‘차이나 언센서드’ 진행자들, 중국 공산당을 밑바닥까지 파헤치다 (2부) [ATL]

I recently have been thinking a lot about public diplomacy and kind of the lack of, frankly, most Western liberal democracies using that. It's a very powerful tool, notably, incredibly valuable as part of the Reagan administration's efforts and seeing the end of the Soviet Union happen. But what you talked about right now was just a form of public diplomacy, because really you're communicating to the Chinese people. I mean, I think when you look at what the CCP cares about with narrative warfare, you should look at the propaganda that they're putting out, but you should also look at what they're trying to censor. So, you know, there are social media channels even on Twitter X, where people are posting all of these videos and things that are appearing on the Chinese instrument being neatly censored. A lot of them are things like, you know, lots of small protests against, you know, banks for financial malfeasance, companies for not paying their employees on time, real estate companies for like the loss of people's investments in their homes and things like that. And so you can see the cracks in the CCP society and what they've tried to build and the things that, you know, they're worried about that they're censoring and the things that Chinese people care about. So there is a lot of messaging I think we can do about, you know, this is the reality of what's happening, because a lot of Chinese people don't know that there are these protests, right? They don't know that, you know, things like that are happening in China. And if the CCP keeps people in the dark like that, then there is this feeling like, well, it's hopeless to go against the CCP, right? There's no point in speaking out or trying to, you know, improve things. But, you know, just exposing some of these things that are happening, telling the truth about the lies that the CCP has in their narratives. Many Chinese people don't even know the Tiananmen Square massacre happened. A lot of young people, yeah. But things like that, like those are things also essentially refuting the CCP's narratives about America, I think in a lot of ways, because, you know, if you watch the evening news in China, the CCTV evening news, like this third section of the news is always about international news. And it's essentially always about how chaotic and dangerous the rest of the world is, especially, you know, liberal democracies, they're full of chaos and violence and things like that. And I've talked to people in China who are like, are you afraid of walking down the street in New York City, because somebody might shoot you? And I was like, well, it's definitely not like that here. And so these are the kind of things that people think in China. So like, just being able to talk about, okay, you know, America has problems, but, you know, the positive sides of America, you know, every year, the CCP comes out with a human rights, white paper about the US, that's just, it's kind of comical, actually, like, you know, what they put in there to try to make the US look bad. And we never tried to, you know, respond. Yeah, I don't even know if you have to respond to that white paper. But it's kind of like they're, they're, where is the impetus in the US government to talk about why America is great? I yeah, I don't know why every politician and media organization in the US isn't like they're harvesting organs and prisoners of conscience in China. Like that just sums it up. China uses rape as a form of torture. That's a message that needs to be out there. The flip of what flip side of what Shelley is saying is it's not just messaging to the Chinese people, but it's also messaging to the American people. So Americans know the reality of life under communism in China. And also, the same thing about the US has its problems, but the US and the Chinese Communist Party are not equivalent evils. That's something a lot of people believe a lot of people believe the US is actually worse. US does not use rape as a form of torture. We are not harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience. And this is that's narrative warfare, to just say the truth. Saying the truth is the greatest weapon we have. I think when it first became more apparent what was happening to the Uyghurs, there was, you know, people who testified in front of Congress, even about women being raped in these vocational education camps, detention centers, things like that. Systematically, it wasn't just, you know, some guard abusing his position. This was condoned and, you know, perpetrated across the system. This, especially with the case of I know Falun Gong, they have like meetings and experts on how to break Falun Gong practitioners. So these are tactics they've developed and refined specifically to use. So again, this is not just some prison guard doing abusing a prisoner. Yeah. This is the practice. And so this is why I think this is this is very powerful narrative warfare. If everyone understands, China uses rape as torture. Then when someone like John Kerry comes up and says, Well, you know, we need to work with China on climate change. China uses rape as a form of torture. We're going to work with them. Are they a trustworthy competitor or other nation? So it's very interesting. We've been talking primarily about narrative warfare of the Chinese regime against the US and perhaps against the Western world more broadly speaking. But you just started talking about internal narrative warfare or internal use of narratives. And of course, that's also incredibly important, as you just pointed out, Shelley. Is there a greater focus on one or the other? I mean, it seems like this is such a central piece of how the regime operates. Well, I know for many years, China spent more on their internal security, their police networks, than they were spending on the military. For the Chinese Communist Party, the greatest threat is the Chinese people. That's why they spend the most amount of their time focused on propaganda internally and punishing any kind of dissidents. And just controlling information internally, right? Just closing the internet down. They've been focused on internet control for so many decades. It's refined to the point where it becomes harder and harder for people to get around the firewall or find out what's going on, access that kind of information. And sadly, that was built up by Western companies going to But I think narrative warfare inside China, it's kind of like, you know, the whole metaphor about being a fish in water, and you don't know what water is because you're just swimming in the water all the time. I mean, Chinese people just are living in this propaganda. They live and breathe in this propaganda every day. Any Chinese town, city, propaganda posters everywhere, you don't notice it. Banners, you don't notice it anymore. You learn in school, not just like the CCP, you know, you go to Marxist-Leninist classes, but also just, in general, the kind of history you learn, Chinese history, it's infused with the CCP's propaganda about how, you know, without the CCP, there would be no new China, that kind of idea that the CCP is the same as the Chinese government is the same as China is the same as the Chinese people. So you learn to like, identify in a certain way, your self worth with the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, even people who don't don't like the Communist Party, right? They can get pretty easily triggered if they feel like China is being criticized, which is really the Chinese Communist Party being criticized the Chinese government, but, you know, they become like sensitized to these things. Like, probably a good example is what happens with, you know, the CCP has been saying for years about Japanese people, Japan, using Japan because of what happened in World War Two, when Japan invaded China, which many horrible, they did many horrible things in China. But, you know, the Europe in Germany, like, you know, everybody's kind of tried to heal and move on and from that, but the CCP will never let the Chinese people, like forgive Japan because they can use that for propaganda. You know, when you're a kid, you watch movies that are about like, the Japanese invading China during World War Two. There was this viral video that went around a few months ago, where there was a, it was like a first grade classroom, where one of the kids drew a picture, and he wrote, I love Japanese people on the picture. And the teacher filmed a video of himself hitting the kid like hitting his hand with a ruler for writing I love Japanese people. And he was like, see what all the other kids wrote. And everything else was like, every other kid wrote like really patriotic stuff about loving China. And so he was like, Why did you write? I love Japanese people. And the kid couldn't really give an answer. But he was a little kid. He was he was six. So then the teacher punished him. And then he recorded himself on a video talking very patriotically about how he felt this was his duty as a teacher to punish this kid for saying he loved, not even the government of Japan or whatever, just loving Japanese people is considered incorrect. And he was saying, you know, no, we need to educate the youth today and make sure they understand why the Japanese are evil. And they can't go around saying I love Japanese people. And he posted this on the internet. And there are a lot of people who agreed with him in the comments. I mean, there are definitely people who are like, you shouldn't be hitting a child because of this. But there are other people who are like, very nationalistically, like, yes, that's, that's correct. We must teach people that, you know, the Japanese are evil. And that is, you know, one of the these things, that's the narrative warfare. So 10 years ago, there were anti Japanese protests where people were burning Japanese cars and things like that. Even more recently, there's been cases of just deranged individuals attacking Japanese students in China. Yeah. So there was a case at a Japanese school where a woman and a child were attacked. And a Chinese woman actually died trying to save them. And she was actually, you know, to give credit where credit was due, like, she was like, kind of put up as like a hero like that, that she tried to save this kid. But there was another case more recently where somebody, a Japanese person was stabbed. And so this is a result. Yes, this was a result of there's actually been a lot of knife attacks in China recently. But that's kind of a different subject. I want you to kind of give me a sense of where things are at really, then, because on the one hand, I hear that the Chinese people have been completely brainwashed by the CCP to, you know, do these, some of the extreme things you're just describing as example, not just around China, but, you know, Americans, of course, there's this huge, consistent anti-American propaganda, anti-West propaganda, colonialism, whatever. On the other hand, you hear, well, actually, the Chinese people are fed up with the Chinese Communist Party. They've had enough of it. There's, you know, bubbling up dissident movements everywhere. Of course, with the economy being in rough shape, I don't think anyone disputes that, even the CCP at some level, that this is all, you know, kind of metastasizing now of sorts. What's the reality? These are such disparate visions of what's happening there internally. Well, the reality is, it's very hard to know what Chinese people in that system actually think and feel because there are real consequences for saying stuff, especially to foreign journalists. We saw with the COVID protests, people in China were actually directly calling for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to step down. That was a pretty big shift. And what I saw within China and internationally, a lot of Chinese people felt like, oh, this is what I've been thinking the whole time. I didn't know anybody else was thinking it, so I never said it out loud. And then there were the white paper protests. Yeah, this is what I'm talking about, white paper protests. But you know, after the fact, a lot of those people were arrested and disappeared by the Chinese Communist Party. So it's just, it's very risky in that system to be able to speak your mind. So it's hard to know, for sure. And probably it's, you know, there are probably people who are very, very brainwashed. And there are probably people who know exactly what's going on. I mean, I think, yeah, it's both true, right? Because it's not a block of people. You have 1.4 billion people. There's a lot of people who have different opinions on different things. And they may also see through the CCP narratives in some things and be blind to it and other things, you know, because it's complicated, you know, being a human in the world today is complicated. So I don't think we can say for sure that it's one or the other. But I think what you can look at is, it's clear that Chinese people feel like their lives are worse off than they were. The rise of movements like lay flat, let it rot. What you see is people trying to get out of China, right? You see, you know, people who are wealthy trying to get their kids to get an increased rate. Yes, at a very increased rate. You know, trying to move their money overseas in underground ways, trying to bring their kids, their families out of China, buying up real estate in the US and Australia and Canada, like all these places, because they don't feel safe in China. And it's definitely at a very increased rate more recently. And I think, you know, that speaks a lot to that, if the people who have those resources are trying to leave, and then there have also been reports of people having their passports confiscated. And we first started to see some of these reports during COVID, where maybe certain low level government officials or people would not, would get their passports confiscated. There was a report in the last few weeks that school teachers in one Chinese province were having their passports taken away, so they couldn't leave, essentially, without applying for permission to. And so when you see that kind of increased control, you can see that the Chinese Communist Party is worried. Chris, you mentioned a couple, a few different movements that are bubbling up. Could you clarify what those are? Sure. So particularly for young people in China, the situation is very grim. Youth unemployment exploded to such high levels that the Chinese Communist Party stopped reporting it, and then came out with a new metric that made it much lower, and then even that metric skyrocketed. So these movements are expressions of Chinese people feeling like there's no hope in society. So there was a movement called the lay flat movement, which is just where Chinese people would photograph themselves just laying flat. There's nothing lying down on the couch or a table or just random places because they're like, okay, what what's what it's hopelessness, right? Paralysis, really. There's another movement called let it rot, which is just the idea that everything is falling apart. People are calling it now the garbage time of history in China, which is a way of saying that things have reached a point of no return. They've crossed the event horizon. It's just all a downward spiral now. So very grim, hopeless things in a country that also has like 30 million more young men than women. And just, you know, something interesting, like with the white paper protests, right? Like, the idea, I think, is that you have kind of some level of plausible deniability or something. I'm like, well, what could be? How can you arrest me for holding a piece of paper? Right? But everybody kind of knows there's something going on. How can you criticize me for lying on the ground? Well, I mean, I can't, but everybody knows what's going on. I suppose it's the same with the others. But that's, that's also like people becoming creative around expressing dissent, as there is increasing sort of, you know, no repression, I guess, against all these different forms. And what would you guys say would have been like, a high point or the high point of the show over the last 12 years? Being here with you, Jon. Okay, another high point? Well, several notches down from that. I would say just meeting the fans and talking to people and seeing how much the show has meant to them and how much it's opened their eyes. We've had people who have written to us who have been like, yeah, I was, I was a Marxist. And you opened my eyes to exactly what what it is, what communism is. Yeah. Yeah. And you'd be surprised that people reach for me, I will always remember, when we first went to Hong Kong in 2014. Back then, the show is a lot smaller, we had 66,000 subscribers. Chris was basically almost a one man band, he was editing, writing everything, I was working another full time job. So I was just kind of doing it on the side. And so a friend of ours was like, you can go to Hong Kong, you know, because there were the umbrella movement protests going on, they had occupied, like a huge part of the central business district. And we were like, we could go somewhere like we could go actually see what it's like. So we actually, you know, we booked tickets, and we booked an Airbnb next to one of the protest sites. And, you know, we went. And the first night we were there, people started coming up to us in the street and saying that they watched China Uncensored. And again, we had 66,000 subscribers. Today, we have 2 million. But at the time, so it was like, if we had 10,000 views on an episode, that was amazing to us. And to go to a place where multiple people came up to us, Chris was recognized all the time. And that was really surprising to us. And I'll never forget people telling us that, you know, their, you know, professors and universities showed our videos, you know, that, like, they, that they really liked that we were telling people about what was happening in Hong Kong. And it was just really moving. And I think we've had multiple fan meetups in Hong Kong over the years. And we went back 2016. And then in 2019, for those protests as well. And yeah, I think I'll, I will never forget, you know, going there and talking to people and having that experience there and seeing, unfortunately, what happened to Hong Kong. Yeah. Inhaling tear gas in Hong Kong and seeing what happened there. That's the low point. Well, I mean, I don't know, I'm spending three days on a, on a tiny, tiny Filipino fishing boat in the middle of the South China Sea. But yeah, looking back, we were we were definitely, we were definitely a little reckless. Yes, there was a extremely high tides because it was a supermoon. And so it was a boat that was essentially like an outrigger. So there was no almost no, there's no shelter in the boat, except for where the captain was steering the ship and all the electronic stuff was. And so we were sleeping, like on the decks, Chris was sleeping on top of like these giant styrofoam coolers that they put the fish in. And so the waves would come up over the side, splash us in the night and splash us in the night. And that that felt very safe. Yeah, I think at that point, I was just so exhausted that if I die, I die. So do you think you'd be welcome in Hong Kong today? I'm sure the Hong Kong police would welcome us with open arms and give us a free trip to mainland China. And I could retire for the rest of my life. Realistically, most likely what would happen is we would not get we're not allowed to enter Hong Kong, most likely. Yeah. We definitely do not feel safe going to Hong Kong. Because what a lot of people don't understand about the Hong Kong national security law that essentially made Hong Kong just another Chinese city, is that it technically applies to anyone anywhere in the world. So anyone in the world who criticizes the Chinese Communist Party or the Hong Kong government could run afoul of it and might have a well, there's a reason the State Department cautions against Americans going to any part of China these days. Yeah, I mean, I think that the real danger also would be if we somehow managed to go to Hong Kong and enter, we would put anybody we talked to in danger, because they could be accused of, you know, you know, colluding with foreign forces with hostile foreign forces. And so we actually, there's so many people we met and knew in Hong Kong that we cannot talk to, because we do not want to, we even took, we had videos of our fan meet meetups in Hong Kong, and they're not, there weren't anything, like subversive, subversive, but we took them offline, because we didn't want to get anybody in trouble. Even if it had been a fan meetup in like 2016, or something, you know, just because you could get in trouble for whatever. What would you say is the biggest thing or most, perhaps most important thing that you've learned newly, over these last 12 years of running this show? One thing I have learned over the course of doing the show is there's this idea that we're at the end of history, that after the Cold War, the March of Progress had concluded, and everything's, we can we can do business with like, Putin and China, everything's fine, democracy has won. The reality is most of the world is under dictatorship. You know, the light of freedom and democracy is very fragile. And it must be protected and fought for. Otherwise, darkness is always there, ready to swallow us up. And we can't give in to despair, or attack our own values, allow the darkness to corrupt us and think, you know, maybe maybe our society is actually the evil of the world. We need to embrace what is good. Because otherwise, it won't last. That was really dark. But I feel like you pulled it out at the end. I was just like, Oh, my God, I'm thinking like, Eragon at the face at the front of Mordor. Oh, I see. Darkness is overwhelming. Uh huh. But something there's that glimmer of hope and we have to stand and fight. I see. Okay. Well, I have a more positive thing that I've learned, I suppose, which is, which is that I think that more people care than I realized, right? Because I talked about how, for many years, we felt like we were screaming into the void, right? And over the years, meeting fans of the show, I mean, we've met people in the strangest places. I met someone at a, like, archaeological site in Israel, who had watched the show, you know, you don't, you don't really think about the fact that you do touch people in a certain way. And so many people have said that, you know, they, you know, really learned about China from us, they really learned about the Chinese people and have such admiration for them and really are, you know, upset very much at the Chinese Communist Party and want to do something. I think that's the thing. And my favorite comment that I've ever gotten on one of our episodes was a guy who wrote and said that his nine and 12 year old daughters like to watch our show with him. And he'd be like, you know, I would go, have you watched this episode of China Uncensored? And they're like, Oh, yeah, we've already watched that one, you know, dad. And I just love the idea of this dad watching our show with his daughters, and having them care about this part of the world that may seem far away. But, you know, that's, that's, I think, something that I've really appreciated about doing this show over the last 12 years. One of the reasons we use humor in our show is because it really does make things seem not as terrible and dark, you know, there's some kind of lightheartedness, there's some kind of humor so that you can have laugh at this authoritarian regime. And it makes it, you know, easier and more appealing, I think. You know, something that just strikes me, we have talked a lot about, you know, sort of the darkness in communist China right now. And where, where is the light there that you see that you brush up against because you push up against? I mean, I would say that over the course of the 12 years, we've done the show, we've seen such a tremendous change in people's attitudes towards not just the Chinese Communist Party, but communism, in general, people are more aware of the evils of it. People, we don't, we don't really have people saying like, Oh, China's a democracy, right? People, people are becoming aware. Is that just because of the sort of change of approach of the most recent, you know, the Xi Jinping regime? Or is it other? Do you think there's more to it? It's seeing what happened in Hong Kong, it's seeing what happened during COVID. It's things like Chinese secret police stations being put up in New York, the Chinese spy balloon. People are seeing what happened. And I mean, I think the the Trump administration does deserve credit for making it okay from the top levels to kind of expose these things. And that kind of made it okay for people across the political spectrum, to start talking about China critically, instead of what we mentioned earlier, the idea that like, no, you should only say things quietly behind closed doors. It was good to publicly expose that. And that's why you saw broad consensus, consensus on China, even in a very politically divided time, China is something that people across the political spectrum can agree on. And I do think that a lot of these things were happening before Xi Jinping came to power. But at the time, in, you know, in the late 90s, the early 2000s, when the prevalent message was, you know, doing business in China is great, you can make so much money. A lot of these things were happening where American companies were having their intellectual property stolen, they were having lots of difficulties, but they were afraid to talk about it. They were maybe ashamed to talk about it, because that nobody else was talking about it. So I think that it's not that things only started under Xi Jinping. But that, you know, as things have deteriorated over the years, and it's become more visible and okay to say these things, then like now people understand what's happening. There is a great danger of people putting all the blame on Xi Jinping. And I think this is another part of narrative warfare, that there are a lot of factions within the Chinese Communist Party, that would love that that is the message that gets out there. So that someday, if we get rid of Xi Jinping, we can go back to the way it was under Jiang Zemin, when intellectual property was still being stolen, when rape was still being used as a form of torture. When the whole organ harvesting industry was being, you know, scaled exponentially. Exactly. The problem is the communist system. Xi Jinping is a product of that. But he's not the core of that problem. And that's something that I think it has to be understood. Because, again, that's the survival of the Chinese Communist Party, right? What is the point of the narrative warfare? It's to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party survives and comes out on top. So ultimately, the system could sacrifice Xi Jinping, as long as the Communist Party still rules China. Well, it's been an incredible conversation. A final thought as we finish? Men of Gondor. But it is not this day. Not this day. Well, Shelley Zhang, Chris Chappell, such a pleasure to have had you on. It was great. Thank you all for joining Chris Chappell, Shelley Zhang, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.