 We've got a campaign against PBS who is censoring a movie about how China took the last 100 million people out of poverty after it took another 700 million people out of poverty. And so we know we're not getting the truth. We know we live in a sea of propaganda. We know that the tools of war, it hasn't changed since the end of World War II. It's othering, it's demonizing, making someone else an enemy, which then allows you to use weapons and what I say is murder people because if they're dying, they're being murdered, there is no excuse for war. So here we are to be human together, to be humanized. And so this is really a conversation. I'm going to start with a lot of questions I have for teens and then invite you as I'm asking questions. And as you're thinking, put your questions in the chat, we will bring them into the, and give them to me and I'll be able to ask them later. So feel free, what am I not asking? What is one answer from Ting's provoking another question in you? So we'll talk for about 30 minutes and then we will bring me your questions. We are, you know, the drums, Ukraine took up a bunch of time and was, we were on the fog of war with Ukraine. And now we're hearing the drums of war in Washington again for China. It's been a busy week. We disrupted an event this week and maybe Wei can put in the tweet about that. If anybody in the chat, if anybody wants to check that out, we disrupted an event which was literally war games on Taiwan, really disgusting conversation that got disrupted by the coup pink team. And then a vote in Congress where we were able to get actually more people in Congress to say no to a cold war on China than we are able to get members of Congress to say please call for a diplomacy Biden with Ukraine. So that's a little bit of good news. But you know, as we say, it's easier to stop a war than to, it's easier to stop a war from starting than to stop a war, which has already started. And that kind of proof is in the pudding with who we could get on board with both of these issues. So now that everybody's got a chance to join, I want to introduce you yet again to Ting's and some of you for the first time. Ting's talk is part of the Dong Sheng news team and Wei is going to share with you links because if you haven't subscribed to Dong Sheng news, do now because you'll get to hear Ting's every week. I think it's Friday or Saturday. Take you through two minutes of just news from inside China, which we are denied. And I love her voice and I love listening to her every week and like what the diet of two weeks of actual real news on China is a good thing to have in our psyches as part of our diet so that we become relational with China. And Ting's is also a researcher, artist and cultural coordinator at Tri Continental Institute for Social Research. She's been working with movements globally in Africa and Latin America before moving to China three years ago. She's joined us a couple times in the last few years where we've asked her to share a little bit of her life, what she's learning and we're thrilled that she's come back and also that she gets up early to kind of make it work with our schedule here. Ting's, what time is it in China? It's 9am so it's very reasonable. So she had to get up early so we're happy that you got up early to be with us. Thank you so much for joining us again. So you've been living in China almost three years and I guess let's just start out. Oh I also want to say that Ting's just did a piece on COVID because there were so many questions on COVID and Wei will post that in the chat also so we're probably not going to cover a lot there because she's already written so much on it. But you know we're going to touch a little bit on these last three years because they are the COVID three years. What have you learned in the last three years? Like what would you say you know given entering China and where you are now? What would you say some of the highlights of what you learned are? Big question but first of all I just want to say thanks Doty and the whole Code Pink team for having me again. I think it's amazing you continue to fight and create these spaces to dialogue and always on the front lines you know always following your work and trying to see what disruption you're up to so this is great. Always happy to be here. I think these three years it's you know it's so much to so much learning so much learning so much unlearning at the same time right? I mean just a little bit of background on myself you know I'm from Hong Kong and grew up in the west in Canada and and spent a lot of my adult years back in the global south and which finally brought me back here for work and study but even though I've always had a chance to visit mainland I still have family in Guangdong you know we frequently visited my grandfather's village or family there but I never lived in mainland China you know and now I'm currently in Beijing the last time I had been here first and last time was 17 years ago and I think for many of us whether we're Chinese in other parts of China let's say not in mainland or the diaspora or just people who have never lived here I think we have a lot of I don't know perceptions of China can be kind of stuck in the past they're sort of frozen in a different era don't have an updated view and that's maybe part of the reasons why some of these narratives can be taken advantage of in the media and particularly western mainstream media so I think it was a process of unlearning and really seeing a society that's quite dynamic that has advanced in so many ways and I know sometimes there's a kind of interest in the technological, scientific or digital developments which is very important in daily life but it's also the social aspects sort of the lifting up of hundreds of millions of people into a new middle class the eradication of extreme poverty and you feel that when you live here and I think that's the sort of social side of that kind of growth that we don't get to see in the media and I would think that was a big part and it took it takes me a long time to also convince my own family whether they're in Canada or Hong Kong or Macau that China has changed significantly than the views we have from let's say I don't know maybe stuck in the cultural evolution era or stuck in the early days of the opening up reform or even stuck 15 years ago it's just a very fast and changing society you know like I'm looking out my window right now it's a bright blue sky in Beijing that seems inconceivable even 10 years ago that you know the last months I've been here almost every day has been a bright blue sky and I would have thought that was impossible thinking about the pollution that was in the early 2000s so that's just a concrete example of just living and walking and breathing here here it's still a long way to go but it's impressive how much things can change in a short amount of time cool um I didn't note in introducing you that you you last time we talked to you you were in Shanghai but you've moved to Beijing to go to school um correct and maybe give us a little bit of like what's that like to go to school in China I think you went to school in Canada before and um what moved you to to go to school yeah um yeah so I'm I started my PhD this fall um at Tsinghua University I was to say it's been a long time since I've been in university so whether or not it's in China or elsewhere you're right I did my my both my undergrad and my master's in Canada but that was a long time ago so I've been adjusting the last few months remembering all those things like selecting courses and you know those online platforms of how to submit your papers and etc so it's been great um uh and I'm you know balancing the work plus study um which is interesting as well I would say there's a lot of um maybe two things that struck me um that are quite different than studying in the west let's say um one is the experience of the canteens um here the canteens cafeterias are all heavily subsidized so um often like to take pictures and send to my friends and say oh I you know this would be equivalent of like 60 cents for a meal or something like that and um it's just such a vibrant place because you it's basically kind of a big food court where um you can just pick little plates of food from all parts of China and so it depends on you know what day you feel like you want to have some Sichuanese food some Cantonese food or whatnot um and it's just this really collective experience it's very different than I think the time I spent in Canada where I just felt like I was you know um uh like the the the the coca-cola stands or you know the kind of I don't remember the distributors but it was just like unhealthy food not um extremely expensive not subsidized um and anyway so it's a very different experience and also the experience of just eating collectively it's it's uh quite nice um another thing is I guess there is a different kind of culture of um um respect for professors I would say here um so for one example it's um it is a environment where there's a lot less sort of group discussions it is something more like okay you go and listen to the lectures and that's something I'm getting used to as well um but it's a super friendly environment I think the first few days I was remembering you know many many many years ago when I did my undergraduate degree um you know the kind of culture around drinking culture party and culture it's quite different here here it's there's a lot of um a different kind of social life that's not centered around alcohol um for students so that was also refreshing there's just a lot more like the first few days there was so much like physical activity and games that people were playing all throughout the university um I didn't really play but I I absorbed it all and that was quite interesting to see as well oh cool that's fun plus it's a beautiful campus I've seen your photos it looks quite beautiful yeah amazing that's true around you know that's true in Shanghai and Beijing just the beauty and the parks and the greenery is always so staggering that you know in such a big city and everyone bikes um so that's one thing you really have to get used to like if you I always biked in cities I always you know use that as my transportation but um here's real biking you know when you have to enter the sort of rush hour of hundreds and hundreds of bikes on the campus well I want to go back to COVID so um you were living in Shanghai when the first kind of quarantine shutdown hit what was that like a year ago um yeah in May around there May of not this year of last year yeah yeah so maybe like seven months ago um what was that like you know that um you'd been free you know the whole world was suffering from COVID and China hadn't really been suffering from it um once it'd been eradicated in the very beginning um and then it hit what was that like you were living in Shanghai the first city to be locked down correct well actually I think one of the things is you know three years a lot of things happens and I think right now in the recent months especially in the western media it's kind of quite um sensationalists about what has been happening is there's a kind of amnesia I think short-term memory you know a short-term memory society short-termism is how we see the world is that looking back um for after the Wuhan period which was controlled in about 73 days um in that city and that was a scary time you know because there was a virus that no one knew anything about there were no vaccines and the city was shut down and the country mobilized its resources sent tens of thousands of doctors and and try to save lives and that was the most important thing in that moment but for the most the vast majority of the last three years I would say most of us lived a pretty normal life you know because especially the first trains strains the most deadly ones were contained pretty effectively by the zero covid policy so I think one of the things and you mentioned the article and I think shared it in the group here that I wrote was just this I think I felt the need to be able to defend not all the kind of the bad and the ugly and the mistakes of that any government will make in terms of confronting such a difficult and like historic pandemic but actually just remembering it feels like there's that amnesia that for a long time most of us were not living in lockdown okay you know we wear masks in public spaces that's not because we're like fearful of the government but it's just because we're a collective culture and we want to protect people around us as much as we want to protect ourselves that's just a normal thing that's not even an issue or that we had to take a PCR test before you travel from one city to the next and there were sort of some pop-ups of cases that were controlled pretty quickly sometimes with lockdown measures sometimes with mass testing sometimes with other measures because China was testing how to deal with this virus in cities of different scales you know Shanghai has a place of almost 25 million people it's massive so I want to just kind of at least bring that back to the president to remind us that that was the the reality for most Chinese people for most of the last three years um Shanghai was tough you know I spent the entire two months that the city was in lockdown in lockdown I think there were including the government itself made its own criticisms of some of the lack of preparations or sort of slowness to act you know initially they wanted to sort of just close some areas and not the whole city and that you know the virus moved around and I think it was also a learning about the new strains of virus especially Omicron are extremely transmissible you know the old measures that worked quite well with even Delta or the previous variant wasn't as effective for something that transmits that fast that was also at the same time less deadly so this is also kind of a testing ground the Shanghai moment as much as it was tough for for all of us it was a learning moment for now this period of transition to a more relaxed COVID policy and it's learning from that one thing I did learn even though they spent two months in my house which on the good side is I after you know initial period of figuring out how to buy food and that was sorted out pretty quickly there's a lot of neighborliness and I think you'll like this because I know Code Pink is very interested in building a local peace economy I think in some ways many of us learned that uh that kind of local level solidarity of course the government was there and sent boxes of food when they could but it wasn't everything that you needed so a lot of the community groups and just neighbors got together formed we chat groups we chat is our social media it's kind of WhatsApp form groups to bulk buy to kind of check in on each other especially the elderly who are the most vulnerable you know exchange food you know I knew a neighbor on the third floor that had a baby and you know did she have enough milk that kind of thing so a lot of people experience that uh neighborliness uh in a city so big it's sometimes hard to recover that so that is also I think I think a silver lining of that experience so um during that period of time before the lockdown you got to travel a lot around China and um you talked about how large Shanghai is I think one of the things I think that's also confusing to the US is there were like all of China never was in lockdown is that correct yeah absolutely maybe maybe 200 million people were locked down in it I actually don't know the numbers but maybe in terms of major cities about 10 cities over the last three years have experienced a kind of lockdown um and they vary in length you know for example Guangzhou uh was um very oh yeah Guangzhou was pretty fast uh they did a lockdown about seven to ten days around the time that uh Shanghai was in lockdown but that was about two months so it this says a lot about local implementation and just different measures and effectiveness and so it's not all one blanket thing but on the whole I mean China's massive country 10 cities in the country so big is not that much so probably about a billion people weren't in lockdown yeah or if they were in terms of like experience some isolation would have been short periods of time you know oh if they got COVID or if they you know were near someone with um you know with COVID or high risk of being having COVID that kind of thing but it was not the vast majority of the experience for most of the last three years so could you tell us like you you did get to travel and you talked about getting the test before you got out on plane or whatever and so I have a bunch of travel questions like where did you get to go um what what's travel like the planes the fast trains the subway there's so many interesting you know ways to get around um and um also I think people don't understand the city tier thing if there you could explain the first second third tier rural kind of that's a big thing and a question but like what's it like to travel and where were they where did you go sure no I mean I would have loved to travel more than I actually did that's not because of COVID that's just because of work and time um but I did have a chance to go have a couple of trips up for me were very meaningful of course both in terms of the tiering uh responding to your question is that it China has four tier one cities so Shanghai Beijing Guangzhou Shenzhen both of those are in the south um in Guangdong province where I'm from um but uh these are the mega cities and then we tear down for her different scales and it's not just the size of population but it's like infrastructure you know kind of different facilities there's a whole set of metrics of how a city is classed that way and and it's a way to also help implement policy that being said you know one experience I had was going to I think it's a tier three or four city in Guangzhou and I remember talking to a friend who's from Beijing so she's used to always living in a big city and she's like oh yes it's like it's a small town you know it's a very small tier three four city and it's a city of four million people you know so in any other context it'd be a massive city you know in the city I lived in Toronto I think it's just about five million so that's the biggest city in Canada and so anyways that gives it perspective of what scale is but that would be a lower tiered city um so very much still up and coming in one of the poorest regions uh poorest provinces and that was a great experience because I went with um some researchers of tri-continental which you mentioned to do a study to go and visit some of the places of the poverty alleviation campaign. Guangzhou was one of the provinces that was a focus of this campaign trying to look at basically the poor in the rural areas of the regions that had not been developed as quickly as and prioritized for development like in the eastern part in places like Shanghai and and and in Beijing for example so that being said it was an amazing experience going from the kind of city to the countryside getting to talk to you know women youth elders you know party members people who work in businesses who had been also sent by the businesses to live and work with families who are it were in poverty and kind of over the years create a plan somehow collectively to exit extreme poverty and it was an incredible experience especially when you do the travel at that point was living from Shanghai to get to the countryside to understand uh how life in the countryside has really improved you know I remember talking to a woman uh and she became in the process of this lifting herself out of poverty she ended up joining the party and becoming a local leader as she was said that in the countryside she used to have to walk at least two hours a day to take her kid to school there and back and so that would be four or five hours a day now you know she lives in a community where there is health clinics there's a school there's daycare she says I live I live I live upstairs and I work downstairs because she's not a local local party official but what basically is there to serve you know hundreds of families and knocks on the doors of all these families and helping them because she felt like she was really helped in this process and her kid is you know two minute walk from from her school so these kinds of improvements are very concrete and material in people's lives means that every day she has four or five extra hours to do what she actually really wants to be doing which is contributing to her community I think that's just one example of millions and millions I could I could go on about um and another trip I did which was really meaningful for me personally is I got to go back to my grandfather my maternal grandfather's village and it's been maybe almost 10 12 years that I hadn't been and since my grandfather had gone quite old he hadn't had a chance to go back so I really wanted to do that for him at the time he was in the hospital he actually just passed away a few months ago but I was really happy to be able to go back to the village that he left me was 12 you know during wartime during Japanese occupation and he left on his own to go to Macau and where he spent most of his life but you know it was great I did a zoom call on on like the hilltop of a little memorial that he had built for his parents and all the villagers were there and remembering him and talking to him and we all had a great time and I also got to bring my partner and they were really excited because they had never seen a Brazilian before so and it was fun and the night ended up with us at the karaoke you know with the a lot of our you know relatives and villagers it was great fun well that's beautiful um so you have taken trains and planes in the subway anything you can tell us about how that's different than Canada Brazil Africa you know like the infrastructure of the of travel yeah I mean I'll use this example of going to the village because I've done that trip several times before and since I was a baby you know and it's incredible uh and I was the one thing I consistently told my family members because they were shocked especially those don't who don't live there anymore uh was about the high speed train uh the high speed train that takes us to the nearest city uh which was so quick and it was impossible almost for my grandfather to understand that wow his hometown has a high speed train um because that journey used to be you know really slow roads then you have to take a boat and then you have to like find a local person to kind of take you over there and there's bridges and dirt roads it's like it was a day to get to the village now is we like zip there uh with uh with a high speed train uh and then the roads were great so my uncle picked me up and then we just drove straight to the it was it was fantastic to see I mean this is the improvements in the 10 15 20 years and so high speed trains are wonderful experiences they're just you know if you like people watching it's a wonderful place it's also just you know there's wifi there's um it's so if anyone it has any kind of motion sickness you know it's just like the smooth fast ride you get to see the countryside you get to see the city you don't have to worry about some of the messiness of flying so it's it's a very I would say dignified way of traveling cool thank you you talked about going karaokeing and I'm just thinking like you know when you finish work what is what do folks do for fun after work like what do you do to get together um as friends as colleagues um what social life look like eating a lot I feel like that is just still the center of culture you know especially here in Beijing a big part is hot pot hot pot culture obviously hot pot is in a lot of places and there's a lot of rivalry rivalry between cities or who has the best hot pot you know I'm going to think that Guangdong hot pot is the best but anyways I'm in Beijing now so sharing food is a huge thing um and for those who haven't eaten hot pot before I think it's a wonderful I think symbol of a collective way of eating you know basically you'll have hot pot of boiling water not water like soup or anything and you get to cook different kinds of meats veggies seafood and eat together and make and mix with delicious sauces and and everyone shares from the pot cooks from the pot and and it's a great way to spend you know entire night um but I mean I just I think it's here especially in a big city I think it would be what you expect from from many big cities you know for a while I was trying to take dance classes with a friend but I think I I kind of fell out of discipline with that because I just couldn't make it fit in my schedule but that was quite fun it was a kind of a salsa dancing class and it's quite hard for me so that was fun but I think it's just any kind of big city nothing kind of unusual or different that you could imagine but definitely food is the center of all social life and then you mentioned the woman you've mentioned women a couple of times what's it like to be a woman in China is there anything you find different that's there yeah I think there is something for the first few months I was here it's a quite profound experience or realization and at first I didn't know how to I didn't know how to put a name to it just um by by the fact that you know in Shanghai the streets are pretty safe for a woman to walk in and right before this I was I was living in Sao Paulo in Brazil so compared big city to big city uh and before that I was in Johannesburg in South Africa and then before that I was in Toronto and Canada so have a get a bit of that north south big city experience but I would say between Shanghai and Beijing I've never been in a place as a woman walking the streets I can feel so safe um and and I think obviously one of things is you know I'm Chinese so you know is that one of the reasons like I blend in even if I am not from these cities and I talked to a lot of friends who are also from other places and and they experience you know this a very similar experience um you know I I can go out and late at night or feel like oh I went out and went to bar and come home on my own and generally feel very safe and I didn't know how much mental energy that we as women have I mean it's not that I don't want to paint this as a kind of place where we've gotten rid of patriarchy and there's no violence against women or nothing I don't want to do that but just the mental energy of um not having to always watch my back always sort of be aware oh where's my cell phone you know I can't have it in my hand um just so much mental energy is spent and I that's the thing I couldn't understand when I first moved here I actually had more mental space and emotional space to think about other things and do other things um with that energy and that was something you can't quantify you know uh you just feel it and so I've had this conversation with so many women from different places that say that say that exact same thing and and of course like that isn't just an accident you know um yes you know I'm making a joke that you know there's I don't think there's any place in the world where we've managed to smash patriarchy yet and that's unfortunate and we're still working on it and we're not giving up but there were huge gains made in the early socialist period you know like in terms of education the social aspect so or you know kind of flipping around the whole idea of marriage and and women in the workplace and participation in political life um so that that is present and I think in in terms of when when we say oh Mao said women uh lift up half the sky you know that that became a value but of course we know that you know patriarchal views traditional views culture it that takes a long time to change this is a millennial culture that um takes a long time to change and of course economics the political landscape has also changed really rapidly especially in the last decades you know we're not in a time of the family planning of one child policy anymore but doesn't mean that you know young women are now eager and jumping to want to get married or have a child or feel like um motherhood and wifehood like is necessary to complete herself so there's all sorts of questions now about being a woman I think in China um that's much more nuanced uh than one gets to read in the western media um and there's just such a much more diverse kind of set of questions and um choices in life that were never afforded in in literally 5000 years of history for for women here um or anywhere in the world really so yeah I think those were some reflections and many of them um and I'm really glad to be able to also have a group of of friends and women here from different parts uh different parts of China but also different parts of global south that get exchanged on these these topics a lot but I think it's one of those stories that gets most misrepresented I would say cool thank you so what kind of research do you do and why you know what you're there you're doing research um fill it in yeah absolutely so um as you mentioned you know I I'm with tricontinental and I've been with the institute for the last five years since it was founded and my main role is to um work on art and culture and that's interesting because I think um for anyone who's you know of the left who are socialists who are part of social movements and organizations um it's I think there's a kind of sometimes we get cut off from our own history of struggles that came before us and particularly what I'm interested in my research is kind of recovering that artistic and cultural work of of different liberation struggles especially of the global south from Cuba to Indonesia to China and elsewhere and trying to connect that back into our present such kind of feed our present struggles so um I would say that's a big part of my work because I really do feel like as a socialist that in order for us to build socialism it's also part of the battle of ideas the battle over our emotions you know the battle to create or become more human human beings um that is impossible under capitalism and then I another part of my research and I think it's very linked you know given that I do live in a socialist country and and part of it in these conversations is to try to explain or be a little bit of a bridge or what the project of socialism has been like in China um and part of that is just providing news as you mentioned and thanks for giving a plug to the Dongxian work because a few of us researchers some from here but some from other parts of the world from you know Zambia, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil we kind of came together and said we need information you know and that it doesn't have to be even you know you don't even need to want to be a socialist or believe in socialism it's just you need information I think it does a great disservice to the world if we think that a country of this size developing in this speed and of this you know length of history doesn't have anything to offer doesn't have anything that we can learn from and that we can sort of one fell swoop just think that it's it's um you know the China bad narrative or something like that so it's just to provide some facts information and then also now opening up to other kinds of projects like we have a podcast that's hosted by these great two great friends Mika Medeus about the China Africa experience based from a South African and Zambian perspective we're trying to also bring what we call the Chinese voices you know some of the intellectual debates and the public debates that come in China because there's a sort of thinking that you know there's no debates in one in a country of 1.4 billion people but there is a lot and we want to bring a little bit of those perspectives whether or not you know I personally will agree with the views I think it's important that we have you know that kind of nuance and and like possibility for those who are interested to learn a little bit more and everyone can access those at Dongshan news right both the crane and the yeah on the faces so and we're all the social media platforms so as you search Dongshan news you'll you'll find us cool well I just want to you know take that a little further your people in the west often portray China as an oppressive dictatorship without democracy or human rights um how do you speak to that you know I think I know that I mean of course I'm someone who believes in human rights and humanity and people's lives over profit and I would say if you ask any Chinese person here they will probably say they believe they live in a country that that supports just that but sometimes I think the whole human rights narrative in a liberal sense gets kind of weaponized against people and that seems really bizarre right and I feel that very strongly being Chinese and being here how human rights is kind of used against us in some weird way to save us um I look at one thing you know I I think um especially doing research around the poverty campaign it helped kind of helped me understand what democracies and what human rights is in a much more expansive and I think much deeper way than just go to the ballot boxes every four years to choose you know a president or prime minister or what have you we know the corruption of that system as well but one of the things is um you know in China let's say democracy and I do believe there is democracy just not electoral democracy there's a democracy of a different form when you go down to the grassroots level and had the privilege of being able to do that and in fact it that film that CodePink has been trying to get reinstated from um about poverty China's war on poverty which I really encourage everyone to have a watch it's still on CGTN on the China partner side so please do watch it you get to see on the grassroots level how democracy is actually practiced and enacted um so for example the kinds of um uh uh democratic evaluation processes that happen to be able to ensure to determine if someone is you know registered as poor if someone has been lifted out of poverty if someone has returned out of poverty it's a very collective process that for example all the villagers and all the local officials but plus the party members are involved in it's a collective process of of of debate and dialogue and oftentimes voting there's processes of direct voting at the local levels which then those representatives elect their representatives above and et cetera et cetera and for a country of such a size there's a very complex political mechanism of of getting uh uh information getting responses from the bottom all the way to the top and and it's it's a machinery that is fascinating to learn more about and I'm not claiming to be an expert on that but those processes exist um I think another thing in terms of human rights I you know I think it was quite shocking looking back at the last three years of the pandemic um one thing that happened is that for the first time in history um China's life expectancy actually surpassed that of the U.S. I mean U.S. of course China's the second largest economy but it's still a developing country the U.S. because in large part because of the huge amount of deaths I think recorded now is 1.1 million people in COVID that could have been avoided for a country of that size and wealth but didn't right and that actually caused a decline one of the highest declines since I've seen since you know people are comparing to the world war world war two to you know um the 1920s or you know it's a shocking numbers um but when we look back historically you know when the PRC People's Republic of China was founded in 1949 the life expectancy was 36 years old it was that helps you understand sort of the the poverty of the country the situation of the country and how weak the country was when it's founded in the U.S. it was already 68 so it already arrived at such a high level of of of development and and and I think um why am I talking about the life expectancy because it accumulates a lot of things you know it's about um education it's about uh access to uh to healthcare it's about you know questions of gender many things are embedded in the question of of life expectancy so that's just to say in the last eight decades the average Chinese person has more than doubled their lifespan and this is in living memory while the average person in the U.S. has gained one year of their life per decade that's you know that says a lot when people when you ask a Chinese person to say oh no you're you're really being oppressed your life is terrible we need to save you you're saying we're living some of the best lives we've ever lived and they see it in their material lives they see the improvements they see the infrastructure they see the the the lifting out of poverty they see people getting into universities and the education system improving they see healthcare improving and you can't convince them that they don't live in a society that cares about people and don't live in a society that doesn't have human rights it's just not possible thank you i mean uh way we'll put it in the chat but you know bringing up that movie again we we were actually have the one not on cgn we have the original that was um censored and we're asking people to show it to their communities so way you'll put that in the chat because i think what you just said is all in that movie about they it's not about money it's about creating a whole infrastructure that supports life and and that's basically the answer to how did they lift people out of poverty and i forgot it's the five and the three and the two or like whatever the thing that you did on your last conversation which i think we should put in the chat also way of the last conversation we had with things because i do think it's interesting about how you address something both with a plan but also with humanity and both were present and that there's lots of opportunities for everybody listening to go there and learn that but teams what you were saying is that it's like yes you know there's a life expectancy in the united states but also if you are poor or a person of color in the united states your life expectancies in the you know low sixties so it's also gone backwards in a way and in the south i think there's a eight-year difference of life expectancy from a red state to a blue state so very much that taking out of poverty and the democratic process that is the commitment to life that that is is why i think it's censored because it's it's it could change life in the united states and it is changing life in china and i think that's in this effort right now to humanize china i think that is a really core piece of this conversation is what does a socialist government do it serves the people what is a capitalist government do it serves capital and capital is the destructive extractive oppressive economy so thank you for illuminating leading that i just one more question because you talked about the work you do and the research you do as about culture um where now besides dang sheng news uh could people learn about popular culture in china what movies to watch you know what are the big issues i mean i guess we can see that at dang sheng news but where where do we be able to tap into chinese culture if we can't go yeah well the borders are opening now so hopefully people have a chance to see for themselves and and also get a chance to know china you know um but that aside there are lots of things to learn more about china that isn't on nifflix um but uh well one of the things um to maintain the keep with the dong sheng plug is there's always a section on in the digests on people's life and culture and so we try to bring more of those social stories and also some some trends so you can kind of stay tuned for that that section every week there's definitely a couple of things that's interesting culturally um it's really impressive also i think being here is to see how much you know the film industry and the production quality has really improved and to the point where i think people here actually maybe one of the only countries in the world where um hollywood films are kind of tanking now you know because people are preferring to see chinese films um lots of amazing series uh depends on what you like because what i like might not be what your audience likes but i'll i'll suggest two tv series um that are online you can find them on youtube and you can find them with english subtitles that were really popular in the last couple of years one is called minning town um since i really do like stories about the countryside um it's about poverty alleviation um and the kind of struggles in a town in a village um and it's about you know the women in the period especially in the early days of opening up reform the women going into the cities to work in factories and then also trying to create like a local economy um based on uh different kinds of farming and in this case was our mushroom farming and all the difficulties of having you know to negotiate between um you know party members and how to they serve the local population and then all sorts of things beautiful i think is a really beautiful series and another one who is i think it's recommended for those who want to learn more about sort of socialists and marxist history is called the age of awakening it's about that kind of 1910s 20s and when marxist ideas were coming into the country and the kind of pre-formation of the party also amazing very historical uh historically dense but you know for for kind of history nerds like me that's a fun one um there's also some great films i mean i haven't been i haven't sadly i haven't been to the theaters in a few months but the last one i watched there's a lot of great comedies um there's one called moon man that was quite big this last year um it's like a science fiction comedy um it basically long story short is that there's a maintenance worker on the moon station left behind when they had to all evacuate because an asteroid was about to hit but he was too he's a bit of a you know funny guy wasn't really paying attention to the alerts was busy dancing whatever and he gets left behind with a kangaroo on the moon and so it's that kind of humor but great um and then i'll mention one more movie which i really loved i think it was from two years ago and i think this says something broader culturally in terms of the themes i think you mentioned like what kind of are the topics so this film was called the high mom and it really took the country by storm it's uh well first time um woman director she's she's um she's a comedian she directed this film and it's a kind of semi-autobiographical it's about her story when her mom passed away suddenly in a car accident it was like a she goes back in time and meets the younger version of her mom who was working in a factory at the time and they become friends you know she travels back in time and gets to sort of learn about her life and you know see her moms in a different way and that was you know that's interesting to think it wasn't films about war or end of the world or anything it was actually film about like mother-daughter a relationship um and it was such a huge social hit because people started posting online photos of their moms in the 80s and like writing lots of appreciation notes of saying oh you know how you were so beautiful or things sometimes like you shouldn't have married him you know those the kinds of things and that was the biggest hit of the year and she has now this director is now the biggest grossing woman director all-time film history in the world so these kinds of things that happen that I'm like this is this has something about the mood I guess or the the spirit of the society right it's definitely a not a warmong ring and I'm very much you know a pro piece let's say kind of message well that says a lot about the humanizing that's happening you know in China's which is not how we see them so shame on the United States for seeing it in such a different way um Mark asks do Chinese people feel threatened by the belligerent rhetoric from the US government and media towards China okay I mean that's a good question um this last three years has been tough because as much as the pandemic was hard for everyone then I think you know US really increased its attacks and and and sort of assaults against China in various ways so kind of hidden while they're down type of mentality I think the US has I one thing I think is important to note that most Chinese people as much as it's not about a question of censorship or not or having access to west is that they don't actually read a lot of the western media I mean not only do they not speak English they don't look for it it's just you know the US is not the center of the world of an average Chinese person and unfortunately I think for a lot of people in the US it's hard to like recognize that most of the world doesn't think about them all the time but um that being said yeah I mean there was it was a really I think I think when the moment of a Nancy Pelosi kind of defining all international norms decided to land in in Taipei that was a shock and that hurt a lot of people in the sense of that's a direct violation of the one China principle and and for Chinese people there's nothing more dear than the question of you know a national unification or addressing this history of of imperialism that is a history that's still ongoing as we see what's happening in Taiwan and the aggressions that are happening the provocations that are happening in terms of is there a fear I'm not sure if there's a fear surely is an anti-war sense and people don't want I mean China has doesn't have the track record that the US has in terms of militarism in terms of war mongering it just isn't a country even for you know before was the PRC that was the case so there is no appetite to go and start a war because that's just not also in the nature so anything we can do I think we have to I think that's why the work of Code Pink is so essential is to continue to forward an anti-war message that's essential for humanity. Donald asks are there homeless people in China and are there a lot of single mothers who are dependent on government help? I actually don't know the numbers on this to to be honest about it I would say for one of the surprises absolutely my experience has been living in Shanghai and Beijing but also going to some of the other smaller cities almost you will not see any homeless people almost none and I think it's something that is quite surprising for anyone who especially I think whether it's a global north or global south you know the rise in homelessness the rise in poverty the reverse reversal back into poverty especially of the last few years worsened by the pandemic of course the pandemic doesn't cause those root causes of poverty but it has definitely worsened it's nothing like that here you won't see that in terms of a single women relying on the government there are subsidies and there are sort of changing rules around who can access the kind of benefits including non-married single parents so that is happening I don't actually have the numbers of how many people rely on those though but they do exist. Cool thank you. Kim has a question how prevalent is kissing or is it just for popularization of movies? Yeah I would say you know you do see sometimes you know in a in an alley outside a bar some young people like us but it is not a culture where I mean I lived in Brazil before that I would say there's a big difference about public displays of affection let's call it then here that is true you know it is still a pretty I think there's a kind of I don't know it's a kind of the conservatism around showing that much affection on the streets like people will hold hands people will be very much that but you don't see a lot of people just making out on subways or something. What also how do we ask how do Chinese people react when they see someone who's foreign and is there a difference between tier one cities and other places in their reaction? I just want to answer that I want to quickly say something for me. Yeah you've been in China so you know but I even you know my husband Sri Lankan Jamaican you know not Chinese he's a very much the other you know so not even white and he was coming back from Hong Kong and I remember the thing he said to me he had to go into quarantine he said that everyone took care of him that there were 100 people on the plane and everyone made sure he was okay and I thought about it and I thought if there was one Chinese person on a plane and Americans were going into quarantine would they have done the same thing um especially given how the culture is moving towards hate towards Asians and I just thought you know so that that's my answer to that story what's yours Ting's? Yeah I mean my my partner is is Brazilian and not white and when when we first moved to Shanghai we we moved quite far out of the sort of downtown core where there's a lot of people who are from you know around the world visibly as well we lived in a community where for sure he was the only person who was non-Chinese and I would say I was also surprised with how how normalized I guess people were just they're just nice and treated and maybe minimal kind of curiosity like the nothing kind of the rudeness stop and point look there's a foreigner type of thing it's very different obviously these are still big cities people are kind of used to it and just not um not the same I think it would look very different if you went to a small village even when when we went to my my grandfather's village which is not that small and it's it's much quite developed now and has changed a lot in 30 years um I'm sure some of the kids will be like oh curious you know you don't look like you're from around here but on the whole I think there's a warmness um at most curiosity but really not that much um but there's a warmness and usually what I have found and I've heard from lots of friends who are not Chinese it's almost like a it can feel overbearing in the sense of like really want to make sure have you eaten do you need anything do you know how to get from eight point eight point B maybe like too helpful this you know like no no no I live here I know how to get around um so donald s is there a lot of alcoholism or hard drug abuse in china drugs um are really strictly controlled here um and there is a historical reason for it that kind of very kind of zero tolerance on drugs you know like marijuana is not seen as much worse than cocaine or you know so and this drugs are heavily controlled and not a common thing but I would say even if you talk to most young people um there is a strong anti-drug sentiment and that comes from this history of imperialism of course during the century of humiliation what really began that period was the opium wars led by the british and it was a an aggressive forcing upon us of opium um and and what that did to the economy to the people to the culture and so that's in living memory of that kind of humiliation that was suffered and and the use of drugs as a tool weaponized as a tool of of basically accessing chinese markets and exploiting um chinese people so that has created that so drugs is not a major thing in the cultures culture here and it's very very strictly controlled and it's it's not a joke um alcohol is something that um I think it's probably like in any society um I don't know much about in terms of you know how serious how to compare alcoholism versus other places um but surely there is going to be alcoholism here um like in any place like any other country the same as you said about you know being a woman and patriarchy it's it's global um uh dylan says you've lived in both canada and china's or anything you like better about canada than china well definitely not the cold uh I don't miss that at all even though I'm now Beijing is pretty cold and I was a little resentful to have to live where I have to buy a winter jacket again um I guess what I do miss is especially in toronto and in the sort of around the greater toronto area it's a place that is I think now probably more than half the people are born outside of canada and and largely from the global south so there's a dynamism and and a kind of culture that I love I do miss being able to um have friends and community that from all parts of the world and I do I mean this might sound right but maybe the food is what I miss I get to eat all the chinese food I want here which is great but I don't get to eat all the whatever food that I'd like to eat at the same quality as I can get in toronto that's for sure so um one last question um um uh and I think this john sorry I don't I'm not sure this is appropriate for tings because it's a political question about uh you know china's aggressive policy regarding islands that have been considered vietnamese and I I she's not I don't I don't think that's a tings question um I know I am not following it well to comment on it yeah I think tings does spend time on an island in southern china that she loves you want to say anything about sanya and you're escaping to sanya and what that's sure yeah sanya is the city very touristic city um it's the beach town in the province island of hainan it's the southernmost part of china um it's I mean who who doesn't want to spend some time on a beach you know well I know some people who don't but I love it so when there's a chance to go down there I really do try to um it also has a really lovely I think you know socialist history that I think since we talked a lot about women and everything that I love which is around it's called the red detachment of women and it's a based on a historical um basically brigade a women's brigade uh that was you know fighting against feudalism fighting against the nationalist fighting against japanese occupation and so it was a brigade of about 120 women um that were their guerrilla fighters in the jungles of hainan and that has really become a living legacy culturally um throughout the you know last hundred years uh whether it's um you know ballets plays films and now there's a production I think jody you've been there before to see like this massive production that's on every night where there's like 500 actors moving stages and it's a beautiful homage to to that history that it's a reminder for especially younger generations of that living history you know so that's one of the reasons also I love love Sonia well the first time I went one of the women was in a wheelchair I think she was 98 or something um I don't know exactly alive but yeah quite amazing to keep that spirit that revolutionary spirit alive about those women that would not accept the violence of their of the landowners so thank you absolutely well tings thank you so much for letting us see china through your eyes and letting us ask you some questions thanks for all you do um ways put a lot of ways to engage in the um in the campaign this campaign is about china is not our enemy and there's so many tools for you to be a tuning fork for peace to to invite people to the dong sheng news to invite people to some of the studies that tings has done done for the tricontinental research that there there is information out there that helps us humanize ourselves and humanize china in our eyes so deepest gratitude please everyone be engaged we can see it's it's up again the you know washington is a buzz with we're going after china today they just said you know the republicans the one thing republicans and democrats agree on is the war on china so you know we have work to do we know wars are not the answer we know we need cooperation for people and the planet and thanks tings for keeping us informed in all the ways you do and i encourage you to please read tings's piece on coven um because that's one of the places where the mass of lies is happening and she really takes us in a deep dive um in that piece and there's one piece that came out of the train is not our enemy team asking a question and i um after they read it and that was well how did why did it change so quickly why did the pivot happen so quickly and i think you've just added that um if you could answer that question because i think it's fascinating about you know it was going to maybe they were going to you know after the congress they were going to enroll it over a few months and then they switched flipped but what what was that flip i guess in a way um as i was mentioning back um with the shanghai um recognizing that lockdown period was already appeared okay this virus is changing um it's both more transmissible and less deadly so there was already a process that was happening over the last months and so um back in november uh early uh november 11 was the first time the central government already began relaxing measures um it was the 20 measures of various things around quarantine rules no more use of lockdowns etc etc and that period was a transition some confusion in especially local areas of how to implement it and then later on in december was another the the more big announcement i guess of you know january 8th the um the travel restrictions are going to be lifted uh PCR testing uh mass testing was lifted and the variety of things that we saw as the kind of quick um quick change but i guess i want to put it in a context of a it's been a few it's kind of been a few months process there's no way of sort of half opening the border or half doing covid zero the virus comes and it comes and it was already spreading quite quickly so that was i think it was one of the ways it was this very quick roll out and and infections were grew and everything like that but it was already in a couple of months of okay let's relax a little bit and then we just they opened up the border um now in many cities already the cases are are already on their decline um of course in winter it complicates things because it's colder especially in the north where um it's usually people have other you know winter related illnesses so it's it's a difficult moment and it's an in transition um there's also quite a lot of i think relief you know we're we're about to enter the you know chinese new year the luna new year which starts in nine days um people are excited to you know see their families travel and return back to relatively normal life so there's also optimism about the future can you say something about spring festival i'm sorry to keep you so late do you have to be somewhere no no no oh um because i think it would be interesting for for everyone to understand about spring festival you kind of brought it up about the new year but um you know we have Thanksgiving or Christmas where people go see their families and in china at spring festival if there's anything you can tell us about that i'm sure how to happen yeah yeah i mean it is the most important holiday of the year and you know there's four big holidays um around the seasonal changes but spring festival is by far the biggest and it's always a shock you know i remember i know every year the media goes like wow this is a single largest migration of human history that happens every year because that's the time where you know there are literally billions of trips being made you know when you're thinking they're back uh for people to go visit their hometown and so it's a week-long festival and usually it's people just go home you know a lot of people who live in different cities this is their chance that they can reunite with the family eat eat a lot always food um and so that's this is what we're expecting a large amount of people to be traveling this year to go see family probably still not at the sort of pre-pandemic levels with you know people traveling caution especially those who are elderly and etc um but yeah it's it's a pretty exciting moment this year it's happening a bit earlier because it's on the lunar calendar so it doesn't fall on the same day every year in the Gregorian calendar so we just had the the kind of Gregorian new year January 1st and then very three weeks later we have the other one so it january's uh double celebration this year cool with the whole idea of a billion people moving to go home is quite staggering and and how i think it's important to say how long it lasts it's a week is it a week it's a week i mean you know we get four days here and three days there you know to really grapple grapple with having a week that you get to take off that is what the whole country is doing when you think about just the two days that people take off around Thanksgiving or New Year's and what that feels like even in the quietness and the stillness and the not working it's quite a powerful time yeah well one of the things though with the with the holidays here sadly oftentimes we have to make up for a Saturday following or a Sunday following so but we get the full week off so that's that's a nice thing you just might have to make up a couple of the days later that's good to know thank you all right teams thank you so much for joining us um thanks for all you do to make it smarter and more human and more related thanks to all of you who joined for your care and your concern and your wanting that you know you're lifting up that China is not our enemy may we continue to do this work much needed we do not need another war uh all of you could be engaged with us uh International Women's Day we are calling for a global movement to say no war diplomacy cooperation is what we need and it applies both to Ukraine and to China so please reach out to Wei get engaged uh teams maybe you'll like do something out of out of China we can have it be part of our part of our global call we want 50 countries that would be cool absolutely let's think about all right everyone onward to peace thank you so much and thank you to Wei and Maha for making this all work thank you for the hard work thank you for having me and thanks to everyone who stayed on the call