn't before right environmental concerns public health concerns right there is this kind of limited watchdog role for the media within China and it's not all of just about control all the time voice greater voice for citizens you know one of the things about the internet is that it's a user driven platform so you're giving citizens the opportunity to voice themselves and that could be dangerous if you're you know Egypt or Tunisia but it could also be beneficial if you're able to kind of keep that thing in a box right you're giving citizens a greater sense of freedom and this is what Rebecca McKinnon calls the gilded bird cage right that there's still a cage in China but maybe that little cage is more like an aviary or it's a little bit bigger and what you see actually as citizens feel like they have a sense of freedom because that aviary is much bigger than the little bird cage that they used to be in and so there's also criticism of that and that it's still an aviary right there's only there are still places that you can't go how we doing on time I'll give you a couple of examples here that I think are interesting you see that one of the ways that authoritarian control has changed within this environment is that the government is not cannot completely control information discourse and so it has become more kind of proactive and and changed how it engages in control and so what this means is that they actually study like media management theory and you know think about how the United States say you know United States government tries to kind of manage media discourse and they've become more proactive in terms of kind of marketing and spin right so that it's not just about this kind of blunt you know hammer of propaganda that's that's you know hit hits you on the head every day but that the messages that they create are more subtle and more savvy in terms of how they try and do it and so it's more like you don't realize that there is a mechanism of control behind it so an example here is what I call the Google incident this happened a little while back when Google exited China but basically Google claimed that it had been hacked and that some of its data had been stolen it probably was and what they did is they went public with it right that they basically said government hacked us and they said we are no longer going to censor our search engine in China so once again every search engine has to kind of self censor and so they made this kind of very public statement basically taking on the government very directly and this is a sensitive issue right because you're taking on the propaganda system or the system of control right that's another thing you don't want people talking about and so what you saw was that they tried to block all discussion of this on the internet and in the media but that information still got out there right that you can you know hundreds of millions of people you can't control everything that's out there and so you had citizens in Beijing going to Google's office and laying white flowers down on their sign because white flowers are a symbol of mourning right and so you had these kind of very dramatic sorts of things taking place and so if you can't control it what do you do you're going to spin it right so these are some examples this is from a very nationalist newspaper called the the Huanqiu Shuba the the kind of international foreign policy newspaper and they essentially not only did they start covering it but you see they have like a whole page right they have the whole page is devoted to the Google incident you can come over here and voice your opinion and take some take some surveys so they had chat rooms and they had these surveys but if you look at what they're saying here is structured in a way that's very clear right so the first question is do you think the Chinese government should accept Google's demands to operate under uncensored conditions and then the second question is do you think Google's actions constitute an infringement on China's political sovereignty right this one I like this one too do you think the Google incident who do you think the Google incident harms the most Google the United States government Chinese internet users or the Chinese government right so the implication is very clear here they want to spin this as this isn't just about Google taking some kind of principled action this is a nefarious plot by the United States and Western countries to infringe on China's political sovereignty right that's the that's the narrative that they're trying to build but they're not just banging you over the head with it's in the context of you freely expressing your opinion right so it's a good example of how they've kind of changed what they do to become more more savvy I think Xi Jinping the current president also embodies this to very large extent you know I don't know how much you pay attention to China's political system but generally the leadership is like very boring and technocratic so who didn't tell the previous president was like one of the most boring people you've ever seen in your whole life right she has totally flipped the script on that he is a populist to a very large extent and a lot of what he does is in a popular populist orientation right so you see him on social media looking looking swab and his leather jacket he'll go to he'll go to like a dumpling restaurant and order dumplings and carry his own tray and sit down at these cheap dumpling restaurants and like talk to citizens right like that's very very different from what the leadership in China has traditionally done and so you see this as well that it's kind of reforming the image of the leadership to make it more palatable more populist and more popular I think he is popular to a very large extent this is not so dissimilar from what we see with other authoritarian regimes I think Putin in Russia is a good example of this you remember our friend Hugo Chavez in Venezuela he was a master of kind of media populism right using the media to build kind of a popular view of yourself right he had a show called a low president that was basically a variety show that he would come on and sing and dance and talk about whatever and you know it was paradigmatic of his use of media to become kind of an authoritarian populist so this is the environment that we live in now that we have a much more complicated and complex information environment that has much more has a very large impact on kind of political pluralism and ideological diversification it also has an impact on how governments navigate this that I would argue that information age is a challenge to authoritarian states that we do see change happening and that they are responding to that in a way that is very different from the kind of Soviet Union or China of the past so this is where we are and all in there and happy to answer any questions in one of your slides a while back it showed that both gender and age were factors but it didn't say what gender or how age impacted it yes so I can tell you right here so so male so the male is associated with greater more of a liberal position in this study and the age group is that also something I think this is really interesting actually older citizens tend to be more liberal in orientation whereas younger citizens are expressing more of a conservative ideology and this actually I think this is one of the really interesting puzzles about what's going on in China today that the youth in China are very cosmopolitan you know they grew up in an information age they talk about going to Middlebury College and Harvard and wherever so they're very they're extremely worldly and cosmopolitan at the same time they're much more nationalistic and and I've always found that hard to believe like they are globalized citizens and yet they're also more nationalistic and that's really a puzzle that I don't I can't fully understand I think it's a lot to do with kind of national patriotism and pride in China's rise yep you showed on your on the screen Shanghai was a largely internet controlled city but I could I watched the BBC all the time and I got a New York Times and there weren't holes in it were you staying in a international hotel sure but so were my friends and my Chinese friends and they would come to my room we watched the BBC so that is that controlled so that's a good that's a good point it's actually not as controlled because it's in English first of all so they're much more interested in the Chinese the Chinese language sorts of sources so like if you were gonna watch I don't know if you watch the nightly news in China but it is highly choreographed so so no I think I think in general we would say English language sorts of things are not as tightly controlled as Chinese language sources they're not worried about foreigners rising up in the streets they do I think that's also that's also a good example of how they can't control everything too right because Chinese people speak English they can have access to that that's going to reach reshape how they think there's a lot of sources online where they will take New York Times articles or the economists and translate them into Chinese right so you can actually find that information in Chinese on the internet if you know where to look for it right and that happens all the time yes I have a question setting aside political silence which you've been saying that they protect strongly the under the internet can the Chinese people quest for knowledge not political knowledge just knowledge with all the spectrums that can bring them yes so this is one thing I've looked at when I've I lived in Beijing in 0607 and I ended up reading a lot of academic articles in Chinese and I was always pretty surprised at how open and critical they were and so I always kind of viewed it as well if you're at more of an elite level there is greater freedom of questing for for knowledge right if you're in the university or you can speak English and that the real control is on the what we call the Lao Baixing right the old 500 names right where they really more concerned about the masses right masses of people not the elites so I've always thought that elites had more of kind of a privileged position within the system and that there was greater opportunity to quest for knowledge as you say I think if you look at you know the top universities I was at Beijing University they always had like top international scholars going through there right so if you're bad you know you can talk to you pretty much whoever you want and that's not controlled at all one thing I would say is that that is changing right so Xi Jinping part of his one thing I would say is that he has been engaged in a process of authoritarian rollback over the last few years I think it's very clear it's actually become much harder I'm going to Indonesia this summer because it's become much harder for me to do work in China and part of that authoritarian rollback is something that we saw in the past which was like guard against you know subversive bourgeois liberalization and and so the he's directed universities to not have as much kind of Western academic resources right and so there's this was I think something we saw continually in the 80s and you know it's kind of pushed back against Westernization and he's doing that again today I didn't think I'd ever we'd ever see that but he is he is trying to do that whether or not it can be done I don't I don't know I interviewed the head of the communications university and asked him about his curriculum he said yeah we study kind of Marxist theories of communications but most of what they did was kind of Western media theory so I you know I think they're definitely trying to do this I question how successful they'll be at it so I have a couple of questions about the censorship about the censorship do you think the average Chinese person understands that what they are able to access online or in print media or whatever form has been filtered and do they constantly have the sense that they're not getting the whole picture or do they not realize that I think they do I mean I think you know again I think it depends on who you're talking to you know I tend to talk to more I think politically aware sorts of individuals but you know everybody I talked to they know full well that they're under a system of control it's not like it's something you don't ever realize and so they talk about it and then and you know they understand like part of their choice is based off of that right so I interviewed a very kind of aggressive the economist of China and they said like 18% of their audience was government officials because the government officials wanted like a more unvarnished sort of information I had one of my friends is a major in the PLA and she said I would never read the people's daily unless I just want to see what the government line is so I think we have to think about this in two ways I think one is people that are kind of politically aware do you know about this but there's a lot of what's called bread bread and circuses taking place and distractions and so there's a lot of people that just are not engaged in that at all and don't even think about it right they're playing they're playing video games they're watching desperate housewives you know like there's like a mass you know a mass opiate that is out there that I think also distracts a lot of people and that's also very important functionally for the state right they don't want people to be engaged they want them to be kind of distracted but it also gives them a sense of freedom right they say how am I controlled I can download you know any desperate housewives I want you know I have greater freedom right so so I think if you actually look at public opinion that's one of the parts of why the regime has been successful in being so durable is people do think that they're freer than they used to be and the deal is basically we give you freedom of choice socially you know a lot of things you can say you know talk about anything there's much greater freedom of thought and discourse you just can't cross these you know remaining red lines that we want you to stay out of and that's generally politics here at the back you mentioned Tiananmen Square I'm here at the back okay and next year is going to be the 30th anniversary of that event do you think that the propaganda bureau is already sitting deciding how they're going to spin all the news that's going to come out of Western media you said the Chinese know it as a geographic destination they don't really know it is the iconic thing that it was so will they learn something or will it be censored and blocked that will be one where they they do everything to block that and they do that every year every year on June 4th they they're always looking out for Tiananmen information so that's something they gear up for on an annual basis not just on the kind of 30 year anniversary sorts of things and yeah it's it that is kind of Orwellian in some sense there's some good videos out there out there where somebody is interviewing these Chinese students in the United States and they show them the kind of Tankman photo and ask them you know what is this and they none of them know what it is so that it that is one area where that is such a politically sensitive sort of issue that they will go all out on that for sure my question is that you said it's me it's more difficult for you to go to China now and you're going to Indonesia instead what is it that that's difficult what are you not allowed to ask certain things are you afraid you're going to be jailed or imprisoned or something or do you just not feel comfortable no it's not it's not that quite that bad you know like I've never been never been tailed by I've never had a public security bureau come talk to me or have tea it's more about access and the ease at which you can access people to talk to you so I'll give you an example I did a project two years ago where we took a number of Middlebury students to China to do fieldwork and we had a project on vocational education which I don't think of me was not particularly sensitive sort of topic and we were in Hangzhou and just before they were getting ready to have a G20 meeting there and Xi Jinping had told everybody to be aware of foreign spies posing as academics and so it was super hard we had a successful project but it was really hard to set up interviews I think in part because we're coming as a big team too was a little bit different but we had to get we had to really pull a lot of strings in order to get the interviews that we did and we had to work much harder to get people to talk to us and so it was possible we did it we have a good project but it was just tiring it just took me a lot of a lot of time and a lot of effort and it was clear that people were much more on edge about talking to us in ways that they weren't before when I did I mean I did my dissertation on media in China which is a pretty sensitive topic and I did over a hundred hundred and twenty interviews and it was not hard to get people to sit down and talk about this with me and sometimes in very open ways and I so I was always kind of optimistic about China that even though you have sensitive topics that you know there's a saying you can say anything you want as long as it's around the dinner table that's sort of changed a bit so I think for me it's more of just the ease to which you can talk to people and the amount of effort you have to put into a project have you been to Indonesia do you think it's better there yeah absolutely think it's better yeah Indonesia is a consolidating democracy right so Indonesia went through a democratic transition in 98 by all accounts they are consolidating as a democracy so it's very pluralistic multi-ethnic society and they have a moderate form of political Islam so I have a lot of contacts there and I'm expecting it to be much easier do you have any indication that Chinese students who have been here and studied in return to China and when they were here of course they did learn about Tiananmen Square at least our version of it that they are harassed controlled threatened in any way and they can't forget what they've learned when they came here what happens to them I you know I I don't think anything happens to them to be honest you know I have a number of former students that are living in China right now you know I think they're always trying to balance what they've been taught growing up with what they learn in the West and we I had some students that a project on this and it does impact them so they they talked to a lot of Chinese students at Middlebury and they did say like being exposed and to Western thinking and ideas does impact my my viewpoints but I don't think there's any effort to kind of harass them when they go back there really is personal freedom in China it's really as long as you don't you know as long as you're not like organizing a labor movement or something like that then then you're generally fine right so as long as you're not involved in politics you can think whatever you want for the most part so it is interesting I worked with a student from Vietnam last semester too and she said to me at the end she said I just realized that everything I've been taught was controlled and and managed about Ho Chi Minh and all of this stuff and so it was really interesting like I had gone through a whole semester of political communication with her she has this like dramatic revelation at the end so it is interesting and there are there's increasing numbers of students studying outside of China for sure so how they manage that is interesting as well thank you all very much this is very interesting