 Thank you for joining. Lovely to have you on this summer evening. I know I can see a lot of people coming from around the country, so thank you so much. Oh wow, and we've got the Northern Lights even. So thank you. I'm just gonna wait a few minutes while people are joining and then ask that you keep muted just to give you a sense of the flow. I'm gonna start out by having a little conversation with John, our guest, and letting you get to know him through those questions. And then I'm very excited that today you'll get to meet Kale Holmes, who is the new coordinator of our China's Not Our Enemy campaign, and Kale will take over for me to ask the next round of a couple of questions and then you'll have a chance to ask questions also. So that's kind of the flow of our time together. So looks like we're getting some more folks in. Just give me a couple of minutes before I start. As people are entering, it takes a little while to let everybody in from the waiting room. And I just also want to thank Grace, who's here. She's one of the core bedrocks of Code Pink that makes everything happen. And she's here to support us tonight to make sure that this gets recorded and put up on YouTube and also livestreamed on our Twitter. So Grace, thanks for being with us while you're cooking dinner at home in Chicago. So also feel free to put in the chat where you're joining us from your name and where you're joining us from so folks can see who out there cares about peace and from where. It's always fun to know. All right, we've got a good group in. So I think I'll get started checking with Grace that we're good to go on. It's streaming. Yeah, it's being slow, but it'll start true. Okay, cool. All right. So welcome to Code Pink and another episode of China is Not Our Enemy. I'm Jody Evans, one of the co-founders of Code Pink. And I started this campaign about three and a half years ago when I saw the same playbook that took us to war in Iraq playing out towards China. And I couldn't believe that the US would think it was a good idea to go to war on China and nuclear power, especially since in this moment in history, we should be cooperating with China on very serious issues like climate change, AI, and the needs of the people globally. So you know, the campaign has evolved over time. And we try to focus on a few things. First of all, that from sanctions to military expansion, the US is already preparing and driving us to war with China. So we talk about those things. The campaign aims to stop this US war on China instead of pivot that energy to cooperation. So we focus on where should we be cooperating? Where's cooperating and happen? And how does that look? Which is in many ways, when it's happening, it looks awesome. And it's what should continue to happen and where the focus should be. Hostilities are already derailing engagement on key existential problems around especially the climate crisis. And you know, especially when you look at China, that's producing, I think somebody said 80% of the solar panels. And our trade with China is so extreme and needed as we've seen with Janet Yellen's concerns about what would it mean if we, the US decoupled from China. So, you know, paying attention to what those issues are. It already has casualties this drive to war on China and their Asian Americans. There are also indigenous peoples of the islands around China and the peoples of the Asia Pacific who are threatened by the war on China. And that's where we're going to have this conversation about today. It's like, we hear all this propaganda and we hear all these voices, you know, anything that goes wrong, it must be China's fault. And I'm really excited with our guests to be able to look from Asia back at the United States, which isn't a view we get to hear from often. And then of course, you know, what brought me to this campaign is that it's propaganda and lies that weaponize our hearts and minds and take us to war. And we saw that just this week with the recent Pew poll that showed that 50% of the United States thinks the most dangerous thing to the US in this moment in history is China. And that was all created by propaganda. So, you know, the cost of this hate and making enemies our lives and the planet. So we're here to help unpack that, help give you talking points to have conversations with those around you because it's each one of us in conversation that can help debunk all these tools that are used to drive a war. So I'd like to now introduce our guest. I had the pleasure of being with John on on his conversation with his friends on Friday, and Kale will post that link in the chat. It was a really fun conversation. And so now we get to just learn about John and hear from him. He's been a policy and strategy advisor in government and business across East Asia for two decades. He has held senior fellowship at Columbia University, New York University Stern, and the Raja Atnam School of International Studies Singapore, where he helped start the Center for Multilateralism Studies. As director of a leading investment bank in Southeast Asia, he founded a research institute and later a council of business leaders to support regional economic integration. He is a former official in the Malaysian government. He was educated in the London School of Economics and Stanford University. He is interested in framing the political theology of international relations discourse, especially as it applies to China, East Asia, and the question of the whole world order. So welcome, John. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much. It's great to be here with you. Very impressive resume that you have, John. My first question to you is with that, you know, all that you have done in your life, what has brought you to this moment? Like, what have you seen from all those different vantage points that brings you to this concern about China not being our enemy? I have actually watched this escalation to this point over at least the last decade. It began with this pivot to Asia, which came across my desk or came to my attention, so to speak, as I was working on ASEAN. I was then running the ASEAN Research Institute, and I was very much involved in efforts at regional integration. That is that you have to know that there is an effort to build a peaceful economic region with free trade and investment and so forth. And of course, transportation links as well across Southeast Asia, but also, I think, at that time, there was also the idea with China, because in 2010, a China ASEAN free trade area came into effect, so very, very early. And so in the middle of this, and right after the financial crisis, we heard about this pivot to Asia business with an article by, it began with an article by Secretary of State and Hilary Clinton. I think it was called something like America's Pacific Century. And she called for a, well, it announced this sort of pivot and a large, and this really was a pivot in America's attention, strategic attention from the Middle East from, and we're still embroiled in the war in Afghanistan at that point, to Asia. And some of the, I was just looking at it just a moment ago, and some of the lines in it are really striking. So you have to understand that things date from there, but we can go into it later. I don't want to go into the weeds of that right now, but I'd like to later, if we have a chance, but I was already quite uncomfortable with it, because I didn't see China as a threat, and this was very clearly directed at a kind of, at that point, soft encirclement of China. So the TPP came about at that time as well, but in my own biography, I then had to come to the US quite suddenly in late 2016. And from there, it's been an absolutely kind of amazing, a tumultuous time. Things have changed, escalated, deteriorated to an extraordinary degree. Even knowing the trajectory, then, one sees the full, the thing in sort of at full pace right now. And I think the propaganda that we're all experiencing is a big part of it. The most disturbing thing is absolutely unhinged propaganda campaign, propaganda and misinformation campaign about China, but by extension about Asia. So one thing I want to talk about today, if we get a chance, is the extent to which things are quite linked there. And if you're attacking sort of the Chinese economy, you're also attacking the Asian economy and the Southeast Asian economy. So it's true that I became yet more engaged, but it just became absolutely nuts. I think the Hong Kong riots actually were a kind of turning point in my sort of decision to basically speak up. Yeah, we can talk about it more. Yeah, if you could describe that for those here, because you're closer to being able to understand it than people in the United States, because we're living in the stories we get told in the media, but you have a different understanding. So maybe if you could share what the shock was for you and how you saw it. The Hong Kong you have to realize is a kind of second place, a very, very familiar place to a lot of Asians, Southeast Asians, and particularly to the overseas Chinese community, of which I'm a member. There are about 30 million overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. So I come from Malaysia where about a quarter of the population is Chinese. But whether you're Chinese or not, people are quite very, very used to going to Hong Kong. And many of us have family there. It's a bit like for me, it was like if you're from the West Coast, something like East Coast, and it's about that distance as a flight. Wait, how long is it? What was the flight time? It's less than that, right? It's about three hour flight from Palo Lumpur. I have family there. So I know the place and I know what it feels like. And these protests that cast the issue in that particular light, as if Hong Kong was this totalitarian, authoritarian place without what was being demanded, were absolutely ludicrous. I'm sure you've all heard it before and I don't want to go into every particular issue, but the place never had universal suffrage. In all the years, 90 plus years of British rule, there was never an election. In fact, rather brutal repression of protests at certain times in the late 60s, for example. But right after 97, you have this, and there were elections. Hong Kong does have elections. Only you don't elect the leader of Hong Kong directly. Remember that Hong Kong is not a sovereignty, it's not a polity. It's like New York legally as far as China is concerned. And probably somewhat less sort of stroppy about its distinctness, in fact, than from the rest of the country, the New York City. Or just about as insistent on it. But here was this idea that you had to have direct elections for the chief executive of Hong Kong, or else it wasn't a democracy, but they did have wide consultation. They had a system in which you had different groups of parts of society represented, and also election for representatives. But the chief executive, the only requirement from the central government and from the system was that the candidates were approved or were not vetoed by Beijing. And so there you had it. We have elections in Hong Kong. It's not sort of direct elections. Neither do you have direct elections in the United States. Correct. We have elections but selection, the same as China. Yeah. Elections and selection. But you have an electoral college. This is not Switzerland. But the enormous hypocrisy of that, and then the protests were something else. They began as something and then developed into this, imagine a year-long January 6. And in fact, the relevant comparison is that, well, we had the capital sort of invaded here, and people call it an insurrection. You call these people terrorists and so on. You hunt them down. Well, Hong Kong had that. The legislature was broken into and defaced and sort of wrecked in a place that unlike the capital. And so all that was being excused away or rather portrayed, the students were, or not students, the protesters were portrayed as freedom fighters, democracy heroes. Let me get more direct and even more personal about it. I actually tried to teach a course on this as this thing was going on. You know, I was teaching a joint course with, and the plan was to have a joint program with Hong Kong University. That would have been amazing. So I was at my college. Actually, we shouldn't embarrass anybody here. So I would run the course with a bunch of students here. And the idea was to study the protests, to think about them as they were going on. Because of course there were issues, all kinds of issues we wanted to get into. And I wanted to get at the tremendous economic issues. Hong Kong is capitalism on, you know, on steroids. It is the most laissez-faire place in the world. Freedom House, the K2 Institute, they love Hong Kong. Every year it comes out number one in freedom. I kid you not. I mean, I'm not unironically, it is in every on every such index before the freest place on earth. Well, that's the neoliberal notion of freedom. It's very easy to start a company and do business and so on. But especially after 97, it became more and more the province of the, it was always controlled by the economy was always dominated by tycoons. Well, the word tycoon comes from Cantonese, right? But by these big bosses. And the real estate sector is very powerful. And rents there are sky high. People have a very, very difficult time. So you have what felt to me like a huge bunch of disaffected youth, but there were all kinds of reasons for them to be unhappy. But, and then one began to see clear signs of unmistakable signs of instigation. And so actually for me, it was seeing it, you know, almost embarrassed to say it's like, this is when it happens to you, to your own society, you know, color revolutions. So it's one thing. And when they happen in Egypt and so on, you know, I could stand, you know, I could be quite uncritically, sort of think, wow, this is a great thing or cheer them on when it happens to your own society. And then you start to see this complete mismatch black being made into white. It's really quite an experience. I'm not the only one. Hong Kong was a turning point for a bunch of guys like me. You know, you look at my profile, I'm not, you know, I was not the activist. Okay, I worked in I worked for an investment bank for heaven's sakes. You know, I was a Davos guy. Right? But once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. You cannot unsee people being fed certain lines and the media just lying 180 degrees day by day for a year about what was going on. So it was way too much for a whole bunch of people. You know, these, you know, Southeast Asian uncles, like myself, right, if you will, is middle-aged guys who are very comfortable with the whole Western thing, you know, you know, I worked in all these C-suite things, Fortune 500 companies, right? Once you have seen that, you'll see, wait a second, it isn't just accidental. It isn't just these media people carried away by their own sort of their own beliefs. No, there was clear suppression of what was going on. Those kids, these protesters were, there was a very, very strong right wing and racist element, believe it or not. And they were literally no clubbing people on the head, right? Hitting people with bricks. They set a man on fire. They were stabbing policemen. Not a single protester was killed. If you had tried any of this in New York, you know, or in LA, right? Yeah, you know, you'd have been shot for sure. And the Hong Kong police managed that for a year. And Beijing, right, despite all the blood thirsty, you could see the press wanting to see a Tiananmen incident in Hong Kong. And of course, they were too smart not, you know, to do that. So even the PLA, which has a barracks in Hong Kong, I mean, they provoked them, they provoked the embassy, or the, or the, or the, not the embassy, but the Chinese government presence there tried to set it on fire. But they didn't resist. So it was a, you know, it was a tremendous restraint. And the city went through hell. My aunt was there, again, very personal. You know, she couldn't come downstairs. She was afraid. She's in her 80s. There are a whole bunch of people that this thing, it completely doesn't give a, give a damn about, right? Ordinary people of Hong Kong who want to get on with their lives being terrorized. So no, that, that was, that was something. So one of those things, theoretically, but to, to see it in action, you know, brings it home. So that was your turning point. I mean, mine was noticing the propaganda and saying, oh my god, this is how the United States always goes to war with lies and propaganda. Absolutely. Absolutely. I share that with you. Yeah. And so you're seeing the same kind of lies and distortion, but you're seeing it much more personally in relationship to your experience of what's happening. And then that's right. That's right. And really the, the worrying thing, and this, of course, you know, you, you remind us of all the time, the really scary thing is to see the, the progression, the playbook, first the propaganda, then the demonization, and then stuff happens. You know, they're not, they don't vary it too much. It's a playbook that works. And again, we saw it happen with Ukraine. I'm very familiar with the issue from, from 30, 14 onwards. But I didn't realize it would, you know, be allowed to get to this point. But then you see the demonization, but the demonization of China, this Hong Kong, and the, and what's been happening over, over Taiwan, the crossing of very, very clear red lines. Those all lead up to something. And then it's, it's really worrying what it leads up to. Yeah. So, so the, the propaganda is not incidental. It's not accidental. It accelerates. You can observe its progress. And it doesn't lead to a good place. We have seen time and again. Correct. And, and the distortion confuses everyone. Because if you're not on the ground, if you're not from there, if you don't understand, but every day for, like you said, a year, you're getting propaganda. It's very hard to have a true relationship with what's happening. Because you're having, indeed, it is hard for us. So I'm early, I think I've seen how it works. You know, it's like, it's really like stigmatization, right? It's, it's throwing just stuff on, on so much stuff on you, so much crap out there, frankly, that no one dares engage with it, not on any intellectual grounds, but it's just, just messy and you don't want to be associated with it. So it, it works on this sort of social dynamics. It's, it's not based on, on, on, on reason. It becomes discrediting. It becomes sort of beyond the pale to discuss certain things. Right. And I, you know, by talking about these things, I, I'm beyond the pale in this society, at least. Exactly. What I'm giving, what I'm trying to say is a lot of this is basic common sense out in Asia. One thing this does is set the Western population so far from what is common sense. And what, what I would maintain is most of the world, but especially in Asia, you guys have to have it, you, it is sense it, it's really quite terrifying. It's, it really, really alienates the, the kind of elite class, the funded class of the West from, from the common sense of Asian people. This, this experience of Hong Kong, for example, a very well known, very respected statesman, a friend of mine, as it happens, George Yeo, former foreign minister of Singapore. If you look up some of his talks on YouTube, you know, a guy who had been foreign minister for many years, regular general in the, in the, in the Singapore armed forces. This is not a guy who's a radical in any way or, you know, someone very comfortable with US power in East Asia. Yeah, that was too much for him. The Hong Kong thing. There is no way to talk about it nicely or to talk about it honestly while remaining on basically remaining polite with what the West has done to it and how it is talking about Hong Kong. Right. The great news is it's now under control. It, you know, they, they implemented a national security law such as you find in every country. That was just the one gap that Hong Kong had. Yeah. So I, I, I don't want to make this a seminar about Hong Kong, but anybody curious about it, I can go on about it. I thought I taught an entire course in it. Well, well, thank you because I think what you're talking about, and I want to go back to your words, you know, it's like it creates a stigmatization, stigmatization. So let's talk about that because there's Hong Kong or there's, it's like even Kayla and I were talking about the way we see the world because we've been through China to China, but that we can't even talk about with anyone else because it makes us feel crazy. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's the part that you're talking about. It's like, so do you experience that? And I just like gratitude for your being here with us because obviously you don't experience it silencing you because you're here, but have you over the time felt it silencing you and have you had to build up your courage or your capacity that no matter whether it silenced you or not, you felt it more important to speak because the, the stigmatization isn't... Let's just say I have lost my positions and opportunities over my speaking out. Yeah, it hasn't been, it hasn't been free. Yeah, it hasn't been free. So yes, I have. I've just been willing to do it. Wow, I have more. I just couldn't keep quiet about it. Sorry. So, so I, yeah, I have lost those positions. I'm no longer at these places, nor do they want to be associated with me because decent people don't talk like me. So now, I think one thing is this. I mentioned political theology, sort of, you know, in my bio, but one might also talk about political anthropology. That is that when you engage in these disputes with people, you're not, you're naive if you think that you're in the space of reasons. You're naive if it's about, if it's, if you think it's epistemology, right? This is what liberals like to pretend. It's all just, you know, the space of reason, right? No, it's the, a clearer frame for understanding this stigmatization, for example, is the religious one, or in terms of religious anthropology, this is pollution, stigma indeed, right? Pollution, it's between the, the, you know, this, this is a phenomenon in religion. I put this stuff on you and it, you know, and you are therefore impure. So it's, they're working with, with that. They make entire topics. They make China, anything around China becomes that. And if you are associated with that, you are also the impure. Now these, these phenomena are, are quite deadly. So from a certain perspective, the US continues to be, it's sort of like a village, you know, Salem, circa 1800s, or was it 1700s? The Salem witchcraft trials. So the, the, the phenomena of the, the witch hunt, I'm not just talking metaphorically. I'm not just talking about being, colorful here. There is other dynamics that are mobilized, right? But except by the massive apparatus of, of state propaganda, state and state affiliated media. And, and one discovers an entire media class of people who are prepared to play this game. They either get something out, they, some satisfaction out of it. Or again, another thing I've seen is how they are rewarded for it. But, you know, from my perspective, the US looks like, you know, it's like looking at a village of really superstitious people. You know, it's as small, it's, it's like a village of, of what it is, semi, semi-literate, sort of witchcraft believers, but witchcraft phenomena are real in the anthropological sense. You can do this to people. And another age, so if I may, a kind of Southeast Asian perspective, I just tweeted about it yesterday, is the understanding that the, of the relationship between this and mass murder, because it has happened time and again in Southeast Asia, quite often to the Chinese community, but not just to them. So the Indonesian massacre of 1965, for example, that it's just forgotten, maybe 800,000 people or a million people were, were killed by hand. Okay. Shot, you know, bludgeon over their head, stabbed, strangled until the rivers ran red, literally. How did this happen? And quite recently, these documents were released about US and UK involvement in this. British are very, very good at this. They had an entire unit for spreading black propaganda. And the black propaganda included stories such as, you know, these communists. So this was the mass slaughter, just to recount the broad outline of the largest communist party in the world outside of China. It was peaceful. It was unarmed, which is perhaps their, their, their, you know, fatal for them. So they were, they were demonized. It was an argument. It was portraying them as like demons, as murderers. And then there were these atrocity stories, you know, they would do these horrible things to people, et cetera. And this came out of a newsletter, run out of Singapore, laundered through several countries and purporting to be Indonesian, in Indonesian. It was by a bunch of Brits. Okay. This is completely in, now it's in public domain. When you see what these witchcraft sacrifice mob violence things do, and I was very aware of this in Hong Kong. Okay. Uh, you take it a lot more seriously. This isn't just about, you know, it's unpleasant for me as a Chinese person. No, because I know the intimate relationship between these processes of victimization. Right. And mob sacrifice, because in Hong Kong, again, you saw the, the crowd, the mob and mob behavior. A mob is something else. You know, then, then, then six people, you know, discussing a book. Um, so they play with these phenomena and you are seeing this also being played with on a mass scale in, in, in the US. This is just a perspective on this. So these things, this black propaganda has huge effects on people in Southeast Asia. It's not, you know, not just you get beaten up in the subway. Okay. There's a mass murder. One of my earliest memories was, was of one of these incidents. So, I mean, you're talking about what happened in Rwanda. You're talking about what happened, but really this is what happened in Germany. I mean, because that fascism was a mob behavior where the mob was, you know, riled up around the same thing with Jews by the same stories. Well, they knew how to invoke this. Yes. Yes. Yes. And the people who invoke it very, very well. Uh, you know, people on this side, actually, if you look at the largest propaganda apparatus in the world and what it is doing. So it's quite a shock. You know, look at me educated in the UK and so on to, to realize, wait a second, these people are doing this scientifically, right? Deliberately. And well, they've done it to all kinds of people. And now that they're back at it, they did it in, in, in Indonesia. Uh, they used it in Malaysia. The Cold War was fought also in Malaya and in Indonesia. It's just people forget it. All the stuff you hear about Vietnam, strategic Hamlets. In other words, mass interning people, Agent Orange, all these were pioneered by the British in Malaya. They, you know, they consulted and, and, and taught the Americans in, in Vietnam. So there is a history to these, to these things. And, you know, that I was just talking to, I mean, with, with Jody, right, about the sort of wake up. There are people, very, very kind of well behaved, straight down the line people, Nuri Vitachi, for example, this extraordinary, really, really fun guy, right? This, this extraordinary journalist, I've been reading him since I was a kid. And that's a long time ago, based in Hong Kong. He too, he was a supporter. He, he started out supporting those protests, which began long ago by the way, 2014 umbrella protests and so on. And he saw with his own eyes in this recent set of protests, US officials handing out the lines, teaching them to ask for, you know, to be saved by Donald Trump. So, so you see this, this, this manipulation, and I have an absolute horror of this, this kind of manipulation. It's, you know, there's a line there. I think that's, that's the same with, you know, what we do with food pink, it's that we see the smoke. And when you see the smoke, you're supposed to put out the fire, not flow, you know, blow more oxygen on it. So it turns into a full blown fire and does destroy people. And I so appreciate you are grounding us in these are lives. This is, this is murderous. This ends up really, really ugly. And yes, these are people who are living in peace with each other. Yeah. So it shouldn't, we need to take this seriously. It's not light. And the, the fact that this Pew poll just came out and said that, you know, when Americans are asked what is the greatest threat to the United States, they say China. When China's done nothing that could be a threat to the United States, and where they're suffering floods and, you know, fires and, you know, homelessness in their cities, but the greatest threat is China, that distortion of like, we can't, we're not getting anything else taken care of. If everything can be blamed on China, then, and we can go to war with China, it's probably better when you're talking about that's a fantasy on steroids, because no, that will just make everything worse. That is a real it. Yeah. Right. Right. So there is the, the conceptual part. If you ask somebody on the street, well, what's the greatest threat? And then if he or she says back, oh, well, it's, it's, it's China. On one level, you know, and we went over this in, in the space, you might, it may not be that deep. It may just be, well, this person realizes that's the right answer. They hear it every night, right? On every mainstream channel. But it doesn't, it doesn't stop there. If it was only that, China is too far away for people to bother with going to war with. The propaganda doesn't stop there. It's not at the level of argument. So if you see the coverage, it isn't just actual argument about China doing this, China doing that. It's China bad in every reference possible. Every reference, every photograph, every photograph that comes out is a security camera, a guard. They literally fill, you know, put on a, a dark grim filter, a cloudy day. What the hell is going on here? You know, so every single image is a negative image. So they're playing on the, this, this phenomena. They're othering it. They are quite honestly, they're scapegoating and, and this scapegoating phenomena is, is kind of, it is also politically the diversion. Scapegoating is, is, is political diversion. Right. That's another reason why it's so strong here. Because we need a lot of diversions. Right, right. And so one worries that as it gets, things get more and more out of control back here for reasons internal to this place, that there's more of this scapegoating because that's the one thing that people can agree on. And that's the other point. The agreement, even though the agreement is the cost of their, their lives. Yes. So, you know, I just would like to go back because you started that you had just read, you know, we were talking about the pivot to Asia, or that's where you started. And you said, I was just looking back and reading some things from back then. I think you said from Hillary Clinton or something. Can you, what was it that you saw them that you found so interesting? Well, she had some statements, right? Like, she had to make this argument for turning to Asia after the administration had been focused on the war on terror and the Middle East. And we're failing at that. So they needed a diversion. That's right. So they had to say, well, we have to come here and the words were harness Asia's growth and dynamism. This is central to our strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama. Harness. Harness. Yes. Harness. Asia's growth and dynamism. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So, and the U.S. portrays itself as maintaining peace and security across the Pacific as so there's this whole Pax Americana idea. So another, you know, a great paragraph from her is just as Asia is critical to America's future and engaged America is vital to Asia's future. The region is eager for our leadership and our business, perhaps more so than at any time in modern history. We are the only power with a network of strong alliances in the region, no territorial ambitions and the long record of providing for the common good. This is, you know, it's hilarious actually in retrospect reading it at the time I wouldn't have been able to. I wasn't going to wouldn't have laughed as I do now. Right. This is a country that has, I don't know, three, four hundred bases in Asia and no territorial ambitions while you maintain these bases in South Korea, Japan, you know, and all the islands around. Yeah. And bases in other countries as well, small bases and large. But the issue that they used back then was this freedom of navigation and it puzzled me at the time because wait, all those sea lanes, they all go to China. If you're worried, I mean, it's not that China is going to blockade itself. Who is threatening freedom of navigation? So what they do is they come up with a concept. And, you know, I was at the a think tank strategy and strategic and international studies type of think tank and very, which would look at things from a military and strategic perspective. So all of a sudden when they bring this concept out, I think what a lot of us would have thought is wait, there's something I don't know here. You know, there's this phenomenon of these people are smarter than me. They seem to use this vocabulary. And there are concepts in there that I know, maybe there are there are things happening that I don't know about. Actually, there's nothing behind it. This is like rules based order. So what the hell is rules based order? There must be something, you know, something sophisticated that I don't understand. Well, actually, it's simple. It's as simple as my rules. You take the orders. It's a way of not talking about international law. It's a totally empty concept. So you have these totally empty concepts being put out there. And then I saw diplomats from, you know, from Japan and then from the US as well. And one voice after another echoing this. It's amazing. They all have the same vocabulary all of a sudden this new vocabulary comes out and they're all parroted. It's something to watch. So I saw that kind of build up. I didn't realize he would build up to this. Well, I'm thankful that you like talked about what how you read Hillary the first time and how you read it now and how we're not even aware of how the information that we get distorts our thinking and allows us to accept things with an imperialist mindset, even as we're peace activists or even as we care for the planet, or we're not even aware of the contortion of our own thinking and where we are in our lives. Right. Right. And so you, you, you said, and I'm, you know, that you've paid prices for telling the truth. Um, and so before we move to Kail, to let Kail ask him questions, you know, what in you encouraged you to tell the truth, even though you knew you were going to pay prices? And then what has happened since you've paid those prices? Have you become more silent? Have you decided to stay with the integrity of truth? Like, if you could unpack that a little bit, I think it was in the first place, an isolating experience, which is how it's meant to work on you. You lose friends. You lose, you lose being an acceptable member of a certain circle, certain class. And you realize that they, they, they, they surround themselves with a, with, with a certain worldview. And within that worldview, there are these assumptions that you don't question. And you then realize that one of those assumptions is American empire. And, and actually we ought to be thankful for the last few years and the return of Western supremacy as, you know, in your face. You know, it's nice to have the quiet part spoken out loud. And it is, it is also white supremacy. If behind it all there is, when I, when I talked about the stigmatization, there is racial stigmatization going on. It's an essential, essential to this. You might wonder, well, these people don't need to do this. They're too smart. Well, we're behind that. We're talk, we don't need to talk about, you know, bringing civilization to people, right, or Christianity or whatnot. We have democracy now and justice. No, it's not enough to do that. You do have to racialize the chinks. You do have to associate them with certain images and you see that happening in the media. Your images of disease, for example, a COVID, what proportion of the US is Asian America is Asian. And yet the predominant image is of some yellow face, some Asian person. Even in Germany, it was really, it's hilarious to go back over these things. So then you have the tagging that the association with disease. This is all old stuff. We know this from what was done to the Jews. We know this from what was done to the Chinese way back, the association with disease, for example, right? These people coming across these Coolies, they were the bearers of disease. Therefore, they had to be expelled. So the racial thing is very strong. Now, I'm not someone, as I said, who, you know, for whom speaking about that was part of the way I operated. Remember, I was in polite circles. And if you're talking about, wow, international relations, oh no, you don't suddenly talk about white supremacy and settler colonialism. Yet these are essential to understanding what's going on. So this is a very interesting moment. This is when these old things come out and they just come out and say it. In that way, it's interesting and it's worth talking about because I think China has caused a kind of derangement. It is causing a panic. And I sometimes, I often say this, look, the US goes picking on one, creating one enemy after another. But this time you have picked on the largest and longest lasting. There isn't going to be one after this. So there better be some way of de-escalating from it because they ain't going to be, this is not Iraq. You can't even fail at this. You can't even go in and get bogged down. This is going to be really, really bad if it gets to blows. Well, short of that, this demonization was going on. I think to answer your question, one of the reasons, one of the things that made me speak up was these attacks on people during COVID, my own safety. I live in a pretty sort of nice place. But even around here, occasionally, you sometimes you get accosted, right? And certain racial remarks are made. So the Asian community here has had quite a time of it. And nobody wants to know about it. Because this is the permissible racism of the moment. There was Black Lives Matter, there was BLM and so on. But suddenly you have this and this is very inconvenient. And so it's, don't talk about this. But yet they're doing classic techniques of racialization. So then one has to think further back and you realize that racialization, the introduction or the invention of race and its introduction as a concept for dividing and ruling people and for creating a certain hierarchy, race as a political, as a power construct, is very much part of how Asia is thought about. So well, yeah, I don't know if I've answered your question, but I couldn't keep quiet and be a human being. I couldn't, there's absolutely no way, you know, okay, personal again, but what could I do? What job, how could I function and keep quiet about it? You know, when I came to the U.S., a lot of the work, whatever, what expertise or networks or knowledge I had was to do with Asia. But if you have this totally arranged, deluded idea of China, you also have a deluded idea about the rest of Asia. Please, it's even worse. They know nothing and they care nothing about Southeast Asia, right? So it's, no one wants to know, no one wants the truth. There have been times when I was a consultant working on things in which, you know, you help people understand a sort of business environment, an investment environment. Well, the whole thing is politicized and militarized now. There's no room for that, that kind of thing. Still, yeah, I mean, basically, you know, what we've been talking about is, is the distortion of reality in the United States has almost made brittle. The people of the United States, when the truth hits, it's kind of like, you know, a parched soil. Yes, yes. Find a way in and even I think the water hits, it must really sting. Yes. Yes. So that's a, that's a lot. And I feel like everyone's taken in a lot today that you have been so generous. And I, John, I just want to say to you, like, I know the courage it takes for you to be who you are, for you to give up a life that you've built and positions that you've built and, you know, your capacity to be someone in the world to instead, to instead be what we should all be, which is human beings in relationship with each other. And they have is that and I, I think that's my experience of Asian values that I think might be a little painful for people that on the West that have those values of humanity kind of stripped from them as part of being in a white supremacist, you know, you know, the roots of United States are based in, in humanity. And so, you know, slavery and genocide of the indigenous peoples that we're still trying to heal from and change from. But humanity and being human is really at this moment in history, the most important thing. So I just, well, that's what you taught us myself and the co-host, right? I want to honor who you are as a human. And then I know we've like on way over time. But, Hale, I wanted to bring you in and ask you to ask John some questions. Absolutely. Yeah, I just want to say it's a pleasure to speak with you, John. And thanks, Jody. Thanks, everyone. You know, I really thought it was interesting how you were talking about, you know, the link. Well, I mean, this is not what you explicitly said, but you know, I've been thinking about the link between kind of white supremacy and this notion of rules-based order and how it's been propagated by, you know, western government. And I think a lot about how that relates, especially to all the tensions in the South China Sea, where you have, you know, China, for example, has been pushing for much more regional dialogue and solutions to resolve different territorial disputes in the South China Sea. And, you know, the U.S., as you were talking about, was really intent with this pivot to Asia on freedom of navigation exercises and accusing China of violating a rules-based order. And, you know, I think things like the Nine Dash Line, things like, you know, China mediating territorial disputes with Vietnam, with Malaysia, with other countries. This wasn't an issue that the United States was so obsessed about 10, oh, you know, maybe 15 or 20 years ago or 30 years ago, but it became such an obsession in, you know, within the last 10 years. So how do you think, why do you think that is and how do you think it relates to this notion of a rules-based order that's deliberate? Yeah, that's why I started with this pivot to Asia business. There was a status quo with the U.S., the top dog in Asia. And at a certain point, it became not acceptable. And, of course, it had a lot to do with the rise of China. It's not accidental, I think, that this happened after the global financial crisis, in which actually the capitalism, global capitalism, western capitalism, was saved by China, ironically. But it's around that time, 2010 and so on, that the Chinese economy started to, well, it exceeded Japan's and then it started to be a threat to the U.S. economy in terms of, you know, which one was larger. And they had to be put down. It's really as simple as that. It does not tolerate a rival. U.S. empire does not even a rival in that sense. I mean, they did this to Japan, which was an ally. If you know, in the late 80s, they basically kneecapped the Japanese economy. Of course, it was possible to kneecap Japan. You have bases there, you know, you could bring them to heel. They are trying the same thing with China through these sanctions and it's not going to work. So what next? So, you know, on one level, it is just, it is that no one should, the U.S. cannot, if you hear these people talk, it's this bizarre language. I think the scientists did it the other day too. Are they becoming larger than us and therefore this is a mortal threat? I mean, what kind of insane, how did you survive the first 100 years, you know, of your existence? So it's that kind of thing. At one level, it is that. And that's how a lot of Asians see it. What they don't see is this embeddedness in racism, in settler colonialism, etc. That they don't see, that they're less aware of, that I saw as an Asian person living here and understanding, wait a second, to understand this, the full depth of this. You need that, you need this perspective. I became a James Baldwin, Malcolm X guy here. I was reading him and said, this is really, you know, the 60s guys, the Black Power guys, they understood things. There was an identification with decolonization, a solidarity with the Third World that was then killed. And we have the Third World rising again now. Yeah, I feel like, you know, I was living in China for three and a half years. I was in China during the, I was living in Beijing during the tail end of the unrest in Hong Kong. And, you know, some people were framing the situation as a project, a decolonization project. And, you know, I guess like, what do you say to people who, I guess, regardless of whether or not, you know, whatever is happening, whatever decolonization efforts are going on in Asia, how sincere they are and whether or not they are not sincere. Why do you think the U.S., like, what do you say to people who think the U.S. should be involved either way? Because it seems like the U.S. getting involved. So they see, you're talking about Hong Kong as the protest movement is decolonization? No, no, no. Rather what the, what people in the mainland, officials in the Chinese mainland were trying to do for, but that was what my colleague, while I was working in Chinese news, was telling me, but what do you tell people who, regardless of whether a decolonization effort is sincere or not, why the U.S. should be involved? You know, because some people think, oh, the U.S. State Department has the best interest, like this is imperial thinking, you know, and is kind of everywhere around us. And so how do you converse with people? The U.S. should get out of the business of suppressing decolonization, which is what the Cold War was about. Yeah. Hong Kong is, your colleague is right, is a case of an still ongoing decolonization. I come from Malaysia, which obtained its sort of independence in 1957. One part of it did anyway. It's not a complete process. As you can see in Africa, and particularly in West Africa right now, it's not a complete process. You know, I think we're going through a second and perhaps final wave of decolonization going on now, a decolonization of world order. But Hong Kong, you expect that a place that was colonized was an utter colony for so long in 1997, has the process complete? No. You had people who were very, really colonized in their thinking, for example. You had the attempt to preserve a colonial political economy in Hong Kong, which is what it was, this extremely exploitative economy, as far as the working class were concerned, it's inherited from the colonial era. If you know, if you ask me, Beijing should have intervened earlier to not let it get to that stage. Hong Kong should have had some of the social equality that people in Guangzhou had, rather than become a kind of extremely unequal hellhole for people at the lower end, while being a kind of capitalist paradise, a real estate and finance paradise. So there is a decolonization that Hong Kong has to go through and it's none of the US business. What I mistook you for saying earlier was there are people on the left here who like to use that language and talk about the protesters as decolonizing. I hate the way words like, that's why I don't use them normally, decolonize, even settle a colonialism and so on. They're bastardized later and virtualized by pseudo academic use. There's a kind of left here that wants to be disconnected from or with no connection with actual attempts at attaining sovereignty in the rest of the world. 80% of the world was under and the land mass and the population of the earth was under western domination was colonized. And that 80% of the world, it's not completed, it's path to freedom. Let's talk freedom, but in that sense. Well, and I think when we talk about freedom, we forget that that's freedom for everyone and so many times we love freedom with sovereignty. Right, we look through a class lens instead of understanding there's a whole class that isn't free. That is what isn't happening. You tend to rely in western media, it relies on a class of people on the other side that they have cultivated. These particular voices, all of whom were educated at certain places or they are being funded by certain organizations. And that's their job. Their job is to reflect those western values back. But if you actually live there and have any concern at all for people there, you would actually be looking more broadly and asking how are people doing. And I think that's the way to do it. One doesn't have to be an expert on Asia or on any particular part of this vast continent. But wherever you go, actually go, actually see people, actually observe their lives. Are they well? Are they not? As Jody likes to say, relate to them as human beings. Thank you, John. I know we've taken up over an hour of your time and so grateful. This has been so interesting. And I really wanted you here so that people could witness and hold space for a voice from Asia. Because we listen to people that have never been to Asia and talk about Asia like they know what's happening. So just to hear your thinking and your voice has been refreshing. Thank you, Kale and Grace for holding us all together. And we've gone over the hour. I just want to thank everyone for being here and to say next week our guest is Kale. So Kale has just joined the team. He's now the coordinator of this campaign. China is not our enemy. But Kale lived for three and a half years in China during COVID. And I think it's going to be fun to hear from him of what that was like. Another voice from, let's hear from the voices from Asia because we don't realize how manipulated our brains have been by the propaganda, the stories and the lies. And I call it the brain flossing. Our brains need a little bit of flossing so that we can also see and be clear and be humans together. Just in our holding space for each other and listening. So John, thank you for your courage. Thank you for your commitment. And thank you for being in conversation with us today. Oh, you just- Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you all. And thanks for- Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Good night. All right, everyone. Good night. We'll see you next week, I hope. Bye.