 All righty, we'll make a start because we're pretty tight on time for the rest of the day. So we are privileged to have three excellent speakers this afternoon to discuss information warfare trends in Asia. I suspect and have been informed that that will involve a focus primarily on two states of significant interest in the region. We will go in order of the speakers listed unless anyone's got an objection. So our first speaker is Dr Michael Clark from the National Security College and I'll pass it straight to you. Great. Thanks first to Herora for inviting me to speak today. I suppose there's no nice surprise in guessing the focus for myself this afternoon. So looking specifically at China and information war and in particularly how it conceives of the concept of information war but also how it relates to its foreign and domestic security issues. So first off I'd like to suggest here that the China's approach is really framed by the strategy known as the three warfare and this divides information war into three realms psychological warfare, public opinion or media warfare and legal warfare. It is often conceived of the concept of the three warfare is geared primarily against external adversaries or potential ones. However I'd like to suggest towards the second half of my remarks here that has important domestic targets particularly with respect to the issue of Xinjiang and Uighur terrorism. However overall the purpose I think is the same to achieve political military goals without the use of kinetic means. So in terms of application the three warfare has again has a number of understandings and applications in Chinese strategic thinking. In particular there are three levels of application, tactical, campaign or theatre operations and strategic operations. I'm primarily going to look at the three warfare in terms of how it operates at the strategic level. Now at the strategic level in Chinese thinking there is also again another division national level, national security level and the military strategy. The national strategic level is particularly interesting because it's not about not necessarily about military strategy it's about protecting national interests and national security. In this context the three warfare's are offensive and defensive activities to protect what China often refers to as comprehensive national security. So under this label of comprehensive national security not only comes territorial sovereignty, security from military threats and so forth but also primarily what we in the west would term regime, security or state security. So I focus on security of China's political system, security of the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power and also wider issues to do with national unity. So here the ongoing activities under the three warfare's are conceived in Chinese writings as very much as a continuum across what you might refer to as a peace crisis and war scenarios. So this suggests fundamental difference in Chinese and Western conceptions not only of the notion of information war but also I think the notion of sorry the conception of politics itself. So in terms of origins before I dive into perhaps some of the more substantive elements of my remarks the three warfare's has been defined by Chinese strategic culture and also post Cold War geopolitical or geostrategic changes. In terms of strategic culture Chinese information war is very much framed by classical elements of Chinese strategy for example Sun Tzu's often quoted notion that to defeat the enemy without battle is the acme of skill. It's also informed by legalist interpretations or pardon me an instrumentalist view of the law i.e. legal codes are there to be used as a means of enforcing social and political control. And this is very much runs into the Chinese Communist Party's approach to political power. In terms of geostrategic developments in the post Cold War period three core events have been identified by Chinese strategists here. The first is the first Gulf War in 1991 NATO and American intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and the second Gulf War in 2003. For the PRC from the PRC perspective each of these conflicts demonstrated US superiority in information war and the way in which China conceives of it. So in terms of some of the wider issues to do with the content of the strategy of three warfares psychological warfare is essentially about influencing and disrupting decision making capabilities fostering doubt about adversaries capabilities and demoralizing military and civilian leadership. The media and public opinion warfare is about activities to influence and condition perceptions and this has been carried out throughout variety of means print television online media social networks. For example you would have heard quite a bit about Sina Weibo and the Communist Party so called two million public opinion analysts who are paid to contribute various elements on social media forums. Legal warfare is also about exploiting legal systems customs and conventions both internationally and domestically for political and economic and strategic gain. Interestingly the most obvious and recent element of China's engagement in legal warfare has been China's idiosyncratic understanding and interpretation of unclassed with respect to the South China Sea. It's important to note here in each of these streams of the three warfares is that the audience is both domestic and global publics. This is about shaping narratives and expectations of Chinese power. This brings me to the issue of Xinjiang. In terms of Xinjiang in terms of some background context the key issue has been long-standing ethnic grievances however since 2001 and certainly in the last five or six years there has been an intensification of China's approach to overcome what it sees as dangerous elements of Uyghur ethnic identity particularly as it relates to Islam. So here the first image actually both of these images relate to what is termed informal sorry abnormal and abnormal Islamic dress and appearance so the picture on the left here publicising the banning of certain elements of Islamic dress and following the niqab the full head-to-body dress. The second frame which is part of a Xinjiang pectoral competition that ethnic minorities are encouraged to enter displaying in their own works of artificial party policy demonstrating the party's view of Islamic dress. The second major element of China's activities with respect to overcoming what it terms the corrosive influence of traditional ideologies and religion is well captured in this particular piece of art from that competition. Participating in extremist activities is playing with fire. Very much a sustained campaign across Xinjiang to paint religiosity in particular and outward displays of Islamic identity as one encounter to the national unity of the PRC. So how does this reflect elements of the three warfares? Well it reflects each element in particular in terms of psychological warfare it's about diminishing Uyghur capability and political will to overtly oppose the China's Communist Party and this is achieved through a variety of means in particular through the institution of regular yearly strike hard campaigns aimed at a people's war against the so-called three evils and the three evils are separatism, extremism and terrorism. And this is done in a variety of means from monitoring of mosques and religious institutions and through to the legal side of the equation. So this is about you read in Chinese publications countering terrorism according to the law very much reflecting the legalist tradition of Chinese legal thought where you have a very instrumentalist view of the law. So here elements of Uyghur identity and ethnicity in fact characterise as illegal and this is what the French scholar of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs has turned the judicialisation of Islam in Xinjiang. So you have the promulgation over the last three or four years of extensive legal codes stipulating what is in fact illegal and legal religious activities ranging right through from establishing so-called illegal Islamic schools, underground mosques in actuality right through to the wearing of beards and the wearing of headscarves. Finally you also have as the ultimate bedrock of this approach what James Leibold scholar of the Trobe terms the emerging security state in Xinjiang. So you have mass display of the Chinese state's hard power. Not only this hard power but it's also coupled with an increased surveillance state including the imposition of various CCTV surveillance networks in major urban centres, development of facial recognition technology that's used to determine access to particularly sensitive areas for example the Idkar Mosque in Kashgar which is the spiritual home of Uyghur Islam. This however contrasts with some of the global aspects of China's handling of the Xinjiang issue and Uyghur terrorism in particular. So here we have a new front if you will in China's information war as it relates to Xinjiang. You're probably familiar with Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy initiative which is the Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative at least rhetorically is about encouraging trans-Eurasian economic connectivity. And some of these materials that have been specifically targeted at Middle Eastern and Central Asian audiences are quite interesting. They counter pose what seems to be a very favourable Chinese Communist Party view of Islamic dress, Islamic customs and Islamic identity more broadly with what it's actually doing in Xinjiang itself which is very much essentially about assimilation and integration and also control of Uyghur ethnic identity and expression. So ultimately the Chinese Communist Party's information war as it relates to Xinjiang has two primary goals as encapsulated by these two pieces of art from the Xinjiang pictorial competition. The first here on the left supposedly displays at the bottom an extremist family and at the top a de-extremised or counter-radicalised family displaying what the CCP hopes to achieve with respect to its Uyghur population in Xinjiang. The second perhaps not so subtle diagram here is in fact the so-called bulldozer state. The hard power of the Chinese Communist Party and in fact the security organs crushing the black hands of Uyghur separatism and terrorism. So in conclusion the three warfares clearly have both external and domestic implementation reflects the Chinese Communist Party's view of politics as going across a peace crisis and war continuum. However what is problematic for the party state particularly with respect to Xinjiang and the wider Belt and Road Initiative concerns the contradiction between its external messaging as displayed in some of the favourable views of Islam and ethnic identity that it portrays under Belt and Road and the reality of what it's doing on the ground in Xinjiang. Thank you. Thank you Michael. And next speaker I think everyone's familiar with Professor Rory Metcalf who's the head of the National Security College if you'd like to join us in the interest of time I think I'll keep the, everyone's got the bios for everyone so we'll keep it fairly brief. Thanks it looks like it's been a fantastic conference and I'm sorry I couldn't be here earlier in the day I think you've been competing with the Australian Institute of International Affairs and holding your own here really well so congratulations to Hororo and colleagues on the conference today. I'm going to offer just a few brief remarks looking particularly at what I would define as Chinese influence if you want to call it interference feel free but the different levels of Chinese influence in Australia in recent years and I guess a little bit about what that perhaps tells us about the changing nature of Chinese strategy when it comes to the information dimension to really the strategic use of information and propaganda to advance China's domestic and foreign policy objectives. So I'll talk specifically about the Australian experience in a moment but just I guess a few words of context first following on from I think Michael's remarks I think it's very clear under the current Chinese leadership it's very clear that under under Xi Jinping we've seen really the precise opposite of what some China watches had anticipated five or six years ago when we saw the transition to this leadership in other words we've seen we've seen a China that is that is very outwardly focused that we've seen a Chinese leadership that draws a very very clear thread between China's their domestic stability and legitimacy challenges at home and China's engagement abroad and in particular we've seen a I think a growing emphasis on the the mobilization and indeed the influence of Chinese diaspora in the region in the Indo-Pacific and indeed in the world to advance Chinese state and party objectives now a lot of that now may seem to be fairly uncontroversial but it's only five or six years ago that I think many observers were anticipating that in fact we would see very strong focus on economic development and on really the the maintenance of a set of policies based around non-interference so having said that I think we've seen in Australia in the last couple of years a number of data points that point to I guess the kind of strategy the kind of influence that we're going to see from China in influencing both public and political opinion in other countries in years to come and I think in many ways Australia is proving to be something of a bellwether in this regard because what do we what do we have in the Australian context at a strategic level obviously we have a country that's a middle power and among other things a defense and intelligence ally of the United States a country that that is really seen in China as part of a US-led regional order that is out to if not contain because I don't sort of buy the containment line but it's certainly out to balance and limit China's strategic influence as it rises we've also got a country that has two other interesting characteristics that I think have made and I'm making Australia something of a priority in in China's emphasis on political influence and propaganda and that is firstly that there's very a deep and growing economic relationship China is broadly good for the Australian economy broadly indeed becoming pretty critical to the Australian economy but there's also a societal dimension that's particularly interesting and that is that to the extent that the legitimacy of the Communist Party leadership and the the system in China depends on a I guess a very clear narrative and a very clear sense of consent within China then the existence of countries abroad that provide essentially sanctuaries for dissenting opinion is going to be increasingly problematic for the Chinese regime so we've seen I think if you look at the objectives of Chinese activities in Australia aimed at influence I think we've seen two really distinct and overriding objectives one is that there is I believe an effort to to increasingly limit the the tightness of the Australia-US alliance you could argue that Donald Trump's doing a pretty good job of that on his own thank you very much and that you know I think is true but having said that even if Trump wasn't in the picture you've got I think an effort to to really drive something of a wedge between the allies now it's true in my view that Australia has an independent foreign policy but it's an increasingly popular mantra that you hear among some commentators that we need an independent foreign policy be because we don't allegedly have one and I think one of the challenges for policy makers there is to avoid the trap of assuming that an independent foreign policy is one that privileges Chinese interests over those of other countries in the region so there's an alliance dimension but the second dimension that I think is just as important possibly even more important to understand why we've seen an increase in Chinese propaganda information influence activities in Australia in recent years is to limit and indeed to suppress wherever possible the criticism of the regime that occurs on Australian soil among the very diverse Chinese communities that we have in this country and I think that in a sense is is actually more troubling from a sovereignty point of view than the than the anti alliance dimension of of Chinese information operations because this is this is really in part about the you know the values and legitimacy of freedom of speech within Australia and I guess the extent to which any foreign power seeks to limit freedom of speech in any part of the Australian community can manifest as as really a challenge to to our liberal democratic system but also a challenge to the notion that all Australian nationals deserve equal protection of their of their freedom of speech so we have we have something of something of a problem now those of you who followed this debate in the Australian media which has been quite robust in the last year or two would know that Australia is not the only country that's experiencing various degrees of Chinese influence and propaganda and I think you'd also be aware that there is a debate that we need to engage with which is that to allow to a degree influence and propaganda from any country can and should be an acceptable part of the discourse in in any second country because after all we want in a multicultural society to engage voices from all parts of the community in debate about this country's future the the problem arises when there's evidence that there's essentially foreign state and indeed foreign political party mobilization of this debate and a genuinely propagandist element to what should be a free and open debate in Australian society I'd also note as I said at the outset that Australia is not the only country where we're seeing increased efforts at influence whether it's through political donations whether it's through the purchase of space in mainstream media organs whether it's through the apparent purchase or indeed intimidation of independent media voices or whether it's through some some pretty interesting relationships that we see in in the think tank in the university space New Zealand has had its own recent experiences in this regard that have had a lot of attention. Canada's beginning to look at the Australian experience and see what it can learn and indeed in a number of other countries including Singapore and a number of European powers as well we're seeing these debates quite alive. So look a couple of a couple of general points I want to leave you with and hopefully we can we can open a bit of a conversation about this. Firstly I'm not sure that it's correct to characterise what is happening as soft power of course by any conventional academic definition of soft power the Joe Nye definition soft power is the power of of attraction of in other words of being able to put a well argued evidence based competing narrative into the debate and seeking to essentially attract or persuade other voices on the other side to the correctness and legitimacy of your perspective on the world and so soft power works best when governments don't do it when it's done essentially by non-government entities private sector or academic or others. The other point to note is that if you look at the the rather credible reports that have emerged in the Australian debate whether it's about political donations whether it's about mobilisation of community organisations ostensibly as independent organisations but with some pretty significant evidence that these are directed or driven if not by the Chinese Communist Party than by the United Front Work Department which is of course the the bridge to to others beyond the Communist Party. I think it's pretty clear that much of this has a strategic objective those objectives that I've spoken of and so again it's debatable as to whether whether this this phenomenon is is spontaneous is driven by community groups on their own accord or whether it in fact has the the active support asset support of of official official channels. A couple of thoughts to leave you with about the policy challenges that this leaves for liberal democracies. Firstly as I said at the outset the response to dealing with a propagandist challenge whether it's you know trying to change Australia's narrative or Australia's policy positions on issues that are sensitive to China such as the South China Sea or whether it's seeking to really squeeze if not eliminate Australia's status as a sanctuary for dissident and dissenting views on issues ranging from Tibet to Tiananmen to Taiwan. Lots of tea words there. The the challenge is essentially the same for government and that is how do you I guess identify and counter propaganda and often intrusive foreign state influence without resorting to what essentially would appear to be a McCarthyist set of responses in other words without imposing some kind of censorship regime of your own some kind of set of legal sanctions that could of course tarnish or capture innocent people in their web. One of the risks of course for all of this in a multicultural society like Australia is precisely that that fear that any criticism of Chinese state or party influence inside Australia can fan attitudes of xenophobia attitudes potentially of racism and so forth and of course that needs to be guarded against that's really a reason why this set of issues has to be owned by the political mainstream and a bipartisan consensus in Australia and it's also a reason why I think it's quite strikingly positive that a lot of the a lot of the awareness and criticism of Chinese state influence in Australia is coming from Chinese community figures and Chinese community groups in this country. There was for example a recent publication by the independent Chinese Australian newspaper Vision Times putting together about 20 odd personal accounts of Chinese state influence in Australia more than half of which were by essentially Australians of of Chinese origin so as I said this needs to be an issue that is owned by the political mainstream and that reflects the diversity of voices in the in the in the Chinese and other migrant communities in this country. One last observation that that might be useful and one is that which is of course bearing in mind that as I said the best soft power or indeed the best propaganda doesn't tend to come from from governments is that if there is going to be a state response to this it needs to involve not only I think a legislative framework that for example limits or bans foreign political donations and we're seeing some progress on that score now but perhaps also an institutional response so so that for example following the Canadian example there's no reason why Australia couldn't have a ministerial responsibility for something like the protection of democratic institutions but it remains to be seen whether the Australian political class really grips up this set of problems or whether a couple of years from now everything I've said is very much a matter of a matter of history and we see a continued erosion of the I guess the the free debate on these issues in this country. I'll stop there. Thanks Roy. I'd like to ask Dr Petrov to come up. He's an alumni of the ANU and extensively qualified to speak on Korea and Russia and a range of other information operations. Thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be invited by the friendly department of international relations. As you can see I'm from school of culture history and language so and I I'm offering the cultural approach to to the inter-Korean conflict and the Korean War which as you know technically was between 1950 and 53 but as I claim and my students are here they don't probably I wouldn't disagree with me that the Korean war is still continuing so today I'm going to talk about the propaganda war and the war for the hearts and minds. The Korean War just briefly from the beginning from the start it was the civil war for unification started by North Korea but very quickly turned into international conflict the proto like a surrogate World War three with the intervention of international forces who tried also help to help South Koreans to unify the country but unsuccessfully so the frontline was going up and down and the war turned into a hybrid war the war without rules the war where conventional kinetic movements were combined with propaganda and subversive acts and each side tried to avoid attribution and retribution so the current situation where it's neither war nor peace and there's no peace on the Korean peace no peace regime in Korea right now still inherited these elements of hybrid war propaganda war where each side is simply trying to claim its own legitimacy and impose any possible any possible means to win the the other but my paper and my presentation today is trying to claim that they're not doing it very well the propaganda war is highly unsuccessful at least for North and South Korea vis-a-vis each other's population so the hostilities of the Korean war ended with the signing of armistice agreement where the demilitarized zone was established four kilometers a strip of land no man land and it's a misnomer it's highly demilitarized piece of land so you can't deceive people also the tunnels you see the tunnels which which were dug by apparently North Koreans again were used for propaganda to scare South Koreans or on the opposite to give them some confidence that North Korean brothers and sisters will soon arrive so don't worry we will come back and liberate you the joint security area well again it's it's very insecure periodically there's some shootings skirmishings and even their ex-murder incident happened in 1976 so but the demilitarized zone the joint security area itself is just manifestation of this continuing cold war in Korea we can't really say that cold war finished in Northeast Asia and the hot spot is in Korea and the demilitarized zone is is the one so everything about this area is about propaganda there are two propaganda villages one north of the demilitarized zone where North Koreans have the largest tower with the biggest flag and they pretend that they have their huge harvest much much much richer harvest than in South Korea but of course we know that it's not in South Korean propaganda village as well they have the population where they who till the land and the population is exempt from military service but we know it's actually it's Korean Central Intelligence agents who are working there as peasants so 64 years after the war what we what we see right now it's a it's a natural it's a it's a disaster it's a division of the peninsula division of the nation which history probably hasn't seen before there's no communication no postal no telephone no radio and television signals are jammed everything is done deliberately to avoid the people of north and south Korea to understand each other to communicate with each other and of course visit each other so propaganda war is waged by most primitive ways right they don't use anything more sophisticated than helium balloons or you know megaphone diplomacy with loud speakers which shout propaganda at each other they used to stop you know suspend this propaganda from both north and south side during the so-called sunshine policy the policy of peace and prosperity when North and South Koreans traded communicated visited each other but it was discontinued by the conservative government of liman buck some 10 10 years ago helium balloons how useful is that well because they can't travel and these days they still you know the national security law prevents North and South Koreans from visiting each other and at tens of thousands of separated families who haven't seen each other for the last 74 years well they South Korean activists and North Korean defectors try to send some messages and they send you know drop radios and put sometimes they put letters and and propaganda materials and North Koreans even even use the hard copies of propaganda material little laminated pieces of paper with crude propaganda which is designed to influence South Koreans opinion in fact it doesn't so what is going on what South Koreans sent to to the north with say helium balloons well apart from the from the radio receivers which are prohibited in North Korea they are listening to the foreign radio is a crime which can be punished by imprisonment and well these days South Koreans tend to send a kind of small devices like usb and sd cards what do they put on those useful thumb drives well they put a little bit of propaganda South Korean you know k-pop soap operas tv dramas which which are watched in North Korea secretly but again they're not very effective in well except for the fashion design and you know North Korea is a paradise for fashion makers you know designer brand bags and shoes what else western film the interview 2014 which is also you know supposed to influence North Korean mind but i'm not sure it's you know going you know accepted well by the North Korean audience what do South Koreans actually do to encourage North Korean brothers and sisters watcher they added one dollar u.s. bill to add some value to the soft power which i try to impose on North Koreans what North Korean sent to South Korea well it's even even worse than that so they sent political cartoons which outdated which you know like dates of North Korean national holidays like Kim Il-sung's birthday or some cartoons of Obama and you know future president Trump something which is completely well irrelevant North Koreans know that Americans are evil so they don't need to emphasize that South Koreans probably many South Koreans agree with them after the importation of American thought system that you know particularly relations between South Korean China was so badly damaged by by this alliance and South Korean school children are well encouraged and rewarded for collecting this paper based propaganda and returning to to the police without reading it and nobody in South Korea are going to read it because they're much more computer advice they spend days and nights on their computers and social media they're not going to read North Korean propaganda so do North Koreans they also love signs of modernization and little gadgets and with the arrival of Kim Jong-un the new leader who himself was very fond of gadgets and studied in in Europe the image of modern and prosperous advanced nation began to be visible on the streets you can see the propaganda post computerized in the American century we're going to be with the world and see of course the image of rocket in the 105-story hotel also aiming high so it's all now probably if we understand how it works the propaganda works in North Korea maybe this North Korean rocket nuclear problem can be understood not as an attempt to rule the world and attack some U.S. territories in the Pacific but simply to you know praise themselves and make themselves like proud and happy about what the nation is doing and the new generation of North Koreans the so-called Changmadang generation market generation is completely different from their fathers and grandfathers they grew up already now after 1990s many of them were born after the famine of 1990s they actively participate in market activities go overseas and work and learn languages and compute technologies but they're still conditioned by this old communist chuchu hairstyle ideology and propaganda so they they're brainwashed but at the same time they kind of you know that's that's the element of life in the socialist country Kyle knows you know you have you need sort of a partition your hard drive must be partitioned one part of your hard drive is for public places and one part of your computer operates for families and friends and you must be very careful you know not to mix this but you know the school education of important part of education is of course very strongly anti-american anti-imperialist kill the Yankee bastard guy it's fun of course South Koreans don't relate to this South Koreans want to you know go to the United States and study so for them this propaganda simply doesn't make any any sense but in North Korea it does because North Koreans don't go overseas and if they do well they're not supposed to talk much about what they've experienced upon their return but when they return again there's like new drive for new gadgets North Korean produced tab some Gion kind of tablet how many how many mobile phones does this lady have probably one two maybe third one here so the more mobile phone you have so the more business you can do so you are supposed to be a modern person constantly in contact the problem is that you can't really receive telephone calls from outside of the country sometimes they can't even get communicated between the cities should be very very restricted very much very controlled again if you have this beautiful tab what can you read how useful is that because there's no connection no worldwide web access and even they deliberately don't build any Wi-Fi receptors into this device so it's probably good to study the works of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-il and maybe you can read the newspaper the old edition because there's no news in North Korea anyway so they have the same one TV channel only which starts in the afternoon not in the morning I was in Pyongyang last year and I completely forgot about this I started turning on the TV and it was not working in the morning so I went downstairs to the reception of Korea Hotel saying you know something is wrong with my TV I can't I can't watch the morning news and I told me we don't have morning news it starts 4 p.m. only so well with new new entertainment see Kim Jong-un was very inventive and very entertainment orientated his wife is a singer of Eun-haseul band so Kim Jong-un sort of encouraged the whole film male music Moran Bong band to portray the image of modernity and play western music and even in a national TV you can say Minion Mickey Mouse reading 2011 2012 but well doesn't mean that North Korea is now more than western I know absolutely not they're playing the Moran Bong half time they play western music half time it's old patriotic revolutionary military songs two minutes right um some case studies military see it's the propaganda actually used to work somehow but maybe the wrong way one American soldier the American defect that Joe Dresnick you know violence on guard in in the demilitarized zone crossed the across the DMZ went to North Korea but couldn't return he was one of the six American nationals who stayed there for for for life working as English English teacher and also the propaganda actor for the for the films he gave the story of his life to Daniel Daniel Gordon the a British film director in the documentary crossing the line can see these images try zone the 38th parallel division actually affected the life of Americans too now he has two sons living in Pyongyang also operating as film stars and the younger son James is also the military officer and they dream about making North Korea strong and and prosperous giving interview to the pro-North Korean American newsletter not all Americans are as successful in North Korea as Joe Dresnick and his sons Otto Wambier experienced a major catastrophic event it's really not clear what happened there he he did upset the North Korean host the government and after his emotional after after after his admission of the guilt while North Koreans had no other choice but to sentence him to 15 years of hard labor what did Otto Wambier do is still not clear because we look at the propaganda poster which was used as as evidence for the for the show trial the one part of the poster is masked we don't know the name of the leader what did what did Otto Wambier do you know desecrated the the vandalized the poster it's not clear but something really bad happened and and tragically and I believe that Otto Wambier simply one of the victims of the ongoing Korean conflict South Korea well South Korea also leaves at war and they try to influence their their people and their advertisement in South Korea on every telephone booth uh everywhere you can see this little poster with the telephone number 111 it's a an invitation from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency to dobin spies and if you want to be rich so you can catch a spy or sympathizer but strangely prices didn't change you know when I was student there 1990s exactly the same prices so how come South Korean pop also is now being used for propaganda anti-communist propaganda the whole you know the the ideology of South Korea's anti-communism so if you're in South Korea and if you see the lovely ladies from all female hallow venus group they seeing a song um that under the torch of communist eradication we will willingly sacrifice our lives South Korean song very popular and uh North Korean defectors finally we're just getting closer to the end see North Koreans have uh there's a was a trickle first of North Korean defectors now they're 30 000 plus North Korean defectors there and they're often used by South Koreans for propaganda purposes they go to schools and they go national tv and talk about horrors of life in North Korea but then some of them actually decide to redefect and go back to North Korea and tell you know in North Korean national that horrors of life in South Korea and they seem to be quite sincere about that because unemployment in South Korea is very high and this lady um Im Ji-hyun or Im Ji-hyun um she was welcomed by South Koreans worked as a as a star you know paraded as uh as a in commercials and then last month surfaced in North Korea um blaming South Koreans you know being cruel being uh you know doubles double standards and and discrimination against North Koreans simply because they speak with accent so to finalize what conclusions we can make from all this long-term continuing standing division see the truth in Korea actually you know froze uh the understand or misunderstanding between the Koreans and keep this you know misunderstanding and lack of communication and lack of understanding actually gives the you know does the bad job towards the reconciliation and final unification see North and South Koreans simply don't understand what is going on on the other side of the Dimitri Zone they uh both North Seoul and Pyongyang claimed so legitimacy on the peninsula they there's no way they they're going to accept the other they're not going to uh legitimize or recognize the existence of the other regime and well that effectively prevents the reconciliation because to reconcile you need to know something about each other you need to talk you need to you know sit down and iron out your differences but the propaganda on both sides creates and uh kind of many uh sort of entrenched these differences and often misrepresents the other and it's not very helpful but foreigners often play a role in this and propaganda Korean War is continuing and I believe that we often become part of that particularly when we go to North and South Korea thank you very much