>> For more than a decade, as China Deputy Bureau Chief, Josh Chin has covered policy and technology in China for The Wall Street Journal.

In 2018, he led an investigative team that won the Gerald Loeb Award for a series exposing the Chinese government's pioneering embrace of digital surveillance.

Along with fellow journalist Liza Lin, Josh Chin is co-authored Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, a gripping tale of how China's Communist Party is shaping the will of its people through the sophisticated harnessing of data.

Josh Chin is joined in conversation by Evan Osnos.

In 2008, Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a Staff Writer, and today still covers politics and foreign affairs.

Previously as the Beijing Bureau Chief for the Chicago Tribune, Osnos was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.

His book, Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China is based on eight years of living in Beijing and won the 2014 National Book Award.

Recorded at the University of Louisville, Kentucky Author Forum, this is Great Conversations, Josh Chin and Evan Osnos.

>> I have to say it is a total treat to be here with the Kentucky Author Forum in this extraordinary city that has given so much to this country, the culture, the sports, but really also the bourbon menu, and our grateful nation thanks you, especially during the pandemic.

We are here to talk about two very big forces in our world and in our lives, and that of course is China and technology.

And before we get going, I have actually a bit of a surprise for the audience.

Very briefly, and this you'll find either unsettling or a little bit thrilling I think, which is that when you submitted your names for tickets for this occasion, we selected half of you.

And with the help of some funding and some technical wizardry, we got a full listing of all the webpages you've seen in the last 30 days.

And we're going to be putting up that list just very soon.

Now, I want you to remember that little sensation you had there a second ago.

That little, I really, really hope this is a joke moment.

Yeah.

Because that runs through Josh's extraordinary book.

And Josh, I have to tell you, this book was completely eye opening for me.

And I think it will be for a lot of people, whether they care about China or they care about technology or democracy.

Some of the questions that are running through my mind, and we're going to talk about it today, but things like, can we put the genie back in the bottle?

Right.

These technologies which are such a part of our lives, both on the negative side and on the good side, how do we reckon with that?

What does it do to us as a coherent political society?

What does it do to our position in the world?

And so on and so on.

And we're going to get to all of that.

But first, I think it would be really helpful to set the scene a little bit by giving people a sense of the China that you arrived in.

Right.

What brought you to China originally?

What did you think about it as a place?

Was it in your mind, a poor place, a rich place, a technologically advanced place, a backwards place?

And how did that ultimately lead you to taking on this project?

>> Right.

So actually my first trip to China was in 1991.

It was a family trip.

I'm half Chinese, my father's side of the family's Chinese.

And my grandfather organized this trip.

It was two years after Tiananmen Square.

And my image of China was basically shaped by San Francisco.

My grandfather would take me on trips.

He owned a grocery store, and I would work there every summer, and occasionally we would go on these supply runs to Chinatown.

And for a long time I actually thought San Francisco was a part of China.

And so we went on this family trip in the early '90's and we got there...

I was 14 years old and it was almost more than my brain could compute what I was seeing because it was nothing like what I had expected, right?

I was expecting crowded streets with the cacophony of commerce and neon signs kind of hanging from buildings.

And instead what you saw when you got to Beijing in the 1990s was these sort of grim, Leninist buildings, right?

Something out of Moscow.

And people wearing clothes that were either navy blue or gray, rivers of bicycles, people riding donkey carts on the highway, no restaurants or bars or anything like that.

And I think in that moment there was this friction between expectation and reality that sort of created this spark, right, and it kind of lodged in my brain, and sort of over time smoldered into an interest that kind of went beyond my just sort of root seeking for my family.

It just became its own thing.

And my interest in this place that was so vivid in my imagination and was so different in reality.

And so I got just hooked on it.

I went to school.

I learned Mandarin.

And then I went back periodically throughout the 1990s.

And I believe you spent some time in China in that period as well.

And China in the 1990s was just this fascinating place because it was reopening to the world after Tiananmen Square, kind of decade later it was finally sort of letting people back in.

People were traveling there in large numbers.

And it was this period of immense experimentation, right?

Mm.

>> I do remember.

By the way, when I was a student there that the coolest guy we knew was the guy who had a car.

Right.

Right.

And it was just like the whole world was open to us.

So you were over there studying at that point in the '90's?

You were over there visiting?

Yeah, I was studying.

I was studying Mandarin.

I was in college.

And >> I remember one of my most vivid stories from that period of time, which I think really illustrates the kind of place China was.

The late '90's was when punk rock arrived in Beijing.

And it was just the sort of perfect musical genre for Beijing at that time, right?

It was rebellious and young people really glommed onto it.

And I was allegedly studying Mandarin at the time.

And instead I was mostly spending most of my time in punk rock bars.

You were studying punk rock.

Exactly, exactly.

And I remember there was this one guy, he had a this big, tall, skinny, perfect sort of punk rock aesthetic, had a mohawk.

And I remember we would hang out with him and he was telling us all his musical influences, and it was the Sex Pistols and Nirvana.

And then he was like, I also really like Barry Manilow.

What?

And we were like, you can't be a punk rock musician and like Barry Manilow.

And his response was, why not?

>> Now I have to say, Josh, this hits home because a lot of people say, I look a little bit like Barry Manilow.

I wasn't going to...

It's the best story the whole night.

And thank you for that.

Yeah.

I did hesitate to tell this story actually.

I didn't know how you were going to take it.

It's close.

I feel seen.

I feel seen.

Good.

Good.

But >> that was that moment in China, right?

It was just so charming to see people kind of trying to make sense of all the world coming in, right?

China had opened up and it was flooding in and nobody had any context, right?

They didn't know.

All they knew was that they liked things.

And so they were just busy kind of absorbing as much as they can and they were trying to make sense of it.

And so there was just so much possibility and so many unexpected encounters.

And it was just a magical place to be.

Especially later when I got into journalism, it was the perfect place to be a journalist, because everywhere you went was just a fascinating story of this immense country opening up to the world and trying to find its place.

And in 2001, I was there when China got into the World Trade Organization, which of course had been a huge fight.

And also when they won the right to host the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

And I remember people just flooding into the streets filled Tiananmen Square, filled the Bar District, and it was just genuine elation, just real exuberance.

And it was kind of addictive.

>> There was this real feeling of openness to the outside world too.

Almost a kind of ravenousness.

I mean, you capture it with the punk rock moment.

I remember I had a friend in a band, I was a student there in '96.

And the band was really into western rock music, but they didn't have a very large repertoire.

So every night they'd play Hotel California twice.

And so there was a way in which all of this information was kind of rushing across the borders into China.

Right.

And I'm curious, how do you think the government thought about that?

>> Yeah.

I think they were clearly nervous about it.

And there would be these occasional campaigns in China where they would try to clamp down, right?

And I used to think of China at the time as being sort of like an accordion, right?

Mm.

It was just like there'd be times where things would expand and people could explore and new ideas, even political ideas.

And then things would contract and everyone would kind of scuttle back into their apartments and be quiet for a while.

But it was a long pattern of that sort of thing.

But then over time, after I'd been there for a few years, we went through... Jiang Zemin was the leader who came in after Deng Xiaoping.

He was the leader when I first got there.

Then there's this sort of the area under new President Hu Jintao, which more or less sort of continued.

And then in 2012 we had Xi Jinping come to power.

And I don't think we realized at the time, but that was a real inflection point for China.

Mm-hmm.

And that was a moment at which this openness started to close down, right?

And there was always that sort of instinct I think in the Communist Party to close things down, to exert control.

Talk to political scientists, people who study party history and they always point out the party was started as an underground organization, right?

Yeah.

And it has sort of...

Revolutionary outfit >> and sort of its genes.

It's kind of psychic >> infrastructure was of an insurgency.

Right.

And it's kind of hard to take that away ultimately.

Right.

And then one of the sort of key characteristics that drives an organization like that is paranoia, right?

Yeah.

And so I think that that was always a part of the Communist Party's psyche.

And when Xi Jinping came to power, it started to manifest much more clearly and started to push out other impulses in the country.

And starting I think a few years after he came to power, so around 2015 or so after he had sort of consolidated power and sidelined his rivals and he could really sort start implementing his agenda, you started to see this really interesting movement in China, which was for decades the Communist Party had been mostly pulling itself away out of people's lives, out of their personal lives, just allowing them to kind of do what they want to do, get rich.

That was the imperative.

Go out, get rich, be wealthy, and just don't challenge our authority.

It went from that sort of a posture to one where they were reinserting themselves in the lives of individual Chinese people, much more kind of a harking back to the Mao era, right, where they sort of had a vision of the type of society and the type of Chinese people they wanted.

And they were starting to try to mold those people.

And a really key coincidence is that right around this time actually in California and around the United States, there were these key advances in technology and particularly in artificial intelligence that made it possible for computers to start doing really powerful things, right?

For example, recognizing faces, recognizing objects, analyzing vast quantities of data.

And this sort of coincidence of those two developments ushered in this totally new era in China where suddenly Xi Jinping had in these new technologies the tools to start really imposing the Communist Party's discipline on China.

>> I remember reading something that Lenin wrote early on.

It was in a letter to somebody where he was imagining the ideal communist society, and he compared it to an orchestra and he compared the leader to a conductor in an orchestra.

Right.

And he said that the conductor's job is not just to make sure that everybody plays the music correctly, but it's to understand who played the wrong note and why.

Right.

And it's the why that is kind of chilling, because it implies a sort of level of psychic inspection.

How can you know and ultimately what can you know?

And one of the things that was really clear as I'm reading through your work, is the way in which these technologies suddenly seemed to be able to deliver on this promise that had been the dream of the Communist Party from the beginning but they didn't have the way to do it.

It used to be the old line was that the Stasi could only use an index card, was how they would keep track of all of your contacts in East Germany.

And so the confines of the surveillance state were the confines of the index card.

But now all of a sudden they could more or less make it as big as they wanted.

Right.

How did you get interested in this topic?

You were living in and among it, but was there a thing that made you suddenly say, I want to make a book out of this?

>> Yeah.

So around sort of the beginning of 2017, I was working for The Wall Street Journal at the time, and some colleagues and I we had been discussing sort of this shift, right, this effort to sort of reimpose the kind of orchestra idea on Chinese society.

And we were looking for ways into it.

And a colleague of mine, Liza Lin, who's my co-author, ended up being my co-author on this book.

She was a tech reporter.

And her job was to follow investment into startups.

And she noticed sort of in the middle of 2017, a vast amounts of money, including American money flowing into this one area of technology in China in AI, which is computer vision, right?

And that there were these startups that were kind of quietly flourishing and they were basically selling this kind of sci-fi cutting edge technology to police.

And so we went to go see them and I mean luckily at the time, it would be impossible to do this now, but at the time they were so eager for investment and they really wanted to get attention.

So they welcomed us into their offices and they showed us everything.

And it was like stepping onto the set of Minority Report, right, that Tom Cruise movie where they had just cameras that were pointed at the street and in real time kind of logging everything that went past them.

So they would say a gray BMW and they would label a gray BMW or a woman wearing a red sweater on a bicycle and that would be labeled.

And it was a tool that police could use to search to actually create a search engine for surveillance video.

And then there were other systems that could track someone as they moved through a neighborhood.

So they could essentially say, all right, we see gray sweater >> today at this intersection.

Yeah.

Where has gray sweater been over the last 48 hours?

Right, right.

>> Yeah, exactly.

They could say, there was a guy holding a sign saying down with the communist party, and I don't know who he was, but he was wearing red pants or something and then they could look through and search red pants in that time and find that guy.

This is why I never wear red pants.

That is a wise choice.

Just self-protective.

Yeah.

It's just being careful.

Yeah, it really is.

It really is.

So they were open about it, they would talk to you about it?

They were totally open about it.

And at the time, nobody really knew who they were except for a few investors.

And so we wrote about them.

After we wrote about them, they started raising more money.

They eventually did become China's largest AI >> startup in one of the biggest in the world.

This is SenseTime.

SenseTime.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is SenseTime.

I remember I visited them too around the same time and they showed me this stuff and I was sort of thinking to myself, this feels a little creepy, but I didn't have the initiative to write a book.

And so you've now told us so much more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just went home and told my wife, this is creepy.

>> Yeah, yeah.

Well I mean the thing is I mean that kind of happens in China, right, and you see stuff like that and you're like, oh that's wild.

And you think maybe it's a one off.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And I think we were lucky in that our editors agreed that it was interesting and gave us the sort of the leeway to look into it.

But for the book, I think it really came down to a trip I took to Xinjiang in late 2017 with a colleague.

And Xinjiang is this big vast region out in far Northwestern China on the doorstep of Central Asia.

And it's home to these Turkic Muslim minority groups, right, about 14 million of them.

They have very little in common sort of culturally or ideologically, linguistically with Chinese people.

And it's always been a bit of a fractious relationship between people in Xinjiang and the Communist Party.

And we had heard from someone who had visited that all this technology that we'd been writing about was everywhere there.

And so then we went out >> to check it out.

And when you were driving into a place like this to do your reporting, were they keeping an eye on you?

Well, >> that was the thing.

So we actually tried to figure out.

We were like, how do we get there?

We're like, we can't go through the airport because they probably will notice us.

So we did drive, we took a car.

What about your cell phone?

We had to have our cell phones, right?

What we did was we erased all the data.

We completely basically cleared... You're giving out all of your secrets right now.

Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, there's people around.

But I think it's safe.

You guys won't mention it.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah, so we cleared our phones and we snuck in.

Well we didn't sneak in.

We drove in.

At that point I've been a journalist in China for more than a decade and there were very few...

I would be surprised often, that was why I stayed there, but I was very rarely shocked.

Yeah.

And driving into Xinjiang was just truly shocking and just frightening in a way that I've never, I could just feel my heart beating in my chest almost immediately after we got in.

There was just this kind of elemental fear that I never hadn't really experienced in China before.

And it was because it was just what we saw there was just so suffocating, right?

You essentially couldn't move in Xijiang more than a few hundred yards without encountering some sort of security checkpoint where people are scanning your IDs or a bank of cameras tracking you.

We had to get gas for our car and we had to get out and they wouldn't let us into the gas station because to get gas, we had to scan your face just to get into the gas station and we didn't have the right IDs.

We had to get a guy to scan his face for us just to buy gasoline.

You had to get a gas dealer?

We had to get a gas dealer.

And what was truly shocking was when we finally kind of got deeper in and we sort of figured out what was happening and we were talking to Uyghurs sort of furtively, the local population, the biggest group are Uyghurs, and were talking to them and snatches of conversation because we didn't want to be too obvious about it, but we sort of figured out what was going on.

And essentially the police were using all these new technologies and they'd built this sort of vast system to track every minority in the region essentially all of the time.

And then they were gathering this data onto to a central platform and they were using it to categorize Uyghurs based on data that they could gather according to the level of threat that they might pose to communist party rule in the future.

And they were labeling these people either safe, average, or unsafe.

They were categorizing them.

Categorizing them.

And >> one of the analogies that I think you drew in the book, which is very vivid, is that it was in some ways kind of an echo of apartheid era South Africa too, because people were being categorized by ethnic origin.

>> Right, right, exactly.

I mean, there were so many echoes to really sort of dark episodes of the 20th century, right?

That was probably the most disturbing piece of this, right, is that I kind of grew up at the end of the 20th century.

Most of that was already history by the time I became a conscious human being.

But there was things like apartheid, the sort of passbook system that apartheid used to regulate how people could travel.

That was basically something Uyghurs faced.

And then more disturbing was what happened to the people who were being labeled unsafe.

And it turns out that they were being sent to what at the time everyone referred to as schools, and we didn't know what they were actually, but we did find one of them and we went up to it and it was basically a prison.

Had these huge towering walls, spotlights, razor wires being guarded by these men with assault rifles.

And I remember we went up to an official looking sort of guy standing next to the door and we asked, what is this?

We're journalists.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And he's like, it's a school.

And we're like, well, what kind?

What do you teach in a school like this?

And he said, for your own safety, you shouldn't ask those questions.

Wow.

And so we had a Uyghur driver, a taxi driver, and we figured at the very least we didn't want to get him in trouble so we left.

But what we later figured out was that this was just one of dozens maybe hundreds of similar internment camps where they were sending Uyghurs, religious minorities.

Obviously it reminds you of what happened in Germany during World War II.

And it was just this notion that that had returned and was being combined with this sort of 21st century technology was just really disturbing.

>> I'm curious, you've described this kind of Promethean quality of technology.

It can have both these amazingly productive elements and then also of course it can destroy.

And I think Covid was probably the clearest demonstration of the power both positively and negatively of how it was experienced in China.

How did this kind of surveillance tech come into use during Covid?

Why was it important?

What effect did it have ultimately on China's experience of Covid, >> good and bad?

Yeah.

Well, Covid when we started writing this book, actually we sort imagined writing a chapter at the end that would imagine what would happen if a scenario in which another 911 level event happened.

And the reason we thought about that was because 911, the US reaction to that sort of launched this current era of digital surveillance.

It created the global market for digital surveillance and it also created this notion, right, of suspending individual liberties in the name of national security, right, that that was okay.

And that was a notion that China grabbed onto very quickly.

And so we were curious.

Remember after 911 Americans really pretty readily they supported the Patriot Act.

It had I think 70% support, maybe even more.

And really were just happy to kind of take a backseat individually to let the government sort of secure the country.

We were curious what would happen now with sort of this level of surveillance that is possible and the invasiveness that you can achieve with today's technology.

How would people react?

Would they do the same thing?

And then as we were getting prepared to write that chapter, the pandemic hit.

And the pandemic emerged and ended up being an event that was many, many times more serious than 911 obviously, and more life threatening on a global scale and in China.

And so what happened in China was really instructive in that the first years in particular, they really succeeded right?

They used these systems to control the virus without vaccines in a way that almost no other country was able to do, right?

And what was striking was they used some methods that had initially been pioneered in Xinjiang, right?

So I remember walking down one morning early in the pandemic from my apartment, and discovering that my whole residential compound all of the entrances but one had been closed off, right, so that they could track everyone who was coming and going, and they were giving you a pass if you wanted to go out which is exactly what they had done to Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

>> Now, was this the day that you bought a plane ticket to decide to leave?

This would have a powerfully motivating effect on me, I think.

>> Yeah, yeah, I mean it was really frightening.

And then what happened afterwards was they took another page out of the Xinjiang playbook where they made everyone install on their phones a health code app, right?

They would track their movements and measure their exposure risk to Covid 19.

So if you had traveled, it turns out they had detected you traveling through a hotspot or even a district where there had been a few cases, your health code, it would rank you.

Sounds familiar, right, either green, red or yellow, right?

Mm.

And so if you had gone through a hotpot, you were red.

And if that happened, you could be locked down at home but more likely taken off to quarantine.

Mm.

And this is tracking everyone, everyone in the country.

But it was enormously effective in that first year.

So we had talked to people who initially were really creeped out, Chinese people, who were like, I don't know, I don't feel good about this.

We talked to one woman, she had been in Wuhan and she went home to see her mom and then got a phone call from a guy who was like, we know you were in Wuhan.

And she was like, this is creepy.

But a year later as death tolls in the US are creeping up and China's kind of back to normal going to pool parties and that sort of thing, she was like, actually, I'm cool.

I'm fine with it.

Wow.

>> I think I know we're going to broaden this out in just a second to kind of US, China and other things about this extraordinary country and this period or encounter with us.

But I want to just one last question about the book.

How do you think this plays out?

I know it's a prediction and journalists are allergic to prediction, or we should be.

But do you see that this is the kind of system that is sustainable?

Or do you think at a certain point people say, enough is enough, we don't want this anymore, and they begin to sort of push against it or let it be known they don't accept it?

>> I mean, I think you can say for certain that the communist party is going to continue to try to refine this system.

And now because of Covid, they have the infrastructure in place to track everyone in the country and they've had two years of experience doing it.

So they're going to continue to do this.

They're going to continue to refine their systems.

The big wild card is how are people going to react?

You are starting to see some signs of pushback.

There was one instance recently where some security officials in a city used the health code to try to prevent a protest.

They knew the group of people were coming to protest in their city over bank accounts that have been frozen as part of a fraud investigation.

And when they arrived in the city their health codes suddenly turned red and they were shipped off to a quarantine hotel.

Wow.

Which you would sort of say, oh typical China, right?

But unexpectedly that blew up on the Chinese internet, became viral in a way that the communist party was not eager to see.

There was public outrage and they had to fire the top security official in that town.

Mm.

So there are signs of resistance.

I think the question which is really difficult to answer is whether that resistance will ever sort of achieve the escape velocity necessary to overcome the systems of the gravity of the surveillance state.

So... >> I have to tell you, my experience in the United States tells me that Americans wouldn't respond very well to some of these techniques.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

>> Well, I think it is in here in the US which we can definitely talk about at some point.

But I wanted to switch things up a little bit and ask you some questions if I may.

I consent.

Okay.

I get the terms and acknowledge the conditions or whatever it is I'm supposed to do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's a rare opportunity.

I remember actually very vividly the time I first heard the name Evan Osnos was in 2007 in Beijing.

And it was because the Chicago Tribune at the time was publishing this astonishing series of stories of some reporter who had somehow persuaded his editors to let him retrace the steps of an early 20th century English explorer named Edward Dingle who had walked something like 1,000 miles through China.

And there was a reporter who was essentially doing the same thing and filing these stories.

And I remember it being really striking just that any reporter had actually been persuasive enough to do that story.

>> I will note that the company went bankrupt shortly thereafter.

>> It was worth it.

Well, no, also because yeah, I mean, I'd also was really, really struck by the depth and the empathy of those stories.

And I remember looking you up afterwards and looking at your background and you have a... You're like, what's Barry Manilow doing walking across >> China?

And I mean, you have a remarkable background.

I mean your father was a Jewish refugee from Poland.

Your mother was the daughter of a European diplomat and none of that had anything to do with China.

And so I've always been curious about how did you get into China as an American with sort of no connection to this country?

Mm.

I think I was kind of >> seized by it.

I mean, I went into a class in college, and I think this applies to one of the great glories of being a kid, a freshman or a sophomore in college, is that you actually really do have the opportunity to discover vast realms of human experience that you have no encounter before and it can change the whole course of your life.

And that was very much in my case.

I mean, I walked into a class taught by a brilliant professor, and his name was Roderick MacFarquhar.

A legend, yeah.

He was a total legend.

He made the history of China legible because what he did was he put it particularly in terms that were relatable to us as young people.

He taught a whole class on the events at Tiananmen Square, the protest, the democracy demonstrations, and ultimately the crackdown.

And these were young people who were basically our age.

And I remember watching this, reading all of this, it had happened just four or five years before.

And I thought, my God, I've got to understand this place because it's going to be a part of...

I can't understand the world without really understanding it.

So I went to see him and he said, well, you have to study some of the language and you have to eventually start spending time there.

And I did exactly what he told me to do.

And I just went off and started going over there listening to a lot of Hotel California.

And eventually I said to my editors, I mean you're kind of remember this project, this kind of slightly hair-brained project, which is still to this day one of the most extraordinary fun things I've ever had a chance to do.

I said to my editors, look, I really wanna, China is moving so fast, everything is changing so fast.

I need to slow down.

I want to go slow as possible.

Yeah.

I want to slow down to three miles an hour or whatever it is.

I feel like that's probably generous.

Yeah, particularly me, I'm rather a slow walker.

And I don't know why they said yes, but I think it was relatively cheap because I was just walking and sleeping in basically above a restaurant or wherever I would get to at the end of the day.

And I remember when you'd run into people all the time on the road, it was a great way to meet people and have real conversations with people in China because it removed some of the weird static associated with being a foreigner or being from a wealthy city.

Here you are in the countryside, you're just two people walking on a road.

And they would all look at me and I'd explain, well, I'm writing, I'm a journalist from an American newspaper and I'm just walking across Sichuan for a while.

And they would think to themselves, I could see they were saying, my God, this person is so low on the totem pole they make him walk.

Right.

All of them, I mean to a person, they would say, you should take a bus.

Right, right, right, right, right, right.

So there's something valuable in that insight.

And they just thought this poor dimwitted little fellow walking along doesn't even know there's the bus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And >> your experiences in China allowed you to write a book, Age of Ambition, which we discovered today is still a textbook.

It's what the new generation of potential China foreign correspondents are reading and China scholars are reading.

And I was rereading it recently myself, and one of the themes in that book that has I think a lot of resonance today is the importance of propaganda to how the Communist party functions, just how critical that is to the way they maintain power.

I feel like it's particularly resonant today because of TikTok, right?

Yeah.

This is the world's most popular social media network >> and is owned by China.

I think a lot of people don't even know how much it's owned.

It's a Chinese company and it is extraordinarily powerful in this country.

I mean, I will say even before we talk about TikTok, I mean the power of propaganda is something that has become much clearer to all of us as citizens of any country over the course of the last decade or so because we don't call it this, but when you go on social media, it is the experience of receiving propaganda, because it is things that have been essentially edited by algorithm or by your friend group or by very interested parties.

I mean, I had the very funny experience of moving from China to Washington.

And in China there is a ministry of propaganda.

Right.

You sort of almost want to give them credit for just naming it and saying...

Being transparent.

This is propaganda.

Yeah.

Would you like some propaganda?

Yeah.

And then I moved to Washington and discovered that it was a slightly different thing, that you would cover Congress or something and it turned out they didn't have this name for it.

But in Congress there are 435 members of the House and there are 435 ministers of propaganda in each of those offices.

And I was kind of naive.

I would call up and I would sort of talk to somebody and I'd get their side of the story and I'd say, my god, this sounds like a terrible bill that there's being foisted upon the great people.

And then I'd call the other side and they'd say, no, no.

And I'd say, oh my God, oh, you're absolutely right.

I didn't realize just... And so there was a way in which we are inundated with propaganda all the time, and it's become supercharged because of the technologies we're talking about to the point that we're not even aware of what we're seeing and what we're not seeing.

Right.

And that's where TikTok is kind of a prime example, because TikTok is I mean the example that I think of sometimes is that when the Chinese tennis star named Peng Shuai accused a very powerful minister in China of sexually abusing her, she made a public statement.

And that appeared on a lot of social media, but not on TikTok.

Right.

It had been edited out.

Right.

And to a degree that you wouldn't even know it existed if you hadn't been.

Which is remarkable because I mean this was front page news.

Huge story.

Everywhere.

Right.

And I think, so we're living in this era in which what feels like a completely outmoded piece of political technology which is propaganda, is sort of become one of the modern instruments of power games.

Right.

And in our politics, one of the things we've learned is that people will remember something even if they know that it's false.

Right.

If it's said over and over again, if it's delivered in a zippy way.

Right.

It will linger.

Yeah.

And this is something that demagogues have known forever, but is a really contemporary problem.

>> Well, I think one of the really striking findings of your book when you did Age of Ambition was that the Chinese propaganda industry learned a lot from Americans, right, from people like Walter Littman, right?

Yeah.

American public relations.

Can we flip that around?

I mean, what can we learn from China now that we're sort of all in this age of pervasive inescapable propaganda?

Is there anything we can learn from China, Chinese people?

>> I remember that the Chinese system had studied things like Coca-Cola.

Right.

How do you sell people sugar water?

And they said, this could be useful for us here in the Communist party.

I mean, how do we sell people things?

And they adopted a lot of those techniques.

And there's actually a parallel to something that you wrote, Josh, which is about the ways in which a lot of the surveillance technology was actually sort inspired by, adapted from, cribbed from what we created here.

All of the ways that algorithms begin to track your behavior and then model that behavior and then compel behavior.

We've all heard examples of this, but you start with a chat group on the subject of jogging and within two clicks you're in the most extremist running group where you're doing 150 mile race and you're like, how did I sign up for this?

Right.

And there's a way in which that we do borrow from each other in ways that are I think not always healthy.

Right.

Right.

No, I think >> that that's definitely been one of these dynamics that is really fascinating when you're looking at China.

Well, can I ask you?

>> Actually, this is a question sort of along these lines, which is we're watching each other all the time, US and China.

Yeah, yeah.

So right now, these two countries are in this very tense moment, right?

Right.

And I'm sort of curious, you've been living in China until very recently, and I wonder how the Chinese side has experienced this downturn in US China relations?

Here we are.

We had a president who talked about decoupling from China.

And I'm curious, do you think on the Chinese side people say that's impossible, that would never happen, these two countries can't pull themselves apart?

Right.

Or do they look at it and they say, well, maybe actually in the future we should be more self-sufficient, more self-reliant?

>> In China the Chinese views of America really have always been really fascinating and complex.

And for most of the period of time that the first period of time that I was there, and in the period of time you were there early on, most Chinese people really worshiped America.

And it was a real problem for the Chinese Communist Party that America's soft power was so strong.

And I remember asking Chinese people, if you had a choice of where to live, same job, same income, everything else, would you choose China or the US?

And almost everyone would say the US.

And I think that was a fairly common attitude at that time.

Mm.

It actually changed.

I think the moment the change was in 2008 financial crisis.

People say, oh, it was Trump or it was something else.

And a lot of things have happened in the intervening years that have maybe damaged the American image abroad.

But it was the financial crisis in China that I think really changed the way a lot of Chinese people viewed the country.

The financial crisis because they began to say, well, hold on, this system that we bet on may not be as solid as we thought.

And maybe the wisdom that they're espousing about free markets is not what we thought of.

Exactly.

And then China and the Chinese government sort of plowed through the financial crisis.

I mean they did it at great costs with acquiring immense amounts of debt that they're sort of still paying down.

But the Chinese people got through the financial crisis fairly well.

So now I think there is this moment where I think Xi Jinping is an incredibly nationalist leader and he has, I think successfully using all of the propaganda tools at his disposal, created a very nationalist moment in China where people feel themselves on the verge of reclaiming their past greatness, right, and this is Xi Jinping's entire platform.

And they feel that that is near, and they believe the United States is trying to restrain them.

So I think that a lot of Chinese people now do feel perhaps it's time to decouple from the United States because it's trying to constrain China.

And of course there are always going to be other voices.

But that does feel like where we're headed.

And I mean, I'm sort of curious because you're in DC now and you... Don't hold that against me.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I try not to.

But how does the relationship look from your side?

>> Well, I've noticed this thing happen over the course of the last five or 10 years where there really was this consensus beforehand that China was kind of gradually, steadily becoming, and this is oversimplified, but more like us.

They were starting to sort of listen to the same music and dress and it felt like there was this general pattern of convergence, and that was an assumption on both the left and the right.

And I think there's been a recognition over the course of the last few years that was not right, or at least not complete and certainly not preordained.

Yeah.

And that's become a really interesting thing to watch because unfortunately what happens too is that people, and actually I knew a guy who worked on these issues in the White House who said as much to me, he said we were sort of too slow to realize that China was not moving in the direction we thought it was.

And then we overreacted to the point that now we're on this trajectory that can sometimes feel as if we're almost kind of assuming we're in a new Cold War.

Right.

Are we in a new Cold War?

Well, I think you and I both know in the China analysis world, sort of the world of Americans who work on this subject and think a lot about it, that's a really fraught question, because it feels, I think oversimplifying to say, yeah, it's the Cold War, partly because that leads you to bad analytical habits, because you start to say, oh, well we know how Cold Wars work and we won that one, let's just do it all.

Let's just do that again.

But this is totally different because our economies are completely intertwined.

They own huge amounts of US debt and they're buying huge amounts of US products and all this kind of stuff.

So it's a different moment, and so would actually the same instruments work?

So I guess the question, do you think we're in a Cold War?

>> I think I agree with you and that I feel like we're sort of constantly reaching back for some 20th century concepts to understand this moment.

Mm.

And I think that's dangerous, right?

Yeah.

Because I think what's happening now is unprecedented.

It is new, and the relationship between China and the US is unlike I think any relationship probably between two great powers, at least in recent history that we've ever seen.

And how this plays out, I think we do need to liberate ourselves from that notion.

But for one area that I think is really especially hard to figure out is with Taiwan, right?

Mm-hmm.

And where I think a lot of people when they talk about the Cold War, they look at Taiwan and they see sort conflict building and that extreme end people are sort of predicting World War III.

>> And I think that talk has especially expanded since the Ukraine war happened.

It's worth just saying quickly why it is that people in China and why the government is so kind of fixated on it.

There is this belief on the Chinese side, it's deeply held that Taiwan is the sort of last unfinished bit of business.

That's how they would describe it.

They'd say, here's this island that they think the Communist party says should be our territory.

And the only reason it's not is because we were too weak to be able to claim it earlier, but here we are now, we're strong and we're going to be able to do it.

And they're sort of testing America's commitment to, well, do you actually think that you would defend Taiwan in the event that we went after it?

And Joe Biden has sent some kind of clear messages recently that are in their own way kind of confusing to the Chinese side.

The US for a long time has left this very ambiguous.

It's by design that we want to make it unclear what's going to happen.

Right.

Recently, President Biden has said, oh, we would risk American lives to defend Taiwan.

In its own way, that's actually quite a subtle move because it really scrambles the circuits in Chinese decision-making.

Right.

If we were inside the party offices where they're saying, what do you make of this?

I think it's really hard for them to know what to do.

A couple of things we know, and a couple things we don't know.

One thing we know is that Ukraine I think has been a clarifying and sort of chilling moment because everybody assumed going in, oh, the Russian military's so much stronger, they're going to be able to go in, they're going to be in Kiev in 48 hours.

And that's not what happened.

Right.

And I think in the Chinese leadership's mind, that was a little bit of a useful exercise to see, oh, I see, okay, history doesn't actually unfold quite that way.

On the other hand, what they also saw was the United States didn't actually send any forces to Ukraine.

And then you have to take those same things and say the Taiwanese side has also been watching.

And so as they're trying to decide, are we going to make moves that establish greater autonomy, more like independence, or are we not going to do that?

What do we expect from the United States?

The honest answer, and then I'll put this back to you, is none of us really know.

But I will say one thing that's important for us to keep in mind, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have different tolerances for risk.

Right.

You've seen Putin over the course of his time in office take these extravagant risks, I mean going and doing things that people would say, this could undermine the whole enterprise.

And he does these things and in this case it's a disaster.

Xi Jinping hasn't done that.

He's an authoritarian with a capital A, but he has not done things that seem like they might break the whole enterprise and that might ultimately be the differentiating factor.

Right.

What do you think?

>> I think that that distinction is really important.

Xi Jinping like Putin he's sort of a prisoner of his own rhetoric in some ways, right?

I mean, he's made the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation his mission, his version of make China great again.

And a core piece of that is getting Taiwan back, right?

And he's been explicit, that that will be one of the signs of China having attained its greatness.

And you get the sense from Xi that he has driven Putin by ego to a certain degree.

He wants it to happen on his watch.

He wants to go down in history is one of the greatest Chinese leaders ever.

So he certainly...

He has said, "this is not a problem we can leave >> from generation to generation."

Exactly.

Which is a way of saying, as long as I'm around, this is a live matter and I'm going to try to deal with it.

I sort of want to address the big question I think that a lot of us think about as we try to imagine the future of the US and China because we're into this new era now, this era of two superpowers.

We haven't had this in 30 plus years.

And it feels both familiar and I think also really anxiety producing.

And I'm curious how you think about this, call it a contest or maybe it's not a contest.

Does it ultimately lead to a situation in which one of these systems prevails over the other?

Or do you think they can in fact kind of coexist in the world?

Right.

I mean, there's a lot of speculation about what China's intentions are, >> right?

Does it want to take over the world?

Does it want to replace the United States as the preeminent global superpower?

I'm not sure there's evidence for that.

But there is definitely evidence that China wants to make waves and wants to change things.

And the way I sort of think of this is China kind of operates the same way as a Silicon Valley company operates, or at least currently.

The Communist Party is sort of like Facebook.

They want to move fast and break things.

They've got this new model that combines sort of technology invented in Silicon Valley with authoritarianism, and they believe they have this sort of new, nimble form of authoritarianism that will be appealing to other people.

Mm.

And they're just kind of throwing it out there.

They're not evangelical like Americans can be.

They're not saying everyone has to adopt our system, but they're saying, here it is, and if you want it, we'll sell you the tools to do it and we'll bring you over and give you a little bit of training.

And that's been successful.

They've sold these systems globally, more than 80 countries as of 2020, so probably more than that now, including to some police departments in a few democracies, right?

So there's definitely appeal.

We live in times of just intense and really disorienting complexity, right?

We have climate change, we have global pandemics, we have war now, right?

And I think a lot of people out there, a lot of governments, but also just populations who are really eager for simplicity, for simple answers.

But that sort of authoritarian promise leave it to me, right?

And that includes some Americans, right?

I think there are people in this country also sort of find that message appealing.

And so I do think it is a real challenge for the United States to come up with an answer to that, right?

>> One of the things that I'm very mindful of living in the US now and having lived in China all these years is that in some ways the messages we send to the rest of the world are even louder and more vivid than we sometimes assume.

And for a long time, the United States was sending this very, call it a sort of morally glamorous image to the rest of the world.

I mean, for a chunk of the 20th century, and God knows we are not perfect and have never achieved the ideals we want in this country, but we've been oriented to these notions of democracy.

And I think I've always been struck, I imagine you've had the same experience, that particularly when you move around in developing countries and you have that moment where you run into somebody and you say, I'm an American.

And there's just that little spark of recognition of, well, what's that like?

And I think it's a much more fragile thing than we sometimes assume and you can lose it.

And part of the reason we have it is because of sort of the aspiration of social mobility and the idea that we generate these amazing technologies and movies and that one hopes conduct ourselves with a bit of decorum.

And a lot of that stuff has obviously been in doubt in the last several years.

And I'm mindful of something really important though, which is that the United States we have this built in infrastructure for renewal.

Every four years we get to have a bit of a do over and fix some of the mistakes that we made.

And that's a huge difference with China.

Absolutely.

China right now is about to embark on the third term of the same president, and nobody gets to have a word of disagreement on it.

And so in some ways, I mean, our democracy is our secret sauce.

It's the thing that allows us to fix what we screw up.

And I have a hunch that probably is the thing that separates us from a system that doesn't have that capacity.

Right.

>> No, and I actually absolutely agree, and that's often in the course of writing this book and talking about this book, we also often get people be like, oh, well what about the United States?

We have the same systems here.

And that's true.

I mean, the New York Police Department has some really scary tech, right, and they will use it.

The difference is that the United States, we do have rule of law.

We have an independent media, we have elections, we have courts.

And the key is we need to maintain and use them.

Mm.

And I'm just as guilty of this as anyone, as an American sort of taking those for granted.

Yeah.

And I think now more than ever, especially with China out there sort of offering this other example, I think now is the moment that we really need to sort of make sure that we are maintaining those institutions.

>> And then we can have a conversation like this where we talk about the big questions.

This has been a total treat.

Josh Chin, thank you very much and thank you to the Kentucky Author Forum.

Yeah.