Latest / UK Column Radio / Jerm Warfare - Complex systems, propaganda, and culture

Transcript

Jerm Warfare - Complex systems, propaganda, and culture · UK Column Radio

0:38
None, Nick. I wanted you on my show and when
0:42
I invited you, you said yes. But there's a condition.
0:45
You want to ask me questions? I do indeed.
0:48
You know, it's been 16 years since I was lost in China at at
0:52
that time in my life, I spent quite a lot of time there
0:55
because I was starting up a business there, a subsidiary for
0:58
one of the South African banks. And so I won't say that I was
1:04
had an opportunity to be deeply steeped in the culture or
1:07
anything to that extent. But I did travel quite widely
1:11
and had a lot of meetings. And, you know, we were really
1:14
trying to understand as well as we could what the, the, the lay
1:19
of the land was. So it was a reasonable exposure.
1:23
And since then, I've had just an incredible paucity of
1:27
opportunities to talk to people who have, you know, be
1:31
thoughtful, people who have, who have visited China and done a
1:34
little bit of travelling and so on.
1:36
You get a lot of people coming back saying, well, you know, I
1:39
was in Shanghai and the buildings are amazing, you know,
1:42
Well, that hardly gives you any insight.
1:43
And you start asking them a question of or two about like,
1:47
well, tell me about the surveillance state.
1:49
Tell me about, you know, and they don't have any insight.
1:51
They haven't, they haven't even crossed their mind that, that
1:53
there was something like that to, to discuss, you know.
1:59
Well, look, this is the thing. So first and foremost, I just
2:02
want to point out because whenever we have a discussion
2:04
like this, people say, oh, but if you're just a tourist, it
2:07
doesn't mean anything. You don't get any insight.
2:09
No, I think you, you do, you get a keyhole, but it's a keyhole
2:14
nonetheless. It's it's better than nothing.
2:17
Yes, but, but I think what, what, what, yeah, what you can
2:21
definitely get very quickly is, is if a very false impression
2:25
has been created in the, in the eye of the, in, in the, in the
2:29
public imagination. You know, that, oh, every, every
2:33
time you move, you've got to swipe your digital ID.
2:36
And if you jaywalk, you get knocks off the you know, that's
2:39
the kind of impression that I think many people have.
2:42
I remember if we just go back, there were two crazy psyops at
2:50
in the early stage of the COVID phenomenon involving China.
2:56
The the first one, which is the one that had the biggest
2:58
impression on me was the the famous falling man video.
3:01
You know, where this guy's like walking along the street and
3:03
then all of a sudden it's and plunks, he falls over, you know,
3:07
and we are all, yeah, we're all meant to believe that this is
3:10
what the novel deadly virus does, you know, and, and from
3:14
from for many observers at the time that that was actually the
3:18
thing that that woke them up and said, hold on, what's going on
3:21
here? This isn't real.
3:22
Why is that? Why are we seeing this material
3:25
that's on Twitter, not, you know, a platform that ostensibly
3:28
doesn't really exist in China, that it doesn't appear to be of
3:33
Chinese origin. What, you know, who's, who's
3:37
circulating this material and to what end.
3:40
So that was the first one. And then the second one was the
3:43
notion of the, the, the draconian Chinese lockdown.
3:47
You know, it didn't take long to dispel that one completely.
3:50
A few phone calls to people to say, well, yeah, what's going
3:52
on? Are you guys locked down?
3:53
And no, no, we're not locked down.
3:55
It's, it's it, it looked like there was a real showboating
3:59
lockdown going on. And then The funny thing again,
4:02
the material purporting to record this draconian lockdown
4:07
did not appear to be of Chinese origin.
4:11
So, So what was going on? And, and, and so I think China
4:15
and conditions on the ground in China and the nature of the, the
4:18
surveillance state there, the nature of the Communist Party
4:21
and so on. We, we, we, we are once again,
4:25
as is often the case, swimming through a sea of diversion and
4:30
misinformation. And under those conditions, I
4:34
think a visit with by, you know, even remotely curious mind can
4:40
do a lot to spell these notions. I went to, I think 9 Chinese
4:46
cities and I spend most of my time in the province of
4:50
Xinjiang, which is by far the most militarised and the most
4:53
politically sensitive. And you get a very different
4:56
perception there than what you do in Shanghai.
4:58
So I think, I think Shanghai, we can all agree, is just a mega
5:03
city. It's very, very similar to any
5:06
other big city in the world. It doesn't have the kind of
5:12
draconianism that you would see on X.
5:15
At the moment. There seems to be this concerted
5:18
campaign, this anti China, what do you call it?
5:21
Sinophobic operation? This is very concerning.
5:26
It's clear to me that that China is a geopolitical target.
5:31
And in the same way that we have to always be vigilant with
5:35
everything that gets thrown at us, this is another one of those
5:38
that we need to be vigilant about.
5:40
And the the whole idea of digital idea has just suddenly,
5:45
like in Lord of the Rings, where where the focus of Sauron, the
5:50
eye just changes and suddenly. Yeah.
5:53
And, and what frustrates me, Nick, is I was there, I saw with
6:01
my own eyes and I and I spoke to people and I asked them all
6:05
these sorts of questions and still coming back home, people
6:09
go, it's all rubbish. This, this video on YouTube is
6:12
the truth. Yeah, that's it's, it's, it's
6:15
like this unbelievably tough nuts to crack.
6:19
Yeah, I mean, do do you remember there was this fellow who gave
6:24
off in every way the heir of ACIA asset, My Call singer, who
6:32
was yes, yes, yes, yeah. Trying to pin the entire COVID
6:36
phenomenon on China. And.
6:40
And it came out pretty quickly. It was irremarkably well put
6:44
together, you know, supposedly by a guy operating completely
6:48
alone with no support staff, no funding, whatever.
6:51
He writes this book and he also put these incredible pallets
6:56
together of social media posts that were being amplified in a
7:00
sort of human bot fashion. So yeah, there'd be actual real
7:04
S Africans, for example, promoting some posts about how
7:08
how we needed to we needed to lock down and we needed to do
7:12
the right thing and, and look after the elderly and whatever.
7:16
And the posts would have this remarkably similar language and,
7:20
and would suddenly appear, you know, people would pick up
7:23
amplify exactly the same message.
7:26
So I mean, the stuff was interesting, but he was a 1
7:30
trick pony. You know, you could say whatever
7:32
you want to do about the COVID phenomenon as long as it
7:36
implicated China. And so, so I think there's
7:41
that's part of the same phenomenon here.
7:43
Yeah, definitely. I remember, I think, I think I
7:47
was driving to the city of Kashgar.
7:50
I might, I might have my cities wrong, but I think it was to
7:53
Kashgar when you and I chatted on WhatsApp and you asked me, do
7:58
you see these things that are on social media?
8:02
And the answer is yes and no. And, and this is this is, this
8:07
is where you, I think I've hit the nail on the head so many
8:10
times. We're dealing with complex
8:12
systems. You know, if we, if we're
8:14
dealing with a country that has what, technically five time
8:18
zones or four time zones, and it's the size of the US and it's
8:21
got one and a billion people, you can't apply a single word
8:26
descriptor to the whole thing. It's just ridiculous.
8:29
Yes, you're dealing with the system as well.
8:32
Yes, massive. And just between the provinces,
8:35
you know, like Shanghai, it's got 30, it's got 30 million
8:38
people, right. Then you've got the, the the
8:39
province of Xinjiang. Just that province is 1 comma
8:43
three times larger than South Africa.
8:46
Yeah. So, so I mean it, it's a
8:49
fascinating thing that because if you speak to Americans that
8:51
they'll have no problem acknowledging that the culture
8:54
in San Francisco is very different from from the the
8:58
culture in Houston, you know, that that they can imagine very
9:02
easily and that life on the ground is quite different in
9:05
those two places. That's not a difficult notion
9:08
for them to comprehend or it, it's unremarkable observation,
9:11
you know, but at when when it comes to this unknown BLOB, this
9:16
massive space on the map, there's an imagined homogeneity
9:21
that is completely, you know, incompatible with just the, you
9:27
know, in any kind of country or reality.
9:30
Yeah, it's just this imagined, you know, uniformity and and I
9:36
think that that is kind of what's exploited when trying to
9:41
create this idea of a monolithic communist beast.
9:47
I noticed, I don't know if you saw this when you were in China,
9:50
but the Chinese people, when you speak to them, they don't care
9:54
about these words like communist or socialist or capitalist.
9:57
They don't care. They're just practical people
9:59
for the most part. They just want to make money and
10:02
they want to get things done. And historically, you, you see
10:05
this is what this is what people in the West struggle with.
10:08
They don't understand the historical context that led to
10:12
where China is now. If you talk to somebody who's in
10:15
their 50s in China, in Shanghai, they will, they will tell you,
10:19
which they did to with me. They chatted to me and they said
10:22
in the 80s we had food rationing, right?
10:25
We got a stamp and we would be given a basket of food.
10:28
Half of Shanghai was still rural and and they had mass amounts of
10:34
crime and poverty in 30 years. The government through a through
10:40
a series of central control mechanisms, turned everything
10:43
around. And whether or not you like that
10:45
is not the point. It's that they did do it.
10:48
And and you can understand when you talk to somebody in Shanghai
10:51
now and they go, we love our government because look at what
10:54
they've done. Shanghai is safe, it's highly
10:56
efficient, everything works. You can't say to them, Yeah.
11:02
I just want to pick up on one thing though.
11:04
Yeah, sure, sure. Sure, sure.
11:05
Yes, they had some central control mechanisms, but the
11:09
overwhelming story of China is that of Deng Xiaoping liberating
11:15
the SME sector, which had previously been subjected to
11:22
immense central control. And, and that basically led to
11:26
an explosion in economic growth as the, the, the markets were,
11:33
were liberalised. I'm talking about product
11:35
markets, not stock markets or anything like that.
11:37
And and commerce was allowed to flourish for the first time in
11:43
in many decades. So there's actually a profound
11:46
decentralising move that led to the growth.
11:50
And then when, when you, you find in recent years that
11:56
probably, let's call it the last 10 or so, some of those measures
12:01
have been tightened up again and, and the growth rate slows
12:04
down. But, but I think your point is
12:07
well taken that, that the, if the, you know, the, if the
12:10
experience on the ground is that of massively improved lifestyle
12:14
and reduced hardship, then people are not going to care
12:18
about the polity that they're living under.
12:19
What ISM is attracted to it. And I mean, I people say things
12:24
like, oh, but you know, you haven't got freedom of speech in
12:27
China. Well, we've just spent five
12:28
years proving that we don't have freedom, freedom of speech
12:32
anywhere. Because you know, the moment you
12:34
step out of the Everton window, the the media and social media
12:38
control mechanisms clamped down and, and yours, your your voice
12:42
is suppressed. So I go, OK, so we, well, we
12:47
don't have that here either. And what you know, do you have
12:51
freedom of movement? I.
12:53
Mean, yeah. It's relative though, Nick.
12:56
Yeah, it's relative. You can choose.
12:59
You choose your, your, your heel that you want to die on.
13:02
So if you want to be a political cartoonist in China, no, it's
13:07
not a very good choice, right? You're not, you're not going to
13:09
do very well there because you can't really criticise the
13:11
government. The government, the government
13:13
of China is incredibly insecure, right?
13:17
Incredibly insecure. You can't say anything positive
13:19
about the president and you can't, you can't say anything
13:21
negative about the president. They just don't want you to
13:23
acknowledge them at all, right. And they are very bad at
13:27
propaganda and they are very bad at marketing themselves.
13:30
But if you want to go there, what's that?
13:34
Yeah, You're very bad at propaganda.
13:36
Yeah. Yeah, they're definitely, they
13:40
don't do it very well. I mean, they, they, their whole
13:42
style is just very cheap. They're not sophisticated in
13:46
the, in the, in the propaganda output.
13:51
But what I was saying, what I was saying though, Nick is, is
13:53
if you want to be a political cartoonist in say, Europe, you,
13:56
you still got a pretty good chance in America.
13:58
You can do pretty well. You, you won't do well in China.
14:01
But let's say you want to be, I don't know, a historian like
14:04
David Irving and you want to research the Holocaust or World
14:07
War 2, whatever that you cannot do in Europe, but you can do
14:10
that in China. So, so it depends on what it is
14:14
you want to, to, to have freedom of expression around, so to
14:18
speak. But it's, it is relatively in
14:21
the sense that, I mean, it depends on what you want to
14:24
discuss. South Africa, we have, I think a
14:26
great deal of, of freedom of speech, if you think about it.
14:30
And if you compare to other countries, we're still pretty
14:32
good here in that sense because the government is so useless and
14:35
so inept that it's not, it's not really able to to crack down on,
14:38
on, on, on us saying, you know, dissident things.
14:41
The Chinese government is a lot more efficient at that.
14:43
But it doesn't really go around. And that's the other thing
14:45
again, it's always nuanced. It doesn't go around arresting
14:48
people and filling up its gaols. It just basically gives fines
14:51
and cuts off the social media access for two weeks or
14:54
whatever, you know? Yeah, yeah, sure.
14:58
Whereas whereas in the states you'll have you'll have the the
15:01
SWAT teams at 5:00 in the morning breaking down people's
15:04
front doors. Well, you really do.
15:08
Yeah. That's what you'll see on social
15:09
media. That might be the salient sort
15:11
of video. I often look at those things and
15:15
I just chuckle. Yeah.
15:16
The ones at the moment are that are classic.
15:18
Yeah. The British ones where you have
15:20
lots of handheld video. You know, somebody was shooting
15:23
from a cell phone. Ostensibly, the police have
15:26
arrived at the front door to arrest them for posting
15:28
something on social media. I look at those things and my my
15:32
intuition bells go up and say that doesn't look real queries
15:37
that somebody's going to be. Let's talk about something
15:41
actual, you know, like something that's real.
15:43
OK, so the first thing you notice when you go to Shanghai,
15:46
and you might have noticed this when you're in China already.
15:48
I mean, and The funny thing is that China works in sort of five
15:50
to 10 year blocks. So if you were in 2015, a lot
15:53
has changed. Yeah, sure, because they are.
15:55
So they are so fast at what they do, But nonetheless, the first
16:00
thing you notice is there are cameras everywhere and China is
16:04
quite technocratic. There's no doubt about it, it is
16:06
quite technocratic. Everywhere you go there are
16:09
cameras. I think Shanghai's got around
16:10
15,000,000 cameras installed, which is on.
16:13
I think it's a, that's about 1 camera for every two people.
16:16
That's a lot of cameras. I mean, I remember when I was at
16:19
the airport in Chengdu and I was waiting at my gate, I looked
16:23
above me and I counted 5 cameras pretty much looking in my
16:26
direction. It is insane.
16:30
But yes, the thing, Nick, and this is, this is where the tug
16:33
of war starts happening. London also has a lot of
16:36
cameras. I think, let's say 24 million
16:39
cameras, right? But there's a huge amount of
16:41
crime. There's almost no crime in
16:43
Shanghai. Is that attributed to the
16:45
cameras or is it just a byproduct?
16:47
I don't know. Yeah, but it's the political
16:51
will as well to do something, you know, to use the whatever
16:55
devices they have at their disposal to do something and,
16:58
and how this information is being used and processed, all of
17:01
that. You know, I remember in, in
17:05
2008, thereabouts, on one trip, I had the same experience
17:12
happened twice, which is we went out to dinner with, you know,
17:17
local businessman. And there were there were
17:20
questions that you ask in a restaurant where you could just
17:23
see them get all of a sudden uptight and nervous.
17:26
And that would sort of indicate to you with their hands, let's
17:29
just leave that for later. And then what happened in both
17:32
cases was they proposed a walk home, you know, walk back to
17:36
walk us back to our hotels. And on that walk, they then
17:42
answered your questions. So these were people who, you
17:45
know, 1617 years ago were concerned enough that they might
17:50
be surveilled in a in a restaurant because they were
17:55
talking to foreigners that that was actually a lively fear in
17:59
their minds. And it's not as if we were
18:01
asking them deep, dark political secrets.
18:04
You know, it, it was, it was entirely commercial kind of
18:07
questioning like, you know, is it difficult to get approval
18:11
permits or something like that? You know, how long does it take
18:13
to register a company questions of this nature?
18:15
I can't remember what they actually were.
18:17
We would have done quite a lot of homework before getting
18:19
there, but there would have been a few things that we were not
18:21
clear on, you know. So it was that kind of question,
18:23
some of those questions even just made them very nervous.
18:26
You know, you could, I don't want to, didn't want to be in a
18:28
position of saying anything negative.
18:30
You know, they weren't even sure sometimes whether the answer
18:34
would be negative, you know, or perceived negatively.
18:38
That is exactly what I experienced.
18:40
The locals still have AAI, don't see.
18:44
I don't know where it comes from, but they have a deep sense
18:47
of suspicion if you don't look like them, if you, if you're not
18:52
Chinese. And even within China, there's a
18:57
suspicion like with the Uyghurs and the Tajiks and, and the, the
19:02
other types of folks on the, on the, on the, on the western
19:04
side. And that's why there's a what?
19:07
I'm sorry. On the periphery, yeah,
19:09
Basically old peripheral nations, yeah.
19:12
Tibet, Tibet figures, Mongols, all these.
19:18
Yeah. And I'm not sure.
19:19
I'm not sure where that comes from, where that suspicion or
19:22
that or that paranoia that that could be a result of of, you
19:25
know, state indoctrination. But the thing.
19:28
Yeah. And what's that?
19:29
It could be results propaganda, you know.
19:32
Yeah, yeah. Othering in propaganda.
19:34
We don't. It's difficult, you know.
19:36
And again, you, you're dealing through the, the barrier of a
19:41
very different language and writing system.
19:45
So, so I'd imagine a lot is lost in translation when you're
19:48
trying to pause the, the propaganda or the the the
19:52
information structure, you know? But the thing that that I've
19:55
noticed is that people are very quick to criticise aspects of
20:01
the Chinese system. Now, one thing that is very
20:04
clear to me, Nick, is that the Chinese system is not trying to
20:07
impose itself on the rest of the world.
20:10
In fact, the Chinese government has said that.
20:13
What works for us might not work for for other countries.
20:16
But yeah, you have NATO countries that are trying to
20:19
impose their system everywhere else.
20:21
You know, let's bring democracy and they invade and they bomb.
20:24
I don't see that happening within, within the Chinese
20:27
system. They just kind of doing their
20:28
own thing. They are this.
20:29
They are this entity that exists that if the whole world around
20:32
them disappeared, they would still be OK.
20:35
Yes, yeah. I mean, it's not despite its
20:40
immense size and and and phenomenal sort of resourcing,
20:45
China's still still very dependent on the outside world.
20:49
Yes, but that's why you can. That's why you can access the
20:52
outside world. Sorry.
20:54
That's why you can access the outside world they don't
20:56
actually clamp down on on the Internet.
21:00
Yeah, Yeah. Unlike Russia in this regard,
21:02
you know, Russia's to a large extent or tactic in the sense
21:05
that they could literally just close the borders and they'd be
21:09
more or less fine. You know, there, there are very
21:10
few commodities that they they would not be able to obtain
21:15
themselves. And I think it's probably the
21:19
case that Russia's unique in the world in that regard.
21:24
But China's not like that, you know, that does rely on heavily
21:28
on imports of several commodities and and of course on
21:33
exports. So it it's a different beast
21:38
from Russia, I think. I was.
21:41
When I was in Shanghai, I visited a an economist friend of
21:46
mine. He's been living in in China for
21:49
29 years. He speaks fluent Chinese and his
21:52
wife's Chinese. I think he has enough St cred to
21:55
know about how the system works. And I asked him, We went for
21:59
dinner and I asked him. I said what in your view was the
22:03
primary vector that led to the turn around and his answer was
22:08
private property. For me, and for me, it's so
22:10
unremarkable to make that observation.
22:13
Of course it relates to what I was talking about earlier.
22:15
It was liberalisation and property rights becoming a thing
22:19
and people being allowed to practise whatever trade they
22:22
wanted. And you don't start whatever
22:25
business they wanted and interact with whomever they
22:27
wanted in the commercial space, you know, that that's your free
22:32
market sort of world inserting itself inside a society that had
22:38
previously been controlled in a very top down fashion or so or
22:44
so or so the story goes, you know.
22:49
Yeah. I I wonder though, you know, OK,
22:52
so, so your economist friend, did you ask him any questions
22:56
about whether he felt that his life was materially impinged
23:00
upon by any of the state apparatus?
23:02
And what did he say? So we had a very interesting
23:07
conversation and I recorded some of it on my phone just so that I
23:10
wouldn't forget about it if I wanted to reference him.
23:13
But just for the sake of because I haven't asked him if I can
23:16
mention his name, so I won't mention his name now.
23:21
But yes, what's really interesting.
23:24
So he said, look, he because, OK, so how it works in China is
23:30
you can't become a citizen unless you're Chinese.
23:32
There isn't really a path to citizenship.
23:34
Even if you marry a Chinese person, if you yourself are not
23:38
sort of ethnically Chinese, you're not really going to
23:40
become a Chinese citizen at any point in your life.
23:42
But you can be a resident. Chinese meaning Han Chinese or.
23:46
Han, Han, Han, Han. Yeah.
23:49
Because I mean, they, they are the Super majority, about 90% of
23:52
China's Han. And he said to me, he's little
23:56
boy, he's got a 2 year old kid. At the moment.
24:00
The American embassy wants him to apply for his British,
24:05
British, he's American passport and he doesn't want that.
24:10
He says he wants him to have a Chinese passport.
24:12
Because he says despite everything and despite the fact
24:14
that he does like some of Trump, what you know, Trump's policies
24:17
and some of the things that Trump says and does, he will
24:20
still choose Xi Jinping despite everything.
24:23
He'll still choose China as, as the better future for, for his
24:27
kid. I mean, I, I found that
24:29
absolutely fascinating. And I asked, you know why?
24:31
And he said because despite the fact that there is censorship,
24:37
he says that can change because he says in the early 2000s,
24:39
they, China was fairly, fairly open Internet wise.
24:43
And it depends on who is the president at the time.
24:46
And, and people also forget this.
24:47
You have, you have this party structure that that doesn't
24:50
change. The party is the party, but
24:53
internally the members change. And sometimes you might have a
24:57
more liberal president or you might have a more conservative
24:59
president, you know, legacy. Speaking currently, Xi Jinping
25:03
is not very good. And he says this guy is not,
25:05
he's not doing good things for the country, but the next
25:08
president might. Yeah, that, that is really
25:10
interesting. I, I'm not entirely surprised to
25:14
hear it. You know, I've heard similar
25:16
comments from from other people who've you've, you know, ended
25:21
up are working in businesses in China for many years, that kind
25:24
of thing. So that doesn't surprise me.
25:30
You know, they're similar, similar discussions to be had,
25:33
for example, about the Emirati cities and you know, people,
25:42
people talk about the there, there are definitely
25:46
circumscriptions of life that you have to put up with.
25:48
But you know, they're they're sort of tried that all for
25:52
whatever it is crime free, administratively,
25:55
administratively efficient life, you know, so people make these
26:01
traders all the time. And it's not not at all
26:04
surprising to me. But the thing for me is I could
26:08
never live there. So I mean, here's the thing, why
26:10
not you? You have to what's?
26:11
The thing? Culture, I think, Nick, I think
26:16
ultimately I cannot get past that language barrier.
26:19
I cannot get past the cultural barrier.
26:21
It's just too much for me. So I found if I'm just, I found
26:24
the place back in the 2000s to be intensely alienating.
26:30
And there were some things which were totally abhorrent to me
26:33
are, you know, just just for the benefit of listeners.
26:37
I mean, I know you know this, but I, I love the Wilds.
26:40
The Wilds, you know, I go to the Bush as often as I can and I'm
26:45
completely smitten by forests and savannas and so on.
26:49
Bird watching's a big hobby of mine.
26:53
The attitudes towards wild animals in China completely
26:57
freaked me out. Yes, yes, I found that too.
27:00
Yes, it's the sort of laughing at the suffering of animals and
27:04
things like that. Now, I'm far from like a sort
27:08
of, you know, what's the word animal rights activist or
27:13
something like this. I'm not a vegan.
27:15
I'm not a, you know, not trying to throw red paint on people who
27:19
are wearing fur coats or anything like that.
27:22
But there was something dispiritingly inhumane about the
27:26
whole attitude towards wildlife. And I've seen that outside of
27:31
China too. And I've gone to visit the
27:33
forests of the lower Zambezi River Valley and in Mozambique,
27:37
for example. And, and you, you arrive there
27:39
to find that some local official has made a deal with the Chinese
27:44
to Tara Road and presumably to receive a whole stack of brown
27:49
envelopes. And that road has been used to
27:52
strip the forests of the, of their hardwoods.
27:57
And the forest is completely gone.
27:59
They don't go do anything selectively.
28:01
They'll just raise an entire forest to the ground, drive
28:04
their trucks out, and with that, the road surface collapses and
28:07
the country is left with no trees, no Rd roads and a fat cat
28:13
that's now emboldened by his new found riches.
28:17
So you know, from that perspective, it's incredibly
28:20
rapacious. And I've seen that I'm giving
28:23
you one instance. I've seen that in numerous
28:26
countries and in multiple places within single countries which
28:32
this this very sort of predatory kind of in your face extraction.
28:37
And, and, and, and you notice this also in the, in the wet
28:40
markets, all the night markets, the food markets, there's just
28:43
no sense of, of, of respect. Well, I mean, yeah, it, I mean,
28:48
did you, did you spend much time in rural areas?
28:51
Did you talk to people? I imagine it's very different.
28:53
You would have needed to work through a translator and so on.
28:56
But I mean, were you, were you talking to people in rural
28:58
areas? Did you detect a difference in
28:59
the sort of agrarian world from the the the city world?
29:04
Definitely it will. Look in Shanghai, you don't see
29:07
any animals because it's just a huge mega city.
29:09
But when I was in Xinjiang, I mean, I was in a number of of
29:12
fairly small cities. And you still don't, you still
29:18
don't get the impression that they have a, a sense of respect
29:22
for for animals. It's almost as though the
29:26
animals are just commodities. Yeah, I was surprised when I was
29:28
in Shanghai to see an article in one of those English language
29:33
news sheets, you know, and, and, and, and the, the thing that
29:37
drew my attention was there was an image of of an, of an egret
29:41
in the, in, in on the one page. And the egret appeared to be
29:46
tangled up in something. And you think, oh, that's quite
29:48
surprising. Here's a, here's a story about
29:51
how they rescued the, a bird out of an entanglement.
29:55
And the article wasn't like that at all.
29:56
It was basically an article about how stupid the bird was
29:59
that it flew into this thing. And, and I, I was, whoa, what's
30:02
that about? You know, when do you get to
30:04
that? How do you get to somebody
30:06
thinking that that's the article you need to write and that will
30:08
be consumed? And that goes beyond weirdness,
30:13
you know, and that's what I meant by that sort of profound
30:16
sense of alienation. And in so many interactions are,
30:19
are just completely unrecognisable.
30:22
And, and you know, you, you and I are people who come from a, a
30:26
country that is, has remarkable ethnic and cultural diversity.
30:30
And, and so we're used to things not being done according to the
30:34
lights of your own immediate reference points and so on.
30:39
We're completely used to that. We're much more tolerant of that
30:42
kind of thing or accepting or able to navigate that kind of
30:46
thing. Then, then, then I think most
30:47
people in Europe and America are, for example.
30:50
But still, when you arrive there with all the will in the world,
30:54
you just find yourself hitting that brick wall of of of of the
30:59
alien you know? It's interesting though, because
31:03
I don't know if you remember, but when you order food, they
31:07
tend to bring the entire animal to your table.
31:10
And I think that is a a sign of trust is like this is what we're
31:16
going to give you to eat. So here it is.
31:18
I'm not used to seeing an entire lamb arriving on the table, you
31:22
know, or an entire duck. But.
31:25
But there it's been weird that because it also implies that,
31:30
you know, if they didn't do that, they would be doing
31:32
something. If they didn't show you the
31:33
animal, there would be some other con job being done in the
31:36
background. Or that the level of suspicion
31:38
of restaurant tours in the society is such that you have to
31:41
actually do that. I mean, Can you imagine going to
31:44
a steakhouse in Cape Town and insisting that the guy bring the
31:47
cow? You know, it's a kind of a
31:49
strange phenomenon. I'm not too sure that it speaks
31:52
very well of them. You know, Let me.
31:55
Can I ask you though? Yeah, sure.
31:59
This Let's go back to that the surveillance story.
32:03
Yes, yes, because we're going to get, we're going to get grilled
32:05
if we don't talk about that. Yeah, so let let, I mean, the
32:09
imagery that we are asked to swallow is of swathes of people
32:15
being locked out of their ability to purchase basic goods
32:19
and services because they've had too many traffic fines or
32:22
whatever, you know, and, and sleeping rough on the on the
32:27
streets. And I remember from the the
32:31
apartheid era how people sleeping rough were often, you
32:34
know, misrepresented or a picture was taken of a guy
32:38
sleeping in a park a day. And, and this is now a person
32:41
who's been killed by the security forces, you know, that
32:44
kind of thing. There's all sorts of
32:46
misrepresentations that can take place.
32:48
And I'm not saying that images even have to be fact, they can
32:50
be real images. But did you get a sense that
32:52
there there's a system that's alive and well and poised to
32:56
pounce on you and extract? You from No, no Nick.
33:00
So OK, all right, so here we go. So you have to break apart what
33:06
what social credit means #1 if you have a criminal record in
33:11
South Africa or in any country, you're going to struggle to get
33:15
a bank loan. Now that is a social credit
33:18
score right off the bat. It is based on your behaviour
33:23
and you have a negative score, right?
33:26
I remember in the early 2000s when I was in Sydney, I don't
33:29
know if it's still like this, but I remember then already that
33:32
they were implementing or they already had a demerit system.
33:35
So if you get like 15 points as a as a driver and if you violate
33:40
the road rules a certain amount of times, you lose all these
33:43
points and then you lose your ability to drive for six months
33:46
or 12 months or whatever it is. And then you have to apply for a
33:48
licence again or something like that, right?
33:50
That's also a social credit score because it's based on your
33:54
behaviour. Now social credit scoring, I'm
33:58
not saying is good or bad, I'm not giving a moral judgement,
34:02
but I'm saying that it is there and it is everywhere around us
34:07
to different degrees. So yes, there are social credit
34:12
scores in China. You will struggle to to get
34:15
certain loans from the bank, for example, if you have a criminal
34:19
record. But if you're talking about
34:21
jaywalking, so this is a this is a popular one.
34:23
I jaywalked all the time in Shanghai and in every city I was
34:26
jaywalking and why not? Because I was trying to be a
34:29
rebel, but simply because I, it's, it's not something that I
34:32
think about. I being a South African, I just
34:35
across the road where, where it's safe.
34:38
So I don't look for, I don't look for pedestrian crossing.
34:41
I just go, OK, there aren't any cars coming me quickly run
34:43
across the road. Now that's, that's technically
34:46
jaywalking and, and in most mega cities like Shanghai, they don't
34:50
really like that. Nonetheless, here I am.
34:54
I didn't get any fines. I saw people riding motorbikes
34:57
without helmets on. Apparently that is against the
34:59
law, but I saw it many times. People were jaywalking
35:04
everywhere. There are no big screens with
35:07
people's profiles appearing saying, well, this person has
35:10
violated the law. So yeah, yeah, let's make a
35:13
mockery of them. So none of that.
35:16
Yeah, OK. I guess the, the question is,
35:18
you know, I often just like to remind people that that social
35:22
credit credit systems have been in place for, for many years.
35:26
They're just not operated in a, in a very centralised way.
35:32
So like the, the, the entire social process of having a
35:35
reputation, you know, what is reputation?
35:38
It's credit, social credit. So if you're, if you, if you're
35:44
a Cape Town businessman and you, you develop a reputation for
35:47
sharp dealing, you might find that I hear about it.
35:50
And so when I get a phone call or an email from you, I'm, I'm
35:55
looking at and saying, what's the sky on about?
35:57
No, I don't think I'm going to have a meeting with him.
35:59
Whatever it, whatever's, there's no good that can come of it.
36:03
And so I've asked that person out of a segment of the economy
36:07
by virtue of my own just perhaps prejudicial responses to their
36:12
reputation or my perception of their reputation.
36:16
And so when social creditors for millennia operated at a very
36:20
local level and, and what's happening now is that the
36:25
technology is sort of starting to appear to maybe enable this
36:33
reputation management to be conducted at an intensely
36:36
centralised level. One where the, you know, you're,
36:41
you have no connection to the, the person who's making the
36:45
judgement or the device that's making the judgement, the
36:47
algorithm that's making the judgement.
36:50
And I, I look at that as a model and I say, well, that's going to
36:52
be horribly decoherent. That's going to collapse.
36:54
There will be so many contradictions.
36:56
Automating that kind of thing is not possible.
36:59
You know, the, the judgement I'm making about the businessman
37:02
depends on huge range of factors, the reliability of the
37:05
people telling me the stories about him, you know, or, or when
37:09
they stack up with my past experience or, or whether I've
37:12
heard something else that also confirms that.
37:14
You know, there's lots of intuitional material coming into
37:19
that decision about whether I exclude them from my commercial
37:22
realm. Whereas that stuff is all lost
37:26
in algorithmic systems and at the top.
37:29
But I also think it would deco here so quickly, the decisions
37:32
that would be being made that the system would become
37:35
unmanageable fairly quickly. Yes.
37:39
Also the thing, Nick, is, I mean, when I was in Urumji,
37:42
which is the capital of Xinjiang, I mean it's a much
37:44
smaller city, I think for 4 million people or something,
37:48
which by Chinese standards is not very big.
37:51
I did still see a lot of surveillance cameras.
37:53
But something that occurred to me while I was there is how do
37:57
you know that every single one of those cameras is operational?
38:00
We know that we have cameras here in South Africa that have
38:04
they're just empty boxes. They're just there as an
38:06
illusion to trick you into thinking there's a camera.
38:09
I mean, if so many people are jaywalking and not right wearing
38:12
helmets and all that kind of thing.
38:13
And it's it does sometimes look like chaos, like it's just the
38:16
streets are just a mess. Yeah, you go, OK, well, I don't
38:20
know. Do the are those cameras really
38:22
working? Is it just there for for for
38:25
appearances? This is and sorry.
38:29
And this is the other thing the the propaganda of of of the West
38:35
makes it seem like the Chinese government is unbelievably
38:38
efficient. Yeah.
38:41
And it's not. No, of course not.
38:44
And and also the Chinese businesses are unbelievably
38:46
efficient. I mean, I ran several
38:48
experiments there, you know, taking South African factory
38:51
managers through, you know, sending them on tours through
38:54
plants and asking them to register efficiencies at every,
38:59
every point in production. And the one businessman who's
39:03
still, I'm still very close to him, I'll never forget it.
39:05
Yeah. He came back and he said it's
39:07
not that they're inefficient in some areas, they're inefficient
39:10
in all areas. There were more people involved
39:13
each task. There was this.
39:15
There was less thoroughness in each task there.
39:17
There were more rejects. There was there were more
39:20
production errors there. There were more quality control
39:22
problems. You know, they, they, they
39:24
reported back in this way and, and yet we were all at that
39:28
stage believing that, that you couldn't compete with these
39:31
Chinese guys because they were so ruthlessly efficient and all
39:35
the factors of production cost less and everything that, that,
39:38
that didn't actually really stack up when you scratched
39:41
beneath the surface a bit. So you, you mentioned earlier in
39:44
the conversation the, the concept of paranoia or of
39:49
insecurity on behalf of the, the, the, the party, you know,
39:55
and, and I think people who sight of that, that the, the
39:58
main drive towards centralised control is perhaps not the
40:06
accretion of vast resources or, or an ego trip, but a
40:11
fundamental insecurity. That you know the reason you
40:16
want to see things centralised, as you're terrified about what
40:20
might happen in a decentralised world.
40:24
Yes, exactly. Yeah, Well, and but also the
40:29
last five years, one of the big talking points that we've heard,
40:33
you know, the sceptic folks talking about a sovereignty,
40:36
everything's about sovereignty. We've got to got to got to get
40:39
these foreign forces out of our country, OK?
40:43
But that's what China has been doing.
40:45
I'll link it back. Let me link it back to the your
40:47
observation about the lack of subtlety in the propaganda.
40:51
I think that's, you know, I'd mentioned the example of the
40:54
rapacious behaviour on the the forests, but I would never for a
40:58
minute believe that the destructiveness of Chinese
41:02
activities in Africa exceeded that of American activities.
41:07
You know, there what happens is you, there's no, you won't see
41:10
something, you know, naked like that.
41:13
Build a thin Rd, extract the forest, leave a sand Rd behind.
41:17
That kind of activity would not be typical of America's modus
41:20
operandi. But what is typical is the
41:24
undermining of governments and not because they're doing
41:27
something wrong or because they're they're infringing on
41:31
human rights simply because they're actually starting to
41:35
assert a degree of independence OR to offer the potential for a
41:41
country to become wealthier. You know, Americans want cheap
41:45
resources, so they want instability in Africa.
41:47
And they do that through an elaborate network of of of CIA
41:53
cut out organisations. They can turn that.
41:56
We've seen it around the world. You know, Georgia, Nepal, recent
42:00
being recent phenomena where where's there's just a kind of a
42:05
switch that's turned on and the the hand of the CIA is palpable.
42:11
And there you go. Suddenly everything's upturned
42:16
upended in that country. But I want to also point out
42:19
just on that surveillance issue which we haven't touched on yet
42:23
is the surveillance in China is very blatant.
42:27
It's in your face, right? It is everywhere and and they
42:30
have this approach where they want you to know that it's that
42:34
it's there. Let's compare that to Palantir.
42:37
Let's compare that to Stargate. Let's compare that to what's
42:41
going on on the other side of the world where it's all
42:43
subversive. You're not sure, you know,
42:46
you're not sure what's going on on your phone, for example, You
42:48
know what I mean? Now, we've all had that creepy
42:50
experience where you do a Google search and for the next three
42:53
days you're pelted with advertising for the thing that
42:55
you searched for. That kind of thing.
42:57
Yeah. And, you know, I see my
43:00
information is being used in a really quite arcane fashion, you
43:03
know? Yeah, I totally agree with you.
43:06
I find Palantir a much more creepier phenomenon than the
43:08
Chinese Communist Party. No question.
43:10
Let's take ourselves back in Europe a couple of 100 years.
43:16
Did the average person walking around in Europe believe that
43:20
somebody was watching him? I think he did.
43:23
There was a real visceral belief that God was watching them your
43:28
every move. So it was life very different
43:31
from for that European versus one in ours.
43:34
You can see the cameras. Somebody's watching him in some
43:39
ways that that sort of the, the, the dominant belief structure
43:44
was, was far more invasive because you had this like, if
43:49
you like a AGI, you know, not, not only watching you when you
43:55
were, when you had the camera pointing at you, but watching
43:58
you at all times and knowing your every thought and action.
44:01
And you know, if that sense of the world was still manageable,
44:08
then you know what, what, how, how different is that in
44:14
compared to the modern case? And I guess it comes down to
44:17
what is done with the information you know.
44:20
We all exactly. OK, so let me give you an
44:22
anecdote. So we were, we, we drove through
44:26
the Taklamakan Desert and most people don't even know what it
44:30
is. But it's, I think it's the
44:31
world's second largest moving desert.
44:34
I mean, it's it, it feels alive. The dunes are moving all the
44:38
time. It's it's an incredibly big
44:40
desert. And you forget that a
44:42
technologically advanced country like China does have deserts.
44:46
And we drove through from, so we did a cross section from the
44:51
north to the South of the, of the desert, which was about 11
44:54
hour drive. And we, we stopped off at what
45:01
they would consider a top of Grand Canyon, Very, very
45:05
beautiful rock formation that looks like a Grand Canyon
45:09
because of the way the, the mountain kind of runs parallel
45:12
to itself. It's it's gorgeous.
45:15
We are in the middle of nowhere, but there was a law, a by law
45:20
that stated for the two weeks that we were in Xinjiang in that
45:24
province, no drones were allowed across the entire province
45:28
because it was, it felt in into the time period of the 70th
45:34
anniversary of the autonomy of the Xinjiang province.
45:37
It's a big thing. Huge, huge celebrations.
45:40
Yeah, yeah. You're going to say.
45:41
No, no, no, I'm listening. Very interesting.
45:43
Oh, right, right. And, and, and Xi Jinping flew to
45:46
the province to to, you know, form part of the celebrations.
45:50
We were just there at the same time.
45:52
So for two weeks, no drones were allowed anywhere.
45:55
OK, But we now in the middle of the desert and we here by this,
45:58
this this mini Grand Canyon story.
46:00
And the, the, the guy that that we're with, or that's with us,
46:04
one of the film crew, he decides he's going to send he's drone up
46:08
in the sky and just get some beautiful footage.
46:10
I mean, we're in the middle of nowhere.
46:12
I kid you not, Nick, about 20 minutes later, the police pitch
46:15
up and they asked us who was flying the drone in the middle
46:22
of nowhere. All right, we'll come to that in
46:25
a second. So then they they, they took
46:27
down the information of the drone because you have to all
46:30
drones have to be registered and they took it down.
46:33
They asked to look at the footage.
46:35
No issues. Didn't have to delete anything
46:37
that they said. Look, you may not fly drones,
46:41
OK? Then we, we sat in the car to
46:44
was trying to figure this out. OK, so #1 it's a DJ.
46:47
Yeah, it's a DJI drone. So we think that because it uses
46:52
satellites to, to, to, to know where it is, it's sending that
46:56
information to, to the authorities.
46:58
That's I think what's going on. And it's fairly accurate.
47:02
The fact that they came straight to us and asked who threw the
47:05
drone in the middle of a desert, that is very, very creepy and
47:09
that I don't like. No, that that is rather speaky
47:15
here. I don't like the word communist
47:17
because I don't really know what that means anymore.
47:19
Nick, when you go to when you go to China, you don't see
47:22
communism. You do see it, but you don't see
47:24
it. It doesn't.
47:24
The whole thing doesn't make sense.
47:27
It does science and what is true.
47:29
Yeah, it has. It has features, yeah.
47:31
Capitalism, you know, So yeah, it's not a communist system.
47:34
No, but the government does control the banks, and it does
47:37
control. The utilities, enterprises,
47:40
etcetera, yeah. But yet it works.
47:45
And this is this is the tug of war.
47:47
The philosophical conundrum that I find myself having is that I
47:51
cannot make a claim that it's that is dystopian, and I cannot
47:54
make a claim that it's rainbows. Yeah, it could be the case that
47:58
that type of system will never see Chinese people have their
48:01
living standards elevated to the level of Europe or America over
48:05
the last 50 years or whatever, you know, because they're still
48:09
sitting at what, like a 10th of that level.
48:12
You know, and I always remind people, Can you imagine cutting
48:15
90% of your consumption? You know, just imagine, like
48:20
you, I said to you, look, you can live exactly the same way as
48:24
you always have, but you have to spend 90% less.
48:26
What? It doesn't even make sense.
48:29
You can't do it. So, so like a 90% cut in
48:31
consumption puts you, you know, in, in, in the, the position, if
48:36
you like, of a hypothetical Chinese counterpart.
48:39
That's a long way to catch up still.
48:42
And I'm not sure that it's going to happen under that kind of
48:45
system. That would be, my sense is that
48:47
they're actually have accepted a trade off between the, the
48:51
potential for growth and the, and the loss of control.
48:56
Did you ever encounter a sense of that they were regarding you
49:00
as sort of disgusting or, you know, some kind of racist
49:03
attitude towards you or looking at you as if you were like a
49:06
alien? You get that sense.
49:08
What do you think? It was fairly.
49:10
They were not. No, I don't think they looked
49:12
down on me. I certainly think that they feel
49:16
themselves to be very superior. I'm looking at the time now.
49:20
We're coming in for a landing, but I think there is, I think
49:22
there's a lot that we can learn from them.
49:25
Their big selling point is technological advancement.
49:29
I think there's a lot more to life than just that.
49:32
We spoke about wildlife and animals.
49:33
And like you, I prefer being in Africa.
49:37
I want to be able to go into the Bush and, and I don't want to go
49:42
through checkpoints to do that, you know, But I think there are
49:46
sort of cultural characteristics of the Chinese that I think we
49:49
should, we should adopt. I think when last five years,
49:54
the people that we've been chatting to have all been
49:56
talking about the importance of community and family.
49:58
Well, they, they have it. They, they do have it and we can
50:03
learn from them and that, but I think there are other things
50:05
that we can learn to avoid. And I, I think there's a lot of
50:09
sort of technocratic stuff there that that I just don't like.
50:13
Sure. Well, that's a good summary,
50:15
Chairman. That's been very interesting.
50:16
I I really appreciate it chatting to you and getting some
50:19
first hand reporting from a from a scallywag on the ground.
50:26
Nick, how can my audience follow you?
50:29
I'm on X at at Nick Hudson CT and also on sub stack with a
50:37
similar handle. So that's it.