at its most basic, at its most is so important and so with this book, if i can make people laugh, bring people together, and, you know, just have a little bit more joy, that's what i want. and also, i want to sell as many copies again, please buy it. comedian lupe perez, the book called that joke isn't funny anymore. on the death and rebirth of comedy, we appreciate time on c-span's book

hello, everyone. welcome to you, america. and this talk we have with josh chin and liza lin and from the wall street journal on surveillance state. your new book. i'm super excited to host is because josh and i were a longtime colleagues at the wall street journal and china. so first things first, a couple of housekeeping rules before we get into the meat of the audience, before we start.

if you do have questions, do the event please submit them through the q&a function and we'll get to them in the second half of the event. and of course, more importantly, copies of surveillance state are available for purchase to our bookselling partner, solid state books and you can find a link to buy a book on this page. so just click on that. a quick introduction for our two speakers josh chin is a new america fellow in 2020. he's also the deputy bureau chief in china. the wall street journal. as i mentioned, he previously he and i were previously colleagues there in china. and he has, of course, gone on to do huge, huge things, including being investigated of team that won the loeb awards for international reporting for a series exposing the chinese government pioneering embrace of digital surveillance. he is also the recipient of the dan balz medal given to investigative journalists who have exhibited courage in

standing up against intimidation and i'd love to ask about that a little bit more in a second. liesel lin is a has been covering data use and privacy for the journal from singapore and she was also part of the team that won the globe in 2018. and prior to that, liza's spent nine years at bloomberg news and television too as well. so welcome both of you to this talk. maybe i'll just start first by asking you guys about the how things have changed, because when the time when josh and i were both reporting in china, we're talking back india your 2000 to early station was a very different time. yes. we as foreign reporters, we were surveilled. we were aware that most were being watched. but at the same time, there was a deep awareness at that time that a feeling that with the advent of the internet, that this would be a cover that would, you know, pry open the government's control and lead to a much more open society.

and that, of course, has was a wrong assumption. so how did we go from that kind of utopian view to this decidedly more dystopian view that you present in your book? yeah, i it it is remarkable to think back on those times and you know, and there's that experience. i think a lot of reporters have in china that when you're there, you think it's the worst it's ever been. and then three or four years go back and you and then go back and you suddenly liquid nostalgia, a sort of previous period. but yeah, you're right. you know, i remember, you know, when i first started interested in china and reporting on china was around when china was entering the wto in 2001. and bill clinton, you know, had delivered this famous line when he was trying to argue for china's inclusion in the wto, which was, you know, he said, you know, if china joins the wto, the internet will know will start spreading there. and, you know, and and, you know, trying to control the

internet is like trying to nail jell-o to the wall. right. and so, of course, the communist party will never be able to do that. and eventually, you know, ideas about democracy and freedom and the rule values will spread through china. right. and i think a lot of people believe that. i certainly believe that, you know, and i think and i think china was sort of believed it as well. i mean, i think a really afraid of the internet. they obviously censored it pretty heavily. but i think there was a kind of there was a turning point in china probably around sort of 12, 11, 2012 with the when when social media really started to spread in china quite widely. and i think that so it really freaked them out. and there were, you know, there were a couple of incidents. there's one in particular in 2011 that some people may recall. there was a train crash, a crash outside of the city of when joe the of china's high speed new high speed rail and this had been a high speed rail project of been a symbol of kind of china's advancement as a country. and then after the crash, it

became a symbol of china, of kind of the communist party, of of economic growth run amok and of corruption and of all these other problems in china and it was a huge explosion of public anger that i think caught the china's leaders off guard. and it was right around then when you start to see them really get serious about using technology. so switching from offense or from defense to offense, right? using technology to exert control rather than then erode it. oh, what about, you know, when was the clicking point for you when you realized that this was absolutely taking a turn for the worse? so i think i would describe the changes that happened after you left me in three buckets. firstly, the tech innovation and secondly, legal changes. and then thirdly, just a cultural shift. i'll start with the last one. i think at the beginning of 2010, you started seeing smartphone phones really start to flood the chinese market. and along with the smartphones,

began a shift in chinese society to live their lives entirely on the phone. so everyone was chatting on the phone, on chat messenger. they were buying stuff off e-commerce, using your phone. they were using their phone to map out where they were going places or where they frequent to, you know, leaving reviews. all that leaves a digital data trail that's very, very much easier for the government to track. so that was already like one step. and then the second step that really aided this was the tech innovation, right? and the tech innovation i talk about is not just the mobile phone, but tech breakthroughs and deep learning and ai, which are allowing companies like tencent, which is china's largest social media company, to essentially monitor messages that are sent from you know, you and i, if we were using that chat messenger so they would be able to do not just voice recognition because you can send a voice chat, but you could do character recognition. so tencent, actually the ai

that's censoring your chats and monitoring your chest knows exactly what you're talking about. even if there's no human behind it, there's a machine and the final bucket is really long after you love me. like there were tons of new laws coming out, just tightening the government's control on what could be said and how much influence they had over tech companies. for example, the internet law would force internet companies to turn over terrorist material or potential national security threats to the government. and they had to do it voluntarily. it wasn't something retrospective where the government could go to them for data. so it was just like bits and bobs they'd done that has just generally made this environment a lot more tense and a lot more controlled. well, i definitely feel that you know, i definitely agree in the last part, particularly on the cultural issue, i, i remember at the time when i was covering that dawn event off of credit card companies and things, we were like, oh, no credits china such a low credit society, this

e-commerce thing will have all sorts of barriers to it. and now everybody has a qr code. you can't practically even use cash in china, but you know, even beggars have qr codes now. they won't even take cash. right. that's that's the story there. but one of the things that really struck me as really interesting, a book that i was personally very interested in, was the issue with your stories about the sort of the origins of harness ring technology for digital control? and some of this has, you know, linkages for our american audience or american audience, particularly. and the centers around the figure of interest and these very brilliant scientist who was one of the founders, i think, of the jet propulsion lab that caltech has. and during the mccarthy era, you know, where he was accused of being a spy, he he was basically so turned off that he went back to china, which i think some intelligence officers, the asset was the greatest mistake of the time. but what chen did was take his

genius and brilliance and use it to apply to the issue of cybernetics and the idea of being able to use technology to for to harness for desirable behavior in society. and what we saw some of that happening was always proceed proteges in a very early stage was was the one child policy where the idea was to control and create technology and surveillance, to control people's desire to have children and families, and that has obviously gone a long way. but of course, at that time, 30 years ago, there was simply not that level of ability to control to the to where it is now. so can you talk a little bit about how chen and this whole concept of cybernetics and social control and technology has blossomed forth, which is what you talk about in your book. so fascinating. lee right. yeah. really glad you brought up chen mae because changes and he's i mean, he's one of these characters who really speaks to just the sort of the depth of

the connections between china and the us when it comes to all of this sort of stuff. right. and you know, i mean, chen, he was one of these he was this sort of genius chinese engineer who went to the u.s. very early on on a u.s. government funded scholarship and and started to build china's right or the us rocket program in conjunction with with theodore von karman and a few other people. and, you know, for all intents and purposes, it seems like he really wanted to be an american and it's been applied for u.s. citizenship before he was chased back to china in the mccarthy era. there are obviously parallels today with with chinese scientists in the us now, but yeah you know he one of the things that he did when he was he was under fbi surveillance for several years in los angeles and sort of couldn't work. and what he did during that time was sort of sit in his study in his house in l.a. and read books. and one of the books he read was by an american mathematician

named norbert wiener called cybernetics. right. and it was this book that was sort of basically created this whole field that was extremely just revolutionary at the time that examined how essentially how you use information to exert control. right. and it's you know, it's very broad and it kind of applies to everything from sort of human beings and animals all the way to sort of mechanical systems. right. and chen used these these insights just to kind of create a whole new approach to engineering, which he first use in missiles. he sort of helped build china's missile system, but then he also he was extremely ambitious and he wanted to use these systems to wider society. right. and so he sort of developed norbert wiener, the founder of cybernetics, was very skeptical that you could use this to to these ideas to control society. but but changed course and disagreed and thought like you could. so one of the first things he did, which was totally disastrous, was was advised he wrote a paper during the great

leap forward in the 1950s in china, where he he he predicted. with basically zero knowledge of agriculture that the china could rat could exponentially increase its farm output. and a lot of people blame him partially for that because they think that he convinced mao to kind of go ahead with this sort of disaster. his agricultural policy that led to famine and then, yes, his protege, song jin, use those ideas to push the one child policy which you would you wrote about so brilliantly in your in your fantastic book. but you write so and so for a long time. these ideas about engineering society to kind of after especially after the one child policy they kind of hovered in the background and, you know, they were kind of being taught in the party school and and, you know, the central party school in beijing and communist party officials were sort of being steeped in this idea of systematic thinking, right, of thinking, of society in terms of engineering problems. but they never really had the

tools to kind of implement it. and so as these as these are sort of alluded to, one of the big shifts here is that, you know, with advances in i sort of around 2010, especially in deep learning. which is a which is a phrase, i'm sure people are familiar with, you know, it was it became possible to teach machines, to sort of learn like human beings by feeding them huge amounts of data. right. and that was just it was one of these just critical technological advances that allowed china, the chinese communist party, which has access to huge amounts of data to to really start trying to engineer society in ways that change your and had had promoted and the ideas, you know, to kind of make it like a machine, like a self guided missile. right you know, like it's the correct stone path that like it sort of it doesn't really actually need that much effort to control. and so let's move on to talk about where this was really applied for. you know, it for the first time was disastrous efforts or effects on human rights.

and this was with xinjiang, right syndrome was really the lab at which the big question of now you have this big ideas about social control using technology, and now you also have the tools of deep learning. and i and then beijing sees as a problem what they see as the separatists tendencies with the xinjiang province where you have a very large turkic weaker muslim population. and so they start applying this. why don't you talk about how you unraveled it with your book? what's how what sets off this spark in your thinking? what you start saying, hang on a minute. this, this is really getting to be a huge issue. right? right. so, you know, so we so we did this this investigative series in the it into surveillance into surveillance in china in 2017. and these and i started it right and at the end of the end of 2017, we were hearing stories from people about they're like, oh, you know, people are coming

back from trips to jinjiang. and they were saying, oh, you know, this technology writing about is everywhere that you really should check it out at a time. really. no one no one was really talking that much about xinjiang and no one was quite aware what was happening there. so we didn't know what we were getting into. but, you know, a colleague and i drove drove a car in and into into the xinjiang. and it was just what we discovered was just mind blowing, right. i mean, it was you know, i've you know, i've been a journalist for many, many years at that point and was, you know, rarely shocked. you know, often surprised, but rarely shocked by things that i'd seen there. and this was just utterly, utterly shocking. right. and you know what? it was what we discovered was that, you know, they had essentially blanketed the entire region in these technologies to the point where if you were a regular living in xinjiang, your entire daily existence is recorded and tracked and analyzed, you know, from the minute you leave your door and actually probably before you leave your door. and, you know, so if you wanted

to go to a bank or a market or a hotel, you would have to you would have to scan. you have to go through a security gate that would scan your face and compare it to your id and sort of note where you were going and if you had done something wrong. like we met a guy who had failed to pay his phone bills for a few months. and every time you went through a security gate, an alarm would go off and you wouldn't be allowed to pass through. so he was essentially imprisoned in his neighborhood because of an unpaid phone bill, you know, and they were collecting biometric data, fingerprints, dna, voice prints. they're making 3d images of people's heads so they could be tracked by facial recognition cameras wherever they went. one thing that we you know, we had read about before we went to, you know, was the we didn't really believe was that they were in some places in xinjiang. they were if you bought a knife as a wigger, you would have to have your all of your personal information sort of laser etched into the knife in the form of a qr code. and then we just thought that was like ridiculous.

but then we lo and behold, we went to this town and went into a knife shop. and it was and it was true. so, you know, and the end goal of all this tracking was to sniff out wiggers, who, according to, you know, calculations, we don't really understand, are seen as potentially threatening to the communist party in the future, not people who've committed crimes, not people who've done anything wrong. right, but people whose sort of daily behavior is suggests they might someday resist the communist party and then sending those people to this network of internment camps right. and that was yeah, that was the second really shocking thing was you had this sort of 21st century surveillance technology being married with this 20th century institution that i don't think anyone ever thought would be coming back. right. you know, sort of mass incarceration of religious minorities. right. and so that was just totally shocking, i think, at that point, you know, just clear that we would need that. what was happening there was

really new and really significant. and we needed a book to sort of fully unpack what was happening. right. and i can imagine that i mean, and all these repressions happened, you know, right. lee from the time that you started reporting and the many other organizations, nonprofits and some of my very colleagues to at human rights watch like maya wong and sophy richardson happened document have now in some sense it feels it feels like some some form of validate and perhaps in a way that there was a recent u.n. report on this that sort of you know that's that did confirm that these are, you know, quite lightly crimes against humanity, which is what we at human rights watch have said. but that said, this process of documenting, writing about this comes at a terrific cost, not just to unfortunately, to the to the millions who are incarcerated, but also for those of you reporting on it, both of you are no longer i think, a sort of persona non grata in china. i take it you about sort and

even the process, i imagine of going to report this, you know, in a very soviet country must have been hideously difficult. so maybe i'd love to hear a little bit more about and i think our readers would, too. what does this mean? what was the cost involved? how did you even get to go places you know, without having your car pulled over? you're you're people that you've just spoken to 5 minutes before, interrogated. how did that all work? how did you operate? yeah, that was a that was a real challenge. i mean, that's actually one of the reasons we drove in rather than fly in because we figured the airport would be crawling with even more surveillance, but actually, while we were driving around, it's funny you mentioned not getting or getting pulled over. you know, one instance i remember just very clearly was my colleague and i at the time we were driving and we just sort of we had been lost and we were on some sort of dirt road trying to find our way back to a highway like in the middle of nowhere in xinjiang, which is which, you know, is a really vast kind of rural, empty place. right.

and then all of a sudden, we were just we were surrounded by this cloud of dust and and when it cleared, we saw up ahead of us a police car blocking the road. so we screeched to a stop and we looked behind us. we saw a police car pulling in behind us. we were trapped on this road and all. and, you know, all of these police poured out of the cars are wearing sort of swat gear and carrying assault rifles. and they ordered us out of our car and started interrogating us about what we were doing there and why and and which is just too terrifying. right. and then, you know, we finally did manage to kind of talk our way out of it and persuaded them that we were moving along and they could they didn't have to worry about us. but yeah, before i before we left, i was like, i turn to one of them. i was like, how did you even find us? there's like nothing out here. and and the guy was like, oh, we had some cameras back there that automatically identified your license plate and told us and then alerted us. and so that's why we rushed out here. so, you know, it's just i mean, it just really brought home to me, like, how difficult it is to just move just to move around in

xinjiang and, you know, it was it was it was strange at the time in xinjiang. i don't think people really thought that what was happening there was wrong, like han chinese people. right. the people sort of carrying this out who were responsible for implementing the system that i don't think they thought it was a good thing. i mean, they were sort of like they felt like this was a new way to to get tied to exercise tighter control over xinjiang. and they were sort of, you know, enamored of the technology. so a lot of them were actually willing to to talk about it, at least initially, you know. but talking to wiggers was was very difficult, right. and partly was difficult because we didn't want to get them in trouble and we had no idea, you know, at the time i mean, now it's very clear that as a foreigner to be seen speaking with a weaker is, you know, extremely dangerous for the weaker. at the time, we weren't sure, but we you know, we had to be extra cautious. and so, yeah, we would sort of try to catch, you know, we would try to interview people and like snatches of conversation, you

know, in like in alleyways or places we couldn't be seen or in cars and stuff like that. and it was just it made it it did make it very difficult to do that kind of reporting. and but it was amazing just how brave i mean, just extremely brave we were. and and being willing to take us aside and tell us what was happening. yes. just what particular family that you you profiled, timur. right. a filmmaker we go from, again, his family and his story is particularly compelling, one for the book. and i'd love to ask you a little bit more about that one second. but i also wanted to give lisa a chance to talk about her wonderful experiences, too, in this role. so, lisa, tell us, i mean, what was the personal cost to you of reporting on this? you know, so i definitely had an easier time than josh with respect to the book on a day to day basis, working for the wall street journal, you do realize your phone and your wechat, which is the dominant chat

messenger in china, you realize that that's compromised because you sometimes call people who and when you're working on a story and you realize that, you know, after talking for like a minute or two, that like a crossed line, right? you hear someone else's conversation and the other parts of you and you can't hear you can't hear her and you know that it's the ai that's at work because the ai's probably picked out that you're talking about certain sensitive terms to the chinese government. and, you know, they're actively trying to make sure that you both are not continuing the conversation. and and often the cross line gets so bad that you can't and you can try. but if you keep trying, then you just get cut. so it's like day to day experiences like this that make me realize that, okay, even though now we're reporting on china from outside of china, we're still not safe and like i've heard from sources as well that when i try to call them with my chinese mobile number, it turns out, as, you know, a

message that says this is a fraudulent number. this number has been known to be linked to a scam. do not pick up. so it is very difficult. it heightens the challenge of being able to talk to people in china and very commonly, if you're working on a sensitive topic, when you talk to these, when you talk to your sources, they're petrified themselves. you know, they ask you not to email them. there's often a different form of correspondence that we use that's not a chinese based chat messenger. and typically like it. increasingly so in the last year or two, everyone wants to talk on background, only rarely do they want to put their name on record. yeah, so that's actually like more reporting on with the wall street journal with this surveillance state book. i, i actually had an easier time because josh and i, when we started digging into the surveillance state in china, we discovered that the same camera

systems and the same kind of surveillance technologies that we use in xinjiang in very nefarious instance, the ways we used in very in other ways in other chinese cities, wealthier chinese cities, all han chinese cities, in ways that residents found very attractive and alluring. so in that in that case, actually, we had unprecedented access to like a law and order unit in hong jail, which we would have never gotten, but yeah, why don't you talk a little bit about that? because they struck me as being so astonishingly open. you want to quickly describe what it is for our readers, certainly to want to read your book even more so. so for some context, typically what we realized was china had like a proliferation of smart cities in every city. we wanted to use the latest technology to digitize governance or to make the city

city services just more efficient. and we we we honed in on one particular city, hangzhou, which is not not as well known as its neighbor shanghai, but it's 2 hours from shanghai and it's actually home to the tech company alibaba, alibaba, and it's also home to the world's largest camera maker, hikvision. and before that reason, hangzhou is just very embracing of this sort of technology to do everything from keeping the streets clean to discovering people of interest on the street. so so the city actually has this systems that were built by city. and for some background, see, etsy is the same kind of chinese defense contractor that makes a lot of the surveillance systems in xinjiang. so the same surveillance systems in zeitoun that were used to spot leaders were actually used to pick out people of interest to the city. police in hangzhou itself. and these would be like criminal

fugitives or it would be drug pushers that they had their faces on the list. generally, people that you don't want to see on the streets anyway. so systems like these are very attractive, but let me maybe, perhaps talk a little bit about the law and order unit that i visited, and we had an open president access to i found a district in hangzhou in which the hangzhou chengguan and the channel one are like junior varsity police in china. they are essentially making useful things, right? like littering violent, that sort of stuff. yeah. yeah. so they're not in charge of arresting criminals, but what they're in charge of is keeping the streets clean. no trash piles or there's like a car illegally parked on the sidewalk or a street hawk without a license. it is like the john warns, the widely hated. yes, and they're notorious in china because everyone doesn't like which i'm glad they don't have the same power as the

police, but try and act like the police so the end up really coming off is a big police and the chihuahua was the one in hong jo that invited me to take a look at their system. the system was called city wide and when i first got to the building, it's very nondescript. think about any any ordinary boxy, communist looking kind of beat building that you see and in chinese second tier cities, it was very nondescript on the outside. but inside what was happening was really fascinating. there was like when i was in, yes, it was a wall full of plasma tvs and they were streaming. streaming footage from the street, from the entrances of schools, from the entrances of hospitals, like cameras focus on sidewalks, everything was being streamed in real time. and the leader of this shanghai unit was so proud of the system's effectiveness that he welcomed me in. and that was the reason why he wanted to talk to me about it, because that system that they

installed two years ago had helped them actually reduce the number of street hawkers to make a license. street hawkers almost close to zero. and most like the streets are very, very clean in that neighborhood. you didn't see trash piles e-scooters weren't they? strewn all over the sidewalk. so he was very, very proud of the system. and the best part he said it was, you know, like we mentioned earlier, the children are very notorious and did not like he said the system helped to smooth out relations between the chengguan and the local residents because the chengguan what the system that was it has cameras facing the street. and whenever the camera spots something abnormal, it takes a picture, it uses image recognition. what's that normal takes a picture and it gets sent to the chengguan and the children will go down and show the offender like, this is what happened and can you clean it up? in the past, there would be a lot of like tussle because the

person who did it would not want to admit he did it. but with the cameras, you know, it's very transparent. there's nothing to hide. great. i'm going to take a moment at this juncture to remind our audience to send in some questions, which i'm sure you have, but then we flip this back quickly because it is this utopian view of, you know, technol egy that creates a perfect society. well, a pretty nice, much nicer society. technology will make it so that we're not our streets are not jammed with cars, not let it be pollution. that's the utopian view. and that's what i love about your book is how you joined the dots. and this is not just a purely china book, but it's talking about how those technologies are now being actively marketed and use in many parts of the world. so can you talk a little bit about that and both the good side and as we've talked about some of the more dystopian views on that one? yeah, i think that's the i mean, that was that was one of the sort of big, big revelations for us when we were looking at this.

is that is that that vision right to this is it is not merely you know what's different about what china is doing compared to, say, like the stasi in east germany. right. is offering, you know, carrots as well as sticks like the stasi only wanted to control and sort of sniff out and eradicate dissidents. right. and china definitely wants to do that and is doing that. but they also yeah, they have they're offering the sort of more convenience, more secure, predictable life for the people who who do agree. right. who do who who are willing to behave. and they are selling the system globally. right. and that and the vision along with it. you mentioned at a time and i remember reading in the book that the only places where they haven't sold us, the two continents are what, antarctica and australia. yeah, exactly. exactly. so they're everywhere now. so my question to you therefore is, you know, is there more carrot, elastic? because, you know, let's face it, there's also carrot and

stick depending on who for a for autocratic regime. yes. wonderful carrot for people under that autocratic regime. maybe stick. right. so well, from what you've seen and you give a very compelling case study with what happened in uganda, which was clearly much more of a state issue. could you talk a little bit about that? yeah, i would say, i mean, i think the stick function of the system is more fully realized than the carrot function and some ways it doesn't, you know? yeah. i mean, it's just because it's always been that way. and you see this in uganda. so we, we traveled there actually the was originally a sort of wall street journal story and we had gone to uganda where the leader there you are, museveni, who's a long time strongman, although also a long time recipient of u.s. aid, was facing this new challenger. this the sort of pop singer

named bobby wein, who's sort of young and really charming and had sort of rallied the, you know, poor, poorer youth in a country who sort of felt left out. and he had really succeeded in sort of drumming up a lot of opposition to to museveni and as a museveni was looking for ways to deal with this. and he ended up turning to huawei, which is i think most people know this that name by now but it's a you know it's china's largest telecom equipment maker. it builds, you know, telecom. systems around the world, including in africa and and and sort of said, what can i do? how do i you know, do you have anything for me here? right. and he also, you know, also brought in the chinese ambassador at the time and was discussing it with him. and and so the chinese embassy and huawei together, they they flew ugandan police out to china, took them to huawei headquarters, of course. and there but then, you know,

took them to the ministry of public security's gigantic headquarters on the on the sort of on the edge of tiananmen square, where they kind of random through all the ways that china uses its new surveillance systems to sort of maintain control. right. and to and to sort of sniff out opposition so that uganda police, when they got back to kampala a short time later, the ugandan government had signed a deal for i think was $127 million for a little kind of chinese surveillance state starter kit that museveni rolled out and used to in the last election. use successfully to track down a lot of bobby warren supporters and basically neutralize them and then emerge victorious in the in the latest elections. well, so maybe i'm going to open this up to questions in a few minutes, but along those lines, i mean, so the big question, curious and you and what i like

about your book is also it doesn't sort of paint, so it tries to be very balanced, which is an answer to big question here, which has china really successfully used, surveil and to for social control and you talked about some areas where it's been successful, but you've also talked about some flaws where this model maybe doesn't always work and particularly not enforced for some for export either. so i think particularly like so you about it quite a bit. so i'd love to hear your could you explain what what how how this works. sure. yeah. and maybe let me talk about another interesting finding from our research as well. when we looked into the export of such models overseas, we found that the export of such models was largely apolitical like the chinese government was selling these systems, but they were not trying to push a certain like they're not trying to push autocracy versus democracy. see, essentially, you know what we were finding was they were

doing this for two big reasons, which really started to make a lot of sense as we did the research. the first reason they were trying to export and sell these models was to validate their own system back home. because every time you saw a chinese chinese made surveillance system get sold, in particular, particularly in a democratic city, a democratic country, you would see chinese state media trumpet up at whole to its own readers saying that look at china's innovation and we're innovating in in governance models or innovating in technology. xi you know, this this is trumped up as a reason for national pride. and the second reason why they really needed this export model to succeed is because, you know, china as i mentioned, china is home to the world's largest surveillance camera maker, hikvision. and it's not just home to the biggest surveillance camera maker. it's home to the second and third largest world's largest

security camera makers, which is thoughtful and univision. so it's it's got incentive to keep the export machine humming for these large companies because if think about how many cameras there are in china right now, china has close to more than 400 million cameras. and at some point, the demand is going to saturate. and who's going to pick up the demand? they need the export markets to do it. so these were two reasons why we felt like the export the export of such systems so critical to china and possibly not for like, you know, just because we wanted to push like autocracy. so autocratic ideas overseas, i want to push back against that a little bit because i do think and quite a lot of people do think as well, that there is a, you know, alternative version of china. so idea of what makes for a perfect society that it is pushing, which, you know, it's it's maybe soft power. you might define it as such. but it certainly is a that i

think is perhaps somewhat compelling to particularly to you many nations that sort of don't buy in to what they see as western centric. well, you know, luxurious thoughts about what human rights could be. you know, like here you are. you've done a and now you tell us to do b, but, you know, you you've profited off, you know, cutting off your you your, you know, woods and stuff. but now you tell us we can't do it. you know, that kind of thinking is particularly prevalent and i also find it what was even handed in your book particularly was when you look at the involvement of both american companies, silicon valley, u.s. government policy into this. this is not just us, you know, beijing's bad, but this is all tracing for some of the involvement of some of the things. and since we're coming off very, very soon, a week after 911, i think it's particularly interesting to talk about the juncture where some of this

shaped what we see, what you see today. so can you talk a little bit about the role of the u.s. and both private and corporate and and also government in sort of spawning this hyper technology surveillance culture? yeah, i can i mean, i think i think, you know, this question of whether china just did just to address that really quickly, you whether china is is pushing its model, i think i mean, that is a fascinating debate around all of this. right. and and and and it sort of ties back to 911 in a lot of ways. but, you know, i think what china is trying to do is is they're saying if you want to adopt our model, here it is. and why we think it works well. and you can do. but they're not insisting they're not sort of attaching conditions to those systems. right. they're not saying, you know, the way that sort of the us sometimes attaches conditions to its financial aid. right. china is not saying we will only sell you this technology if you use it in certain ways. right. i think that our ideas,

governments can use it to exert control in whatever way they find works best in their country. right. i mean, but the the technologies themselves are sort of built for political control. that is that's kind of how they're they're they're designed. so for 911, you know, we did just past the anniversary and, you know, this entire market for digital surveillance, the global market for digital surveillance, which includes many countries, including canada and israel and germany, was a direct consequence of the war on terror, right? i mean, it was just the us spending billions of dollars to do to to prosecute that war gave rise to just a huge number of of surveillance companies who wanted to to meet that demand and and american tech companies obviously were a huge part of that and they've been a huge part of the chinese surveillance state from the very beginning. right. i mean, going all the way back into the early 2000 when china was trying to figure out how to censor the internet, when they were trying to figure out how

nail jell-o to the wall. you know, they they they would hold these security conferences. you would have companies like cisco systems, sun microsystems, intel, other companies would attend these conferences. and, you know, we're trying to sell china the technology to censor and control and monitor the internet and with the more with this sort of latest evolution in ai driven surveillance, it's the same thing. you know, in this case, they're sort of selling components. you know, they sort of contribute chips, hardware, that sort of thing, also capital. so, you know, intel is a good example. they, you know, in 2010, they invested in this in this startup called net, those in china that would go on to be a very know one of the more most important companies driving innovation in surveillance in china and they they gave it money, they gave it chips, they gave it advice. and they basically helped build you know, build it into a company.

and at the time, you know, they they were really kind of openly enthusiastic. how big and potentially profitable this this market would be. right. they didn't really hide it, i think, at the time. they just, you know, just seemed like a great way to make makes money in china and and it's not just intel as well as part of like research for josh and i talked to like hundreds of government contracts government contracts by like chinese police seeking vendors for such systems. and they would be very specific on what they wanted, you know, they wanted a gpu of a certain like speed and very often that sort of gpu only comes from american tech companies. and case in point, in many cases it was nvidia. so nvidia was providing a ton of the chips that were processing that were used in the applications to process large amounts of video coming in to recognize these faces. so a lot of the face and image recognition was based on these

chips and it wasn't just the high end stuff, like low end stuff, like hard disk drives, because you need huge amounts of storage space to store all that video and often the chinese police would call for video to be stored for 365 days. so a lot of these hard disk drives came from companies like seagate and western digital. so all in all, i mean, what we found was in the not we got less of supply chain, commercial or financial partnership. there was a ton of links between silicon valley and the chinese surveillance state. yeah. so what are you describing here is and i'm taking this some of some of the readers questions which i'm also seeing right now here. and so i'm trying to shape them onto a follow up for what what are you describing as, you know, both china and u.s. have both sort of claimed the profit motive as a big thing. you know, we need more places to buy our stuff. we didn't know if we started policing everything that our stuff was used for. then would have no business and we would just die out of existence. now, that kind of argument it

has, i think, has a seismic shift, particularly with the issue of covid and the pandemic. right. and the awareness that secure or issues that reliance on the self reliance was particularly how have you seen a shift in that thinking with what all that's happened recently that the pandemic with the awareness with the sort of a fraying of relationships the us-china relationship. yeah i would say i think sorry. go ahead. go ahead. begin. okay. yeah, i would say like us companies in the past, maybe, you know, in the early 2000 and even up to like the mid 20 tens, they had this naive optimism about china as a market. you know, china was always seen as a source of very and quick profit and people tended to ignore like the human rights risk to actually selling in the market. right. when you think about like corporate boardrooms, shareholders and directors,

their questions about china would be like, how fast can you extend the right? how can we tap the market that was the general field. well, and you've definitely seen a big shift beginning with the trump the trump presidency, particularly where the us tech company u.s. companies now a very aware of the regulation risks to investing and expanding in china and very aware of the reputational risks should their product be embroiled in forced labor. so there's definitely been a big, big change in way china's been viewed in the all in viewed by companies now now the big thinking in the overriding thought is how can we reduce all the different risks. china as opposed ten years ago when it was let's expand our cost let's talk about public awareness. and this question comes from isabel in the audience, who was wondering if episodes like the recent abuses of health codes in the hunan banking crisis have

changed people's views of this technology's for the worse. yeah, that's that's been a really fascinating development. i think, you know, josh, when i have a quick recap for those of us who don't know what's what happened with the hunan banking crisis. right. i mean, i can yeah. so this was a this was a situation that happened has been sort of happening over the course of a year. there was essentially a group of rural banks that had that in part had been involved in a fraud. and the chinese government, as they were investing ending that fraud, froze all of the funds in the in the accounts. and so people who had deposited money, sometimes their life savings in these accounts got really angry and they and they staged a surprise protest on the steps of the bank regulator in zhengzhou, in a city in hunan province and and it really surprised the security officials there. it's very unusual these days for for people to be able to organize a large protest like that. so so the second time, you know, after nothing had happened, the

protesters were getting prepared to come back to jiang jo. and as they were about as they were coming out of the train station, you know, in china now everyone has a health code app right? that sort of tracks their exposure to the covid and and it kind of codes you red or green, depending on on your on your exposure and as they were as the protesters were coming out of a train station in zhengzhou and scanning way through the security gates, all of their health codes turned red. right. and a their security folks were there and ready to take them off to a quarantine center, basically prevent the protest from happening and the reaction to this was really fascinating. and to understand, i mean, you kind of have to back up a little bit, you know, that you know, in the first part of the pandemic, you know, people were quite you know, the pandemic resulted in this huge explosion of of surveillance in china. right. you know, sort of on a scale that previously people had only seen in in xinjiang where now because of the pandemic, everyone in china is being

actively tracked. right. they all have health codes. you know, any city where where there are cases that, you know, residential compounds can be locked down and your your comings and going can be monitored or you could even prevented from leaving at all. and and, you know, in the early days, people sort of accepted it. they were they were ultimately happy with it because they saw the death count in the united states and elsewhere climbing. and meanwhile, china wasn't experiencing those deaths. but with zhengzhou it was interesting. is it it became this viral sensation. it just blew up and there was immense public outrage at this idea that the government was misusing this technology. right. and and as a result, the head of security in zhengzhou was fired. a few other officials were fired. but the health you know, the health officials, you know, scolded scolded them for misusing the technology. and it's so will be really interesting to to, you know, going forward to see how this

effect continues, if that outrage sort of continues to boil, because it's, you know, certainly one big fear with the pandemic is that the government will use these systems for for other more political purposes. so. so you've certainly answered a bit of the question from jocelyn, who asked about what was the philosophy that the chinese government officials say is their reason for, these use of this high tech surveil and other than crime reduction? so you've mentioned obviously one would be public health reasons, right to control pandemic and certainly with xinjiang, there's terrorism. but one one the reason oh when, this touches to another question from johnson was to the audience was the use of the relationship of surveillance and control control policy to the chinese anti-gay policy. and he and wondering if you could talk a little bit about that sorry, i didn't catch the a.i. so in other words, the big question here is, you know what

is the justification for chinese government officials for all these tools of social control? and we've touched on some like, for example, prevention of terrorism is their claim for health, you know, public health reason for to prevent for social instability. but under it comes some of these issues that such as anti-gay policy, perhaps, and which, you know, one of our readers is asking if you could talk a little bit about. yeah, i think, you know, ultimately what this is all about is is sort of the communist party reinserting itself into the lives of chinese people. right. you know, so for decades, they sort of did pull back, you know, and sort of decided, you know, said, let people we'll let people live their lives long as they don't rebel. right. as long as they don't call for our for democracy or whatever. and they sort of were more or less content, let people do whatever. right and now, you know, the

party is much more interested in kind of telling people how to lead their lives. right? they want it wanted they want to engineer a certain kind of society. right. and and it's a certain kind of society that i think xi jinping has in mind. right. and and that's a tough society. that's like a strong it's a great power society to sort of capable of standing up to the us and others and and, and so, you know, yeah, they've, they've definitely targeted the lgbt community in shanghai and elsewhere. they've, they've shut down a lot of the wechat accounts that, that, that community uses. there's some indication that they are surveilling lgbt activists much active, much more intensely. and a lot of that, you know, it comes back to this idea that the lgbt lifestyle, which previously the communist party really didn't have. i mean, they were not they didn't approve, but they also didn't really go out of their way to say much about it. it was kind of a don't ask, don't tell approach in a lot of ways, especially, you know, the later years of the hu jintao

era, that's that's reversed. they don't i don't they don't they sort of actively disapprove now. and they're using these tools to to express that disapproval. i wonder if someone is that married to that might go on. yeah, sure. i was going to say that the underpinning of this all is also because the party is creating a new social contract for chinese citizens. in the past, the social contract was always keep us in power, we will deliver like higher economic growth and higher right. and and now we've seen china, china's economy slowing down the fissures in the economy like very, you know, like the property bubble is finally starting to look like it's going to burst. and because of the zero-covid policy, like economic growth in the last quarter, it was close to zero. now that they're struggling to deliver that, they're trying to write a new social contract. and in this new of social contract, the trade off would be, let us have your data and will keep your streets safe and

clean and make your life as frictionless and as easy as possible. so, yes, we might not deliver economic growth, but you still have quality of life and improvement there. i'll just it's incredibly fascinating. but somehow also very depressing. so i want to sort of finish, i think a little bit since we're coming close with a hopefully on and a hope more hopeful note now when whenever i was in china before we used to have this issue where you would be like okay well a lot of my chinese must be like, what about the u.s.? they're just as equally corrupt and do horrible things. and i would quite frequently say, yes, they do these things too. but the difference is, if i was reporting this in the u.s., i could ask these questions and i wouldn't be put in jail. that's the difference. now, in this particular case, when we talk about surveillance policies to which, you know, u.s. government and the u.s. policy and for u.s. companies are implicated, what we see here is perhaps the difference is there has been more, i think, political pushback more, more more pushback from ngos such as

my our own and lots of other people. more pushback from the people and more empowerment in the whole process. do you are there any particular specific trends in this that you find helpful and useful that you're following or watching as an example of this pushback? and i want to push you at this point because we're time ways to keep this up short. yeah, i think i mean, you know, if you're if you're looking for a sort of hopeful note, you can look to the eu, right? i mean, the big question for all us is how do democracies contend with these technologies? right. and china has a very clear vision. democracies don't. right. but the eu has a draft law that they're considering now that would essentially ban the use of real time surveillance. you know, they've been very strong on front and they feel very that these technologies are just too disruptive and too powerful and they don't they're not they shouldn't be used in that context. the us is, you know, a little bit more schizophrenic. some cities welcome this

technology. others don't. you know, one place to look, i think, to pay a lot of attention to now if you're interested in this is california where they're, you know, instituted a lot of bans, but they're sort of now rolling them back because of a desire to fight crime. and i think, you know, i think thankfully, these issues are going are getting more attention in the us actually, partly because of the repeal of roe, because this is to really start to affect a lot of women in states where they're abortion bans. and i think that that in and of itself is really frightening. but i think the conversation that it has sparked encouraging because now people are paying much more attention to it. that's great. and actually, now we just quick, quick one. in the uk there's a code of conduct for surveillance camera use and there is a surveillance camera commissioner that's independent of the whole ministry that is watching over the law enforcement areas, agencies to make sure they're not abusing us. oh, well, i just want to close on this point, because coming to the top of the hour, too, thank

you both so much for the work you've done on this. and continue to do on this and for this very fascinating conversation. i want to thank our audience here for a disturbing voice and encourage them to buy the book. if you haven't already. and lastly, i want to thank new america, particularly dent on both the overall new america as well as the international security team who also collaborated in putting together this talk and putting it together. so thank

welcome, everyone. we are here to discuss the book, the great escape true story of forced labor andmmrant dreams in america by my