China is not our enemy, the webinar series we're doing. All right, so this is part of, like I said, the China is not our enemy campaign at Code Pink. We have a series of webinars trying to push out more information, dismantling the Western mainstream media and US government narratives about China, China bashing and generally a confrontational approach to China that is preventing cooperation. This webinar is called A Transnational Perspective from Dr. Jun Xu and we're honored to have Dr. Xu here today with us. Before we get started, I would love to introduce the co-sponsors that made this event possible today and give a warm thank you to them. This event was co-sponsored by Pivot to Peace, our coalition partners, United for Peace and Justice, UFPJ, and the University of Massachusetts Asian and Asian American Certificate Studies Program. So thank you so much to our co-sponsors. Please check out their work, Pivot to Peace, UFPJ and UMass AAACSP certificate studies program. Now I'm gonna introduce Dr. Jun Xu who is an associate professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice CUNY as well as Howard University. Previously, Dr. Xu has taught at People's University in Beijing. His main research interests include political economy of development, Chinese economy, economic history, and he is also on the editorial boards of Science and Society and the Journal of Labor and Society. His recent book from commune to capitalism, How China's Peasants Lost Collective Farming and Gained Urban Poverty was published by Monthly Review Press. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much Madison and thanks for the invitation from Code Pink and all the work that you guys have been doing for such a long time. Thank you. You are so welcome. The work we're doing is for people across the globe, not only Chinese citizens, not only US citizens, but our entire planet really because what we're talking about combating right now is the potential for a US-led war on China which also opens up the potential for nuclear war, low-yield nuclear war, hot war, which could impact the entire planet in terms of environmental damage in nuclear winter, but also in terms of human rights and the murders of civilians through war. Throughout the webinar, you'll be seeing links in the chat so you can get more engaged in our campaign. You can always find us and follow us in our actions at codepink.org slash China. You can also follow us on Twitter at ChinaNotEnemy is the handle and we'll be talking about an action as well at the end of the webinar where you can, if you are a US citizen, contact your senator right now to urge them to vote no on the newest anti-China legislation in the Senate which is the Strategic Competition Act. So let's just get started with this conversation. So could you tell us a little bit about your history as a scholar, as a student and a teacher? What universities have you attended and taught at both in China and the US? Give us a little bit of background. Sure. I grew up in a province in the middle of China called Hubei province. I studied in college in Beijing and after college I came to the United States for graduate school. I got my doctorate degree from the University of Massachusetts, almost. After that, I returned to Beijing to work for a few years. I taught at People's University or Renmin University in China. I also taught some of the students from Beijing University and others. And after a few years, then I found another position at Howard University in DC. That's where I have been teaching for a number of years. And I recently joined the econ department at John Jay in New York City. So it's been from one bubble to another bubble basically. That's great. Congratulations. And you've talked about how one of the biggest material differences in attending school as a student between China and the US is, of course, the cost, right? I think you said there was like a difference in like 5,000 won a year to 70 US dollars a year for tuition, as well as free dorm, cafeteria, et cetera. So I didn't have to incur as much debt in China. Indeed. For those students who actually attended college, I think prior to 1998 or even earlier, going to college is not just a way of getting education. It was also your part of the workforce. So you get paid to go to college. And later on, you don't actually get paid.  So the tuition, the annual tuition in Beijing University which I went to was around 5,000 Chinese yuan, R&B. That's about 700 US dollars. And it's a pretty regular price for across the nation. So you don't really see much differences among the public institutions. So there are private for-profit colleges. Those are generally less, much less respected and they charge a much higher price. But you would pay another $200 per year for a dorm. And the food price in the cafeteria at school are highly subsidized. So you really don't pay much. So it's a, compared to what the students have to pay in this country, it's a, students don't face that much difficulty in China. Yeah, that's amazing. That's really what we should have in the future. Yeah, that's amazing. That's really what we should have across the globe as much as possible because the student debt that's been incurred for mine and recent generations in the US has been very debilitating for many folks to the extent that they can't even go to graduate school or they have to change their life decisions as a result. I know many folks have advocated for getting rid of student debt and student loans in the US and how much that could change our debt-based economy in the US. I wanna also ask, so before you came to the US, did you have any expectations about how that would go? And then what did you actually experience when you got here first? Sure, I was, I didn't have, I grew up in more like a working class family. I didn't have much experiences, I'd say traveling, not even in China. So I didn't know much about the United States. On the one hand, I know it's a very advanced society, a very advanced economy. On the other hand, it's a distant continent and I didn't know what I would actually see. So I still remember how many years ago when we decided to, let's say among the students where we decided to came to this country to study, a frequent topic is that, so what things we should bring from China to the United States, would we be able to find, let's say a rice cooker in the US so we can still make rice? Do American people all eat, let's say some bread, some typical, let's say fast food every day and a lot of those expectations definitely were not true. I mean, when I arrived in the United States, I felt like very welcomed. It's at least in the small town that I went to in Western Massive True Sets. It was a very nice place. The residents there are very kind, very generous with foreigners, with foreign students. So I felt immediately at ease when I actually came to this country. That's great to hear and that doesn't make sense being kind of in the academia bubble, the campus life. There's a certain flow to that life where it's like, there's some repetition and familiarity to seeing people. You did mention that there was like one particular incident where you felt like it kind of opened your eyes to the types of potential like profiling or racism that are unfortunately common in the United States. Would you be able to talk about that a little? Yes, so I learned about racism in all kinds of literature from the books. Most of the time I stay in a small town in Massive True Sets. I interacted with my fellow workers, my professors. Those are in general very progressive or radical. And I don't even see a single trace of racism from them. So I didn't know much. There's a few cases, let's say I was my friends, we went to Boston one time. And in the airport, we were stopped by a police. I think someone worked in the airport that he said, so what are you doing here? We said, we're just dropping off our friends. Did we park in a different, at the wrong location? And the police basically didn't answer that question but he said to us, so where are you from? I said, originally we were all from China but we studied in different places in the US. Then this police then very seriously asked us, so are you guys militarily related? It was so totally, I didn't even know where they come from. So we chuckled, we thought this guy was joking with us. This guy was joking with us. And then the police was definitely very offended, saying, why are you laughing? This is a very serious matter and this is...  So you should come out. And he interrogated our friend for quite a long time. Basically the questions that our friend later told us was, so which school are you going to and how you are from China, China is so poor. How can you afford the tuition that you're paying now since you're in this particular school? And we felt the questions were ridiculous but it was also a terrifying experience because he seems to have the authority of interrogating us or detaining us if possible. So we thought, let's get out of here when possible. Later after we get out of the airport then we reported to the airport. We complained that we think this is a racist attack. And we mentioned what this office sort of looked like and where we were. In a few months, I think the airport got back to me saying that we checked very carefully our records and we didn't find such a person on that day that was working in the airport. So what can we do? But throughout my graduate school years I didn't have much experiences dealing with racism but this was definitely one of the cases where I say, oh, okay, so, you know, outside the epidemic bubble there's all sorts of things going on and it's gave me a sense of what racism could look like. Thank you for sharing. I'm so sorry that you experienced that, you and your friends. And it seems pretty pointedly ridiculous that they wouldn't even acknowledge that a fairly common looking security guard officer was working that day just complete deflection and avoidance of accountability. And right now we are going to be probably seeing an uptick in a kind of suspicion, targeting, and repression of international Chinese students as well as other East Asian American citizens who folks do not differentiate between Chinese international students, especially STEM students. And this is definitely related to the Strategic Competition Act, which is in the Senate right now in which there's concerns related to accusations of foreign persons acquiring critical technology, foreign influence in academia, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of language that invokes kind of yellow-paralmongering, red-scare rhetoric just generally demonizes China and anyone related to China. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 55% of Americans support limits on Chinese students to the US, which is up from 40% in late 2019. So yeah, can you speak a little to your own understanding of how this academic suspicion and discrimination, like I know that you are not a STEM student. So there's some aspects that you're not as targeted for and you're able to kind of be in your own field. But to your knowledge, how is the US's approach to international students different from Chinese universities approach to international students who study there? Sure, well, I was working in Beijing in one of those universities. I remember the school leadership was very, I think, enthusiastic in recruiting international students. This is what they told us. This was back in 2012. The vice president of my school back then said, by 2020, we're gonna make sure 20% of our people on campus are foreigners. And so it was an ambitious plan because it was predominantly domestic, Chinese students on campus. And this was just one school, but across the nation, there's this, I think a big push for all kinds of schools to increase the presence of international scholars and students on campus. Part of this, I think, came from the, there was this pressure of increasing the degree of internationalization. It was part of the, I think, the evaluation of a school, how much, you know, how was your position on the ranking? Partly depends on how international you are, your student body and your faculty, et cetera. So they were very interested in this. The kind of suspicion that we often see in the United States against Chinese or against any other enemy state and say that the U.S. has, it's very, we don't really see or hear much in China. As long as you're willing to come to China, the attitude is generally very positive. And they give, I think, generous scholarships to foreign students as well. And actually, that has caused some grievances among the Chinese students, actually. They felt like you were getting generous scholarship to foreign students, but not to us. But in a way that tells how well, you know, the attitude, different attitudes that the Chinese institutions, the Chinese government had towards the foreigners or foreign students, it's a different experience. Very different, yeah. And you can see how Chinese universities and institutions are welcoming internationalization and more exchange with other nations and ideas. And in many ways, the U.S. is growing more isolationist, especially in terms of its universities with a lot of the repression and crackdown on things like Confucius Institutes that help with Chinese language learning exchange. That's very interesting, thank you for sharing. Let's see, I also wanted to ask kind of going back to when you first came here and you had that experience at the airport being profiled, being asked if you were here with the military, which is just clearly such a targeted question relating a Chinese student to the Chinese military and assuming there's aggression and confrontation involved and that the Chinese side of things is provoking and creating a malign influence. So has your positive experience as a student in the U.S. has that shifted or changed at all? The more that you've lived and worked in the U.S. and I know that now you're a father as well. And also if you could add to that in contrast to the ways in which you've learned to identify forms of racism that you experience, because you've spoken about how you had to like kind of learn to notice in the moment these like microaggressions and bigger aggressions and how if you don't grow up with a lot of heterogeneity like it can be hard to notice it right away and respond to it. So where have you witnessed or experienced forms of racial solidarity in the U.S.? So a couple of questions there. How has it changed as you've worked and where have you seen solidarity? Yeah, definitely. So as I mentioned, the experience when I was a graduate student in a small town in Massachusetts was mostly positive. On the other hand, I didn't really interact much with the American society. The one that I talked to, I worked with are already very politically conscious, very progressive people already. By the time that I started working in the U.S. in D.C. area and then now in New York, I was also still in a bubble, as I mentioned. But now I'm also a father, I have a small child.  I have to send kids to all kinds of daycare institutions and you talk to different kinds of people, or doctors, teachers, and I talk to other parents from different backgrounds. So that definitely started to, I think I started no more of the American society. On the other hand, since I work at Howard University, it's a leading historical black college. So in HBCU, I have wonderful colleagues and students and I learn greatly from them. And one thing they share with me over the years was what their experience was growing up in the United States. Or if they didn't grow up in the United States, what's their experience living in the United States as a black person. And those stories, those experiences, I think helped me tremendously in understanding what racism means in the U.S. and how to tell racism. Because as I mentioned earlier, I mean, in China, as someone growing up in China, the concept of racism is pretty abstract. There's not much experience with that. So I can still see this with many Chinese people living in the United States, especially the first generation coming here. They didn't grow up with that. So the way to perceive all those kinds of conversations or the actions can be different from how, let's say Chinese Americans or second or third generation, how they perceive those conversations and actions. And I feel that the more I learned about racism, the more I learned about the American politics, the more I can tell that, oh, this is racism. And previously I may thought, this is strange or maybe this guy is confused. But now I can see, ah, okay, I know where this comes from. This is, I mean, I can tell the origin of this from a hundred years ago. So I definitely, the understanding, the consciousness of regarding racism needs some learning. It's a learning experience for me. As I learned more, as I get to know the American society a bit more, I started to see racism more and more often. But the one thing I felt very fortunate is that while I was working at Howard University, I always felt there's, I'd never felt any kind of racism at Howard with all my colleagues and students there. It's a, I think it's a racism free campus. That's how I felt about it. It's different from the, let's say though, the wider part of the city of Washington, DC or, you know, surrounding Virginia or Maryland. And so it's a very, definitely a very positive experience for me and learned a lot from those people. And the kind of solidarity that I've experienced with the colleagues and students at Howard is also, I think it's also great. One of the things that several colleagues including me, we organize this conference on Africa. West, the West and China's role in African development. And there is what, you know, people, when some people mentioned, let's say China as a new colonial or imperialist force in Africa, one of my students and some of my colleagues at Howard, they actually, you know, they were stood up and said, you know, this is not how they view the situation in Africa. They perceive the relationship between China and Africa in a different way. So there is, again, there are different, it's couldn't be different conversation disagreements on exactly how do we evaluate different kind of relationship, but they were careful. I think they were very careful in not falling into the trap and the kind of narrative that the US government was trying to promote that China is, I guess, the worst even a colonizing force in Africa. And it's something that African people should just simply, you know, fight against. I think they were very clear that this is not the political stance that they're taking. They realized that there is the anti imperialist force that's going on. And the China's relationship with Africa went far back to the socialists with early periods, which was quite different from the colonial relationship. So there's lots of conversations that I've had with my colleagues, and I felt like we definitely had a good mutual understanding, which was very different from, let's say, the mainstream, the US politics. Thank you. That's amazing to hear. And hearing that the one place you didn't feel racism was an HBCU. To me, that makes perfect sense. And I'm just glad that you had that experience and were able to work there and kind of see the solidarity between histories of oppression from the American context in real time. And it makes sense to me that it would take a bit of time to understand racism in the context of the colorist structure of the United States having to experience it firsthand kind of versus the theorizing of critical race theory. And I think even diasporic Chinese Americans second, third and later generations, they might grow up hearing about that, hearing about racism and be on their guard for it. But even in context of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia for those generations, sometimes it even takes time in those contexts to kind of not gaslight yourself, not downplay or minimize microaggressions that have kind of connotations around stereotypes that a lot of other minorities or white people might not notice or might not connect to the deeper stereotypes around things like yellow peril. And it's great to hear about that conference because yes, we do have this pervasive myth right now, especially in the West that China is this neocolonial force.  So it's amazing that there's a space where there's pushback and there's a space for complexity of dialogue and then just like extreme statements that are shutting down a conversation around nuance and complexity. Because as you stated, there's a lot of positive infrastructure development that China is helping with in Africa right now at very low cost loans. Thank you so much. So I also want to talk about a couple of things happening in China right now and the ways that you have researched that yourself as well as some of the connections you have because I know you still have many connections and may return to China. So right now we've been hearing a lot of information about Xinjiang China and allegations of human rights abuses primarily by the singular source Adrian Zenz about accusations of genocide, forced sterilization, forced labor, pretty extreme accusations that even the U.N. cannot corroborate. So we're hearing that in the West from the U.S. State Department, from politicians, from mainstream media in really just the past three years. If you look before the past three years, before the Zenz report, I don't think the average Westerner even knew where that city was or what region of China it was in. And I also want to note that the study by Adrian Zenz is funded by the Jamestown Foundation, the Washington DC based conservative defense policy think tank. So he is funded by the U.S. as he's doing this research. So you yourself have mentioned, Dr. Xu, how you have friends who live and work in Xinjiang and have done your own analysis to an extent on the conditions there. What is your stance on all of this information that is coming out of Xinjiang right now from the Western Zenz perspective? I agree totally with your evaluation of the situation that all the conversation, all the reports on Xinjiang only became something that everybody knows in the last two or three years. Before that was a topic only for small group of people. There's definitely some exile groups that have been lobbying in Washington DC for years. They got funded obviously by the U.S. government and all kinds of donors and they have been repeating the story for a long time. Didn't get much audience. But since a few years ago, the U.S. mainstream media and the State Department started to endorse the kind of narrative, the kind of story, then it started to became more or less a mainstream understanding of what's going on in Xinjiang, which in my mind is very far from what has actually happened in Xinjiang.  I think that without getting more information many people that I respect they rather choose to be silent on this because there's very limited information that we know that in the West about Xinjiang and many of those were produced by people like Adrian Zenz and his associates. So if that's the only available information here there's very little that we can say. I think one of the things that I encourage everybody to do is this has to wait until after the pandemic is that they should organize all kinds of research and study a fieldwork in Xinjiang. I don't think there is really actually much restriction on academic research. There's some, I think there's some bad experience that the Xinjiang people had with media like BBC. I think they really distorted what they were actually seeing in Xinjiang that had a bad impact on how people perceive foreign or foreign media. But overall I think even for the people in Xinjiang themselves they definitely needed a more conversation with people living outside China to know what's really going on in Xinjiang. And without that it's hard to, we cannot provide a point-by-point debunk of all those reports produced by Jane's Town Foundation or Adrian Zenz. This takes, you know, maybe takes days to do it. But I want to mention is that the all sorts of the allegation that Xinjiang is experiencing a genocide or a forced labor, coercive labor of all those kind of things, they were based on very, I think, very limited information and data. And they read small questions rather than provide a conclusive answer. And there are many evidence that you can see from all kinds of sources, from academic research, from official documents, that they portray a very different kind of story in Xinjiang. For example, the genocide story, that there's, I mean, first of all, the population increase in all the minority groups in Xinjiang have been relatively fast. And that has been, you know, even, I guess, even Adrian Zenz wouldn't say no to that. They, it's, but they also like to point out that, okay, so what happened after 2018? Because after 2018 it seems that the, there is a decline in population increase rates among all the minorities. Again, it's, we only have two years of data after 2017 or 2018, but there is a, there is a positive change starting from 2018 that the government started to implement first control more rigorously. For example, when China started to implement a very strict version of birth control starting from the early 1980s, it was meant to be nationwide because there was a fear, I think it's a mafia fear that China would just have too many people and it will be a burden to China and also the world. I think it's the wrong understanding, but the policy at the time was tend to be very strict, extreme version of birth control. That every family can only have one child. And, but the policy in practice, the policy was implemented most rigorously with the majority of Han population, not so much with minorities. In theory, the minority families can have a bit more two children, sometimes three children, depending where you live, but in practice, the government didn't really put much restriction on how many children that the minority families can have. So they can have a lot more than that actually. And that it actually has, as you can imagine, has generated grievances from the Han families because that we only get to have one child, but you're not doing this fairly. And starting from 2018, I think what the government implemented was that, okay, let's really do what the regulation, the law says. For urban family, you can have two, for the people living in the countryside, you can have three or four, depending on the specifics. So it's finally doing what they said they're gonna do from a number of decades ago, but it can decrease the number of children that minority families can have in practice. So that's what I understood, that what could happen, could have happened. Well, it might have happened in Xinjiang. But as I said, without further information, without further research on this, we don't know exactly what happened. Is that really such a decrease in population growth rates? I think we need more information. Well, obviously for US propaganda, for people like Adrian Sands, they don't actually need much research. What they do is they try to find all kinds of things and say, well, we need to produce this story and they try to fit the data to the story. It's the worst kind of research that any scholars would do, but they're not interested in doing scholarly research in any sense. So they're just trying to produce a story, a moral story that China has been doing such terrible things to the people in Xinjiang and that might warrant further actions from the United States, such as sanctions, which they already did. And it hurts the actual producers, cotton producers in Xinjiang and tomatoes. And they didn't really care about what happened to those producers. The farmers that they were trying to, I guess, in the story, they were victims, but they were really victims of the US sanctions. So yeah, I think they were just trying to create all kinds of excuses for, I think, abusive, those imperialist policies from the US. Thank you. Yeah, it is ironic that concerned citizens in the US claim to want to be advocating for human rights and advocating on the behalf of Uyghur ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang. But these sanctions, as well as boycotts, companies like H&M and Zara, they're getting a lot of their cotton materials from Xinjiang. It's actually going to harm the very people that they're aiming to ostensibly protect because they're going to be blocking the production and their right to make a living. I think the idea that we could also just increase the price that we pay, you had mentioned that to me at one point, that could be even more helpful than just sanctioning and boycotting. Right, right. Yeah, if the big corporations, they're really so concerned about human rights, they really wanted to help the people of hardworking people in Xinjiang or anywhere else. I mean, why don't they just decrease the profits and give more revenues to those people producing those cotton or tomatoes or any raw materials? That would have a much bigger impact, a positive impact on people's lives in Xinjiang. A lot of those tyranny, this coercive aspect, they don't really come from whatever government or state policies in Xinjiang or any other places. They really come from the market. It's the tyranny of markets, the tyranny of capital that has been dictating people to move out of their hometown to work for a long time on the factory in the field. That's what the market economy has been doing. In some places, while even in the United States, that people know how terrible the market can be, how dictated the market can be to every one of us. But if you consider the US, it's an advanced economy and people can still get by in many other parts of the world, including in China, that people are already on the immersion of all kinds of things. And the US is trying to put a sanction. That's just trying to destroy whatever livelihood that the working people have up until now in Xinjiang. So that's, I think there's a very reactionary way of dealing with all kinds of social problems in China, in any other country. And I think also what you've been mentioning about Xinjiang and the discourse around there, especially the mainstream narrative, is similar to what we were talking about with China's investment in Africa, where these dogmatic mainstream narratives with a conclusion already developed and these narratives demonizing China as a malign influence in order to instigate and provoke war and other political prerogatives. This really all just prevents a more nuanced or complex discussion on these issues within places like Xinjiang, like population management, because overpopulation is a real issue that does need to be addressed. Or some of the surveillance strategies that the police in Xinjiang have been using. These are questions that we could be discussing in a more reasonable, balanced and complex way because these are interesting and urgent things that we should be thinking about in all societies, not just Chinese society. I'm going to ask just one more question because we're getting close to the hour. So a lot of Western nations have compared the Hong Kong protests to other popular uprisings in the world, comparisons to Chile, other working people who are rising up against often neoliberal military governments, et cetera. Do you think outsiders have a clear understanding of the context and the manifestations of the protests in Hong Kong? What do you think is missing from their analysis? And what have you heard from your friends who have lived through those protests and had to endure how long they went on and how violent in many ways they were? Right, yeah. Like Xinjiang, Hong Kong is also one of the issues that recently became somehow important in the American politics. There has been, I think, the conversations and collaborations between, let's say, different U.S. politicians and the different activists or leaders from Hong Kong. I think that to a large extent it's not just insider or outsider. People living in Hong Kong also may not have the best kind of understanding of what has happened in Hong Kong. This is definitely the case for major social events, social change in history, that when some individual living through a turbulent era, may not have the best idea of what's actually happening. In major social change, it could be a positive change, it could be a reactive change. An individual can feel very differently depending where they are or where they are. But my friends who lived and worked in Hong Kong for some time, I think throughout the so-called protests or this movement, they mostly felt worried, terrified, because they know, like many other Chinese who originally grew up in the mainland and then work in Hong Kong, they can be the next target. There is a very strong xenophobic nativist element in the Hong Kong movement that unfortunately has, I think, largely dominated the whole thing, the whole movement. So it's a right-wing movement overall. And even before this whole thing became something that some US politicians like to talk about, they already became some kind of nightmare for mainlanders in Hong Kong. There are cases that the local, let's say activist groups or local militias, they would chase ordinary workers, sex workers, traders, petty traders, who came from the mainland. And it was definitely, this kind of sentiment was definitely not a very progressive one. And in the US, obviously, there are several layers on this issue. The one layer that the US politicians like to look at, okay, this might create this and that or another disruption in China. In normal times, I think the US elites are pretty collaborative with the Chinese government or Chinese elites. They have all kinds of projects together. But in a time when the US elites, I think, felt uncertain, quite uncertain about their own status, either uncertain about China. I think they were more supportive of some kind of disruption, maybe not major change, but some disruption in China, including Hong Kong. And so that's more like a geopolitical diplomatic way of thinking things. But there is another layer, let's say some activists, liberals, let's say in the US, they also feel sympathetic to the Hong Kong movement because they also, I think they are influenced, they were affected by such a long time of demonization of China. They felt like, okay, China is, the Chinese government is such a bad one. It's creating all kinds of troubles everywhere within China itself, in the South China Sea, in Africa and here in this formerly British colony in Hong Kong. And they felt like it's something that they felt they could support this protest, this movement. And there is also writers, I think more progressive writers, liberal writers, who try to highlight the potentially more progressive element in the Hong Kong movement. But overall, let's say the anti-Xenophobic, the more progressive part of the Hong Kong movement is very marginal. There's not much space for a leftist movement in Hong Kong. We don't have to go into the details, but the Hong Kong history, the Hong Kong politics has not left much room for a leftist movement, at least not for the last two or three decades. So it has been dominated by the right wing forces, right wing narratives. And so I think a better way of doing this is definitely to critically evaluate what has happened in Hong Kong by not siding with this right wing movement or protests. But I understand that many people feel hesitant because, like, well, this is happening. This is social movement. Shouldn't we just join it? Maybe when we join it, we can change it. But that, I think it's, you can't join the Nazi party to change the Nazi party. The whole, the base, the social base, the whole platform is given. You join it, you're going to become part of that. So I don't think that that effort has been helpful at all. And after the passing of National Security Act, I just want to mention that even though for many people in the U.S., it's like, oh, this is the end of Hong Kong. But for my friends who were actually working in Hong Kong, they felt so relieved. They felt okay. Eventually, you know, we're going to get some safety.  Our kids don't have to worry that much, being singled out or being bullied by, you know, some from the right-wing people. So it's a different kind of understanding of what's going on in Hong Kong. And again, I mean, it's a general question of how do we look at the existing social conflicts or social movement, protests in the country that is in the global south and also has a and that the U.S. also considers as part of the part of its, I guess, potential enemies, not enemies, but potential enemies or competitors. I think it's people left as progressives here in the U.S. I think the thing that we can do is that we can read more. We're going to do more research about China and definitely read more than New York Times or Washington Post or any of those mainstream news media in the U.S. They can be excellent news sources regarding domestic politics. But our international politics, they do tend to side with very imperialist tendencies. And you should definitely read more. You can read more news from China itself that, you know, it's different. It has a different style from the U.S. news, but it's good for information purposes. And you can read analysis of news reports from other countries, not U.S. or not China, but from global south perspectives. They can also give you some different understanding of all the kinds of things that has been happening. So if you are interested in, again, in Xinjiang issues, you probably could plan for a trip to Xinjiang to really to study, to talk to local people. Yes, there are surveillances everywhere, including Washington DC. But it's, you know, I don't think it would be much trouble that if you were a tourist talking with local people in Xinjiang or any part of it in China, you can get more of your own understanding of this rather than simply following what the U.S. State Department has been, whatever they have been saying. So I think that's the first step towards a better understanding of all the questions in China. And one place you can find more information is dongshannews.org. There are partners at Code Pink and they put out a roundup of news on China, as well as China and Africa relations once a week. Just this week they were mentioning how the Chinese arrived in Africa and before the Portuguese European colonialists and you had mentioned that it's at Howard how that connection between Africa and China goes back way further before European colonization. So you can check that out at dongshannews.com. Thank you so much, Dr. Xu, for being here today for this conversation. Thank you for bringing in how nativist and xenophobic the right-wing protest in Hong Kong are and I'm very glad to hear that your friends were mostly safe from any targeted violence. But yes, we do know that in Hong Kong the protests have been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy to the tune of $29 million since 2014. So there is a direct influence and we know that the leaders of the Hong Kong protests have aligned with Pompeo, Trump, Rubio, Cruz, lots of right-wing American politicians. So thank you so much for bringing that often untold context to those protests. And we are here at the China is not our enemy campaign to continue to dismantle the propaganda and anti-China rhetoric led by the U.S. and mainstream media. We're here to say that war is not the answer. U.S. intervention and provocation of a new cold war is not the way to solve and address the crises facing the planet right now. We need cooperation between the two biggest economies in the world right now, the U.S. and China. More than anything, that's what working people across the world need. And you can follow us at codepink.org slash China or on our Twitter at China not enemy. You can also check out our most recent action to urge your senator to vote no on the anti-China Strategic Competition Act, which would increase funding for the military, the U.S. military in the Pacific against Asia or against China, excuse me. Thank you so much to everyone for taking time out of your Friday to be here. You can always reach out to me at Madison at codepink.org. Thanks again, Dr. Xu. Thank you so much, Madison. Thanks for all the work.


Hello everybody. Welcome to Burn to Learn. This is Rod Davis. Do you know how to make a contact on Outlook 2016? We're going to teach you how to do that right now in this video. First, we need to know the different options for finding the buttons and getting to your contact page. So first, go up and click on New Items. And you can see in the drop-down box there are several options, one of which is contact. But there is a shortcut for getting to the contacts page, and that's scrolling down to the bottom and clicking on the people. When you do that, you are immediately there. That's a very simple shortcut means of accessing the page for making a contact. Okay. So now to proceed, we need to scroll up and click the New Contact tab. And let's take a few minutes to review what you are looking at. It's organized into six sections. It begins with the Name section. It then goes to the Web Contact section, the Phone Information section, the Location or your Physical Address where you are, as well as the Business Card section, and Notes where you can put down the things you want to remember about this contact. So now let's make a contact. Let's begin by filling in the full name information. We're going to put in my name, Rodney J. Davis. Notice how the name appears over on the right immediately. Now let's put in company information, and in this case, the company's name is Burn to Learn. Now let's find out what the job title is of our contact and the title is Manager. And you can also click the picture. And when you click it, you then have a chance to patch an image. Now if you don't know how to attach an image, you can go back to our video tutorial number five, where we go in depth on exactly what you need to do to know how to attach an image. Okay, so now let's click OK. The image appears both in the picture block as well as on the right. Now let's move to the Internet section of information. Beginning with email. You obviously can put in your primary email, but if you click the down arrow, you can see you can select different emails if you had different email accounts. We're going to put in for our email, Burn to Learn, training.gmail.com. Okay. And it automatically displays as that email address. And you'll see that it also appears over in on the right in our business card. Now let's move to the web page address. What kind of information do you think you would put here? Well, you could put in your Facebook account. You could put in LinkedIn or YouTube. Many people feel they don't have an account, but that's because they haven't thought of them all. We're going to put in Burn to Learn.com. And now for the I am address. There are several things you may put here. You could put your Skype here, your instant messenger, or your FaceTime addresses. We're going to put in Burn to Learn training at gmail.com. Now let's move to the phone number section. Here you can put in all of your phone contacts from business, home, business facts, mobile numbers. Let's click on the down arrow of the business section and look at all the options there. You're going to choose amongst all these as an assistant, as a home business, as a mobile business. We're going to choose primary. Now we're going to put our number in, but please don't call it. It doesn't work. Okay, let's go to the home number. Again, it's a fake. You see how that primary numbers have appeared over on the right on the business card? Now let's fill in the rest of this information. You don't have to fill all of them in, but let's do one more at least. This is our business facts number. Again, it's fake. That's how you fill in this information on all of your contacts. Now let's complete the addresses portion of this data. You notice there is the business address, but if you click on that down arrow, you have some options. You can put your business address, your home address, or some other address. Let's do our business address. Notice you can click on the box that says this is the mailing address we use. That way now your contacts know that as well. So let's put in our address, and this is fun. This is exciting. When we put our address in, I want you to pay particular attention to what happens. We can click on the map it button, and it takes us to maps and looks for the address we typed in. You can just put all the correct information you need, including the country you're in. In this case, by clicking the down arrow, we could change it to whatever, but we're going to leave it as United States of America. And when we click OK, they can see exactly where you are located. That's a very cool feature. Notice the business start up the upper right of your screen. This contains all the information we put in the data information blocks. As you can see, the full name is there. The company name is there, title, telephone numbers, and email addresses. It also contains the actual physical address, which we were able to find even on the map. Okay, so now let's scroll down and put a note or two on what we want to remember about this contact. We're going to put in that this is a new client. Our next step is to save, delete, works, go to another contact. So these are the options. You can hit either one of these buttons and it does what it says. In this case, let's save and close it. And when we go now to our My Contacts page, the contact we created is there. Picture, information, everything. So there you have it. It's very, very easy to do. You can now organize all the contacts that you have, including all the information that you have on them. Okay, now you know how to make a contact on Outlook 2016.


Wealthy Capitalist accidentally makes great argument for revolution. Recent comments from a wealthy Australian property developer named Tim Garner are going viral on social media right now for the unusual frankness with which he discusses the inherent conflicts of interest between the working class and employers, saying workers who've grown lazy and arrogant during COVID need to experience economic pain in the form of unemployment to rein them in and put them in their place. Garner, who with a net worth of $912 million is ranked by the Australian Financial Review as the 154th richest person in Australia, made the comments at the Australian Financial Review Property Summit on Tuesday. You know, tradies, Australian slang for tradesmen, have definitely pulled back on productivity, Garner said. They have been paid a lot to do not too much in the last few years, and we need to see that change. I think the problem that we've had is that we have people who decided they didn't really want to work so much anymore through COVID. Garner continued, quote, we need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 percent. In my view, we need to see pain in the economy. I mean, there's been a systemic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy, which is what the whole global world is trying to do. The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality, and we're seeing it. I think every employer is now seeing it. I mean, there are definitely massive layoffs going on, and people might not be talking about it, but people are definitely laying people off, and we're starting to see less arrogance in the employment market, and that has to continue, because that will cascade all across the cost balance, end quote. It's not often that you'll see a member of the ruling class reveal their hostile, slave master attitude toward the working class so transparently.  But it also wouldn't be the first time Garner drew headlines by publicly expressing his disdain for normal working people. In 2017, he became a meme for blaming the economic struggles of millennials on the idea that they spend too much of their money on avocado toast. Whether he intended his remarks to gain attention or not, Garner has gone viral once again, and opponents of the status quo he thrives on are making swift use of his comments. I like teaching lefty theory as much as the next guy, but I can rarely do better at explaining the connection between capital and social political domination than just pointing at what the guys with the capital do and say, reads a popular tweet by a Georgetown professor. When Marxists say that capitalism, in order to function, literally requires unemployment and homelessness to discipline wages to ensure satisfactory profitability and maintain a useful social domination of the working class, don't take it from us. Take it from capitalists, reads another popular share of the Garner video. Garner's statements are unusual in their frankness and in their admission that unemployment is a weapon of the ruling class to bludgeon workers into working harder for less pay. But his push to decrease employment is also entirely in alignment with what influential economists like Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, and Olivier Blanchard have been saying in recent months. Workers making more money is seen by the ruling class as a freakish, aberrational problem that needs to be fixed via economic pain instead of a good thing that should be celebrated and normalized. It's important to remember these frank admissions when they happen, because they don't happen very often. Normally, the capitalist class spends its time telling workers that they're an important part of the team and we're all family here and hey, have a slice of pizza on us every now and then. But the fact of the matter is that all they really care about is their ability to siphon off the excess value generated by your labor, and they'll come together with remarkable class solidarity to push the capitalist state to hurt you financially in order to ensure that they can skim the largest share of that value possible. This is completely unsustainable. We cannot continue to tolerate systems which must necessarily abuse workers with financial pain in order to keep increasing profits and quarterly statements. We must transcend these competition-based models, where people are manipulated by financial pain into stepping on each other's heads in a rat race to show the ruling class that they can generate more profit for their employer than their neighbor can. We need to move into collaboration-based systems in which we all work together for the good of everyone and toward the thriving of our biosphere. Our current status quo systems are choking us to death. Such changes aren't going to happen until the people start using the power of their numbers to force them to happen. And Tim Garner just made a splendid argument outlining why this should happen sooner rather than later. Remember, a class war is already happening. That decision has already been made for us. The only thing we have a say in is whether we fight back or not.


Hi everybody, let's talk about hemp. First, let me tell you, in my life I have avoided anything that has to do with cannabis. I was not interested in learning about it, I was not interested in consuming it, and this was because of the stigma around the plant. On top of that, I was just never interested in getting high or anything like this, so yeah, I was just not interested in this plant. Let me tell you, I have been seeing this popularity around CBD products. And CBD is a compound that comes in the cannabis plant. It is claimed to have a positive effect on our health. And you know what? As someone that really likes to know the why of things, and that is very interested in plants, I really wanted to know why all the hype around CBD and cannabis. So I did my research and this is what I found in my experience. First, let's talk about the plant. The Latin name for the cannabis plant is cannabis sativa. And this plant belongs to the cannabis family. Some other plants that belong to this family are for example the humulus or hop plant. This one is used for making beer. And the celtic plant or the hackberry plant. A very interesting fact is that hackberries are actually edible, and they're super common in Czech Republic, Slovakia and Serbia. As you may know, my husband is from Czech Republic, so when we go to visit, I'm gonna try to find the plant and show you the berry. Apparently they're super popular there, so I'll have to ask Yan about it. But now let's get back to the cannabis sativa. The most common subspecies of the cannabis sativa are the cannabis sativa indica, the cannabis sativa sativa and the cannabis sativa ruderalis. But I can tell you, there are many varieties, hundreds of them, grown around the world. And this one of these varieties has a different ratio of compounds that are called phytocannabinoids, terpenoids and flavonoids. For the purpose of this video and to get to CBD, we're gonna talk about the phytocannabinoids. I know this is sounding super scientific, but I can tell you it's gonna get really interesting, so stay with me. The most commonly known phytocannabinoids are THC and CBD. As you may know, THC is the phytocannabinoid from the cannabis that makes us high. I can tell you I have never tried it, but this is the one that makes you high. Then we have CBD, and this one does not have the psychoactive effects of THC, but somehow it brings benefits to our body. So when I was doing my research, I thought to myself, but why? How does this compound help our body? And I can tell you, during my research, I found that there is so much research yet to be done, but there are some findings that are really interesting. And what I read about the cannabis plant and how it connects to our bodies, which I'm gonna be getting in a second, was a beautiful representation of how connected we are with this planet. So let me tell you what I found. Okay, you guys, this is where it gets really interesting. During my research, I found a system within our bodies that was actually discovered just in the 1980s. This system is called the endocannabinoid system. The endocannabinoid system consists of neurotransmitters, as well as receptors and enzymes. So it basically works as the lock and a key. So we have a receptor and then the key, which is the endocannabinoid, opens that lock. And the purpose of this system is really beautiful. This system is responsible of maintaining balance in our body. When I was learning about it, I found a very good analogy. So we can think about the endocannabinoid system as the lights in the traffic. So you have the cars going in the street, but we always have the lights and rules to follow. But if one light goes out, we're gonna start getting traffic jams, the traffic won't work efficiently, and we'll be more prone to have accidents. So yes, the endocannabinoid system is just like the lights in the traffic. Setting up the rules so we have balance. We can find the endocannabinoid system in our body, as well as in our brain. And it is really interesting because this system reacts to environmental factors around us and within us. So for example, if we have stress either caused by pain or emotional stress, the endocannabinoid system will react to this. So our body gets the signal that we need to distress. Another very interesting place where the endocannabinoid system is working is our brains. And it was so interesting to read that the endocannabinoid system helps our brain with memory retention, as well as with the prevention of harmful, traumatic memory. So yes, it's a really amazing system. Now, I can tell you I haven't learned about the system until I started to look into cannabis and the effects that it has on our body. And then I learned that I'm not the only one. And this is because of two reasons. The first one is because the endocannabinoid system was only discovered in the 1980s. So it's a fairly new discovery. And the second one is because of the stigma around the cannabis plant, which takes me back to the cannabis plant. How does it relate to the system? Well, the phytocannabinoids in the cannabis plant, such as THC or CBD, fit almost perfectly in the receptors of our endocannabinoid system. Now, I have to tell you the endocannabinoid system is there without you using any cannabis. It exists there even before we are born, which makes it even more beautiful. It's a system that we have in our bodies, but the receptors in this system, just like they receive endocannabinoids produced by us, they can also receive phytocannabinoid. They come from the cannabis plant and they also come from other plants. So, if used properly, the cannabis plant can support your endocannabinoid system to maintain and promote balance in your body, which I think is pretty amazing. So as I said, there is a lot of research yet to be done, but at least this part I find really beautiful. So I thought that I could try it and see what was my experience with it. So let me tell you what happened. I have been taking CBD for one month and since this was the first time that I was trying a phytocannabinoid and my first experience with cannabis, I decided to go for a small dosage just to see if I saw any difference. And I decided to try with this one right here. This one is called Nordic Oil and it's a 5% CBD oil. So it contains 5% of CBD. Now, I really like the Nordic Oil Company because first they actually grew their hemp here in Europe and also because when I was learning about CBD, as I said in the beginning, this industry is going really fast and I can tell you that it's not totally regulated. So there are many companies that are going to tell you that they're giving you CBD, but maybe they don't have CBD in the products. So they're wrongly labeled. They may also have some amount of THC that you may not want to try. So if you only want to try CBD and you're someone like me that only want to try this one, this may be a problem. But when I was doing my research, I found something that is called the Certificate of Analysis or COA. And this is basically a certified document that tells us the specific amount of compounds from cannabis in your CBD oil. So when I was researching this company to see if I wanted to try their drops, I saw that they not only have a COA in their website, so you can see here the amount of CBD in the oil and also other compounds such as THC and all of these ones here, but also they have a lot of information there. So you can see what exactly is a certificate of analysis with lots of information about their product which made me more comfortable to try it. So if you decide to try any CBD oil, I recommend that you always go and find the certificate of analysis for the company. That way you know exactly what you're consuming. So anyways, I decided to try CBD from the Nordic Oil Company and the amount that I took was 5 drops in the morning, 5 drops over lunch, and 5 drops at dinner. So according to them, one drop contains 2 mg of CBD. That means that I was taking 30 mg of CBD per day. And I can tell you the first week I didn't feel anything different and I thought okay maybe the dose is too small or I don't know. But I was like let me just continue trying and see. So the second week I started to see some differences. First I had my PMS during the second week and I can tell you when I get my PMS I get really big migraines the first two days. This is the most. Every time that I get my PMS the first two days I get very big migraines. But this time I didn't. I actually got only one headache and then it was gone really quickly. So that was the first difference that I noted when I started with this oil. The second thing that I started noticing by the second week is that the day started to feel longer. Now I don't know about you but in lockdown I started to feel that the days were really fast and really repetitive. So I always felt kind of anxious. I felt that the day was going really fast and I was not getting enough done. And for a long time during lockdown I felt like this. I know that in the videos I seem really happy and yes I love recording these videos but if you ask Yan yeah there were so many days that I feel that I was feeling anxious. I was feeling that the days were really short and I was just not getting enough done. I felt like that and yeah that gave me a little bit of anxiety and it just made me nervous. It was just not a pleasant feeling. So when I started feeling the days longer that's when I really saw a difference. And this was not like feeling the days long in the sense that they were boring or something or like too slow. It was more about really enjoying the moment like it was three o'clock and I wasn't feeling oh my god the day's almost over like before. Now I was okay it's three o'clock I still have some hours I can work on some things and also take care of myself. So it was a nice feeling to be honest. And the third thing that I noticed I can tell you is really close to my heart and to be honest is the whole reason why I decided to make this video. So to tell you let me just tell you a story. When I was little I used to love music. I still love it but when I was small it was like my place to go to when I was happy sad angry I would always go to music and I remember that I had a game sorry I just don't want to get emotional. So I had a game when I was small and when I was listening to a song I would try to really find every instrument in the song. It was really fun for me to do that and it just calmed me down. You know I had forgotten that. You may know that two years ago I quit my job we actually just moved to Berlin three years ago and many things were changing in my life and since then I have been learning a lot in the process but it has also been not the easiest process. So some days I felt really anxious I was nervous I was questioning myself and yeah I actually stopped listening to music but anyways going back to the CBD drops two weeks after or maybe 10 days yeah I think it was 10 days after I started taking these I found myself sorry I don't want to get emotional I found myself in my room listening to music and just dancing to it and really finding the instruments and it was just at one moment I was not even thinking about the drops but I was just listening to the music and it brought me that feeling sorry it brought me that feeling when I was small sorry I don't want to cry but it was it was really really special for me so yeah at that moment I said you know what these these drops are really cool and so yeah I wanted to share with you guys my experience with them because in the first days as I said it was like by the 10th day that I really noticed the difference so the the days were longer and also I started to enjoy the music again in a way that I hadn't for a long long time and uh sorry and um yeah sorry it has been a month already since I started with these drops now I'm doing 15 percent so I started with 5 percent but then the bottle was done and I was like okay let me try 15 percent and see with 15 percent CBD oil you take just a smaller amount so then I haven't changed the the dose I just get less drops and I've been doing it for a month already and I can tell you now it's a little bit different it's like a constant state it's not like I I get happier or whatever no but it's more like I feel more calm during the day and it's like a constant state of being you know the days feel longer I feel more productive I'm happier generally I'm happier this is my experience of course I want to say in this video this is not a video to recommend that you take CBD this is just to share my experience with you around cannabis what I've learned about this amazing plant that still we need to do research on but yeah I still think that is that is a plan that is worth learning about and to share my experience with you with these drops and with cannabis basically this is my experience with cannabis until now but yeah I'm not recommending that you that you use CBD oil I would say that if you want to try it just inform yourself maybe speak to your doctor and yeah get more information about it but yeah at least in my experience it has been a very good experience so far and to be honest it brought me back to music into that feeling so that's why I wanted to share this with you and I don't want to talk more about this because I'm going to cry but yeah this is exactly the reason why I really wanted to share my experience with cannabis and what I've learned I'm looking forward to read more about it because yeah I know that there is a lot of research to be done and many more things that we need to learn but yeah I'm looking forward to learning more about this plant yeah now in case you want to learn more about this one right here the one that I'm trying they have different products it's not only CBD oil they also have other products with CBD like gum and yeah tablets I think and creams and many different things with CBD if you want to learn more about them I will leave the link in the description down below so you can just go to their website and read more about them and inform yourself and I hope that this video was useful at least entertaining I hope that we connected a little bit more through this I was a little nervous because I know there is a stigma around cannabis but then I decided to make it because of the experience that I had I really wanted to share with you guys and yeah please let me know down below what do you think about this video and if you have any experience I would love to know and as always I will see you in the next one and yeah have a great week ciao