 Hello, everyone. Welcome to new America. And this talk we have with Josh Chen and Lisa Lin from the Wall Street Journal on Surveillance State, their new book. I'm super excited to host this because Josh and I were a long time colleagues at the Wall Street Journal in China. So, first things first, a couple of housekeeping rules before we get into the meat of the audience before we start. If you do have questions during the event, please submit them through the Q&A function and we'll get to them in the second half of the event. And of course, more importantly, copies of surveillance date are available for purchase to our book selling partner solid state books, and you can find a link to buy the book on this page. So just click on that. Introduction for our two speakers. Josh Chen is a new America fellow in 2020. He's also the deputy bureau chief in China, but Wall Street Journal. As I mentioned, he previously, he and I were previously colleagues there in China and he has of course gone on to do huge, huge things, including leading the investigative team that won the Loeb Awards for International Reporting for a series exposing the Chinese government's pioneering embrace of digital surveillance. He is also the recipient of the Dan Vols Medal, given to investigative journalists who have exhibited courage and standing up against intimidation, and I'd love to ask about that a little bit more in a second. Lisa Lin has been covering data use and privacy for the journal from Singapore, and she was also part of the team that won the Loeb in 2018 and prior to that Lisa spent nine years at Bloomberg News and Television too as well. So welcome both of you to this talk. Maybe I'll just start first by asking you guys about the how things have changed because when the time when Josh and I were both reporting in China we're talking back in the year 2000s to early stages a very different time. Yes, we as foreign reporters we were surveilled, we were aware that our moves were being watched. But at the same time there was a deep awareness at the time that a feeling that with the advent of the internet that this would be a lever that would, you know, pry open the government's control and lead to a much more open society. And that of course has was a wrong assumption. So how did we go from that kind of utopian view to this decidedly more dystopian view that you present in your book. Yeah, I, it is remarkable to think back on those times. I mean, there's that experience I think a lot of reporters have in China that when when you're there you think it's the worst it's ever been and then three or four years go back and you and then go by and you suddenly look with nostalgia and the sort of previous period. But yeah, you're right you know I remember, you know when I first started interested in China and reporting on China was around. In 2001 and Bill Clinton, you know how to deliver this famous line, when he was trying to argue for China's inclusion in the WTO which was, you know, he said, you know, if China joins the WTO the internet will, you know, we'll start spreading there and you know, and, and, you know, trying to control the internet is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, right. And of course the Communist Party will never be able to do that. And eventually, you know, ideas about democracy and freedom and the rural values will spread through China, right and I think a lot of people believe that I certainly believed it, you know. And I think, and I think China was sort of believed it as well and I think they're really afraid of the internet they obviously censored it pretty heavily. You know, I think there was a kind of there was a turning point in China probably around sort of 2011 2012 with the when when social media really started to spread in China, quite widely and I think that so it really freaked them out and there were a there were a couple incidents, there was one in particular in 2011 that some people may recall there was a train crash, a crash outside of the city of Wenzhou of China's high speed, you know, new high speed rail. That high speed rail project had been a symbol of kind of China's advancement as a country and then after the crash became a symbol of China, of kind of the Communist Party of economic growth run amok and of corruption and of all these other problems in China and there was a huge confusion of public anger that I think caught the China's leaders off guard and it was right around them when you start to see them really get serious about using technology, switching from offense, or from defense to offense right using technology to exert control, rather than, than erode it. Oh, what about you, when was the clicking point for you when you realize that this was absolutely taking a turn for the worse. I think I would describe like the changes that happened after you left me in three buckets. Firstly, the tech innovation and secondly legal changes, and then the lead just a cultural shift. I'll start with the last one. I think at the beginning of 2010 you started seeing smartphones really start to flood the Chinese market and along with the smartphones began a shift in Chinese society to live their lives entirely on the phone. So everyone was chatting on the phone on chat messenger they were buying stuff off ecommerce using your phone. They were using their phone to map out where they were going places or where they frequented, you know, leaving reviews, all that leaves a digital data trail. That's very, very much easier for the government to track. So that was already like one step and then the second step that really aided this was the tech innovation. Right, and the tech innovation I talk about is not just the mobile phone but like tech breakthroughs in deep learning and AI, which are allowing companies like Tencent which is China's largest social media company to essentially monitor messages that are sent from, you know, you and I if we were using that chat messenger. So they would be able to do not just voice recognition because you can send a voice chat but you could do character recognition. And actually, the AI that's censoring your chats and monitoring your chats knows exactly what you're talking about, even if there's no human behind it there's a machine. And the final bucket is really law. You know, after you left me like there were tons of new laws coming out just tightening like the government's control on what could be said, and how much influence they had over tech companies. For example, the internet law would force internet companies to turn over terrorist material or potential national security threats to the government. And they had to do it voluntarily. You know, it wasn't something retrospective where the government could go go to them for data. So it was just like bits and bobs like that that has just generally made this environment a lot more tense and a lot more controlled. Well, I definitely feel that, you know, I definitely agree in the last part particularly on a cultural issue. I remember at the time when I was covering the dawn event of credit card companies and things we were like oh no credits China such a low credit society this e commerce thing will have all sorts of barriers to it. And now everybody has a quick QR code you can't practically even use cash in China be you know even beggars have QR codes now they won't even take cash right that's that's the story there. One of the things that really struck me as really interesting a book that I was personally very interested in was the issue with your stories about the sort of the origins of harnessing technology for digital control. And some of this has, you know, linkages for our American audience or American audience particularly, and this sentence run the figure of chances and the, these very brilliant scientists, who was one of the founders, I think of the jet propulsion lab like Caltech has, during the McCarthy era, you know where he was accused of being a spy, he was basically so turned off that he went back to China, which I think some intelligence offices in US that was the greatest mistake of the time but what gender was take his genius and use it to apply to the issue of cybernetics and the, the idea of being able to use technology to for to harness for desirable behavior and society. And what we saw some of that happening with some of his personal protégés in a very early stage was with the one shot policy, where the idea was to control and create technology and surveillance to control people's desire to have children and families. And that has obviously got a long sway but of course at that time 30 years ago there was simply not that level of ability to control to the to where it is now so can you talk a little bit about how Chen and and this whole concept of cybernetics and social control and technology has blossomed forth which is what you talk about in your books so right. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up Chen may because Chen Cheson he's I mean he's one of these characters who really speaks to just the sort of the depth of the connections between China and the US. When it comes to all of this sort of stuff right and you know I mean Chen he was one of these. He was sort of genius Chinese engineer who went to the US very early on on a US government funded scholarship and like they and started to build China's rock or the US rocket program in conjunction with with Theodore von Karman and a few other people. And, you know, for all intents and purposes it seems like he really wanted to be an American. He applied for US citizenship before he was chased back to China in the McCarthy era. They're obviously parallels today with with Chinese scientists in the US now but yeah, you know he one of the things that he did when he was he was under FBI surveillance for several years in Los Angeles and sort of couldn't work and what he did during that time was sort of sit in his study in his house in LA and read books and one of the books he read was by an American mathematician named Norbert Weiner called cybernetics right and it was this book that was sort of basically created this whole field. There was extremely just revolutionary at the time that examined how essentially how you use information to exert control right and it's you know it's very broad and it kind of applies to everything from sort of human beings and animals all the way to sort of mechanical systems right and Chen use these these insights just to kind of create a whole new approach to engineering which he first use in missiles. He wanted to build China's missile system, but then he also, he was extremely ambitious and he wanted to use these systems to apply to society right and so he sort of developed, you know, Norbert Weiner, the founder of cybernetics was very skeptical that you could use this to these ideas to control society but but changes and disagreed and felt like you could. So one of the first things he did which was totally disastrous was was advised he wrote a paper during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s in China where he, he predicted with basically zero knowledge of agriculture that China could exponentially increase its farm output. And a lot of people blame him partially for that because they think that he convinced him out to kind of go ahead with this, this sort of disastrous agricultural policy that led to famine. And then yes his protege Song Jian use those ideas to push the one child policy which you which you wrote about so brilliantly in your in your fantastic book. And then so for a long time the these ideas about engineering society they kind of after especially after the first one child policy they kind of hovered in the background you know they were, they're kind of being taught in the party school and and, and, you know, the central party school in Beijing and communist party officials were sort of being steeped in this idea of systematic thinking right of thinking of society in terms of engineering problems, but they never really had the tools to kind of implement it. So as Lisa as Lisa sort of alluded to one of the big shifts here is that, you know with with advances in AI sort of around 2010, especially in deep learning, which is a which is a phrase I'm sure people are familiar with, you know, it was it became possible to teach machines to sort of learn like human beings by feeding them huge amounts of data. Right and that was just it was one of these just critical technological advances that allowed China. The Chinese Communist Party which has access to huge amounts of data to to really start trying to engineer society in ways that change your son had had promoted. And the idea is you know to kind of make it like a machine like a self guided missile, right, you know, like that corrects its own path but like that sort of, it doesn't really actually need that much effort. And so let's move on to talk about where this was really applied for, you know, it for the first time with disastrous efforts or effects on human rights. And this was with Xinjiang right Xinjiang was really the lab at which the big question of now you have this big ideas about social control using technology, and now you also have the tools with deep learning and AI. And then Beijing sees as a problem what they see as the separatist tendencies with with the Xinjiang province where you have a very large Turkic and Muslim population. And so they start applying this. Why don't you talk about how you unravel this with your book, what sets off this spark and you're thinking where you start saying hang on a minute. This, this is really getting to be a huge issue. Right right so you know so we. So we did this this investigative series into into surveillance into surveillance in China in 2017 Lisa and I started it right and at the end of the end of 2017 we were hearing stories from people about they're like oh you know people are coming back from trips to Xinjiang and they were saying oh you know this this technology writing about is everywhere there you really should check it out. And at the time really no one. No one was really talking that much about Xinjiang and no one was quite aware what was happening there. So we didn't know what we were getting into but you know a colleague and I drove drove a car in and into into Xinjiang and it was just what we discovered was just mind blowing right I mean it was you know I've, you know I've been a journalist for many many years at that point and it was, you know, rarely shocked, you know, often surprised but rarely shocked by things that I'd seen there and this was just utterly, utterly shocking right and you know what it was what we discovered was they, you know, they had essentially blanketed the entire region to the point where if you're a Uighur living in Xinjiang, your entire daily existence is recorded and tracked and analyzed you know from the minute you leave your door actually probably before you leave your door. And you know so like if you wanted to go to a bank or a market, or a hotel you would have to you'd have to scan you have to go through a security gate would scan your face and compare to your ID and sort of note where you were going and if you had done something wrong, like we met a guy who had failed to pay his phone bills for a few months, and every time he went through a security gate an alarm would go off and he wouldn't be allowed to pass through. So he was essentially imprisoned in his neighborhood because of an over an unpaid phone bill. You know and they were collecting biometric data fingerprints DNA voice prints, they're making 3D images of people's heads so they could be tracked by facial recognition cameras wherever they went. One thing that we know we had read about before we went to you know was that we didn't really believe was that they were in some places in Xinjiang they were. If you bought a knife as a Uighur you would have to have your all of your personal information sort of laser etched into the knife in the form of a QR code. Then we just thought that was like ridiculous but then we low and behold we went to this town and went into a knife shop and it was and it was true. So, you know, and that the end goal of all this tracking was to sniff out Uighurs who, according to, you know, calculations we don't really understand are seen as potentially threatening to the Communist Party in the future, right not committed crimes, not people who've done anything wrong right but people who's who sort of daily behavior is is suggests they might someday resist the Communist Party, and then sending those people to this network of internment camps. Right. And that was the that was the second really shocking thing was you had this sort of 21st century surveillance technology being married with this 20th century institution that I don't think anyone ever thought would be coming back. You know, sort of mass incarceration of religious minorities, right. And so that was just totally shocking and I think at that point, you know, it was just clear that we would need that what was happening that was really new and really significant and that we needed a book to sort of fully unpack what was happening. And I can imagine that, I mean, and all these repressions have been, you know, rightly from the time that you've started reporting and many other organizations nonprofits and some of my very colleagues to add human rights watch like Maya Wang and Sophie Richardson have been documenting have now in some sense it feels it feels like some some form of validation perhaps in a way that there was a recent UN report on this that sort of, you know, that's that did confirm that these are, you know, quite likely crimes against humanity which is what we much have said, but that said, this process of documenting writing about this comes at terrific cost, not just to unfortunately to the to the millions who are incarcerated and ready, but also for those of you reporting on it both of you are no longer I think I sort of persona non grata and China I take it you were bounced out. And even the process I imagine I'm going to report this, you know, in a very Soviet country must have been hideously difficult so maybe I'd love to hear a little bit more about and I think I'll read us what to what did this mean what was the cost involved. How did you even get to go places. You know without having your car pulled over your, your, your people that you just spoken to five minutes before interrogated. How did that all work. How did you operate. Yeah, that was that was a real challenge I mean that's actually one of the reasons we drove in, rather than fly in because we figured the airport would be crawling with with even more surveillance. But actually, while we were driving around it's funny you mentioned not getting or getting pulled over, you know one instance I remember just very clearly as my colleague and I at the time we're driving and we just sort of we had been lost. We're on some sort of dirt road trying to find our way back to a highway like in the middle of nowhere in Xinjiang which is it which you know is a really vast kind of rural empty place right. And then all of a sudden, we just we were surrounded by this cloud of dust. And, and when it cleared we saw up ahead of us a police car blocking the road. So we screeched to a stop, and we looked behind us we saw a police car pulling in behind us we were trapped on this road and all and you know all of these police poured out of the cars are wearing sort of swat gear and carrying assault rifles and they ordered us out of our car and started interrogating us about what we were doing there and why and, and which is just just terrifying right and then you know we finally did manage to kind of talk our way out of it and persuaded them that we were moving along and they could, they didn't have to worry about us but yeah before I, before we left I was like I turned to one of them and I was like how did you even find us there's like nothing out here. And, and the guy was like oh we had some cameras back there that automatically identified your license plate and told us and alerted us and so that's why we rushed out here. So, you know it's just I mean it just really brought home to me like how difficult it is to move just to move around in Xinjiang. You know it was it was it was strange at the time in Xinjiang I don't think people really thought that what was happening there was wrong like Han Chinese people right the people sort of carrying this out who are responsible for implementing the system. I don't think they thought it was a good thing I mean they were sort of like they felt like this was a new way to get tight to exercise tighter control over Xinjiang and they were sort of you know enamored of the technology so a lot of them were actually willing to to talk about it, at least initially. So, but talking to Uighurs was was was very difficult right and that partly was difficult because we didn't want to get them in trouble, and we had no idea, you know, at the time I mean now it's very clear that as a foreigner to be seen to speaking with a Uighur is, you know, extremely dangerous for the Uighur at the time we weren't sure but we, you know we had to be extra cautious. We would sort of try to catch, you know we would try to interview people and like snatches of conversation, you know in like in alleyways or places that couldn't be seen or in cars and stuff like that and it was just it made it. It did make it very difficult to do that kind of reporting. And but it was amazing just how brave, I mean, just extremely brave Uighurs were and being willing to like take us aside and tell us what was happening. And this is one particular family that you profile, Tamot, right, filmmaker Uighur from again his family and his story is particularly compelling one for the book. And I'd love to ask you a little bit more about that one second but I also wanted to give Liza a chance to talk about her wonderful experiences to in this realm so Liza tell us I mean what was the personal cost to you of reporting on this. I think at least had an easier time than Josh with respect to the book on a day to day basis working for the Wall Street Journal. You do realize your phone and your we chat, which is the dominant chat messenger in China, you realize that that's compromise because you sometimes call people who and you're working on a sensitive story and you realize that, you know after talking for like a minute or two. It's like a cross line, right, you hear someone else's conversation and the other person can't hear you and you can't hear, you can't hear her. And you know that it's the AI that's at work because the AI is probably picked up that you're talking about certain sensitive terms to the Chinese government and you know they're actively trying to make sure that you both are not continuing the conversation and and often the cross line gets so bad that you can't. You can try, but if you keep trying then you just get cut. So it's like day to day experiences like this that make me realize that okay even though now we're reporting on China from outside of China we're still not safe. And like I've heard from sources as well that when I try to call them with my Chinese mobile number. It turns out as you know a message that says this is a fraudulent number this number has been known to be linked to a scam do not pick up. So it is very difficult. It heightens the challenge of being able to talk to people in China. And it's very commonly if you're working on a sensitive topic. When you talk to these, when you talk to your sources, they're petrified themselves, you know, they asked you not to email them. There's often a different form of correspondence that we use that's not a Chinese based chat messenger, and typically, like, increasingly so in the last year or two everyone wants to talk on background only really do they want to put the name on record. So that's actually like more of reporting on with the Wall Street Journal. With this surveillance state book I, I actually had an easier time because Josh and I, when we started digging into the surveillance state in China we discovered that the same camera systems and the same kind of surveillance that we use in Xinjiang in varying nefarious and sinister ways. We use them very in other ways in other Chinese cities, wealthier Chinese cities, all Han Chinese cities in ways that residents found very attractive and alluring. So in that, in that case actually we had unprecedented access to like a law and order unit in Hangzhou, which we would have never gotten. But yeah, why don't you talk a little bit about that, because they struck me as being so astonishingly open. You want to quickly describe what it is for our readers so they want to read your book even more. So for some context, what we realized was China had like a proliferation of smart cities, and every city wanted to use the latest technology to digitize governance or like to make the city services just more efficient. And we, we, we honed it on one particular city, Hangzhou, which is not, not as well known as its neighbor Shanghai, but it's two hours from Shanghai and it's actually home to the tech company Alibaba. Alibaba and it's also home to the world's largest camera maker HickVision. And before that reason, Hangzhou is just very embracing of this sort of technology to do everything from keeping the streets clean to discovering people of interest on the street. So the city actually has this systems that were built by CETC and for some background CETC is the same kind of Chinese defense contractor that makes a lot of the surveillance systems in Xinjiang. So the same surveillance systems in Xinjiang that were used to spot Uyghurs were actually used to pick out people of interest to the Hangzhou city police in Hangzhou itself, and these would be like criminals on, you know, fugitives, or it would be drug pushes that they had their faces on the list. Generally people that you don't want to see on the streets anyway. So systems like these are very attractive but let me maybe perhaps talk a little bit about the law and order unit that I visited and we had unprecedented access to. I found a district in Hangzhou in which the Hangzhou Chenguan and the Chenguan are like junior varsity police in China. So essentially, like when you're small things right like littering that sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, so they're not in charge of arresting criminals but what they're in charge of is keeping the streets clean of trash piles or there's like a car illegally parked on the sidewalk, or street hawker without a license. It is like the Chenguan. Yes, and they're notorious in China because everyone doesn't like the Chenguan. They don't have the same power as the police but try and act like the police so they end up really coming up with big police. And the Chenguan was the one in Hangzhou that invited me to take a look at their system and the system was called city eye. And when I first got to the building it's very nondescript. Think about any ordinary boxy communist looking kind of beige building that you see in Chinese secondary cities. It was very nondescript on the outside but inside what was happening was really fascinating. I brought in. Yes, it was a wall full of plasma TVs and they were streaming streaming footage from the street from the entrances of schools from the entrances of hospitals, like cameras focused on sidewalks, you know, everything was being streamed in real time. And the leader of this Chenguan unit was so proud of the system's effectiveness that he welcomed me in. And that was the reason why he wanted to talk to me about it, because that system that they installed two years ago had helped them actually reduce the number of street hawkers, like unlicensed street hawkers, almost close to zero. And most like the streets are very, very clean in that neighborhood, like you didn't see trash piles, you know, e scooters weren't like strewn all over the sidewalk. So he was very, very proud of the system. And the best part he said was, you know, like we mentioned earlier the Chenguan are very notorious and did not like. He said the system helped to smooth out relations between the Chenguan and the local residents, because the Chenguan, what the system did was it has cameras facing the street and whenever the cameras bought something abnormal it takes a picture. He uses image recognition to spot what's abnormal takes a picture, and then it gets sent to the Chenguan and the Chenguan will go down and show the offender like this is what happened. And can you clean it up in the past there would be a lot of like tussle because the person who did it would not want to admit he did it, but with the cameras, you know, it's very transparent there's nothing to hide. Great. I'm going to take a moment at this juncture to remind our audience to send in some questions which I sure you have. But then we flip this back quickly because it is this utopian view of, you know, technology that creates a perfect society well a pretty nice much nicer society technology will make it so that we're not our streets are not jammed with cars. Not littered with pollution that's the utopian view. And that's what I love about your book is how you joined the dots and this is not just a purely China book but it's talking about how those technologies are now being actively marketed and use in many parts of the world. So, can you talk a little bit about that and both the, the good side and, as we've talked about some of the more dystopian views on that one. And that's the, I mean that was that was one of the sort of big, big revelations for us when we were looking at this is that is that that vision right that this is it is not merely, you know what's different about what China is doing, compared to say like the Stasi and East Germany, right is offering a, you know, carrots as well as sticks, right like the Stasi only wanted to control and sort of sniff out and eradicate dissidents right and China definitely wants to do that and is doing that but they also. They're offering the sort of more convenience, more secure predictable life for the people who do agree right who do who are willing to behave. And they are selling these systems globally, right, and that and the vision along with it. Yeah, I mentioned at that time and I really reading in the book that the only places where they haven't sold us the two continents are what Antarctica and Australia. Exactly. Exactly. So they're everywhere now. So my big question to you, therefore is, you know, is there more carrot and let's stay because you know let's face it, there's also carrot and stick depending on who for for autocratic regime, yes, wonderful carrot for people under that autocratic regime maybe stick right so it was from what you've seen and you you give a very compelling case study with what happened in Uganda, which was clearly more of a stick issue could you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I would say I mean I think the stick function of the system is more fully realized than the carrot function. And in some ways it doesn't, you know, yeah, I mean that's just because it's always been that way and you see this in Uganda so we traveled there. This is the Wall Street, this is originally a sort of Wall Street Journal story and we had gone to Uganda, where the leader there you are in the 70s, who's a long time strong man, although also a long time recipient of us aid was facing a new challenger, this the sort of pop singer named Bobby wine who's sort of young and really charming and had sort of rallied the, the, you know, poor, poor youth in the country who sort of felt left out. And he really succeeded in sort of drumming up a lot of opposition to to move 70. And some 70 was looking for ways to deal with this and he ended up turning to Huawei, which is, I think most people know this, that name by now but it's you know it's China's largest telecom equipment maker. It builds, you know, telecom systems around the world and including in Africa. And, and sort of said what what can I do, like, how do I, you know, do you have anything for me here, right. And he also, you know, also brought in the Chinese ambassador at the time and was discussing it with him and. And so the Chinese Embassy in Huawei together they, they flew Ugandan police out to China. They flew into Huawei headquarters of course and then but then, you know, took them to the Ministry of Public Security's gigantic headquarters on this on the sort of on the edge of Tiananmen Square where they kind of ran them through all the ways that China uses its new surveillance systems to sort of maintain control right and to and to sort of sniff out opposition. And the police went, they got back to Kampala. A short time later, the Ugandan government had signed a deal for I think was 127 million dollars for a little kind of Chinese surveillance state starter kit that new 70 rolled out and and used to in the last election, used successfully to track down a lot of borders and basically neutralize them and then emerge victorious in the in the latest elections. Well, so maybe I'm going to open this up to questions in a few minutes but along those lines. I mean, so the big question here is and you and what I like about your book is also it doesn't sort of paint such it tries to be very balanced and which is an answer to big question has China really successfully used surveillance to for social control and you talked about some areas where it's been successful but you've also talked about some flaws where this model maybe doesn't always work and particularly not in for some for export either so I think particularly Liza you talked about it quite a bit so I'd love to hear your, could you explain what what how this works. Yeah, and maybe let me talk about another interesting finding from our research as well. When we looked into the export of such models overseas, we found that the export of such models was largely apolitical, like the Chinese government was selling their own systems, but they were not trying to, you know, push a certain like they're not trying to push autocracy versus democracy. Essentially, you know what we were finding was, they were doing this for two big reasons, which really started to make a lot of sense as we did the research. The first reason they were trying to export and sell that these models was to validate their own system back home, because every time you saw a Chinese like surveillance Chinese made surveillance system gets sold in particular, particularly in a democratic city country, you would see Chinese state media trumpet up at home to its own readers saying that look at China's innovation we're innovating in the in in governance model we're innovating in technology. You know this this was trumped up as a reason for national pride. And the second reason why they really needed this export model to succeed is because you know China as I mentioned China is home to the world's largest surveillance camera maker, Hicvision, and it's not just home to the biggest surveillance camera maker it's home to the second and third largest, world's largest security camera makers, which is Star華 and Univision. So it's, it's got incentive to keep the export machine humming for these large companies, because if you think about how many cameras there are in China right now, China has close to like more than 400 million cameras. And at some point, the demand is going to saturate and who's going to pick up the demand, they need the export markets to do it. So, so these were two reasons why we found like the export, the export of such systems so critical to China and possibly not for like, you know, just because they wanted to push like autocracy autocratic like ideas overseas. Back against that a little bit because I do think and quite a lot of people do think as well that there is, you know, an alternate version of China's idea of what makes for a perfect society that it is pushing which you know it's maybe soft power you might define it as such but it certainly is a vision that I think is perhaps somewhat compelling to particularly to you know, many nations that sort of don't buy into what they see as Western centric ideas well you know luxurious thoughts about what human rights could be you know like here you are you've done a and now you tell us to do be but you know you've profited off you know cutting off your, your, your, your, your woods and stuff and now you tell us we can't do it you know that kind of thinking is particularly prevalent and I also find it what was even handed in your book particularly was when you look at the involvement of both American companies Silicon Valley US government policies into this this is not just you know Beijing's bad but this is all a tracing for some of the involvement of some of the things and since we're coming off very, very soon a week after 911. I think it's particularly interesting this point to talk about the juncture where some of this shaped what we see what you see today so can you talk a little bit about the role of the US and both private and corporate and and also government in sort of spawning this hyper technology surveillance culture. Yeah, I can. I mean, I think, I think, you know this question of what whether China just did just to address that really quickly. You know whether China is pushing its model I think I mean that is a fascinating debate around all of this right and, and, and, and it sort of ties back to 911 in a lot of ways but you know I think what China is trying to do is, is they're saying if you want to adopt our model here it is and like we think it works well and you can do it, but they're not insisting they're not sort of attaching conditions to those systems right they're not saying you know the way that sort of the US sometimes attaches conditions to its financial aid right China is not saying we will only sell you this technology if you use it in certain ways right I think their ideas. Governments can use it to exert control in whatever way they find works best in their country right I mean but the, the technologies themselves are sort of built for political control right that is that's kind of how their, their, their design so In 2011, you know, we did just past the anniversary and, you know, this is the entire market for digital surveillance the global market for digital surveillance, which includes many countries including Canada and Israel and Germany was a direct consequence of the war on terror, right I mean it was just the US spending billions of dollars to do to to prosecute that war gave rise to just a huge number of surveillance companies wanted to meet that demand. And, and American tech companies obviously were a huge part of that, and they've been a huge part of the Chinese surveillance state from the very beginning. And going all the way back into the early 2000s when China was trying to figure out how to censor the internet when when they're trying to figure out how to nail Jell-O to the wall. You know, they, they would hold these security conferences and you would have companies like Cisco systems, Sun Microsystems Intel, other companies would attend these conferences and you know we're trying to sell China the technology to censor and control and monitor the internet. And with the more with this this sort of latest evolution in AI driven surveillance. That's the same thing, you know, in this case they're sort of selling components, you know they sort of contribute chips hardware that sort of thing. So you know Intel is a good example they you know in 2010 they invested in this in this startup called NetPosa in China that would go on to be a very, you know one of the more most important companies driving innovation in surveillance in China. And they, they gave it money they gave it chips they gave it advice and they basically helped build, you know, build it into a successful company and at the time, you know, they were they were really kind of openly enthusiastic about how big and potentially profitable this this market would be right they didn't really hide it. I think at the time they just you know just seem like a great way to make make some money in China. And it's not just Intel as well as part of like research for our book, Josh and I pulled through like hundreds of government contracts, government contracts by like Chinese police, seeking vendors for such systems and they would be very specific to what they wanted, you know, they wanted a GPU of a certain like speed and very often that sort of GPU only comes from American tech companies and case in point, in many cases it was Nvidia. So Nvidia was providing a ton of the chips that were processing, like that were used in the AI applications to process large amounts of, you know, video coming in to recognize these faces so a lot of the face and image recognition was based on these chips. And it wasn't just the high end stuff like low end stuff like hard disk drives, because you would need huge amounts of storage space to store all that video, and often like the Chinese police would call for video to be stored for 365 days. So a lot of these hard disk drives came from companies like Seagate and Western Digital. So all in all I mean what we found was in the not regardless of supply chain commercial or financial partnerships. There's a ton of links between Silicon Valley and the Chinese surveillance state. Yeah, so what are you describing here is and I'm taking this some of some of the readers questions which I'm also seeing right now here and so I'm trying to shape them on to a follow up for what what you're describing is, you know, both China and US have both sort of claimed the profit motive as a big thing where we need more places to buy our stuff we didn't know if we started policing everything that our stuff was used for them would have no business and we would just die out of existence. Now that kind of argument has I think has been seismic shift, particularly with the issue of covert in the pandemic right and the awareness that security issues that the reliance on the self reliance was particularly I've seen a shift in that thinking with what all that's happened recently with the pandemic with the awareness with the sort of a fraying of relationship, the US China relationship. Yeah, I would say, so go ahead, go ahead, Ethan. Okay. Yeah, I would say like US companies in the past, maybe you know in the early 2000s and even up to like the mid 2010s. We had this naive optimism about China as a market, you know China was always seen as a source of like very easy and quick profit, and people tended to ignore like the human rights risk to actually selling in the market, right, when you think about like corporate board rooms, shareholders and directors, their questions about China would be like how fast can you expand that right. How can we tap the market that was the general field throughout, and you've definitely seen a big shift, beginning like with the Trump president, the Trump presidency, particularly where US tech company US companies now are very aware of the regulation risks to investing and expanding in China and very aware of the reputational risks, should their like product be embroiled in forced labor. There's certainly been a big, you know, big change in the way like China's been viewed in the market and viewed by companies now. Now the big thinking and the overriding thought is, how can we reduce all the different risks to China, as opposed to 10 years ago when it was, let's expand our cost. Public awareness and this question comes from Isabelle in the audience who was wondering if episodes like the recent abuses of health codes in the Henan banking crisis have changed people's views of this technologies for the worse. Yeah, that's a, that's been a really fascinating development I think you know. Josh, I want to have a quick recap for those of us who don't know what happened with the Henan banking crisis. Right, well, I mean, we can, yeah, so this was a this was a situation that happened has been sort of happening over the course of the year. There was essentially a group of rural banks that had been involved in a fraud and the Chinese government as they were investigating that fraud froze all of the funds in the accounts and so people who had deposited their money sometimes their life savings and these accounts got really angry, and they, and they staged a surprise protest on the steps of the bank regulator in Zhengzhou and the city in Henan province and, and it really surprised the security officials there it's very unusual these days for, for people to be able to organize a large protests like that. So, so the second time that you know after nothing had happened the protesters, you know we're getting prepared to come back to and as they were about to as they were coming out of the train station. You know, in China now everyone has a health code app right that sort of tracks their exposure to to COVID and it and it kind of codes you red or green depending on on your on your exposure and as they were as the protesters were coming out of a train station in Zhengzhou and scanning their way through the security gates all of their health codes turned red, right and the security folks were there and ready to take them off to a quarantine center basically prevent the protests from happening. And the reaction to this was really fascinating and to understand I mean, you kind of have to back up a little bit, you know that, you know in the first part of the pandemic. You know people were quite, you know, the pandemic resulted in this huge explosion of surveillance in China right you know sort of on a scale that previously people had only seen in in Xinjiang where now because of the pandemic everyone in China is being actively tracked right they all have health codes. You know any city where the where there are cases the you know residential compounds can be locked down and your your comings and going can be monitored or you could be even prevented from leaving at all. And, and you know, in the early days, people sort of accepted it they were they were ultimately happy with it because they saw the death counts in the United States and elsewhere climbing and meanwhile China wasn't experiencing those deaths. But with Jung Joe it was interesting is is it became this viral sensation it just blew up and there was immense public outrage at this idea that the government was misusing this technology. Right. And then as a result, the head of security in Jung Joe was fired a few other officials were fired that the health, you know, the health officials you know scolded scolded them for misusing the technology and it's so we'll be really interesting to you know going forward to this, if that continues that outrage sort of continues to boil because it's, you know, certainly one big fear with the pandemic is that the government will use these systems for for other more political purposes. So, so you've certainly answered a bit of the question from Jocelyn who had asked about what was the philosophy that the Chinese government officials say is their reason for these use of this high tech surveillance other than crime reduction so you've mentioned obviously one would be public health reasons right to control pandemic, and certainly with Xinjiang terrorism, but one, one other reason when this touches on another question from Johnson was from the audience was the use of the relationship of surveillance and control control policy to the Chinese anti gay policy and they heat and wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. Sorry, kind of didn't catch the anti. So in other words, the big question here is, you know, what is the justification for Chinese government officials for all these tools of social control, and we've touched on some like for example, prevention of terrorism is their claim for health reasons, you know, public health reasons for to prevent for disability but under it comes some of these issues that such as anti gay policy, perhaps, and which, you know, one of our readers is asking if you could talk a little bit about that. I think, you know, ultimately, what what what this is all about is is a sort of the Communist Party reinserting itself into the lives of Chinese people right you know so for decades they sort of they pulled back, you know, and sort of decided you know said let people will let people lead their lives as long as they don't rebel right as long as they don't call for our for democracy or whatever and they sort of were more or less content to let people do whatever. And now that you know the party is much more interested in kind of telling people how to lead their lives right they want they wanted they want to engineer a certain kind of society. Right. And it's a certain kind of society that I think Xi Jinping has in mind right and that and that's a tough society that's like a strong. It's a great power society that sort of capable of standing up to the US and others and. And so you know yeah they've they've definitely targeted the LGBT community in Shanghai and elsewhere they've they've shut down a lot of the WeChat accounts that that that community uses. There's some indication that they are surveilling LGBT activists much more active much more intensely. And a lot of that you know comes back to this idea that the LGBT lifestyle which previously the Communist Party really didn't have I mean they were not they didn't approve but they also didn't really go out of their way to say much about it it was kind of a don't ask don't tell approach in a lot of ways especially you know the later years of the Hu Jintao era. That's that's reverse they don't I don't they don't they sort of actively disapprove now and they're using these tools to express that disapproval. I was going to say that the underpinnings of this all is also because the party is creating a new social contract for Chinese citizens in the past the social contract was always keep us in power we will deliver like high economic growth right and and now we've seen Chinese Chinese economy slowing down the fissures and the economy like very you know like the property bubble is finally starting to look like it's going to burst and because of the zero COVID policy like economic growth in the last quarter was close to zero. We're struggling to deliver that they're trying to write a new social contract and in this new social social contract, the trade off would be, let us have your data, and we'll keep your streets safe and clean, and make your life as friction less and as easy as possible. So yes we might not deliver economic growth but you still have quality of life and improvement there. I think this is incredibly fascinating but somehow also very depressing so I want to sort of finish I think a little bit since we're coming close out with a hopefully on a more hopeful note. Now, whenever I was in China before we used to have this issue where you'd be like, okay, well a lot of my Chinese friends be like what about the US they're just as equally corrupt and do horrible things. I would quite frequently say yes they do these things to it but the difference is, if I was reporting this in the US, I could ask these questions and I wouldn't be put in jail. That's the difference. Now in this particular case when we talk about surveillance policies to which you know US government and the US policy and US companies are implicated. What you see here is perhaps the difference is there has been more I think political pushback, more more more pushback from NGO such as my own and lots of other people more pushback from the people and more empowerment and the whole process. Do you, are there any particular specific trends in this that you find helpful and useful that you're following or watching as an example of this pushback, and I want to push you at this point because we're time was to keep this pretty short. Yeah I think, I mean, you know, if you're looking for sort of a hopeful note you can look to the EU. Right I mean the big question is for all of us is how do democracies contend with these technologies right and China has a very clear vision democracies don't right. So the EU has a draft law that they're considering now that would essentially ban the use of real time surveillance. You know they've been very strong on that front that they feel very that these technologies are just too disruptive and too powerful and they don't they're not they shouldn't be used in that context. The US is you know a little bit more schizophrenic. Some cities welcome this technology others don't you know one place to look right I think to pay a lot of attention to now if you're interested in this is California, where they're, you know they've instituted a lot of bands, but they're sort of now rolling them back because of a desire to fight crime and I think, you know, I think, thankfully these issues are going are getting more attention in the US. And that's actually partly because of the repeal of row, because this is to really start to affect a lot of women in states where there are abortion bands and I think that that in and of itself is really frightening but I think the conversation that is sparked is encouraging because now people are paying much more attention to it. That's great and actually. And just quick, quick one in the UK there's a code of conduct for surveillance camera use, and there is a surveillance camera commissioner that's independent of the whole ministry. That's watching over law enforcement areas agencies to make sure they're not abusing this. I just want to close in this point because we're coming to the top of the hour to thank you both so much for the work you've done on this and continue to do on this and for this very fascinating conversation. I want to thank our audience here for saving this and encourage them to buy the book if you haven't already. And lastly, I want to thank New America, particularly getting on both the the overalls. New America as well as the international security team who also collaborated putting together this talk and putting it together. So thank you all for coming. Have a great day.