 Okay, we're back, we're live here, it's a Monday morning, 10 o'clock. And I'm Jay Fiedel, this is Think Tech Hawaii, and we're going to do Think Tech Asia right now. And we're going to talk with Richard Hornick. Richard Hornick is a journalist, journalist, can I say that? He's a lecturer at Stony Brook University in New York, but he's much more than that because he's spent years and decades covering China for Time Magazine and other organizations. But he's been around the news media that covered China for his whole professional life. And we have the joy of having him here. He gave a talk not too long ago at the China seminar, which is an important organization in Hawaii, which covers China and reveals things about China you wouldn't otherwise know. And Richard spoke there about what is at mind control in China. So I found a remarkable education for myself. We made a movie for OC16, which played a couple of weeks ago. If you have a chance, look that up on oc16.tv. And he's here with us today to talk about the same subject. Welcome to our show, Richard. Jay, it's always a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you. So let's talk about China until five years ago. So it looked like it was getting more democratic, more like the U.S., it was opening its mind, so to speak, opening its heart. And we could have, at least in the future, an evolving improvement of our relationship with them. But something happened with Xi Jinping. What happened? Well, I don't think they were ever going to be a democracy like the United States. I think what they were striving for was to find an Asian path to creating accountability for their government. That's what most people want in the world is, you know, if you asked most Chinese, if you want to vote for president, they'd say, why? You know, that's not... But make sure that the local party chief doesn't, you know, steal the best land every year when they're doing the land appropriations. And you know, they were moving along, and they were using, I thought, one of the most interesting elements was they were using social media as a way of getting around having an electoral process, because you could follow very easily how people felt. And people were using social media to out corrupt officials. I showed you at the speech this talk, this guy who the government official who was caught on, you know, camera laughing at a horrible traffic action. And then the people, the netizens of China went out and found ways that they could look them up. And he had a different wristwatch on almost every day, and they were very expensive. And he wound up in going to jail. So I thought this was very positive. And in fact, I really thought that what had happened was they had managed, what social media was doing was to defeat the key strategy of any authoritarian government. And that is to atomize the population. What does atomize mean? It means that everyone has to keep to themselves what they think. So you and I, if you were living in, I covered Poland during the 1980s, early 80s. And people were afraid to say what they thought, because I didn't know if you were a spy, right? And so I kept, so people were, people in these societies go around thinking, well, maybe everybody else is happy, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong. And every once in a while, that explodes, and well, social media blew that up. Social media made it possible for people to see that they weren't crazy. They weren't the only ones who thought that this was not the way it should be. And I remember something about the Chinese culture, I mean, that if the government doesn't work for you, if it doesn't provide a working economy and quality of life, then there's an inherent right of the people to turn it up, to change it, maybe by revolution. Right. It's a little less direct than that. It's sort of the mandate of heaven. So in Confucian philosophy, it is the duty of the government to care for the people. And if they don't, then the mandate of heaven will be withdrawn. And that normally over Chinese history was evidenced by peasant riots and revolutions and that sort of thing. But if you have the social media outlet, then you relieve that stress somehow. Well, and it's not just relieving the stress, it provides the one thing that authoritarian regimes never have, which is a feedback loop. The only feedback loop they have is from spies, you know, people. And those spies may be corrupt, they may be, you know, doing, you know, reporting that you're a bad guy because, you know, they like your girlfriend and they want, you know, that's pretty standard. So with social media, you have, you know, the wisdom of crowds, you have lots and lots of inputs. So I'm not just relying on a bunch of, you know, spies who may or may not be corrupt. I'm relying on the whole society to tell me what's going on. So what's so interesting about this is that social media requires, required technology, required the internet and all that. And China was going, you know, big time on expanding the internet at the time. But now the technology is used for maybe a different purpose. Can you explain what happened in the last five years? Yeah. Well, I mean, first, the first thing that happened was they, China decided that, and they've always had a kind of love-hate relationship with that, with the outside world. And they decided that the internet was creating, bringing in too much bad, too many bad influences. You know, Deng Xiaoping, when he opened China to the, to the outside world, he said, you know, when you open the window, some flies may come in. Well, I think they thought that, you know, a whole swarm of mosquitoes were coming in. And so the first thing they did in 2011 was to create what they call the great firewall of China, which is to block Chinese netizens from access to the outside world. So no Facebook, no, no Google, no Twitter, all of that. And they created their own versions, which were very, very successful. So, so that, so that's the first thing that happened. And the second thing that happened was that in 2012, Xi Jinping was chosen as the new leader. And he was confronted with a very, very difficult situation. Corruption in all this wonderful openness that we were talking about, and all this economic growth, there was an enormous amount of corruption, especially after the 2008 financial collapse when they had to pump billions and billions, trillions of renminbi into the system. And he basically decided that the only way to fix this was to shut everything down and to start really controlling society using social media and the internet and other technologies, not as a feedback loop, but as a way of controlling the Chinese mind or closing the Chinese mind. And that's what's been going on for the last five years. So are people aware, do they tolerate this? Is this something where if you're having a good middle-class life, you're not going to complain about it, and even though you know things have changed? Yeah, I think absolutely. And, you know, it's, there are, it doesn't affect most people. You know, most people are perfectly happy. It only affects you when it's just like here, I suppose, when, you know, who's ox got gourd? You know, if you're living in a town in the city and everything is fine and dandy and, you know, so what if I can't, you know, see, you know, what's going on, you know, on Google or Facebook? Who cares if, you know, people are being shut down for saying negative things? Doesn't matter. But if you live in a city or town where there is a problem, like a new chemical factory is being built, then, you know, and you're really afraid of the pollution or it's already been built in or the pollution, and then you can't say anything, then people sort of push back. So it's, you know, it's a mixed back. Yeah. OK, so I guess most people would say I don't want to get into an argument about this. I don't want to be punished in any way, so I'll just let it go. I don't care about Google and Facebook. So how has it evolved in those years with the success of the governments of Xi Jinping's initiative to close down the Chinese mine? Well, it's becoming, it's incremental. So they started with the outside and then they started clamping down on internal communication. So for example, I don't know if you're on Twitter, but on Twitter you can have any sort of handle name you want. And there's no... It's anonymous. It's anonymous. In China, they have effectively eliminated all anonymous handles. You have to have real registration, that's number one. So if you say something, they know about it. And they have 200,000, 400,000 people who do nothing but scan social media for people saying untoward things. Can we take a digression at that point? Sure, sure. I have this vision of a huge big building somewhere in Beijing, which doesn't have a lot of windows and which has a lot of security around it. And all these guys who never tell you in the outside what they do for a living are in there scanning everything that goes over the internet. How far off am I? I don't think it... There are a couple of buildings like that, but they're doing other things. They're doing more sort of outward. They're the people who are trying to steal information from the US government and that sort of thing. This can be... Because of the nature of the job, it can be distributed widely. You shouldn't do it from your home. But it's always secret. You don't know... Oh no, I mean, I think most people... No, it's not really secret. They're pretty open about it. So if I'm doing... If I'm scanning your email, whatever it is, I'm a scanner. That's what I do. I mean, most of it is done through artificial intelligence. I mean, they're always looking for keywords, June 4th, 1989, you know, those sorts of things. You know, as I said the other day, they keep updating these lists and then they plug that in and the artificial intelligence will go through. So the latest one or not the latest but recent was a year or so ago when Obama visited China. And anyway, Obama and Xi Jinping were walking together. Somebody decided that Xi Jinping looked like Winnie the Pooh and Obama looked like Tigger. And so Winnie the Pooh is now a forbidden term in China. Anyway, so it's at that level. But more recently, they have made every platform responsible for all of the content. Now here in the United States for many, many years, they're beginning to change a little bit. But Facebook and Twitter and Google said, you know, we're just a carrier. We don't have any responsibility for what people say. And they've been successful in that region. Well, except it's changing. They're now being forced to accept. In fact, I just saw Unilever is threatening to withdraw all of their advertising from Facebook and Twitter and other platforms if they don't crack down on all of this horrible, you know. But it's not the government. But it's not the government. Although people, you know, you could argue that they're afraid that the government would investigate. But anyway, if you're Waybaugh and if I own Waybaugh and you are, you post something that's incendiary and I don't take it right down, they come after me and you, but they come after me. So it's really been quite effective that way. But, you know, there's still elements. But to me, what's more, and we were talking about, you know, what is the surveillance state going to be like? So the Chinese have taken the latest technologies, facial recognition, you know, scanning the internet, and they are developing a sort of a 1984 approach. So that, for example, in the last few weeks, I forget, some major city in China, in the railroad station there, they've arrested eight people who they know or are known to be criminals based on facial recognition software, sort of like the Minority Report, you know. But more like the Minority Report, they are developing a social credit rating system. So you have a FICA score. You can borrow money based on your, whatever it is, 700, you know, rates are low, 500, you have trouble getting a loan. In China, what they wanna do is create a social credit rating where they watch everything you do on the internet. Again, using artificial intelligence. So if you go to pornographic sites, that's against you. If you buy books that are sort of incendiary, that's against you. If you are caught doing bad things in the airport, and they've had lots of problems with their tourists, you know, opening plane doors and that sort of, all of this stuff gets funneled into a new social credit rating system, which they're hoping to have complete within a couple of years. And that will be used to decide if you get a job. It might even be used to decide if they'll sell you a ticket to get on a high-speed train because you've been a bad boy in the past. So that, to me, is the most sort of chilling thing. Well, it's chilling in the sense that it's, in the case of Equifax, that's a private company, not necessarily available to the government. Here, it's the government doing it. Actually, it's not. It's the Chinese platforms who are doing it at the behest of the government. So it's Alibaba and Weibo and all, and so they're doing this, which raises a separate issue, which is, do you want to share your information as a non-Chinese with these companies? Alibaba would like to challenge Amazon here in the United States. Weibo would like to challenge Facebook. And Twitter, Huawei, the communications manufacturer, wants to sell equipment for 5G. The new Xiaomi makes these cheap mobile phones. But, you know, You have to assume that everything is gonna get back to the Chinese government. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, I just saw this, a journalist in China who went in for her American who went in for her annual visa conversation. The official said, you know, we see you tried to organize a meeting on December 8th, and it was not done through her public thing. It was done through WeChat, through a very, what's supposed to be private. So, you know, they're obviously surveilling this. Now, when I was in China in the mid-80s, we assumed that all of our phone calls were being listened to and that we were being followed and that sort of stuff. But what this does is it gives the possibility to watch everybody all the time. And you don't know what they have on you. You don't know what your social media rating or your social rating is. Well, how many people do you know over the years who have had credit scores that were lower than they should be because there was some bogus piece of information or somebody misreported it or they cleared a debt and it never got reported back. I mean, these companies are incredibly fallible as Equifax has more than demonstrated. So, yeah, you could find yourself in a very, very difficult situation. Chilling is the word. Richard Hornick, you know, this is very chilling. It was chilling when we heard it at the China seminar, which is actually within the friends of the East-West Center and therefore under the rubric of the East-West Center. In fact, Richard was at the East-West Center for a time, yeah? Yes, 1993, 94. Yeah, anyway, we're gonna take a break now and we'll come back, we're gonna find out just exactly how more chilling it is and how it does mind control on everyone in China. We'll be right back. I'm Ethan Allen, host of A Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for A Likeable Science, where we'll dig into the science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope to join me for A Likeable Science. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav, I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. Okay, we're back on Think Tech Asia with Richard Hornick and journalists, journalists who are speaking today about China and its attempts and successful attempts to do mind control in the Xi Jinping administration, which is likely to go on for a few years, actually. So, one of the interesting things in my view is that people, until this sort of began to happen and foment into the press, didn't know. They thought it was heading in a good direction, internally and in the daily life of the city. Everybody was very impressed with the technology and the Chinese had all these new systems which often were reminiscent of American systems, but now there's a bit of a dark side to that. So, tell me, it's not China bashing, it's China skepticism and there's a difference, right? Absolutely. My view is that I see the potential of China. I see what they could be doing with social media, with all of these things, and to me, it's a shame because what I don't call it mind control. I call it, my talk was called the closing of the Chinese mind. And if China wants to be that superpower in the 21st century, they need to go up the economic ladder. And that economic ladder, going up the ladder from being an assembler to being an inventor, avoiding the middle income trap that I talked about a year ago, that requires innovation. And innovation requires collaboration and it requires open communication. And so, yes, Xi Jinping is trying to close the Chinese mind and he's not doing it because he thinks that's a great idea. He's doing it because he thinks he has to. He inherited a dumpster of fire. The corruption was out of control. As I said the other day, I'm not sure I would do anything differently than he does. He's facing a billion, 1.4 billion people who many are happy, many are very discontented. There's lots of issues out there and there's a lot of corruption. They have a lot of problems and he's trying to get his arms around that and his view is that this is the best way to do it. And maybe in the short run he's right. But for me, the history of China is one where the swings are between total control and complete chaos. The Chinese have a word Luan and they're absolutely horrified at the thought of chaos. Chaos is the cultural revolution. Chaos is Tiananmen, chaos is the peasants revolt, the boxers rebellion, all those things. A lack of order. Lack, more than a lack of order. Just a lack of any civility, whatever. It goes back to dog eat dog, Hobbesian. Anyway, but I think one of the reasons they have these episodes is that they're so intent on maintaining order that eventually all of these things that get pent up will explode. So it would be better to have them out a little bit. So most countries are somewhere on a continuum between order and chaos. Somewhere in here, right? And China is binary. It's one or the other. And when it blows, and it will blow at some point, and maybe 40 years, maybe 100 years, I don't know. But anyway, I think Xi Jinping is doing the best he can. I don't think he's a bad guy. I think he really thinks this is what China needs. And we'll see. But this may not use your term atomization. This kind of going toward atomization changes the way people collaborate because they're afraid of what they might say, get them in trouble somehow, even if they didn't intend to get them in trouble. And so they shut down. Therefore, you don't have the collaboration you need for creativity. And this is going to affect them ultimately for sure. Well, and also, even Chinese companies that have subsidiaries, they're doing the same thing the Japanese did. They're buying Western companies for their technology and innovation and that sort of thing. But because of this great firewall of China, they're about to cut off one of the last ways that you could get access to the outside world, which is VPNs, virtual private networks. And this is going to hurt Chinese companies as much as it hurts Western companies that are trying to operate in China. So it's not the sort of thing that creates problems right away. Again, it's the failure to fulfill the potential that they have. Right, which is huge. Which is huge. And especially in this field. And one thing you talked about in your comments, which I'd like to cover is academic freedom. Well, freedom of speech in general, but also academic freedom. So how does this affect the press? How does this affect teachers, faculty, teaching in universities? Well, over the last, again, five years, there's been a real crackdown within universities. For the first time, about three years ago, for the first time since Mao, a professor was sent to jail for a lecture he gave inside a classroom. There's always been a sort of wall around the university. The university, the academic inquiry was, especially since the end of the Cultural Revolution, was permitted. And that has been, that is being cut down. The other thing is that they're really reinforcing the need to study Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought. Now they've added Xi Jinping thought as part of it. That's extraordinary, isn't it? It is. I mean, it's actually in the Constitution now. Xi Jinping is definitely has more power at this point in time than Deng Xiaoping ever did. More like Mao. Much more like Mao. And they're even using the same terminology. They've photoshopped his portrait to make him look a little bit more like Mao. The cult of the personality is really going on. And again, this may be something that he thinks is necessary. I don't think he's doing it because of his ego. I think it's all part of this process. But yeah, so that was the point of my talk was the closing of the Chinese mind is that you stop academic inquiry. The news media have been way cut back. Five years ago they were starting to do some really interesting things. But there's almost nothing left of that. So it's become more and more difficult for people to exchange ideas. And it's not just in China because this is washing out into American universities that have campuses in China. It's affecting American universities that have things like the Confucius Institute, which does the Chinese language training and then uses that as a lever to keep universities from inviting the Dalai Lama. The University of California, San Diego had the Dalai Lama do give a commencement address. And the Chinese office that handles overseas scholarships has blacklisted the University of California, San Diego because of that. So there's like- And you mentioned that in Canada the Canadian government has shut down all of it. It wasn't the Canadian government, it was actually Canadian academics. Really? Yeah. And the University of Chicago has kicked the- Shut down the Confucius Institute, you can't be on the campus. Because of these problems. Yeah. This is, it's not super important, but there are other ways that it's kind of, they're trying to infiltrate and will have some impact. Yeah, well, and ultimately it'll have an impact on relations with them, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to separate the noise of Trump from what's really going on in US-China relations. But look, China deserves to have the respect of the world. It is enormous power. It's the second largest economy in the world. They have great military prowess. And they have a neighborhood. Just, we have Latin America and the Caribbean, this is their way they view it. We have the Monroe Doctrine, why shouldn't they have the same sort of latitude in their part of the world? One Belt, one Road, they're trying to influence everywhere. Yeah, I think that's gonna get them into the hubris thing. As you mentioned, there's no word in emandering for hubris. Supposedly, right. But because that's a real sense of overreach. And they've got other problems, which nobody, the people don't really talk about that much. I mean, they still, they don't have the cash reserves that they did even a year ago, a year and a half ago. They lost about a trillion dollars in capital flight and other things in 2015, 2016, 17. So, where's all the money gonna come from for this one Belt, one Road? And also, where's the feedback loop? Many of the investments are turning out to be not very useful. There are a lot of countries in Africa and other places that are getting loans to build projects that'll never pay for themselves. So those loans, they're concessionary, but they're still alone. So that's on, they're gonna be indebted to the Chinese. There's gonna be resentment. You know, they wanna be the United States. Well, you know, being the United States wasn't so much fun sometimes. It wasn't easy. You know, it's like, you know, the Yankee go home. You know, they're gonna start facing that as well. So what happens with Xi Jinping now? I mean, he's been successful. This initiative about, you know, mind, what your term was. The closing of the. The closing of the mind has been successful. Nobody's really complained about it. He's looking for another term, isn't he? So he's a very powerful guy. The rule has been that you only get two five-year terms. And he's beginning his second five-year term now. But the Standing Committee of the Politburo has no, contains no obvious successor because there's an age limit. And so there's a lot of talk and it's just talk. Nobody knows what's going on and side-junked on high. I don't care who you see. I don't care what they say. Nobody knows. But if you look, you know, there's a wonderful book written in the mid-70s by a Belgian diplomat, Simone Lay, called Chinese Shadows. We can never really see what's happening in China, but we can see the shadows on the wall, like the cave in Play Dome. Anyway, so we can see the shadows. And we can see the, you know, and that's, that seems to indicate that he has no intention of leaving. Let it go, yeah. And, you know, or, you know, even if it means keeping control going forward, because again, this is, I mean, all of their real goals are for 2030, 2035. So that's, you know, another 12 years away. So, yeah, I don't expect to see him leaving anytime soon. It really is chilling. Thank you so much, Richard, for this discussion. I hope we can do this again with you. There are so many other questions and issues. Happy to do it any time, Jay. It's a great pleasure. Richard Hornick, thank you so much.