 Shun pwynau drotsol maen nhw hwn have lived in China on and off for about 30 years and it's just back a year ago last october 2018 And he has a really deep understanding of its people, it's society And he paints a picture I think for us of a new China, an China that we don't often hear about on and off maybe and how it operates and interacts with their system When you hear his presentation and read his books, China will know that China exists and we no longer think it exists. He'll explore with us how AI, big data and the social credit system as helping President Xi and his party to reinvent China, or perhaps reinvent dictatorship and China for the information age. age and of course this has an amazing impact for us here in in the west so it's not all about trade wars this is a really deep understanding of the society what it holds for us and the future of western society so Kai we look forward to your presentation thank you very much thank you very much is that which way round thanks a lot for coming I'm very happy actually to be here and I'm very happy about the English language translation of my book I did write the book I just told a couple of people I started writing the book when I was still living in China but I started writing it the night Donald Trump became president of the United States really that was the time when this book actually forced itself upon me I'm not kidding because yeah you know when I went to China first time 30 years ago when you spoke about China when you wrote about China you spoke about China but today that's different when you speak about China today if you when you write about China today is big you always speak about us I want to show a couple of pictures be first this is an old propaganda poster from the Mao times the title is I live under the sunshine of the party this is actually this is a poster that was up very close to where I lived I was living in the Hutongs of Beijing in the old alleyways in a Syrian in an old courtyard home and this poster I could see on Wang Fujin Wang Fujin is the main shopping street in Beijing maybe 400 meters away from my home I saw it every day for a couple of years actually the two big red characters there are freedom because of course I was living in the land of freedom next to it where are the posters Minju democracy because China is the land of democracy obviously and no other presidents since she for a long time has spoken so much about the rule of law like Xi Jinping so China has a free democratic country governed by the rule of law it's a strange animal still a strange creature this China it has been for a long time what I want to tell you tonight today is something I found that many people still haven't realized at least in Germany where I come from and in other parts of Europe is that the China we actually grew up with and the China we have known for 30 or 40 years the China of Deng Xiaoping the China of reform and opening up the China that was curious towards the world and then the world was curious towards this country like me myself this China doesn't really exist anymore there's been a new China forming in the last six or seven years but some things here this is a famous Reuters actually news agency picture from three years ago I think it's from Chengdu and what is this country actually is it capitalism is it socialism is it I mean calls itself a socialist country at the same time it's one of the most unequal countries in the world there are more billionaires living in Beijing than in New York you have Gucci stores but always above all the commerce and the culture of shopping and is the communist party it's always on top and it always has been there when I came back to Europe I suddenly discovered that some American traditions like Black Friday had made it into Europe I don't know about Ireland but suddenly in Germany everybody you know buys their stuff on Amazon with lots of discount and Amazon gets sort of sales records every year but of course a much bigger shopping orgy is going on in Beijing in China and it's the single stay is there Black Friday it's 11th of November every year it's run by Alibaba Alibaba the big platform the big internet platform that has more revenue on its platforms than eBay and Amazon combined and this is a picture from 2018 it always starts at midnight and of course they're selling much more than the Americans one minute after midnight they already had a revenue stream of two billion US dollars last year so what has happened in the past years in the past six years under Xi Jinping you know what did Deng Xiaow that the China I was talking about the China we knew back then the China of reform and opening up a lot of the things that Deng Xiaoping did with this country after Mao Zedong died was a reaction to Mao it was a reaction to the crazy dictatorship of Mao that really laid this whole country into in ruins so what he did was he he got rid of the personality cult and he sort of established collective leadership there was a Politburo of many six or seven or nine people ruling together he decentralized power he gave regions and cities a free room and space for experiments this is why you know free trade zones joint ventures all these economic innovations back then in the 1980s they were started by Deng Xiaoping's reforms and this is the Renminer Mao the people's daily the main party newspaper in china and it's been the addition of the party congresses which are being held every five years and where a new leader has been chosen and if as you can see starting from the first one on the left it has always been the new standing committee of the Politburo that has been a collective leadership and has has been pictured as such on the title page on the front page of the people's daily this is 2012 this is when i came back to china after seven years in turkey november 2012 Xi Jinping just was elected the new party chairman and still he is one of only seven of the standing committee this year is 2017 obviously something happened in between suddenly you have one guy being much bigger than the other ones so again the people's daily this is from an addition last year there was an africa summit so from page of the people's daily 11 articles every single one of them starts with the same three characters Xi Jinping the name of the party chief and on page two nine pictures of Xi Jinping something that really wasn't like that since the times of Mao the don suddenly the little red book has made a comeback also this is Xi Jinping thought you know Xi Jinping has changed the country in ways in these six or seven years that we really didn't think were possible you know there were a lot of optimists back then in 2012 who thought yeah everybody knew that china needed reform there was a feeling of crisis there was a sort of fantasy actual feeling actually really in the country there was a lot of corruption there was the inequality the party was losing control and the party was losing its ideological core also you know nobody believed in marxism anymore and all this stuff and what did and everybody knew that china needed reforms but even in the party many people thought those reforms you know people i spoke to at least intellectuals party members think tank members thought you know maybe we need more of the sort of separation of powers independent judiciary these kind of things to get rid of corruption and then along came Xi Jinping and made something completely different he took back control for the party yeah suddenly it's not the main aim is not any longer sort of economic success that was like under under the Deng Xiaoping years this was like the number one objective was economic success and even politics was only number two with Xi Jinping things are different anymore Xi is not the new Mao some people say you sometimes you can read a headline the new Mao Zedong this is this is nonsense he's a very different character from Mao Mao was a rebel the eternal rebel he loved chaos and this is why we had the cultural revolution and really broke the backbone of the chinese people and he didn't do that by by accident he really this was really um what he actually thrived in and this is how he got his power times and again back so Xi Jinping is the opposite he's a complete freak for control freak and he loves stability and control but he quotes Mao frequently one of the quotes he uses most regularly is doesn't matter whether the north or the south doesn't matter whether east or west or the center the party controls everything suddenly the party has to be in control of everything again which was not the case for 30 40 years the china that we got to know was a china where suddenly civil society grew up people had room you know of course the economy got more freedom but society also got more space and more freedom and there were niches for people doing things that people had thought impossible before but all these niches are gone again Xi Jinping is sort of bringing repression back he's bringing ideology back he suddenly he's talking about marks again you know day in day out it's about mark people have to go to marxism classes again they have to they have to do it in the ministries in the companies friday afternoon you have to do your marxism is cooling in the university in the think tanks or do people still believe in marx i don't think so but that's probably not the point the point is that you show obedience so ideology is back the west is back as the ideological enemy suddenly it has been back as the enemy for since 2013 already look at this the iconography even you know Mao Zhedong on the right Xi Jinping on the left not only does he have a little red book he even has a little red app this is the Xue Xi Jianguo app study Xi study Xi Jinping and make the country strong this is an app where you find all the works of Xi Jinping obviously you will find other revolutionary movies and things but most importantly you can do quiz you can do quizzes on this on this thing and the party wants you to do that and they have competitions they have quiz competitions and the good thing is you know as opposed to the sort of the renminer bow the people's daily which you were supposed to read at home or in your office and but nobody nobody really can control whether you just threw it in a corner and went to sleep with this app they have complete control over you and you get points and there are competitions and you have to sort of you know compete against your colleagues and you get double points for example if you do the quiz between eight and ten in the evening this is my home where I was living two weeks after I moved in there this camera appeared two cameras yeah so as we're going to talk a little bit about artificial intelligence facial recognition and this kind of stuff this is actually one of the most famous facial recognition spots in Beijing you might have read about this this is the toilet of the temple of heaven in Beijing you only get toilet paper if you have your face scanned there and you get 60 centimeters every time if you need more you have to wait for nine minutes this obviously is more a gadget because people have been stealing toilet paper this is why they installed that this is from one of the companies I visited since time you know one of the things Xi Jinping did was basically I told you he took back control for the party repressionist back ideology is back basically with one leg he's gone straight back to the 1950s but if that was everything you know we needn't really worry because socialist parties from the 1950s we have survived a lot but Xi Jinping is doing a second thing as well with the with his other foot he's going straight into the future artificial intelligence big data the modern information technologies you know we were once told you know you remember you know Bill Clinton Bill Glick Bill Gates all these people they told us already 15 20 years ago that starting with every single technology that came up satellite TV mobile phones all these technologies were supposed to bring freedom into the last corner of the earth you know and of course it was the same with the internet and it was Bill Clinton who said you know good luck to the Chinese with your with your attempts to control the internet it's you will be as successful as when you try to nail jello to the wall but here we are we have the great firewall and the jello is there right there for everyone to see not only do they not fear the internet and the other technologies anymore but they fell in love with it they fell in love with it really so in my last two years i started off right when i started off writing book i thought i write a book about classical mechanisms of dictatorship because i you know it was the night when donald trump was elected and suddenly i realized wow so many things that this guy does i know his lies the fake news alternative fact things i don't know whether you remember but two and a half years ago all of us or many of us were surprised by these things you know now we can't hear it anymore because every day it's just it's been too much but two and a half years ago people were were were saying like what what what what is this you know fake news alternative facts and and and this guy lying why does he and why does he do it in such a shameless way and people were starting to call donald trump a pathological liar and i was sitting there in beijing i was like no no no that's not what he does it's not pathological he is not lying pathologically he's lying systematically and strategically he is not lying to convince you he's lying to submit you this is what he's doing and this is what all autocrats have been doing all through history and what all would be autocrats are doing at the moment so i wanted to write about these you know i wanted to write about lies and about words and about language and about about remembrance or amnesia the collective amnesia that the communist party you know imposes on its people you know 30 years Tiananmen we just had june 4th the whole world remembers it only china doesn't i have the the friend of my colleague in beijing we were two correspondents from sutodgytsaido he is married to a chinese she was studying on beijing university the first time ever in her life that she heard of the Tiananmen massacre was when she when she was 26 years old studying in london and so was because she was the first time that she heard of the democracy movement in 1989 and of the massacre it's propaganda is successful censorship is successful brainwashing is successful but then in those two years suddenly there was an explosion of all this you know artificial intelligence activity and suddenly my book turned out to become something completely new you might have seen this picture this went through a lot of media or pictures like this there are you know with the facial recognition thing they are doing the police in shengen and shengyang they started this is shengyang in the northeast of china when you're jay walking on the street you know immediately the camera will pick you up and the video screen on the other side will show your picture the moment you're still walking and not only will it show your picture it will show at the same time your name and your ID number on the video screen while you are still walking so these were all pictures I this is a picture I also took myself from when I visited sense time sense time was when I visited it the most the highest valued artificial intelligence startup in the world these are pictures from I think Luoyang central china where the police started experimenting with sort of you know like the google glass thing where they have facial recognition built in into their glasses and they can recognize you while you are walking there on the street this is cool we were just this is a rural school where where students wear headbands which are supposed to read their brain waves and then they are supposed it's supposed to tell you how concentrated they are or whether they're asleep the same thing they do with facial recognition also we were just talking during lunch about the school in hanjo where they do this with facial recognition and after each lesson or after each school day you will get a statistic that tells you you have been asleep for 10 minutes you have been happy for 20 minutes and things like this and this is the social credit system this is the most sexy part of this whole new surveillance thing and it has been written a lot about so you must have read about it I'm sure I just wanted to show you this picture this is from the official credit china I think it's the name of the of the website so the official government website for the social credit system and it shows someone who has landed on the blacklist of the social credit system so he is a trustbreaker what does the social credit system do maybe I should say this first the social credit system is supposed to divide the people into trustbreakers and honest people the trustworthy people and if you are a trustbreaker your rating goes down and you will land on a blacklist and this is just a picture to tell you a cartoon to tell you what happens if you are on a blacklist this is a guy who wants a date with this beautiful girl and he is sweating because he already knows probably what's going to happen and she tells him no you are a trustbreaker I saw your picture on the big screen of the neighborhood in the streets nobody will ever have a date with you again the social credit system maybe this is where I I start with the social credit system what is this first of all it's important to know that the social credit system all the things you've read about are from pilot projects mainly and certain pieces of the puzzle that are already nationwide but the actual introduction of the social credit system is only supposed to happen next year in 2020 so what is this it starts actually you know great rating systems we also had in our own societies and in germany we call it choufa I know in england there's something called what's it called xperian it's like this where your financial credit history is you know when you go to a bank and you want a credit your bank actually looks up whether you paid all your debts or your taxes and stuff and then they decide whether you whether you can have a loan and how high the interest is on this loan and so on so the chinese took that at the starting point but then they said you know when I had my first interview with a professor from beijing university professor jung jung he's a high ranking advisor to the system he said yes mr shun we studied all the system we studied your germ choufa and we find it very interesting very good but and of course it says something about you whether you're trustworthy you know how you how you whether you you paid your whether you repaid your loans of course it does say something but let me ask you something mr stradwanta how you treat your parents and whether you pay for your metro ticket and whether you're jay walking you know whether you pay attention to red lights on the street doesn't that tell me much more so we want to collect everything you know i said it's quite simple you know there are two kinds of people in the world the good ones and the bad ones now imagine a world where the good ones are rewarded and the bad ones are punished a world in which those who respect their parents never jay walk never download pirated movies you know the people who pay all their bills on time where they are rewarded for their behavior a world where those people are allowed to buy soft sleeper train tickets soft sleeper is like the good sleeper tickets and they are given easy access to bank loans and the others aren't you know the ones who cheat at the university university admission test the ones who download the films illegally or the ones whose wife just had one more child than allowed by the state system you know so this in the end would be a world in which an all seeing all knowing digital machine knows more about you than you do but this machine then can help you improve yourself by telling you in real time how exactly to become a more honest and trustworthy person doesn't that sound like a fairer world like a more harmonious world so it's about honesty it's about create creating the new man again actually in the end you know you know the new man this old socialist project so we want to create the honest person is what they told me in china we want to create we want we want to normalize people we want that that everybody behaves according to norm woman y bar am biao jion hwa they told me yeah we want to have a norm for all people and everybody has to behave at the same norm because then this is what this party official told me then my job is much easier the professor then told me mr shippen if you really want to see how this is working you should go to rung chung you should go to the city of rung chung in shandong because this is the pilot project where we think the system is working the best so go there and visit the office of honesty the chang siu man there is an office office of honesty and i was like what so of course george orwell comes up very often you know in this context and so the ministry what is it the ministry of truth right the ministry of truth george orwell by the way is not banned in china you can get him in every good bookshop so people do read george orwell you just wonder sometimes whether they read him as a warning or as a manual so in rung chung i went there i visited the office of honesty the whole they they divided up there's a neighborhood with 11 000 inhabitants they divided up the whole neighborhood in into cells with 400 families to each unit they watch each other and they report inappropriate behavior and this is how at the moment this all is fed into the system because obviously in the end it's supposed to be algorithms this is what the framework the national framework from 2014 says in the end we want artificial intelligence to record all your behavior your financial behavior but also your social all your social actions and your moral behavior and it's supposed to be recorded in real time if possible by algorithms it's supposed to be evaluated in real time and sanctioned so rewarded are punished but at the moment it's still they're still doing it the analog way in a lot and a lot of times so in this neighborhood for example they had a public shaming is a big part of it they had a huge blackboard and on the blackboard they have the 100 top scores every one month and the 100 losers every month and top of the losers that month when i was there was a miss one whose dog had sort of you know made its business on the lawn and she hadn't cleaned it up five minus points everybody starts with 1 000 points in wrong turn then you can work your way up or down you know they also they also borrowed some of the terminology of american credit rating agencies so you can become a triple a citizen a double a and you go down until do a d and a d is in dishonest and not trustworthy in Shanghai you have an app already it's the honest Shanghai app when you download this app for the first time it you can open it with your face with your facecat and it will download more than one uh five thousand informations about you from 100 different government agencies and it will tell you whether you are a very good Shanghai so so Shanghai or a bad Shanghai that's still a gadget that's voluntary it's not obligatory but of course uh Shanghai is already a pilot project like wrong turn every citizen of Shanghai is already part of the system whether they know it or not you have the government parts but you also have the private industry parts uh the most most people this is very interesting in China most people in China actually still not they haven't really heard about the system or they don't know a lot about the system the one part that everybody is familiar with is the part on their mobile phones because all chinese people obviously they live their lives much more than we do in their mobile phones and cashless payment is the big thing now i live in Scandinavia in the moment can cashless payment is also a big thing in Scandinavia but in Scandinavia everybody uses credit cards in China people don't even know what credit cards are anymore because they only use mobile phones and the two most uh uh the two uh big apps are WeChat and Alipay and a part of Alipay and I think Alipay at the moment are using 800 million people I think are using Alipay at the moment and the big part of Alipay is a is a is a tiny program called sesame credit now again this is voluntary you can opt into it if you want to but already last year when I wrote the book 500 million people voluntary opted into it because there are incentives you know and sesame credit is the private sort of private business part of the social credit system you have you can you have a point a ranking from 350 to 950 points you can work your way up with your for example you know we don't really know how the algorithm works but there was the technical director of the project once gave an interview who said for example now these are his words someone who plays video games for 10 hours a day would be considered idle and someone who frequently buys nappies on the other way would probably recognized as a parent who is more likely to have a sense of responsibility when you choose your address when you change your address too often that can cost your points and what's more your friends course will also affect your sesame ratings so the message is clear stay clear from your friends with low scores in the end sesame credit works together for example with it with a big online dating agency by her so you can make it part of your profile you know like you can advertise yourself you know not only have I a degree from Beijing University and my parents gave me a house but I also have a sesame credit rating of like 920 points so I am a very good catch to what are the sanctions this is one thing I said most of it is pilot projects but some of the some pieces of the puzzle are already nationwide and those have also been reported in the western press so the blacklist that was once established by the supreme court of china has become part of this system and when you're when you find yourself on this blacklist you cannot buy plane tickets anymore you are not allowed to fly anymore and you are not allowed to take a high-speed train and the newest figures from the chinese government say that in the year 2018 that happened 20 million times already in china 20 million chinese not being so a plane ticket because they were on the social credit blacklist and six million people not being sold or five million people not being sold a high-speed train ticket now many of these things I have told you obviously would be things that we we also don't you know if you beat your father and if you jaywalk and if you don't pay for your metro we also think these are bad things but we have a judiciary who's supposed to take care of that obviously the social credit system also goes into the political realm for example in rungchun the most minus points you can get for 50 50 points minus you get for engaging in online commentary that is that is harmful to social stability and 100 minus points for participation in illegal religious activity foreigners are slowly starting to become part of the system NGOs that are based in china companies that are based in china will be part of the system the german NGOs got a handbook last year that really worried them for example there was it was spelled out in there that now I quote from this handbook endangering china's reunification and national unity will give you a fat 100 point deduction for the foundation for the NGO 50 points minus for the CEO libel or publishing damaging information another 100 points docked so what does that mean is any criticism of Xi Jinping and the party now taboo and what about expression for of sympathy for democracy in Taiwan for example or what about if a foundation in Beijing that is only a branch of an international foundation for example the political german foundations Heinrich Beul foundation does a lot of tidbit work in in berlin and in other places what will they be punished if someone meets a Tibetan representative in berlin will they be punished in Beijing all these questions still unanswered social the social credit system was often made out to be sort of the this is the future of the chinese surveillance state but it's only one puzzle you have one piece of the puzzle it's much bigger so the whole artificial intelligence complex it's much much bigger and clearly the communist party has fixed on artificial intelligence as the key to its own survival and the perfection of its rule and it has done so the latest from the spring 2017 where they brought out their big next generation artificial intelligence development plan and ever ever since they have jumped into this field with a sort of with a passion and with resources and with money unseen in any other countries on the planet there is no other government on the planet that spent so much money and pulled so much resources into this field like the chinese one and of course part of the objective is to jump start the economy to sort of catapult the economy into the 21st century because the economy obviously is one of the main pillars of legitimacy for this party it's no longer ideology but at the same time it is also the what they call social management and with social management obviously they mean the surveillance of their populations the guangming daily one party newspaper said when our country missed out on the industrial revolution and fell behind the west china is not about to make the same mistake with big data and artificial intelligence digitalization has given the chinese people the opportunity of the millennium and it's spelled out in the plan they say that in 2025 they want to they want to catch up with the leading technology nations of the world meaning the united states obviously and in 2030 already they plan to be number one i'm already running late there's so much to say i won't say a lot of things just some quotes again from the party big data shows us the future wrote Wang Yongqing a political bureau member in 2015 he said the party and i quote the party has to assemble a complete collection of basic information about all places all things all issues and people tracking trends and what they eat how they live where they travel and what they consume all this will make our early warning system more scientific our defense and control more effective and our strikes more precise and the vice minister for science and technology said in summer two years ago that artificial intelligence will let us know in advance who will be a terrorist and it will let us know in advance who might be planning something bad without the person itself knowing already probably you can see this i mean the people staley they they they're on twitter you know twitter is forbidden in china but they use it for propaganda purposes so they they sent out a tweet last year in the spring of last year where they said already our skynet this is how they call it i don't know whether you've seen the terminator movies but this is the rogue artificial intelligence mechanism in the terminator who's about to destroy mankind i'm sure they don't have a sense of irony in Beijing so they probably have not seen these movies so they call it the skynet the people daily said very proudly they said our skynet is already capable of recognizing and identifying each and every single one of our 1.4 billion citizens in the course of one second now is that you can look that up on google you can still find it is that even true you might ask you know and i would argue no it's probably not true at the moment but and that's a very important point to make here you know in the end it doesn't matter whether it's true in the end the only thing that matters is whether people believe it is true because one of the main goals of everything i am telling you here now is that they want to internalize control they want to put control into your head they want to make you self-sense of yourself you shall be your own policeman in the future so that we don't need the policeman anymore standing in front of your door and you will be your own prison warden and the main testing ground for that at the moment actually artificial intelligence is Xinjiang this is the this is the province in the west of china where they imprisoned actually more than 1 million muslim weegers mainly in a network of reeducation camps that has sprung up over the course of one and a half years i mean that's incredible you know one million to one and a half million people in camps overnight basically and nobody's really talking about it yesterday ilham toti one of the most famous weager academic was named he got the sakharov prize the main human rights prize of award of the european parliament so in Xinjiang if you're a weager if you own a car they will install a state monitor gps transmitter in your car you can only buy petrol once your face has been scanned at the petrol station and the system has declared you harmless in every city town and village cameras will follow your every move if you've been identified as a potential troublemaker in some places cameras will send an alert as soon as you leave a 300 meter security zone that has been specifically designed for you close to your home and to your work if you're on a mobile phone you have to install an app that's called the jingwang app the clean net app this app has access to the content of your phone and according to the government it is supposed to prevent people from accessing terrorist information it will send everything you do on your phone directly to the security organs and then at countless police checkpoints you have to pass through several times a day the officers will can your face and they will actually check your phone whether you have installed this program and and and so much more and I will just cut it short here because I really want you to ask some question in the end maybe one more quote by the by the people's daily I mean do people worry about you know of course you have critical people in Beijing as well like my friends but many of them are basically they've given in to sort of very fatalistic you know view of things and and my friend in Beijing he said you know in this country we're all naked anyway you know it really doesn't matter you know so they know this they can also know that we're all naked anywhere as if that wasn't possible being more naked and naked but I would argue actually you know once they cut off cut open your skull and look inside your brain it actually is possible what we are and this is I will end on this note what we are actually seeing in China at the at the moment with the advent of this high tech surveillance state is actually the return of totalitarianism in China and this is a very important point because no it's been a question for many many years how do we call this thing how do we call China is it a dictatorship I don't know about you but many people for many years they really didn't dare taking this word into their mouth anymore they didn't dare call China a dictatorship uh maybe you know they most you could hear was authoritarian state something like this they were whispering this because obviously dictatorship doesn't sound very nice we're making business with these people do we really want to make business with dictators strangely enough the communist party itself never had these reservations you know in the party constitution in the constitution of the people's republic of China article one it states this country this nation this state is the democratic dictatorship of the people so yes China always was a dictatorship obviously if you think about it but some people also in the past years and decades very easily they used the word sort of totalitarianism to bash China and uh and that was nonsense because China was a totalitarian state for some years under Mao Zedong but it was no more not no longer after that you know a state that really knows no where the party knows no boundary on its controls where the state actually really tries to slip into the last really cell of your brain and and and go into your bedroom and slip under your under under your quilt and under your pillow this was the China under Mao Zedong you know but they did it with relatives that was the time when the wife was spying on her husband and when children was bringing were bringing their parents to the execution grounds actually this was the cultural revolution China was a totalitarian state back then it was no more after that the party actually it went back it it let lose it gave the people more freedom and it was a dictatorship always it wasn't authoritarian state it was not a totalitarian state anymore but now with this totalitarianism is actually making a comeback in digital guys and it's a much smarter totalitarianism than the ones we see because the old totalitarianism the one from Mao the one from Stalin actually had to rely on terror and fear as everyday instruments you know when you were living in in in certain years on a Mao or Stalin you would go to bed at night you know shivering with fear and you would wake up the next morning with the same feeling of course China now is not like that anymore you know and it's not when you step out of the plane it's not it's not the Orwellian sort of socialist Maoist barracks that you that you maybe expect if you have never been there it's a wild colourful place it's it's a love where people consume more than in the united states and and where people actually you know it's it's in the end at least as much all this huxley brave new world than it is George always 1984 and all this huxley he has this very good quote i don't remember it word by word but it's something like you know if you're a ruler if you're an authoritarian you ruler it's not enough to make the people slaves or it's very easy to make people slaves the real art of the ruler is to make the slaves actually love being slaves you know and this is what they're trying to do in china and so this totalitarianism that we see today is a much smarter one than it used to and this has a lot of implications for us and but i will stop here and wait for your questions i'm sorry i've really taken too much time