 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Helen Dora-Heiden. In our show this time, we'll cover a meeting of the China seminar, dealing with the closing of the Chinese mind. It featured remarks by journalist Richard Hornick on Xi Jinping's drive for complete control of the flow of ideas in China. China has gone beyond Xi Jinping's initial campaign to root out corruption. Now Xi and the Politburo are focused on controlling ideas in China. You might have thought the trend was to more freedom of thought and expression in China, but these days that is clearly not the case. Freedom of thought and expression among the public and in educational institutions is under increasing attack by the government, sometimes in ways that are subtle and other times in ways that are not so subtle at all. In China, if you are inclined to speak out against the government, think again. There is a myriad of civil and criminal sanctions that can and will be used to make free expression very dangerous. For many China followers, all this is a bit of a surprise and disappointment. Where we may have hoped to see freedom of expression in China become more open, now we are seeing it become more closed and repressive. We'll hear more about this from the footage we took at the China seminar. Be prepared. What Richard Hornick says does not paint a pretty picture of China today or in the years to come. Richard Hornick's talk was entitled, The Closing of the Chinese Mind. Xi Jinping's drive for complete control over the flow of ideas in China. He pointed out that since Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, one of his primary policy goals has been to reassert party control over all information flows. The initial focus was on censoring and shaping internal social media and on reinforcing party control of news outlets. But in the last two years, those efforts have brought in to include academia, civil society organizations and foreign influences. With the latest party Congress anointing Xi as China's most powerful leader since Mao, the future for exchange of ideas in China is the bleakest in four decades. The implications for Chinese society and the economy will be substantial. Given our current president's penchant for fake news and his unprecedented war with the press, this should make us all the more concerned about freedom of expression in the United States. And taking that with a Putin effect in Russia, what are the global sea changes on this critical aspect of human rights and democracy? Richard Hornick is currently the Director of Overseas Partnership Programs for the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, where he has lectured on journalism since 2007. Richard was the Executive Editor of Asia Week and Deputy Chief of Correspondence and News Service Director of Time Magazine in New York. He ran Times Foreign Coverage and served as Times Bureau Chief in Warsaw, Boston, Beijing and Hong Kong. He was also Times National Economic Correspondent in Washington, D.C. and its Europe Business Editor in London. With that, Richard has more than 30 years of journalistic experience around the world. He is also an editorial consultant and has designed editorial reorganizations at Reuters and the Harvard Business Review, where he was interim editor in 2011. Richard was a visiting lecturer at the University of Hong Kong in 2012 and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2015, when he was the inaugural Daniel K. Inouye Visiting Scholar at the School of Communications. Richard co-authored Massacre in Beijing, China's Struggle for Democracy and is written for Foreign Affairs, Fortune, Smithsonian and the New York Times. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Overseas Press Club. He has an MA in Russian Studies from George Washington University and a BA in Political Science from Brown University. Clearly Richard Hornick is a journalist's journalist and a scholar worth listening to. With all that in mind, here is our footage from his recent remarks at the China seminar. And how that's changed over the last 30 years. This talk is not about rights, it's not about NGO registrations, it's not about the rest of human rights lawyers and activists that was made for another time. This is simply a talk about the flows of information, how they are increasingly being controlled in China. I was a staging director of chief in 1985. And at that point, their information flows in China were completely controlled. There was no internet, all of the publications were controlled by the government or the party. The news was highly massaged, manipulated. And so that was sort of my starting point. In 1991 I was Times Hong Kong Bureau Chief and at that moment things were beginning to change quite a bit. It was post-89, so there were a lot of political controls, but still there seemed to be a sense that information was being more widely shared within the country. I taught at the University of Hong Kong in the fall of 2012 as an experiment to see if we could de-Americanize the course. And my dean wanted me also to try to spread it inside China. And I told him he was crazy. I saw no way that they would permit this. But to my surprise, we developed a very strong relationship with the communication University of China. We had multiple visits back and forth. And in 2014 I was a guest lecturer in a communications university of China. So I was going to get four lectures and train two academics to give the rest of the lectures. And after the first two lectures everything seemed to be going great. And then the three of us showed up for the third lecture. And there were no students. And the two Chinese academics were quite nervous. They didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what was happening. I never gave another lecture. I spent two more weeks there and was basically doing nothing. And since then we have lost all contact with our academic partners there. Emails not returned. And we don't push it. But to me that's sort of a turning point, at least an inflection point in this talk. So let's talk for a minute about the high watermark of information folks. 2012 this gentleman here was the head of transportation security, provincial head of security. And he shows up at a horrible accident where a tanker truck hit a bus and over 30 people were killed. And he's smiling. And China's netizens saw this and went crazy. They denounced him and then they started doing research. And they went and looked at all of the photographs of this guy that appeared over the previous year or two. And he was wearing 11 different watches, each more expensive than the last one. Each more expensive than the annual salary of a Chinese provincial official. Things did not turn out well for that time. He was sentenced to 14 years in jail for corruption. So this was the moment when I started teaching news literacy in Hong Kong. I viewed this as a very positive process for China, not for freedom of speech or freedom of information, but for the development of a modern economy and a modern civil society. One of the problems you have in authoritarian regimes is a lack of feedback. If you've ever studied management, you have to know what the people at the bottom are thinking. You can't rely on it all to be passed up to each level. At this moment, you know, around 2013, but certainly by 2014, what China started doing at that point in time was to closely monitor what was happening on social media. There were various channels, Waybaugh, which was blog posts and stuff. WeChat, which as many of you know, sort of the messaging, personal messaging. So they started monitoring both using artificial intelligence, but an army of 50,000 employees watching to see if anything untoward was being said. They also had a bunch of people who supposedly were paid to post pro-government comments or to try to influence things, not unlike, I suppose, what the Russians were doing to us last year. And they made internet companies responsible for the content they show, even that generated by users. Now imagine Facebook or Google or any of the social media platforms were responsible for the defamatory comments that are being made about people. Don't hold your breath. It's not going to happen anytime soon. So, you know, there were certain positive elements. So during all of this, there began a sort of cat mouse game. Chinese netizens are very, very clever. They love playing games with government. So this, of course, is the most famous picture from June 4th, Tiananmen. It's also the least known photograph from China. It is, they have, all of their screening materials are used to keep these sorts of photographs from coming up. So some of them avoided the screen. And it stayed up for a few hours, and then it was taken down. And they've been doing a lot of this sort of stuff. They can't say June 4th of 1989, so sometimes they'll say May 35th, 1989. This was from earlier this year. But a lot of netizens were comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh. As a result, you can no longer search for Winnie the Pooh or Pooh Bear or whatever. It was a cat mouse game. And so China's netizens stopped using Wavewall, and they started using these private messaging services like WeChat. But censorship has now gotten, went almost immediately to WeChat as well. A lot of netizens and foreigners have used these virtual private networks to circumvent the great global firewall. But VPN access is now very difficult. In fact, someone was just sentenced to jail for five years for selling VPN services in China. These were a bunch of rules that were promulgated earlier this year. Basically, what it amounts to is that you here in the United States and almost anywhere in the world, you can create fake accounts. You don't have to say who you are or where you live. It's very easy. In China now, that is absolutely forbidden. Every account has to be registered to an individual. And as I said before, every platform is responsible for enforcing this and for enforcing the controls on the content. The change began, as I said, in earnest in 2012, but this was promulgated in 2013. So in addition to looking for pictures of Winnie the Pooh and Tiananmen Tang, the censors began to look for references to things like Western constitutional democracy, universal nature of human rights, the empowerment of civil society, neoliberalism as a challenge to China's basic economic system, Western views of journalism. I think that's where my course ran aground, because my course is basically a way of understanding how journalism works or how it should work. Historical nihilism is one of my favorites, meaning trying to actually talk about history without worrying about a political consequence. And any questioning of China's economic reforms. This then developed further. So in 2015, China's education minister basically banned the use of Western textbooks in China, or at least Western textbooks that contain any references to those nine bills. Not just in textbooks, but also in lectures. So even at the worst, 1985, close to now, when China's universities reopened, Chinese lecturers were pretty much allowed to say anything they wanted, as long as it was within the classroom. They went out on the street, that was something else. But academic freedom was remarkably open. And now they are videotaping professors. They are asking students to report professors who go beyond this number of professors at the jail for things that they said in lectures. Xi Jinping was, it turns out, was behind much of this. In fact, it dates back to 2010, when he, before he became first party secretary. In 2010, he was the head of the Central Party School, and he made a number of lectures at that point, which sort of talked about these issues. And he has been spending the last couple of years reinforcing on this. So Xi wants the universities to be a stronghold of the party's leadership, tertiary or university educational institutes who are responsible for the next generation of communist leader, and they should firmly uphold the correct political direction. As a result of this, more and more universities are making Marxism, Leninism, mandatory courses. They're not just ones where people go to sleep anymore. When I was in China, for the last 15 to 20 years, those sorts of courses were always a joke. They paid attention. It was widely accepted. It was just something you had to do. That's not true. This is the result. This is Tsinghua, which is China's top university. If there's any doubt about that, it's one of the top universities in the world. Said that instructors' political stances would be made central to their performance evaluations. A party official, this is a conference discussing the Xi Jinping directions. A party official from South China Normal said that it built a database to track and analyze political opinions of more than 2 million college students in the conference. We're now not just talking about professors. We're talking about what students write, what books they take out, libraries. In 2017, it went to the point where the corruption agency of the Central Committee, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, broadened its mandate from looking for bribery and graft to looking for politically untoward elements within the universities. The checklist includes whether colleges have strong political awareness, the understanding to safeguard Xi's status as core leader, and recognition of the need to tow the party line. Last fall, as you may know, the 19th Party Congress was held, and Xi Jinping's thought became a central element of that conference. Now, these are the front pages of People's Daily. Dating back to 1977, this is the Waguo Feng, the one who Mao supposedly said, with you in charge, I am at ease. He wasn't at ease for long. Anyway, each successive party congress featured pictures of the standing committee of the Politburo. Deng, sort of in the middle, sort of in the middle. Here's 87, Jiaziang, 92, Jiang Zemin. Jiang Zemin gets a lot more play here, 97. Of course, he just accomplished the handover of the Pong Kong. So, and then we start seeing slightly less again. This is from 2012, which was when Xi Jinping became party secretary. For the first time since the era of Mao Zedong, a leader's thought has been put as a key element of the party constitution. Since 1921, only Mao Zedong had such an honor. Deng Xiaoping, who could argue would be named the man of the century for bringing more people out of poverty than anyone else in the history of mankind, this thought did not make that. Want to know more about what Richard Hornick is doing these days? Check him out at stonybrook.edu. Want to know more about control of information in China? Just Google it and you'll see what we mean. Want to know more about the China seminar? Check out friends at eastwestcenter.org. Don't age without a smartphone, radio, TV or computer. The whole, and now let's check out our think tech schedule of events going forward. Think tech broadcasts talk shows live on the internet from 11am to 5pm on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. 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We want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. And now here's this week's think tech commentary. The whole state of Hawaii woke up today at 8.07 a.m. to an emergency alert sent to all cell phones in the state reading in boldface type ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. There are better ways to start a weekend off than for everyone in paradise to jump out of bed thinking they're about to die in 18 minutes that is. It took 38 minutes for Hawaii civil defense to finally issue a second text through the same line confirming the false alarm. Until then, I gathered bits of information through various phone lines and Twitter posts mostly saying not to fret, but I feared all of those could have just been attempts to quell panic. I wasn't about to rest until I heard it from the same source who'd issued the alarm in the first place. Why on earth did it take so long? In 38 minutes, people could have jumped out of buildings preferring to die quickly rather than slowly burn to death. Someone I know did overdose on pills and now can't attend the Sony Open today. Another person ripped out her blood draw at the doctor's office because she didn't want to die with needles in her arms. I'm just thankful I haven't heard worse. The delay was indeed inexcusable. Where were you when it happened? I was in the midst of a deep second sleep when someone frantically barged into my room and woke me up. Telepathically enough, I'd spent much of the night dreaming about wait for it, nuclear war. Yes, I'd been dreaming that our world went up in bombs and blazes right before the apocalyptic text arrived. Of course, it was surreal to wake up and find my dream about Armageddon had become reality. I doubt Walt Disney has this situation in mind when he tells us to the tune of fireworks at the happiest place on earth, dreams do come true. And how did you react when you first got the text? Never again need any of us respond hypothetically when asked, what would you do if you had 15 minutes left to live? Now you know exactly what you do because whatever it would be is exactly what you did today. When I started frantically searching the net, I couldn't find a thing. Like I said, I suspected the news was deliberately quiet to avoid panic when we'd have been dead meat regardless. Radio and police phones were completely tied up. No one I called knew anything for sure, but Michael W. Perry was saying on KSSK when he finally said anything at all about it, that the message was a glitch within civil defense, an internal drill accidentally leaked external, and with the added typo, not. Not such a minor typo, was it? Or was it Kim Jong-un? So there it is. It happened and we survived. Now we have a choice. We can indeed be angry, demand whomever made the typo be fired and complain about civil defense's inexcusable lags. Those are legitimate reactions, but for your own sake I suggest another one. As a late friend of mine once said, let's all just be grateful, hey. Unlike my late friend, you and I are now still alive. My friends, we have at least another day. I hope you go out there and live it as fully as you possibly can. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of Think Tech, but first we want to thank our underwriters. The Atherton Family Foundation. Castle and Cook, Hawaii. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. The Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. The Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. Hawaiian Electric Companies. The High Tech Development Corporation. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Integrated Security Technologies. Kameha Meha Schools. Dwayne Kurisu. Calamon Lee and the Friends of Think Tech. MW Group Limited. The Shidler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. The Volo Foundation. Eureka J. Sugimura. Okay, Helen. That wraps up this week's edition of Think Tech. Remember, you can watch Think Tech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it just like Helen does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more Think Tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on Think Tech, visit thinktechhawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer or an intern, and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our Think Tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii, and of course the ongoing search for innovation wherever we can find it. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Helen Dora Haydn. Aloha everyone.