regrettably because of the pandemic, we still have to conduct a lot that most of our events online. And this is, of course, the first of the China Institute's Seminar program. And I'm delighted today that we have a very interesting speaker who will talk on a important subject that some will find it controversial, others may well find it very insightful, but either way, you will be encouraged to engage with the speaker in the usual spirit that we conduct debate at SOWAS. Our speaker is of course Kai Strymata, and Kai is a very distinguished journalist who is currently based in Copenhagen. And if I'm not mistaken, Kai, you are a German national. Yeah. Who has a long career in German journalism and had spent a long time working in countries where democracy is, to say the least, imperfect. And that includes both Turkey and China. And Kai has spent two long periods of time in China. I think the first time you worked as a journalist in China was from the middle of the 1990s. 1997, actually. The return of Hong Kong to the motherland was basically my first assignment. Indeed. And then you were there for a bit less than 10 years, then you went to Turkey, and then returned to China. So you were reporting in China when Zhang Jimin was leader in China, when Hu Jintao was leader in China, and in your second tour, it was when Xi Jinping became leader of China, which provides the kind of perspective that I think will be mentioned in the talk that you will be presenting later. And if I am not mistaken, you will be speaking based on the research you conducted for this book. We have been harmonized, which came out last year or the year before, last year. Last year, came out last year, and the American edition is just out one month now. Indeed. And the subject that you are going to be talking to us today is the reinvention of dictatorship, which I understand is the German title for the same book issued in Germany. Now, with that, I will hand over to you, Kai, and then when we have finished with your presentation, I will invite participants whether you are on the Zoom or whether you are on the live feed through Facebook to put your questions to me, which and I will try to put all the questions that I can collect to Kai, time permitting. If not, then I will have to try to group them together. And if I in the end have to leave out any, I do apologize for that. Over to you, Kai. Thanks a lot, Steve. Thanks a lot for having me. As you pointed out correctly, I've been working as a journalist in China since 1997. I actually also studied signology in Germany. So I went there for the first time in the mid-80s. And it's amazing. It's like more than 30 years have passed.  Everything was so quiet and peaceful. I mean, especially in this place where I grew up and I really wanted to experience something and well, China more than enough fulfilled that promise. It was like I felt all those times, all those 30 years as a student, as an observer and later as a journalist that actually really, even objectively speaking, this was the most exciting place on the planet to be for any observer, be it an academic, be it an artist, a writer, a journalist. Really amazing the changes that this place has gone through. And actually, you know, I left China then in the November of 2018. And when I left, I mean, I was tired a little bit. I have to admit because it is also exhausting to work there as a journalist, but still at the same time, I felt the same excitement right until the very last minute and the very last second. And actually when I stood in Hong Kong, I didn't leave by plane. I took the train, the fast train, the high-speed train to Hong Kong, to Kaolun to the news station there. And when I got off there, I really felt, okay, I've left a country that is maybe now even more, it's even more exciting what's happening there than it actually has been for all those years. It's really mind-blowing. Actually, also what we've seen in the last 12 months only, you know, starting with the developments in Hong Kong later in November last year only was the big revelations with the China cables about the camps in Xinjiang, the re-education camps for the Uyghurs. I think we've already forgotten about all these things because so many of these things happening. And then it was Corona and with all these developments, you found China on the title pages, on the front pages of the newspapers and magazines and in the top of the news hours in TV stations. And this is really something that is very different from what it was like when I started out as a student of Chinese back then, because or even as a reporter in 1997, you know, back then when you wrote about China, when you spoke about China, you spoke about China. Now it's completely different. Now if you speak about China, and when you write about China, you speak and write at the same time also about us, also about Europe. Suddenly China is in the midst of everything. It's in the middle of the world back again. And it's in our midst. And it really, everything that happens in China suddenly has a meaning also for our lives and for our politics. And this is very, very big change in all those years that I've experienced. Now what we're seeing now really in the United States reminds me, Donald Trump and the re-election coming up, reminds me a little bit when I started the book because in November, I started the book in November 2016. I started the thought, harboring the thought of writing this book. And actually it started off not necessarily because I really felt the urge to write about, you know, like every correspondent does before you leave, you have to write a China book. But on the contrary, it really started off with a very strong feeling about what I saw what's going on in the United States and what was happening also in Germany and talking, speaking to my friends, speaking to my colleagues. I actually, you know, the book sort of, it forced itself upon me the night Donald Trump was elected. That was really the moment when I thought, okay, wow, there's something happening. There's something happening. Not only in China, what I've been witnessing all those years, but there's also something happening in the United States, in Europe at the same time. In the midst of our democracy, something happening with the European Union, with Europe, with liberal democracy, and China somehow has something to do with it.  Why does he do that? And how does he do that? And how is he not ashamed of lying in the way he does, because the lies were so obvious and they were so shameless.  And it was so obvious that he was lying. And I remember that people were really stretching their head and why is he doing this?  And I was sitting there in China with all my experience of having lived in China and having lived in Turkey. And I was like, no, no, no, you don't get it. You know, I know what this guy is doing. I've seen it, I've lived it. Alternative facts, fake news, all these terms that now, you know, we're sort of, we're annoyed when we hear them because we've heard them so often. But four years ago when Trump was elected, actually they were quite new again in our vocabulary and people weren't used to them anymore in liberal democracies.  He's not a pathological liar, as you would call him. His lies are not pathological. They're systematic and strategic. And this is something people living in autocracies know all too well. And this is something the Chinese know all too well. And they've known it for millennia, you know? I mean, the famous story of the son of Qin Shu Huangdi and his chancellor leading a deer into court and telling all the people, you know, and everybody was really astonished, all his ministers standing there. What is this guy doing?  And everybody was like, what? You know? And then, of course, we all know we as students of Chinese history, we know what happened is like all the ministers who dare to speak out, this is not a horse, this is a deer. They were, you know, being led away and executed. And the next batch to be executed were the ministers who stayed silent and only the ones who joined in, you know, exclaiming, oh, what a beautiful horse, this is only they were the ones surviving in the end. And the Chinese even have a Chenyu for that saying until today, it's part of their language. Zhu Weimai made a horse out of the deer. So they know exactly what it means. So take a lie and use it not for convincing people, but use it to submit them, to confuse them and to force them into submission. So I actually thought, and this was only one example of things I saw going on in the States, but also back home in Germany and Britain, all in European countries with the right-wing populism rising. And I saw things coming back in our countries that actually I knew from having lived in Turkey in a half authoritarian state and in China in a full dictatorship. And I thought, I need to explain, I want to explain people about the mechanisms of dictatorship. I want to write a book about mechanisms of dictatorship because it's not only important for China watches to know what's going on in China. It's also important for people in Europe to actually see what's happening in their own countries. So China actually being connected to them now in two ways mainly, you know. One as a mirror for things going on in their own countries and secondly also because as we enter the new era, Xi Jinping having declared the new era, China suddenly wanting to have its own road in the center of the world back.  Suddenly the propaganda narrative was we're the best corona fighters in the world and trying to make people forget again. So this was, when I started off with the book, I thought, okay, I'm going to write a book about China because this is what I know. So, but it's going to be about mechanisms in a universal way about mechanisms of dictatorship and also I felt this really important because I felt not only did people in Europe and in other democracies, Western democracies not really get completely what was going on in their own countries, but are they were missing something? But at the same time, they were also missing what was going on in China since Xi Jinping had come to power, which in my feeling back then already was changing into a completely new thing. You know, Xi Jinping was really serious when he was saying, we're going to create a new era. This was not the China anymore that, and this is not the China anymore that people of my generation have grown up with that all of us have come accustomed to. And this is a difficulty I see with many German and other European politicians and business people that they took them very long to realize that actually something substantial has changed. And in my view, then, well, Xi Jinping was the guy mainly responsible for these changes and I wanted to basically write an analysis what kind of changes he had been up to. And so in the end, my book that was supposed in the beginning to be about classical mechanisms of dictatorship on the example of China turned up to have three, roughly three parts that are equally important. And the classical mechanisms of dictatorship are only the first part. So I would argue, and I have argued that really this China is changing into something that the world actually hasn't seen before. And it's really a completely new creature that we start to deal with. The first thing that Xi Jinping has done, the first new thing, which is actually a quite old thing is that he has brought back repression and restriction of freedoms in a way that we haven't seen in China actually for decades. And that was quite stunning. I still remember, you know, all of us, I came to China in the summer of 2012. So basically I came to Beijing together with Xi Jinping, you could say. I witnessed the transition period which was really extremely fascinating. And so Xi Jinping taking power, becoming the party chairman in November of 2000, sorry, 12, I'm speaking about 2012, 2016 was when I started the book, but I came to China back for my second split in the summer of 2012, and Xi Jinping taking over in November of that year, November 2012. And I would say nobody that I know of actually could have expected was what was happening then. I think it surprised all of us. And it surprised all of us foreign correspondents, but it surprised also, I think, all my interview partners that I spoke to and also the ones actually party members, people in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, people like this, I think nobody, many of them didn't harbor any great illusions that he would be a reformer or something, but nobody actually I think really believed that he would be capable of such a quick and strong and incredible measures like changing the party in a way he does as he actually did. So what did he do? He actually basically what we're seeing now that China today is no longer the China of Deng Xiaoping of reform and opening policy. He, that actually is gone. What did Deng Xiaoping do back then? In reaction to the catastrophe, the suffering that Mao Zedong brought onto the country, Deng Xiaoping went on in decentralizing politics. He established a collective leadership in the party. He gave a local and regional power structures room to experiment freedom. He obviously gave the economy freedom. He actually did away with ideology in a meaningful sense. We all know, we all remember the sentence.  The most important thing is that it catches mice. So Mark, while it was still being preached officially, it wasn't really important in everyday's life and nobody really cared a lot about ideology. So power still was important, obviously, but it was much more decentralized. And Xi Jinping and one man rule had gone and the cult of personality had gone. And all these were, of course, preconditions for the economic miracle that China actually experienced, the pragmatism, the room for experiments and all this. We had a much freer economy. We had, together with the economy, probably something Deng Xiaoping didn't really want, but that was the proverbial fly coming into the open window. We had a much freer society also springing up. We had civil society. We had, well, all these great people were suddenly that we as reporters were able to meet in China, were able to do their things, intellectuals, academics, really doing independent research, journalists being able to do really courageous reporting, some magazines, some newspapers, actually really pushing the limits, even though they say nominally we're still part of the party empire. And all this probably was what led the illusion among some of us, some of our business people, some of our politicians. Well, you know, the China fantasy, wow, China, it looks as if this country is actually, aren't they going to be like us someday? And Xi Jinping, he finally did away with this illusion. He changed a lot. He actually, he re-centralized power. He brought back repression in a way we haven't seen for a long time. He made the journalists toe the line. Again, many of my Chinese journalist friends actually gave up their jobs in the last years. Many independent magazines and newspapers are no longer independent. They all have to bear their family name has to be party now again. So there's no room for investing, not a lot of room for investigative or free reporting anymore. Civil society as we knew it for many years and those things that we actually loved about China, a lot of that has gone on the Xi Jinping because he just did away with all these parts. He has re-centralized power here, brought back one man rule and he has brought back the cult of personality. He has brought back ideology, not only Marx. He's talking about Marx as much as none of his predecessors has probably since Mao Zedong. And that doesn't mean everybody believes in Marx, but everybody has to pretend or at least people inside the party, they have to go to these lectures again in the done ways, in the universities, in the think tanks. Again, you have to do Marxism schoolings like weekly or monthly and you have to at least pretend to believe in these things again. At the same time, Xi Jinping thought schools and faculties are springing up in universities all around the country. He's the first leader since Mao Zedong who has his thinking actually enshrined in the party constitution and in the state constitution. What does that mean? That's very obvious. If you criticize Xi Jinping, you're automatically an enemy of the party and an enemy of the state. So all these things that he has done, they're very, let's say that new for us as a generation, but of course, in the bigger picture there, you could say in a way back to the 1950s, it's like this. It seems that he's dreaming of this pure, non-corrupt socialism full of ideals that maybe was supposed to be ruling in China before Mao Zedong actually kicked off the Cultural Revolution. So this is what he does with one foot. He goes back in time, he goes back to the past. Now, socialist regimes that go back to a socialist, to a Leninism from the 1950s, he speaks a lot about Marx, but in his, I would say, you know, it's Marx on his lips, but in his bones, he's actually a Leninist. It's about power in the end. Leninist socialist countries of the 90s, structures from the 1950s, we've seen a lot on the planet and most of them have not survived. So we wouldn't have to worry a lot about them, but at the same time, he's doing another thing. He's doing several other things. And one of the most important developments, I would say that I've witnessed in the last two or three years of me being there as a reporter. And that's actually why I very quickly realized this book has to have another core, actually, is he started, he was trying to actually introduce 20th century, 21st century information technology, and it's radically new possibilities for control and manipulation into the political structure and basically reinvent the data ship for the information age. Do it with artificial, not only with the internet and with social media, but also with artificial intelligence and big data. And actually I spent most of the last two years of my work in China then researching this part because suddenly it was like, you know, the artificial intelligence strategy of the Chinese State Council was introduced in the spring of 2017. And in that strategy, it says very clearly that they want to catch up with the leading technology nations of the planet, meaning obviously the United States by 2025. And they want to be number one in 2030 already. Of course, that's a very ambitious goal, but as we've seen very often in the case of China, you know, if they have the Communist Party, they don't lack an ambition sometimes and they certainly, if they have identified a certain goal once they don't lack in speed and determination. And there was actually an explosion of activities around artificial intelligence starting from the beginning of 2017 that was mind-blowing as well. And suddenly all these starts up springing up and money raining from the skies. It was suddenly the promised land of artificial intelligence suddenly no longer seemed to be Silicon Valley, but suddenly it was China. And people like scientists, programmers, engineers with Chinese origin coming back from Silicon Valley into start-ups in Beijing, Shenzhen and other places, but also Americans who didn't have Chinese origins because suddenly for some of them there was more money to be made in China than in America. And not only was there more money to be made, but as one of my interview partners, a manager of the start-up sense time, one of those face recognition start-ups who produced these surveillance cameras, as he told me. And you know these people, when you speak to them, they look exactly like the counterpart in the United States. They're like 30 something, they wear night sneakers and jeans and they're completely, they haven't slept for three years and so they're very exhausted, but at the same time completely enthusiastic. Oh, and it's incredible what we're doing here is like all the science fiction stuff that you've seen in movies. We're actually making it true here. And all of them actually will admit that in technologically, in many ways, they're still not as far as their American counterparts, but what they all say is then at the same time, when it comes to practical applications, this guy, for example, from sense time, this manager, he told me, we are already number one. And why is that? Because our government supports us because we don't have these restrictions that you have in America or in Europe, meaning mostly, of course, privacy, data protection restrictions. So suddenly this enthusiasm and this money and of course, part of it was, it's part of the economic plan. They want to use artificial intelligence to catapult their economy into the 21st century because it is a big part of their legitimacy that they have to give people material wealth and they want to continue economic growth and they know they only can do this if they use new technologies. But at the same time, and they don't even hide this, it's also written very clearly that they will use this as measures for social governance or social management, as they often call it, which of course means surveillance, actually. So Xi Jinping might be the first ruler in the history of autocratic rulers who actually can fulfill the age-old dream of all those rulers to actually in the end, maybe with these means gain really total and complete control over every single movement and maybe even over every single thought of their subjects. At least I think this is also part of what they're aiming for. So one thing that's very interesting in all this is that also another fantasy from the West was blown into pieces and that's the fantasy by all these high-tech profits that have been telling us for decades, with every new technology there was, I think it started with satellite TV was the first time they told us that all these new technologies, actually they have it in them, in their DNA, that they will subvert authoritarian regimes and that they will bring freedom to the last corner of the planet and no authoritarian regime. It's like to resist the freedom that comes on the back of these technologies. Then it was mobile phones that were supposed to bring freedom everywhere. Then it was the internet, social media. And of course, as we China watches have known for many years already, not only does the Chinese government, the Communist Party not fear these new technologies any longer, but on the opposite, they have learned to love them long ago and they have really jumped on the bad boy a long time ago and they have realized that if you have the resources and they have shown us that if you are the party with the resources you are actually the one who can in the end use these instruments to your will and you don't have to be afraid of them if you balance your politics in the right way. They have shown us that with the classic internet, the traditional internet, they have shown us that with social media. With a short interlude between 2009 and 2013 where social media was actually looked at sometimes as if it would get out of hand and maybe the internet profits would be right and maybe these new media would be uncontrollable because if you remember when Weibo came up in 2009, for three or four years there was something that the People's Republic had never seen. There was an open debate, there was a free flow of information because the party had missed for some time, actually the core of these new technologies. They thought it was just the same as the traditional internet and what they didn't see was if you have a sensor like in the traditional internet that only needs 20 minutes to actually block or delete a certain comment or an account if you're on social media, if you're dealing with mobile phones where things happen in the course of seconds and minutes, if you need 20 minutes, you're actually 19 minutes and 50 seconds too late. So they didn't realize that for three or four years and many people, including me, I was getting doubtful again and I was like, oh, maybe it is right, maybe new technology is actually good for freedoms and is not controllable as they wanted but then Xi Jinping took power and he showed us how quick it goes. It only took him in the summer of 2013. It took him eight weeks or something and then way more as a means of political debate was completely dead and the party had regained the control over the internet and over social media and I think they have the same optimism in regards to artificial intelligence and also big data. I think, I mean, I can't speak too long, right? I'm supposed to be finished in 10 minutes so I won't go into many details. One question, how far have they come that sometimes, for example, already in the spring of 2018, the People's Daily wrote in a tweet on Twitter, Twitter is forbidden in China, we all know that, but they use it for propaganda purposes. And so they wrote on their English language channel that already by now, the SkyNet, which is the network of surveillance cameras that they, artificial intelligence surveillance cameras that they have established in China is capable of identifying each and every single one of their 1.4 billion citizens in the course of one second. That sounded back then, that's quite a statement and it sounds a little scary in the beginning. You know, when they write these things, it is actually quite proud of these achievements, they see it as a technological achievement. Of course, also their argument is all these surveillance cameras are there for the security of the people so they don't feel very often they have something to hide. My first reaction was, and the first question you have to ask when they claim things like this, is that even true? You know, is it true or was it true back then that they really could do that? And my feeling was no, it wasn't true, it wasn't true back then. It will be true at some point, maybe it's true now, two years later, but the point with these statements and with these claims is, it doesn't really matter whether they are true. The only thing that matters is that people believe that they are true. And this is one thing very central with this new high tech surveillance state, I think, that there's something going on that much more than before what they want is they want an internalization of control. They want each and every single citizen to be his or her own policeman. You know, you don't need the policeman at the street corner anymore. If you yourself are doing all the self-censorship and self-control, and that works very well when you feel that there is an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful eye hovering above you, watching you all the time. And it might be the surveillance cameras, it might be your mobile phone that you carry around in your pockets, or it might be that you're part of the social credit system, the famous social credit system, which is also part of what's established for economic reasons, but of course, its second pillar is also the surveillance people. But there as well as with the other surveillance tools, I would argue that in the end, it's all about making you yourself control yourself. And this is something very smart.  He's a control freak. You know, some people you could read in the beginning in many newspaper headlines, Xi Jinping is the new Mao Zedong. I mean, we all know that this is nonsense. Xi Jinping is completely different from Mao Zedong. And one of the main differences obviously is that Mao was this internal rebel. He loved chaos. He thrived in chaos. And the Cultural Revolution is one of the best examples for that. And Xi Jinping is very different, obviously. He's a freak for control and for stability. He loves stability. He loves control. He quotes Mao very often though. And one of the quotes that he uses very often is this quote, that it doesn't matter whether in the East or in the West or in the North or in the South, the party is the ruler of everything again or in the center. The party has to rule everything again. And this is also the reason why he is curtailing so much of civil society and why all these freedoms that many of our friends used to enjoy in the past years and decades in China suddenly are gone under Xi Jinping because suddenly nothing is allowed anymore outside the realm of the party.  Any kind of organization outside party boundaries now is automatically suspicious. So Xi Jinping wants to regain total control. And he also wants to do it obviously with these technological machines. And I would say because really the the technological means are so amazing now. There is something happening that I would say is that we are actually witnessing the return or let's say Xi Jinping is still, it's a bet that he's doing now. We still don't know whether he will succeed in the end at the moment it looks as things are going not bad for him actually but it's still a bet. So if he wins his bet, if he's successful, I would argue that we are seeing the return of totalitarianism actually in disguise.  We were doing so good business with China so dictatorship was a little bit of this tasteful word. We didn't really want to call China a dictatorship. We called it an authoritarian state, something like this. But of course the party itself never had these qualms that's written in the party constitution right in the beginning that the party is the dictatorship of the people. So they were quite proud calling themselves a dictatorship all along. It was always a dictatorship, I always said that but one thing, you know many China bashes also many years ago they very often they use when they came from the ideological side they use the word totalitarian that was one of those really, really it's like the worst word you can say and I always used to say, that's completely nonsense. You know, China maybe was a totalitarian state on the Mao Zedong but it definitely was no totalitarian state all the years after Deng Xiaoping took power and during the reform and opening era because the party actually pulled back from society it gave freedom, the niches for people to actually do what they want and it gave up control. This is what it did, right? Now what we're seeing now is Xi Jinping retaking control and then the other thing is, you know what the totalitarian state did on the Mao Zedong it was really trying to get into the last corner of your brain and it was trying to get into your bedroom and under your pillow and it managed to do that with the help of your wife or your children or whatever back then and now you don't need your relatives anymore now technology can do that so they can't get back into your brain and they can get into your bedroom and they go to the toilet with you like I guess most of you like me sometimes you take your iPhone with you when you go to the toilet and it's actually quite scary and they are watching you every step, you know when you don't, it's like my wife she uses this health mode thing on the iPhone I disabled this but every evening she proudly tells me that she has done 12,000 or 30,000 steps again and I really think this is crazy if you let a telephone actually do this with you and we are delivering all these information to the high tech companies residing in America and Silicon Valley but in China all this information of course goes also to state security organs so one thing I would say one thing is it's the internalization of control they actually, it's the return of totalitarianism but it's a much smarter totalitarianism it's not a totalitarianism that is relying on everyday terror and violence as it used to be the case on the Mao Zedong and Stalin you don't need that anymore nowadays now that you have a very clever mix of George Orwell George Orwell was a very prophetic guy I advise all of you to reread his books actually but with George Orwell you can only explain at the most half of China and we all know when you fly to China you step out of the plane, you look at Shanghai you look at all the glamour, you drive through Beijing you see all the expensive cars you see the nightlife, the restaurants you open the Chinese internet it's very colourful, very lively all kinds of and it's a mecca of consumerism and commerce and second thing I would say is actually so China is much more a mix of George Orwell and all this Huxley actually brave new world than it is an Orwellian state alone so this is the second thing and one thing maybe one detail only what they're doing with these new high-tech means and I think it's quite an important detail because it leads to something that is happening in the west of China, you know already in the year 2017 there was the vice minister of science and technology Li Meng in Beijing saying a sentence he said with his new artificial intelligence technologies now the party already, we can already know who will be a terrorist in the future we can know now already who will be a terrorist tomorrow and I would say, you know, brackets that even if the guy himself doesn't even know himself that he's going to be a terrorist so predictive policing is a big thing with all these data collecting in all these databases, you know they're trying to make profiles of potential well, in one party document it says people who behave unnormally so people who potentially who have the potential to disturb social stability and one place where we see that very clearly is Xinjiang, of course where with the establishment of all these reeducation camps not only have you one of the biggest, you know camp Gulag states appearing in the course of only two years incredible the speed that they did this with but at the same time, Xinjiang is also the prime example for this high tech surveillance inside China and all the technologies that are being developed in Beijing and Xinjiang are being tried out in Xinjiang first and all the companies actually are being told by Beijing also to go to Xinjiang which brought them in big troubles with Donald Trump they landed on some blacklists in the United States because they are supplying technology for the Xinjiang surveillance but actually what's happening in Xinjiang is a huge predictive policing program all these people in the camps, you know there were as they have to have been estimates more than a million they are not people who have committed crimes that they were indicted for they have never been indicted they have never seen a court there is no, they have never seen a lawyer instead they have been chosen by all these data after actually the calculation and judgment of all the data that has been collected by them and the data includes GPS GPS movements with their cars but also mobile phone data of course surveillance camera data who actually is moving together with whom but also birth control records online shopping records, all different things and then the algorithm in the end tells some bureaucrats that actually and they have a platform the platform in Xinjiang is called joint operation platform there's a very long human rights watch report on it where you can find many detail on this platform and when you are actually deemed unreliable after all your data has been examined then you'll end up in one of those camps so this is I would say where it has gone to its most extreme and the thing is, if we look at Xinjiang we, it's probably not enough to you know, think these are all the Muslim the potential Muslim terrorists and it will never be this is not something you have to worry about if you live in the rest of China I think a lot of those things that we see in Xinjiang will actually come to the rest of China as well and they will be exported into other countries that's happening already as well so my time is up just I haven't spoken about the third part of my book but this is probably something we can do in the question and answer sessions the third part, what else is new about this new China of Xi Jinping of course is the new China dream where he actually says what we're working for as the Communist Party is the renaissance the renaissance of the great Chinese civilization let China retake its place in the center of the world and with that, together with that whole new foreign policy actually a foreign policy that is a lot more assertive sometimes even aggressive than it used to be and something that is actually going to be a big challenge for us because on the one hand you have now Xi Jinping on the Party Congress in 2017 November he stood there and he said first of all he said this is now the moment where we are going back to the center of the world he said that and then he said we are willing and of course he wanted to appear very benevolent and he said we are willing to give the world the gift of the Chinese wisdom Zhongguo Zhihui but of course he doesn't mean Confucius and Laozi and whatever what he means is just the wisdom of the Communist Party of China which is just the wisdom of a Leninistic data shift I think this is something we have to bear in mind very often when you actually do a systemic analysis of China's political system then you will find that the Communist Party itself actually engages in a kind of Orientalism when it claims to be this kind of you know it's all Zhongguo Zhihui it's all the Chinese it's all socialism with Zhongguo Zhihui and it's all a very Chinese model and nobody can understand China because only Chinese can understand China because we are this country with such a long history we are so different from everybody else while in fact when you look at it very closely it's not a lot more else than good old-fashioned Leninism now with an update with an high-tech with an high-tech update but that is challenging for us because the new foreign policy of China actually means that on the one hand they're trying to go into international institutions now I mean they have to find now very clearly their interests and they have made clear that they are willing to defend those interests all around the planet now and in a much more aggressive way than they used to and on the one hand they're doing this in... we're seeing they're doing this in international organizations and obviously the absence of the United States Donald Trump's really erratic and irrational foreign policy and his pulling back has... it's a huge gift for the Chinese leadership and has given them the vacuum to actually to actually go ahead with a lot of their plans and then the second thing is that not only are there being active in the international organizations but of course also in our own countries and a lot of these activity of course is legitimate and all of our countries do this but what I would say and what I would say where we have really have to be careful is we really have to define some red lines because what also Xi Jinping and the Communist Party have said long before we have said this this is actually a new competition of system the competition of systems is back and there again we have a China we have a Communist Party claiming their system is superior they actually say their democracy is superior they have the much more effective democracy and the West while the West is going down in chaos and decline and their prime examples are of course Donald Trump and the UK with Brexit it's like actually actually CCTV had a great headline last year once saying is liberal democracy dead after Brexit and Trump? So they're having a field day always showing Donald Trump on their evening news and sometimes also some Brexit scenes the thing about this is and then I stop and let you ask some questions is that we really have to be careful because sometimes we are open societies and this is the old dilemma of open societies and that sometimes they use like the Russians do it but in a completely different way they use open societies with colored means and this is something where we just have to say stop this is we can't really allow this and this is something where we have to stand up for our values and for our norms and yeah I mean in the end it's coming back to us we are actually I would say liberal democracy in Europe is in the midst of a perfect storm maybe we find ourselves in a perfect storm and responsible for this are on the one hand people like Donald Trump or mainly Donald Trump in the United States and the right wing populists in Europe which actually actively try to subvert our own some of the norms and values that we have but also the structures like the European Union for example so and on the other hand you have the outsiders like Russia and China who are trying their best to actually subvert some of these structures and while everybody was talking all the time about Trump and about the right wing populists and about Russia at least when I started the book nobody was talking about China that we know has changed a great deal now it seems everybody is talking about China and before I go on and on and on I stop here and you just asked a question thank you very much. Well, thank you very much Kai that's very, very thought provoking we already have quite a few questions being put to you and let me just remind everybody that the floor is now opened and it will be helpful if you would in pushing the questions through the Q&A box to identify yourself as to who you are it helps me to understand where the question comes from if you would like your identity not to be disclosed when I read out your question it will be helpful if you could say that at the top of your questions in which case I will not mention your name Kai, before I opens the floor I would like to do a bit of Nick picking with you you've got a very interesting title the particularly the title for the talk and the title for the book in the German edition which is the reinvention of dictatorship hearing your talk and thinking about what you said I'm not entirely quite sure why you thought that reinvention of dictatorship encapsulates the message you were trying to put across because I thought the message you're putting across is fairly clear which is that what we are now seeing in place is a kind of, if you will, digital Leninism that some kind of Leninist dictatorship has never in fact disappeared in China it might have receded somewhat at an earlier age during the earlier of the reform and opening periods under Dong Xiaoping but even Dong Xiaoping had made it very clear from the very beginning when he was talking about that the need for China to hide its capabilities and to buy full term and insisting on the full upholst that it was blatantly clear that there was never any intention on the part of the party state to give up power or to change in any serious way that will infringe upon the leadership of the Communist Party of China it was a matter of timing when the party will reassert is effective control and what we have seen is that technology has done so and in the examples you have cited both Orwell and Huxley and in fact, we don't even need to include Huxley if we just only look at Orwell from the transformation of the Orwellian stories of animal farms to 1984 we already saw that transformation of the old fashioned Leninist dictatorship in animal farm to a kind of a digital future in 1984 Orwell just didn't understand that the technology could do so much more than what he thought and in fact, the technology is able to do so much more now there is arguably no need for the Communist Party whether it's under Xi Jinping or somebody else in the future to secure a full return of totalitarianism because totalitarianism implied and require summary control across the board the digital technology allowed them to have smart control so it's not actually even necessary for the full-scale restoration of totalitarianism in that case, why would something like digital Leninism or some other permutation not encapsulate your message better than the reinvention of dictatorship implying dictatorship had broken or disappeared or something and therefore it needs to be reinvented No, no, no, I think I think actually I think actually we agree on nearly all points I think it's probably a matter of terms and a matter of definition the digital Leninism is exactly what it is this is a budget of why I am calling it the reinvention of dictatorship is because it has never been there in this in this to this extent and in this manner it's like the possibilities of control and suppression with these new technologies have never been seen on this planet like this and I think that this is not only a matter of quantity I think if you have really a development and an advancement where the extent of control and the possibility of the extent of the possibility of control is enlarging on such a huge scale that it actually becomes a matter of not only quantity but also quality and it's actually a new thing this is really something that in this form we haven't seen before and I would agree that it would still be just another mode of Leninism completely they have never given up Leninism and you're completely right with this and the people who were dreaming this kind of China fantasy that they had and that the party actually was secretly paving the way for a transition to democracy they were right, they were wrong on basically every minute of the last decades so yeah I would still say this is if in the end it all works out and if the whole of China becomes an object of control as Xinjiang is already you know now you don't need to put people into camps all of them but if you, it's enough if you have all the surveillance technology around for every Chinese city as you have it already at the moment for every city in Xinjiang I think we are talking about really this is a complete new level this is a complete new mode of living also for the people there and this is a new kind of Leninism I would still say that. Okay, thank you to Kai and now we already have nearly a dozen questions in the Q&A box Kai if you could try to answer them as succinctly as you can then I would try to- Kai will you pick the questions and read them to me? I'll pick the questions and read them to you. Okay. So that you don't have to worry about that I would try to fit in all the questions if possible now you were talking about the bigger situation and there is a in Xinjiang and there's a question I think somewhere here who asked you about that issue exactly I think the question was that do you see the Xinjiang situation as something that will cause a change in how the West will examine its relationship with China? I think that question came from is an email name so I'll just leave it there. Are we at the point of seeing a change in Western attitude to what's China because of Xinjiang? That's a very good question because of course this debate has been going on I think in all our countries and we've seen Donald Trump for one actually using Xinjiang as a pretext for some sanctions and bringing up certain black lists for companies and also Xinjiang officials. This is so far I think the only practical outcome I've seen in any Western countries in a change of policies I haven't seen it in my own country in Germany. There's a big debate in Germany because folks are not a big debate that's too big a word but Volkswagen you know the big German car maker they actually have a plant in Xinjiang and so they get asked this question now very often on press conferences that has changed Xinjiang is on the map suddenly Uighurs are on the map but we all as China students of China we all know that probably until two years ago people all over the world they didn't even know what a Uighur person was the words just didn't exist so this is something new it has sunk into our consciousness I'm not sure about policy change actually as far as the influence of Xinjiang I think it's one puzzle in a it's one piece of a puzzle in a bigger mosaic now of things that have happened that will lead or is leading to a change like Xinjiang together with what has happened in Hong Kong together with how China has handled the coronavirus crisis but also it's foreign diplomacy after corona with this kind of you know wolf warrior diplomats outburst and stuff I think all of this together has led to a sort of awakening in most European societies actually suddenly people for the first time I think on a bigger scale actually realize what you were talking about just now Steve that actually the core what actually the core of the system is that actually this is still a Leninist and what kind of a system is this this is still a Leninist system with practices that come from this from come come from this tradition so for the first time they have opened their eyes and because it somehow fits into the broader picture and it fits in the case of Donald Trump it fits his agenda his election agenda at the moment there you have I think when we talk about the United States it's a very short term probably not too reliable change of politics because Donald Trump is on record saying really you know nasty things also to a Chinese counterpart where he basically he understands them putting weaker people in camps he's on record for saying this one things like this I think in the case of Donald Trump it's really he's only playing with this and if it suits him he might do a 180 degree turnaround okay this is my daughter thank you she wants her iPad in the case of the Europeans I would say we might see some readjustment of China politics I am not too sure how big a factor Xinjiang is playing in all this I think it might be too optimistic on the human rights front if you actually credited the Xinjiang situation too much for this I'm a little cynical I would say it's all the other things together okay we really do have a lot of questions so if we could be more succinct okay you'll be able to answer more often there's a follow-up question to you to the very long answer you have given and if we could be very short with the answer and essentially the question is about whether it is now outdated for the West to take on moral condemnation condemnation of China since China is now confident and of course more than empowered I don't know whether the main point about bringing up human rights was moral condemnation it might have seemed so I don't think so I think the main point about bringing up human rights I think it's actually part of a real of also real real politics as we call it human rights and in the end it's much more about defending our own values and actually you know keeping our own integrity and that's not only a theoretical viewpoint at the moment where we are now when we look at liberal democracies you know I think we're far beyond the point where everybody could harbor the illusion that we could influence China actually and we could make China a better place at the moment I think you know if we bring up these issues and if we and if we tell China stop here and not more it's actually a real it's the outcome of a real realistic politics that we see that these kind of repressive policies and the human rights violations are actually no longer in the end their effects will no longer be confined inside China's borders and they will infect all of us and it will come to us and it will haunt us so I think at the moment when we talk about human rights and liberal norms and values it's actually really about we have to we have to talk about us again okay we got about 22 minutes left and we have something like 17 questions on the phone in the chat okay so one minute per question okay there's a question about what do you think companies like Amazon, HSBC or those those bargains should do so they insist on the rise of their workers should they organize independently of the communist party before they open up factories in China or make other investments in China do you see that happening well they probably you know organize independently if the question does it mean like organize the workers independently or I think the question is do you think that they should be doing it I think implicitly therefore is do you think that they will be doing it too okay I think the main question with companies is I'm not advocating at all that one shouldn't do business anymore with China not at all of course we should we should keep you know Xi Jinping in some way is trying to seal off his country ideologically and spiritually we have a lot of interest going on that the country has that channels are open and the country stays open that fresh air comes into China and obviously trade business is a big part of that but what companies really should do they should get and all of us we should get rid of the naivety that has defined so much of our interaction with China and some of it has been real naivety and some of it has just been acted and I would say in the case of economic actors very often it was more interest than real blindness it was more business interest and I think we really have to they and they also should draw a red line where in the end it is about really it is about our values and it is and that starts with the treatment of workers in China but it goes on with how they behave and how they let themselves being dictated to behave by the Communist Party when a German car company like Mercedes Benz actually apologizes for you for using a quote of the Dalai Lama in one of their Instagram accounts this is something that just can't happen if when a German one of the biggest science publisher on the planet Springer Nature it's a German company based in Berlin when they agree to the request of Chinese sensors to censor all their websites that are accessible from China to clear to clear them from all content and has to do with Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen this is this is the point when I say okay this is where private companies have gone too far okay there's a question from and somebody who's ethnic Chinese and the question starts with a statement which is that some Chinese do not really see Xi Jinping as a Mao but they see Xi Jinping more as a Yuan Shikai figure Yuan Shikai was of course the general who became the first president of the Republic of China properly after the revolution when Shunya Sun hand over powers to him and the question was also about what therefore do you think about how is digital Leninism affect nationalism in China so the person asking the question is meaning he's a nationalist he's more a nationalist like Yuan Shikai let's forget about what that person whether he is a nationalist or not because I don't really understand the question the question is affecting nationalism in China the important thing to remember is if you have this digital Leninism and this regime of high tech surveillance with you know self-control and self that it works then it works very well if it's embedded into a whole system of other things that actually that actually keep it balanced and one of those things one of those things is material wealth is the party has always delivered we can't forget that materially right I mean so many in the urban elite have always been very satisfied with the party this is one thing and the second thing very important is the point of this question is the nationalist and also militaristic education that Xi Jinping has actually strengthened and that starts from kindergarten and I think that is something we should also be worried about I think it's much stronger than it used to be I for 30 years I've been living in China and I've never ever counted things encountered like xenophobia at least you know I'm not black black people might have experiences differently or but there is the rise together with the rise of nationalism there's also a rise of hostility suddenly towards foreigners and and this is something you know it's still not really you know it hasn't exploded in any way but this is something very dangerous and I think Xi Jinping is actually playing on this and he's using this I mean he's using the nationalism for the day because he knows that economically one day China will actually also be will catch up with the rules of with the laws of gravity and it won't grow anymore and for that moment when the internal conflict will actually break up he will need that nationalism okay somebody asks a very simple straightforward question I think there may be others who will be interested in her question as well so if you could use 30 seconds or maximum one minute to explain this and that is the term cult of personality some in the audience don't understand what the cult of personality is so if you could do it in 30 seconds Kai oh well it already started in 2014-15 when suddenly people started writing poems again I think the question is what does it mean what is that what is a cult of personality well I can only give examples when when Chinese songwriters write songs about Xi Jinping again when Chinese painters paint oil pictures in oil of Xi Jinping that are being published when in in churches in Christian churches in Zhejiang the picture of Jesus is being taken down and the picture of Xi Jinping is is being hung up again when party functionaries from Sichuan travel travel to the northeast to a tree that Xi Jinping has one planted to sing Xi Jinping songs and recite his poems this is a cult of personality okay there's a question from a student from KCL Kings College London and the question is about what you thought about how China is using social media to interfere with the politics of other country whether you're talking about big news or some other forms I would say okay one thing I would say if you talk about influence operations I for a long time I have said everybody's talking about Russia nobody's talking about China while China actually is doing so much more on such a broader front they're going into universities into think tanks they're trying to go into our media and stuff but one thing they never really did like the Russians in the Russian way was actually the social media thing into an extent that Russia had done you know the classical Russia influence operation thing is using its trolls and bots on on Twitter and Facebook and influencing our elections at the Brexit vote through this means and actually China was absent from that game for a long time I think that is changing slowly now we've seen first examples for this in Hong Kong first during the Hong Kong demonstrations last year when suddenly Facebook and Twitter announced that they had they had actually deleted hundreds and thousands of of fake accounts which they thought were actually originated in China and we're seeing it again we have seen it again now during the coronavirus crisis where for the first time in Europe actually I saw that there was a large-scale effort also by trolls and by social media but to get the Chinese narrative like you know the virus first the virus is an Italian virus then the virus originated in the United States things like this but also with positive their mass diplomacy but also helped by a lot of by an army of bots the planes landing with the face masks and stuff that's for me where the two the first two times that I saw the Chinese actually really actively employing these instruments so far they haven't done it to an extent as the Russians have okay there is a question from somebody from so us which is to ask you about in light of your talk how should the West share data with China can we actually share any data with China in regards to the digital economy in the future yeah I think this is one of the central questions and I think every society has to actually start discussing that question we are starting discussion we are we're having this discussion right now you had it in England we have it in Germany with the Huawei question right and I think it's very important that we come to a point where we agree where the border where the borderline is here actually obviously there are probably some kind of data the TikTok example for example I would say I don't agree with Trump on that I don't think this is something you know this is not relevant systemic relevant thing of course there's a lot of things wrong with TikTok but probably not more wrong than with Facebook and with Twitter and we Europeans actually we should point to the finger with our fingers to all of this but there are other things like Huawei and the 5G network where it clearly comes to the core of critical national security infrastructure and I would say there there's no way that we should share this kind of data and infrastructure with China and we always have to remember I remember that in the case of China private company in China is not the same thing as in our countries they are obliged to cooperate with the authorities there and they're obliged to hand over the data if the national security organs wish so so the questions in the case of 5G and a company like Huawei is never the one that is put so often so often in so many countries namely the question can we trust Huawei that question is totally meaningless in the end the question we should really ask is can we trust the Communist Party of China and only if we can answer that question with a yes then we can share this data with them okay I have a question here from Graham Hutchings which is directly about something you said he asked you whether you could elaborate on the point you make about Xi Jinping being engaged in a bet why might he lose his bet and what will happen if he does yes why might he lose his bet I think it's not a very clever thing to go down the way that he does maybe in the end because on the surface he looks like a very strong man on the surface he makes he does make China strong and this is why many people in China actually like him for that right like many Russians like Putin it works these kind of things work with parts of the population if the propaganda is in this way but if you look closely if you if you really if you shut down all channels of feedback if you if you silence all the critics if you only allow yes man next to you it makes you blind it makes the system blind and it makes the system prone to errors and actually I would argue that the coronavirus crisis actually was a very good example for that because if you remember in the first two months it was a complete and utter system failure and the Wuhan coders and everything with the secrecy they were trying to to hide everything and they were they were actually silencing the whistleblowers and everything and if you compare that to SARS 2003 they had also been silencing whistleblowers back then but it was much faster the things came much faster to light in 2003 because back then we still had independent journalism a kind of independent journal we still had the Nanfang Joe Mo the Southern weekend this investigative newspaper in China that actually came out and brought these stories and brought them to the attention of Beijing and suddenly now we have Xi Jinping system which is much more airtight than it used to be for the for the last decades and much more blind and he actually he has like what's his name Xu Professor Xu who was arrested for his essay on the coronavirus crisis he writes in his essay that Xi Jinping with his policy has actually taken away he has taken down the social immunity of China and I think this is also a big changer for the danger for the Communist Party I think he is actually shooting in his own foot with a lot of the re-centralization and repression he does and what happens in the end if he fails or if he gets into trouble this is where I come back to the nationalism thing if he comes in if he gets into trouble if really you know I mean I was never one of those who predicted a big collapse of China no way but if you have stagnation alone you know economic stagnation or a little bit of a recession in the next year it will come inevitably it will come what happens then if the internal conflict of China suddenly break up the social inequalities though it calls itself a communist country but at the same time it has some of the highest wealth gaps on the planet you know Thomas Pickett his newest book is not allowed to be printed printed in China because they wanted to censor it because he writes about the inequality of China in his new book and and this is the point then where I hear that Xi Jinping actually might use something like it could be the Senkaku the Diao Yutai islands it could be Taiwan my guess is Taiwan maybe to deflect from internal crisis and internal dissatisfaction and to unite the country nationalistically behind him by creating an artificial crisis and that's where it gets dangerous okay there let me just bring in another question from a SOAS student which is about whether you think the current aggressive expansionist policy of Beijing in South China Sea East China Sea and in Africa is part of Xi Jinping's plans to reinvent the Chinese dictatorship and restore China's former glory the short answer is yes the very short answer yes I think it is also we shouldn't forget that this the his global ambitions they feed very well into the domestic politics I would I would say a lot of this China dream is actually aimed at domestic consumption also you know it helps him with his with to stabilize his power okay complete change of track is a question about Hong Kong and the question is about whether you think Hong Kong how you think Hong Kong might be affected by this high tech authoritarianism used on the mainland of China I think it's already started to be affected like where we saw all the the people that taking part in the demonstrations actually actively you know some of them leaving the mobile phones at home some of them deleting certain apps because they were afraid that they were already being tracked I think Hong Kong Hong Kong has a very very good example for the ambitions of Xi Jinping I don't think the high tech aspect though is the most important one I think you know as we see the actual classical means of repression and politics work are probably enough to pacify Hong Kong to harmonize Hong Kong in the eyes of Xi Jinping the problem the question the big question is why does he do it why does he do it now and I would say it's a very easy answer it's well first of all he probably does it now because with all the corona things going on he feels he's not being watched as much but very clearly he feels threatened by the example of Hong Kong a central part of the narrative of Xi Jinping's Communist Party is the Chinese people is only ever rife and ready for a government like ours this is the only government that suits China and Chinese people per se you know it's not in the DNA of Chinese people to be democratic and free and of course Hong Kong is the perfect counter example so that Hong Kong is a brilliant example of and it's a it's a laboratory it's like Taiwan it's a laboratory of what happens to Chinese people Chinese tradition black hair you know black eyes same DNA same language same culture same tradition actually the same tradition that you as a CCP are so proud of much better preserved because you destroyed it in the people's republic on the market doing this you smashed it into pieces in Hong Kong the tradition is much more alive and still these are the people who are actually you know these people growing up and not in a democracy because Great Britain never gave them democracy but it gave them the rule of law the freedom of arbitrary rule and the fairness a fair system and how do the same people feel how do they act how do they think what do they dream of when they grow up under such complete different circumstances and this is a form in the side of the communist party he has to get rid of them okay got three minutes I want to squeeze in two more questions one is that I follow up on your answer there which is a question from Teresa who wants to see your seek your view on whether you think the Chinese people will accept economic growth and benefits in return for giving up their freedom of speech and other freedoms well they have accepted it for many years now haven't they it works very well okay but let's let's move on is a question from somebody who is working as a consultant in London who who says that even China must have seen that how the American behave as a leader in the world is not working and would therefore China see the wisdom of operating as a leader among equals I'm yeah the question is what does China want in the end right do they want to rule the world do they want to lead the world they certainly want to defend their interests now anywhere on the world but do they want well they don't they don't want to rule the world and they don't want to conquer the world do they want to lead the world in any meaningful way so far they haven't shown the willingness to on the contrary whenever there's leadership you know I mean they're playing along in some parts but they really haven't taken up a leadership role it's much more of I think a question of still at the moment a question of faith probably and the question of image being perceived as one of the mightiest powers in the world do they really want to lead the world I'm not sure they for sure what they do want if you remember there was a famous sentence by one American president saying what is the role of America in the world it is to make the world safe for democracy what China certainly does want to do now what the communist party wants to do it wants to make the world safe for autocracy this is what they want to do together with the russians actually do they want to lead do they want to rule at the moment I would say no this is also why I would say and why I'm telling everybody when this is a question that comes inevitably in all of my talks in Germany they ask me do we have to fear China and in the end I always say no we don't have to fear China in the end it's really about us you know we we really have to defend our strength we have to recognize that we still have strength that democracy actually is the better system I say this as someone having lived in China for nearly 20 years democracy is still better and it is still the more effective systems but the big danger is that we are actually that we are actually too timid at the moment and we're like I don't know we're paralyzed and and and it's really like a self-fulfilling prophecy that we are giving up our democracy and that we're actually staring at this at this fantasy of these wise dictators who have invented a much more effective system I would say this is nonsense and I would say and maybe end with this the only the only people we have to fear are ourselves okay regrettably we have run up against the clock so I must apologize to the others who have sent any questions either through the chat box or the Q&A box I have not been able to fit in all the questions but let me do thank Kai for giving us a very stimulating evening of conversations I was slightly surprised that we did not have somebody who directly not believe in what you have to say and yeah I was waiting for the hostile questions but it wasn't there but anyway thank you very much and thank you also to all of you who have taken part in this webinar we will have another webinar next week and you can find all the details on our website thank you good evening thank you very much Steve


Portfolios. Publish items from your Moodle to other places where you store and organize content. Want to save a great glossary entry about Algor Bloom to your Google Docs? Easy. Watch. Publish to a portfolio you have enabled and check that the glossary entry is where you want it. Content from Moodle can be exported to virtually any stable external portfolio.