The Self, Security and the Surveillance State #11

Today, I'm joined by Rogier Creemers, Assistant Professor in China Studies at Leiden University, and the Co-editor of Law and the Party in China: Ideology and Organisation and by Josh Chin of the China Bureau at the Wall Street Journal, who is also the co-author with Lisa Lin of the new book, Surveillance State, China's quest to launch a new era of social control.

This episode of The Future of You covers:

• The macro context, discussing the geopolitical economic and trade situation
• Technology transfer, highlighting the issues over semiconductors, and China's ambition to play a bigger role in the global economy and technology. 
• Mass surveillance at a personal and even biological level of Chinese citizens, predominantly, but not exclusively, by the Uyghurs. 
• The social credit system, and both the Chinese and Western understandings and perhaps misunderstandings of that. 
• The Supreme People's Court blacklist system
• The regulation of algorithms
• The nature of authoritarianism versus personal autonomy. 
• Why Chinese culture contains no such notion of autonomy

The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology?: www.amazon.co.uk/Future-You-Identity-21st-Century-Technology-ebook/dp/B08XBN4GBB

Links and references at: www.traceyfollows.com

Transcript

Tracey Follows  00:20

Welcome to the Future of You. In this episode, I'm joined by Rogier Creemers, Assistant Professor in China Studies at Leiden University, and the Co-editor of Law and the Party in China: Ideology and Organisation and by Josh Chin of the China Bureau at the Wall Street Journal, who is also the co-author with Lisa Lin of the new book, Surveillance State, China's quest to launch a new era of social control. In this in depth and illuminating conversation, we start with the macro context, discussing the geopolitical economic and trade situation, especially on technology transfer, highlighting the issues over semiconductors, and China's ambition to play a bigger role in the global economy andnd technology. It's a seam that is richly sewn by Josh chin in his new book, which I urge you to go out and buy, as he takes us on a journey of the mass surveillance happening at a personal and even biological level of Chinese citizens, predominantly, but not exclusively, by the Uyghurs. We cover levels of security and surveillance, the systems that are employed. And that includes, of course, the social credit system, and both the Chinese and Western understandings and perhaps misunderstandings of that. The Supreme People's Court blacklist system, the regulation of algorithms, data security laws, and the nature of authoritarianism versus personal autonomy. And why Chinese culture contains no such notion of autonomy, rather, a belief that humans are born incomplete, with the task of the human being, being one of self cultivation and self improvement, and society's tasks being to enable that. It's a slightly longer episode than usual, with an in depth discussion with two of the very best China watchers out there. So please do enjoy the future of identity, privacy, and the surveillance state.

Tracey Follows  02:32

So Rogier, and Josh, thank you so much for joining me here on the future of you really appreciate you, you taking the time to join me. 

Josh Chin  02:39

It's a pleasure to be here. 

Rogier Creemers  02:40

Pleasure to be here.

Tracey Follows  02:42

I wondered if for our audience who some might have more background in China, some might have a little knowledge of what's going on in China and might have been picking up some of the quite heavy press coverage of late around the Congress Party and President Xi's third term. I wonder if you both could just give us your opinion and context to what's happening with China and especially sort of geopolitically on the world stage? Who would like to start? 

Josh Chin  03:16

I guess, I guess I can go first on this one. You know, I think what's happening with China right now is that it is in the midst of a, a really tectonic transition away from the era of reform and opening that followed the death of Mao Zedong, so for the past 30 years, into a new phase that is that is dominated by Xi Jinping. And then also by his ideas about governance, which are really a sort of form of tech authoritarianism, or some some people would argue tech totalitarianism, that are all about maximum control for the communist party with a humongous emphasis on security, both China's own national security and then domestically within China. And we're just starting to see this play out - Xi Jinping just got his, was named to a third term as the as General Secretary of the Communist Party, which is breaking with sort of succession norms that have been put in place by by Deng Xiaoping years ago to sort of prevent a return to kind of Mao style one man rule. And so we'll sort of see what he does with this with this new term. One of the things he did accomplish recently was he managed to pack the top leadership all with his own protegees and allies. So there's essentially no one left at the top of the Communist Party, who can really challenge him or would be inclined to challenge him. So it really it really is. Xi Jinping describes it as a new era in China and I think he's right. 

Rogier Creemers  05:01

To add to that, I think Joseph gave a very good picture of what's happening at the elite level. But I think there is also a very big structural dimension that we need to talk about. And to a very significant degree that has to do with China's development trajectory, where we've now had over three decades of meteoric growth, but that meteoric growth started from a very low starting point . In the early 1990s, Chinese GDP per capita was under 500 US dollars per year. We're now at about $12,000. And that has all kinds of consequences. It means, for instance, that all of the easy ways in which you can sort of have a rapid takeoff, those ways have been exhausted. And more broadly, there is a model that's being exhausted as well, China grew through at first making very low value added stuff like toys and clothes. And it's now at the point where it's making iPhones and laptops. But the problem with that is that it limits the extent to which you can grow your economy. The second element is that many of these sources of economic take off are now becoming impediments. And you see this very clearly in the energy sector, where if China wants to become a leader in green tech it's going to have to take on sooner or later, the coal lobby, which is an incredibly powerful and well connected lobby. In terms of vested interests, it's really pretty big. And so the problem that you now have is that over the last 30 years, you could say we need to maximise GDP. Now the Communist Party is saying not every unit of GDP is created equal, there are forms of GDP that are better than others. And we need to come up with a new model that takes that into account, which in and of itself means re politicising economic management, because these trade offs if you if you don't say we're going to simply maximise GDP, these trade offs can only be dealt with politically. And so when people say it's politics back in control in a way that is because it cannot be any other way. But that also means that the Communist Party is reaching into a vocabulary or a repertoire of tactics that is very clearly very Leninist. And that is that is what we're seeing playing out now. That obviously takes place against the background of a domestic society, which is far more connected, far more mobile, far more aspirational, which also comes with headwinds, youth unemployment, population ageing, and obviously an international environment that is not very welcoming anymore to China playing a bigger role in the global economy, and certainly in technology.

Tracey Follows  07:45

So Roger, you talked to me before about there being a perception and I hope I'm characterising this correctly of you know, a kind of real economy, and then a financialized, economy, and Xi making some kind of distinction between those. Where does technology fit into that? Is it real? Or is it financialized? How important is it to this sort of this repositioning of the economy and its management?

Rogier Creemers  08:13

It is very important, but not necessarily in every way. When we in the West talk about innovation, you know, very often the first thing we think about are the big tech platforms, the Amazons, the Facebooks the Twitters, and so on and so forth. You know, and we have this idea of individual entrepreneur-driven economic development built on data, and so on and so forth. And what the Chinese government really has said over the last two or three years is that, you know, consumer internet, it's all very nice, and it's great that people can order food and so on and so forth. But in the end, it's just a slightly more sophisticated way of getting people to fork out for a new T shirt or a new piece of furniture or whatever, it doesn't sort of durably add quality to the economy. The same is true for fintech. And we've really seen this in the very strict regulations that are now put in place on the online FinTech sector, China has banned cryptocurrencies, already started banning banks from transacting in cryptocurrencies in 2015. And over the last couple of years that has evolved into a complete ban on crypto mining and transactions because it sees crypto as a source of volatility. And if there's anything that the Communist Party really doesn't like, it is volatility, it's unexpected surprises. You know, that's that's very much a negative thing. But we also see this in more traditional FinTech for instance, in and financial, which is no longer just a payment system or a system to move money around. They've also diversified into lending and into wealth management, which are activities that have a direct bearing on the money supply, and which take financial operations as a means of capital accumulation as a way of making profit in their own right. And what the Communist Party essentially has said is, you know, that only leads to volatility financialization, again, is not a high quality form of of GDP generation, it doesn't add anything durable to the quality of your economy. So what we want is FinTech to be the handmaiden for lack of a better word to the real economy, and not be a locus for capital accumulation in its own right, where you see a lot of the investment going, and government attention going is hard tech. And that's everything ranging from robotics and corporate software to things like satellite monitoring systems for more effective agriculture. So it's really using the digital in, in the broad sense to empower traditional economies that mostly produce goods, in some cases, services, but mostly goods.

Rogier Creemers  08:21

I mean, Josh, your whole book Surveillance State is about the role of technology in this economy in this society, I'm sure you have plenty to add to that. 

Josh Chin  10:57

Yeah, you know, I think, I think one really interesting thing about what, what the Communist Party has been doing with the economy under Xi Jinping and and this and this, the sort of move away from the scepticism of the consumer internet companies, you know, big sort of, ecommerce companies like like Alibaba or Tencent that does gaming and social media, is that it's moving away from the one area of the economy that was previously genuinely innovative. It was it was the one area of the economy that was also possibly not coincidentally, dominated by, by private companies. And it was a real engine of growth and dynamism and inspiration, you know, within China, people like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba were heroes to generations of, of Chinese young people. And, and Xi has really moved heavily against this these companies, they he cancelled the IPO famously, of Ant Financial, which is the FinTech arm of Alibaba, which was, which was supposed to be was expected to be the largest IPO in history at the time. And and really, you get the sense in China now, when you're talking to entrepreneurs, to young sort of ambitious people that they don't know what to do, right, they don't sort of they're a little bit lost. The one area where there clearly is a lot of emphasis now, because of the Communist Party's emphasis is in hard tech is in areas like AI, like chips and other other sort of tech that Rogier mentioned. But that's like, that's a that's a very limited area. Right. And it's one that, you know, not everyone wants to go into, and, and it's also, you know, China has had very limited success so far, in those areas. And so it's a really, it's a really interesting move on on Xi Jinping's part to move to essentially shift economic resources and energy from one sector that was, by all accounts extremely dynamic and innovative into another area where where China's prospects are less certain.

Tracey Follows  13:11

It seems kind of a paradox that maybe I'm mischaracterizing that, whilst that's going on in China, and there's a move in that direction, back in Europe, and the West or certainly in Europe, in the UK, there's a sort of move away from industry, a deindustrialization and a re financialization of some countries and how is that going to work out? Are we going to have an imbalance, do you think? And sort of allied to that which of the which of the regions do you think is more ready and prepared and will be more successful if a proper decoupling does take place? 

Rogier Creemers  13:46

I think none of us is really prepared for the consequences of a true decoupling. And certainly one of the things that I haven't seen, for instance, now in relation to, for instance, the sanctions, the sanctions around semiconductors, you know, the semiconductor industry is perhaps the most complex economic activity in the world right now. It involves hundreds, if not 1000s, of companies, it involves technology that's really pushing the limits of the laws of physics. You know, the metaphor I sometimes use is, it's a finely tuned Swiss watch that some of these sanctions are now taking a hammer to. And that's happening in a sector that was already under pressure, you know, we all know about the chip shortage in a range of industries. And I think we're sort of still trying to figure out the fallout from that, and certainly, so is the Chinese government, as well as the businesses that are that are involved in this sector. And you know, over the long run, that sector will probably readjust, but it's going to be hugely expensive and time consuming. And so the question really is, there seems to be a paradigmatic shift where we move from a globally integrated digital economy that had been developing with economic efficiency as the sole organising principle under WTO rules with not really a lot of meaningful borders, impeding the flow of goods, you know, components, semi finished products and all the rest of it. We now seem to be moving towards a situation where we're saying economic efficiency alone isn't good enough, there are massive security concerns here as well, so we need to account for those. And automatically, that means that economic efficiency is going to go down, that automatically means that prices are going to go up. And that means, you know, if we think this through, for instance, are we ready for a world in which in which a smartphone costs two or three times the amount of money that it does now, and where it isn't sort of available on call in hundreds of shops in any city, but where it comes with a with a multiple month waiting period? That being said, you know, sometimes I'd like to take the Chinese on their word and there was a very interesting report that briefly came out a couple of months ago, done by very well respected academics at Peking University, that was immediately taken down from the internet. But that report very clearly signalled how these Chinese researchers at least see China as being far more vulnerable to the impact of decoupling than the United States. 

Josh Chin  16:14

Yeah, you know, that's a, that's a really good point that Rogier makes. I mean, it's it is... It is a very difficult moment for China, right, especially with these with these new restrictions on semiconductors. I mean, for listeners who haven't been following it that closely recently, the Biden administration imposed, a  really, really broad set of export restrictions on any American entity. So that's an individual or a company providing American technology or know how to Chinese companies, for the production of chips, of advanced chips and semiconductors. And the United States, controls so much of the chip industry, especially at the high end, as Rogier was mentioning, in the end, we're we're we're pushing the laws of physics that really sort of tiny chips that you need to sort of to run AI applications and missiles and that sort of thing. The US completely dominates that, that part of the of the industry. And so it is effectively impossible for China to make those chips without relying to one degree or another on on American technology and know how. So depending on how strictly the US government decides to implement these restrictions, it could, it could really just destroy the chip industry in China, or certainly set it back for many, many years. And, and when you just think about all of the applications for chips, it really has the potential to sort of ripple out through through the Chinese economy. 

Tracey Follows  17:47

I mean, the States might have to go to, you know, South Korea and other Southeast Asian and South Asian countries for lots of resources, and to plug some gaps in supply chain if they can't reach out to China. And I guess vice versa, China will probably also need to use those countries for resources. And so do you foresee in this sort of bifurcation, potentially of these two bigger regions, that there's a bit of a battle over the access and the resources in I don't know, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand? Is that why there is so much geopolitical attention and kind of economic interest in those in those areas now? 

Rogier Creemers  18:28

Well, certainly, you know, if we talk about the battle for resources, again, we have to think about the complexity of the sector that we're dealing with. And again, this complexity is unfathomable. You cannot duplicate a chip industry, the costs to entry are so incredibly high. Just to give you an indication of the sort of the numbers that we're talking about TSMC, the Taiwanese company that is the most advanced chip manufacturer in the world, is expecting to spend about $100 billion by itself on capital expenditure in the next couple of years. That company alone, therefore, is going to invest three times as much as the European Union, foresees to spend in the EU equivalent of the chip sector over the next near decade. These are the numbers that we're talking about. And even if China could afford recreating all of these facilities, which it can't, because nobody can, then you still have the problem that again, you need hundreds of 1000s if not millions of extremely highly trained engineers, experts and specialists, you need access to extremely well refined chemicals. Just to give a stupid example. I'm talking to you from the Netherlands and this is obviously a big topic here because in the Netherlands, there is a company called ASML and ASML makes a machine that is indispensable in the lithography process, you know the etching of the circuits in semiconductors. It's a monopolist, there is no other company in the world that can make that can make those machines. But it itself has 1000s and 1000s of suppliers, many of whom, again, are a monopolist or oligopolists in their field, they are so highly specialised to make, for instance, the optical tools, that are necessary for that machine to function. There is only a very small number of companies in the world that can make that. So what you're really talking about is not just, you know, reducing what TSMC does or what ASML does, but you really have, they sit on top of an enormous pyramid that we haven't even begun I think as a policy issue to fathom the complexity of part of that is obviously rare earths. And this is where a very interesting political question comes in. We call them rare earths, but they're not actually that rare. The problem is, they are, they occur naturally in very many places of the world, but extracting them is an incredibly filthy business. And this is a sort of filthy business that for political reasons Western countries have tried to move away from because it's incredibly polluting, you know, labour conditions, almost by definition, are fairly unpleasant. And so we were happy for all of that stuff to happen in China. That means that China has very significant amounts of market share in these activities, in some cases near monopolies. Again, are we ready to pay the political cost to reopen these mines in our own countries or in our, you know, in our allies, coming with all of the social and political costs that that will entail? 

Tracey Follows  21:37

You mean an end to greenwashing? 

Rogier Creemers  21:39

God forbid!

Tracey Follows  21:41

Exactly. Josh, I'm sure you'd like to come in on this. 

Josh Chin  21:45

Yeah, you know, it's interesting actually had, I was I was back in United States recently, I'm from, from the state of Utah, which has a famous Lake, called the Great Salt Lake, and which turns out contains large amounts of lithium we're talking about lithium used for batteries. And I didn't, I didn't realise this, but I ran into a Chinese businessman, when I was back there who, who was involved in trying to find ways to extract lithium from the Great Salt Lake. And what he was saying was, is that there's only one company in the world that has the technology that is capable of extracting lithium from saltwater like this in an efficient way that is actually not environmentally destructive. And, and that company is in China. And so he is, you know, he is, he is desperately trying to find a way to get that company involved in, in pulling lithium out of the Great Salt Lake, near my hometown. But, you know, I asked him about the geopolitics of it. And he was he's sort of you've been working has been working on this for years, and he's kind of thrown his hands up. Because he's not, he's not sure it's going to work anymore. So I mean, like, that's just a small example of how it works. But I think, you know, I think that's, that's gonna play out around the globe. 

Tracey Follows  23:05

That's amazing. I did not know that at all, that's a revelation. So that's a really good context, I think. And we've talked a little bit about the macro, what about the micro? Let's turn to think about some of the technologies you obviously talk a lot about both of you in terms of governance, but also in terms of, you know, just people going about their ordinary, everyday business in China. What happens when we can't get any semiconductors or the Chinese Communist Party and the industry within China can't get semiconductors, let's say, and nobody can have a smartphone to carry around and track themselves and put themselves through the surveillance system? Or there's a problem with facial recognition, getting getting hold of that sort of technology? Can the surveillance industry as it stands in China, keep up, given the limitations or perhaps the challenges and obstacles that there might be in in in supply? Or maybe there won't be any any challenges in China and all the challenges are in the States? 

Josh Chin  24:09

No, I think I think you are going to see some some major challenges for the the surveillance industry, the entire surveillance system in China with what's what's going on now. I don't know, I don't think that that's necessarily the US, the US's main target. I think they're their main concern seems to be with the Chinese military. They want to deny these technologies to the military. They're they're worried about about things like AI weapons, and that sort of thing. But, but surveillance is another motivator for them. Even if it's a secondary one, and you know, already you're starting to see talk at some of the top AI facial recognition computer vision startups in China about layoffs, which is which is really a kind of shocking turn of events. I mean, these companies were for years, adding people, adding staff at an amazing clip, they couldn't get enough people in to help them, you know, with scrubbing data or engineering new products. And now they are Megvii, which is one of the top, the top facial recognition companies in China is reportedly considering fairly significant layoffs. So I think you're going to see, it's a problem. I mean, the, a lot of the companies, the tech companies in China have been stockpiling chips they've seen, you know, they could see some of this coming. But eventually, those stockpiles are going to run out. And you are going to, you know, it is going to be hard for China to replace that. 

Rogier Creemers  25:42

That being said, what is not happening, but just to be complete is that Chinese consumers are essentially being cut off from smartphones. So Apple will, at least, you know, under the status quo be able to continue to sell iPhones into China for the foreseeable future. And the same thing is true for Samsung, and so on, and so forth. So, this is about Chinese smartphone manufacturers that will not have access to chips above a certain performance threshold. And that threshold isn't dynamic, right? So it's never going to move. But an individual Chinese person will be able to get an iPhone, or a Samsung phone or any other non chinese brand of smartphone. It is just that Chinese companies will not be able to get access to the chips inside those phones. We're already by the way seen signs of a grey market in chips developing. So it's going to be very interesting to see what all the fallout of this is going to be across the supply chain. 

Josh Chin  26:40

On the grey market topic that what a really great example of this and just also the you know, of the complexity of supply chains, and the difficulty of actually denying this trade from a regulator standpoint is that recently, the US government banned NVidia which is a California and chipmaker they make GPUs (graphics processing units), which originally you know, designed for for gaming, but which turned out to be really excellent for training AI algorithms as well. The US government banned Nvidia from selling its its highest end GPUs to China, which Nvidia came out and said was going to cost them something on the order of $400 million per quarter in business. But if you look around and you go you just Google not Google, I guess you Baidu around on on, on Chinese e commerce sites. And, and you can find these chips for sale on Taobao, which is a, which is a commercial ecommerce site. So there are all sorts of ways for these technologies to get into China. And it will, it will depend on on exactly how strict the US wants to be in trying to deny it. So just just to say it's all very, it is very complicated. 

Tracey Follows  28:00

It is indeed. Now, Josh, in your book, Surveillance State, you take us on a little journey, particularly at the beginning of a chap I think his name is Tahir where you, it's fascinating. I wonder if you could without them giving too many spoilers, because obviously people want to enjoy it. I wonder if you could just take us on his journey a little bit to illustrate the kinds of surveillance through the implementation of technology in the Chinese state that that he comes into contact with? 

Josh Chin  28:33

Yeah, yeah. So Tahir, his full name is Tahir Hamut. He's a, he's considered by some to be one of the greatest Uyghur living poets. And so Uyghurs are a Turkic Muslim group that come from the far northwestern region of China known as Xinjiang. And so he's a poet. He's also a filmmaker. And he, you know, is a sort of towering intellectual figure in a room he and his story. One of the things that story illustrates, which I think is really fascinating is the sort of boiling frog nature of state surveillance, in that he, you know, being a Uyghur growing up in China he sort of his entire life was was subjected to some level of scrutiny because Uyghurs for for for many, many years have been very resistant to Han Chinese rule. There's there's been a lot of conflict and and so the Communist Party has always kept a very close eye on Uyghurs particularly influential Uyghurs like like to hear. So in Xinjiang around the late 2016, early 2017, a new Communist Party boss arrived, and the Communist Party at this point was was had in prosecuting what it called a People's War on Terror. The government had suffered some terrorist attacks that outside of Xinjiang and carried out by Uyghurs that it was quite concerned about and really been cranking up the pressure and they sort of felt like it wasn't enough. And they wanted to really try something new. And so in 20, late 2016, the new party boss comes in and starts implementing a incredibly intense rollout of cutting edge surveillance technology throughout Xinjiang.

Josh Chin  30:22

You know, just installing huge banks of surveillance cameras building, what he called convenience police stations, throughout Uyghur neighbourhoods. And, and as this was happening, Tahir sort of didn't really, he didn't really notice it at first, right, because he'd always had sort of grown up seeing police and seeing surveillance cameras. And it was only one day in the sort of spring of 2017, when he and his wife got called into the police station that he started to realise that something new was happening. And what happened in the police station was he and his wife were called out to a basement, asked to line up with a bunch of other Uyghurs and subjected to biometric data collection. So they'd been told that they were there to do their fingerprints taken, which which they did. But they also had their blood taken, they had their voices recorded, they were asked to read from a newspaper article while they're while their voices were recorded. And then they had 3d models of their of their faces made in this really painstaking process where they had to sit in front of this camera and sort of turn their head to the left and turn it to the right and up and down and open their mouths and close them. And, you know, none of the police said anything about what this was for. But as they were leaving the police station, it just, they were trying to make sense of it. And they sort of it was just a sign that something something new was happening. And then over the next few weeks, the full picture kind of came into view. And they started hearing stories about other Uyghurs in other parts of town being taken away and disappearing, being sent to schools. And then there were new rumours about a data collection platform based on sort of military technology that have been that was developed for counterinsurgency operations that was being used in Xinjiang to collect data, on Uyghurs, on their behaviours on their on who their friends were, how often they prayed, what sort of content they had on their phone. And that data was being used to categorise Uyghurs according to the level of threat that they pose to the Communist Party rule. And people who are deemed safe, were allowed to move about freely. But those who are deemed unsafe were sent off to what were effectively internment camps where they were subjected to political reeducation. And at one point Tahir, one of his one of his best friends disappeared, and was taken away. And he started sleeping with, with a pile of clothes next to his bed, because he had heard about Uyghurs being taken away in the middle of the night in their underwear. And, and locked away. And so I won't give away the entire story. But But basically, he he did, he did start to try to find a way to escape. He did manage to escape through through some really, there's some luck and some guile. But he was he ended up being one of the last really prominent leaders to get out ofXinjiang before the door slam shut. 

Tracey Follows  33:21

And is that story very specific to Xinjiang and, you know, the problems that we hear emanating from there, or is it a canary in a coal mine for sort of wider application across Chinese society and maybe even globally for the use of technology to surveil people at very biological, very personal level?

Josh Chin  33:42

Yeah, you know, actually, after I took my first trip to Xinjiang, which was at the end of 2017, when all of this was just started starting to come to light, I remember coming back from that trip, going back to Beijing, and I was meeting with a with a Chinese human rights activist for a completely different story, but I just sort of happened to mention where I'd been and describe what I'd seen and, and he's, you know, he immediately said, Oh, that's what's happening in Xinjiang now is going to is just a prelude. That's, that's, that's coming from the rest of China. And I remember at the time kind of being sceptical of that, right, I thought I felt like, you know, the level of surveillance in Xinjiang and it really is it is pervasive and suffocating in a way that that that makes 1984 seem like child's story, right? It's just it's incredibly just intimidating and almost unimaginable if you haven't been there. And so I thought, I thought that's that's an exaggeration. That's probably not that's really not true, but years later, beginning of 2020, I remember coming down from my apartment, this was the beginning. This was when the what was known at the time as the novel Coronavirus had just escaped from Wuhan. And I came down from my apartment into my residential compound in Beijing and I realised that all of the exits to the compound had been blocked off except for one. So that everyone in this compound other 1000s of people who lived there, they all have to go through this one exit, and they would get and they would, and we were being issued passes to allow us to go out and buy groceries and that sort of thing. And they were tracking our movements. And that is exactly the method of management that that the Chinese government was using in Uyghur compounds in Xinjiang a few years earlier. And then after that, the government rolled out this this health code system, which is a smartphone based system that tracks the movements of essentially everyone in China. And, and tracks whether where they've been whether they've been in a high risk area for COVID, whether they've been in proximity to someone who had COVID, or it was a close contact of someone who had COVID. And then it assigns a rating, a risk rating based on that exposure, which, you know, is again, sort of one to one transfer from Xinjiang, where in Xinjiang they were they were trying to track the spreading of the spread of ideological viruses, right. But in the rest of China with the with the pandemic, they were tracking an actual virus. And so they did, they did, it ended up expanding systems that were used in Xinjiang, or piloted in Xinjiang to the entire population of China,

Tracey Follows  36:30

Now Rogier, you and I have talked about the health code before. We've talked about it in relation to the social credit system. So I wonder if you could expand on what Josh was saying. And also, you know, tell listeners a little bit more about the health code and how the social credit system all fits into this use of technology. Or maybe it doesn't?

Rogier Creemers  36:47

Well, in a way it doesn't, it doesn't. They are separate systems, but we tend to sort of conflate them. The social credit system essentially, is an amplification device that get puts on top of traditional forms of law and regulation, which is essentially a means of essentially better enforcing the law. China has had huge problems. It doesn't have huge problems in writing laws, but it has huge problems in getting people to follow them. And that leads to things like distrust in the marketplace, which Beijing sees very much as an impediment to continued growth. So the whole idea of the social credit system is to be able, one to add on extra punishments to people who break the law particularly badly and then you end up in a blacklist. And the best known blacklist system is the Supreme People's Court blacklist system that you end up on, when you have been convicted of something and you haven't met the terms of that conviction, you haven't paid your fine or you haven't paid back your debt, that sort of thing. And then indeed, there are extra sanctions that follow. But what we think is that it's sort of this, you know, the word Orwellian is used all the time, that it's this sort of massive machine that is constantly sucking up information about every single Chinese individual, and then rolling out with a sort of dynamically updated, quantified score, that then decides everything that they can do. And that is phenomenally overblown, you know, there isn't a system in the world that can do that. And certainly, there isn't a system in China that can do that. But it is that sort of that fantasy that we have, I do think sometimes we like to sort of overreact to what China's doing and make it into a bit more of a boogeyman than it actually is. But indeed, with the health code thing, the notion was, you have a traffic light system. And, you know, we use technologies, including things like geo tracking, to identify whether you can go into public spaces, that's the green light, the yellow light is you should probably get tested or go into short term quarantine and the red light is you should go into into long term quarantine. And what we are increasingly seeing is that these systems are then being used, for instance, to deal with protests. For instance, to forestall protests, you can essentially switch people's health code systems to red and there are reports that this has happened. The problem obviously being in this when we think about technology, it's very easy to to come up with the most dystopian case. But we forget that, you know, if you want a system that works to prevent the spread the spread of, you know, an actual virus, if you're going to use it for different purposes, its utility in preventing that spread of that virus is going to decrease. And the same thing is true for the social credit system where if you come up with a single metric to qualify, or to quantify an individual's behaviour, that metric is actually not going to tell you very much about that person. And so the moment that you add on functionality to any system, its original function starts degrading. Now the interesting thing and you ask the question and the question that I get a lot is you know, to what extent is going, is this going to spread globally? And this is where I do feel obliged to remind our listeners that other governments and other countries have agencies too right? And we do see, there is, there is such a thing as technology creep, where, you know, when a technological function is available, and there is a political crisis or a political moment where that is demanded, you know, then that's an opportune moment for states to expand those capabilities. Just look at what the Patriot Act was able to do to American civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. But all of this is to say that, you know, unlike the novel Coronavirus, the spread of technologically empowered forms of surveillance is a political choice, and it's a corporate choice. And, you know, if we are unhappy with the potential of that choice, then, you know, we have ways of political agency to stop that. But it is, again, sort of it fits into this notion of China as a boogeyman that is sort of going to roll out over the world. No, and as these chip sanctions also, underline, other governments have agency too.

Tracey Follows  41:21

It's interesting, that point about perceptions, I think, because I mean, even when I've been at conferences, or events or in discussions in debates, you know, especially about the social credit system, because I think you, Rogier, were the first person to explain to me just how it was born out of an administrative system actually, like a legal system, if anything, but when when I've debated and discussed it, in groups of people here, in the UK, for example, you know, somebody, a Chinese person who's got up made the point, that we seem to have a very groupthink, one dimensional view of the technology and how it's utilised in society. And what I remember one girl, in particular, speaking up and saying, you know, as a woman, she feels much safer walking around certain districts in China, because of the surveillance technology and the CCTV, etc. than she does, for example, in London, I mean, I mean, London's got a lot of CCTV, so about, but I think the point she was making and that I'm trying to make is that, obviously, there are completely different perceptions and completely different narratives and part of it depends, it depends on sort of, you know, the culture and the cultural narratives. I don't know if you want to speak to that, Josh, or Rogier, because I know you do pick up on that in the book in Surveillance State a little bit as well, you do talk about the US, you also talk about places like Uganda, and it's a good reminder from Rogier that obviously, it's not that China is shouldn't be that China is that it's a bogeyman, because every state or many states have this ability, to implement it in several different ways. 

Josh Chin  42:58

Yeah, well, if you want to get sort of really grand about it, I mean, in some ways surveillance is is indivisible from from states from government period, right? I mean, every government and state has to collect a certain amount of information on its population, otherwise, it can't do things like levy taxes, or, or, or draft people for the military and that sort of thing. Right. So so, you know, governments have been doing this for for an extremely long time, centuries. In the sort of modern era, of course, with the Patriot Act, the US, the US actually sort of gave birth to the entire digital surveillance industry globally. So, so China's certainly not unique. But you know, this question of kind of attitudes towards surveillance or towards privacy and culture is a really interesting one. I mean, I think, undeniably, if you look around the globe, different countries deal with these issues in different ways. You know, Europe, obviously, is one of the strictest places for the regulation of data and digital technologies anywhere. The US has a bit schizophrenic, China, China is evolving. You know, the one one really interesting factoid that I came across when writing the book was that, that the word for privacy in Mandarin, did not appear in the official Chinese dictionary until 1998. Right? So it is, yeah, yeah. It's I mean, it probably existed in in conversation, the way language works, but it wasn't sort of officially acknowledged by by the government until 1998. And so the conversation about privacy in China is young, but there is a conversation. And what I think is interesting in China is there are certainly people who you will run across who feel like you know, China's more collectivist society it's not you know, the people in China don't care as much about individual rights or individual identity. And they're much more focused on the sort of common good. And that that may or may not be true. I think what is really interesting in in China is that as privacy consciousness has grown mostly in in bigger, wealthier cities, the government has been really savvy in the way it approaches that rather than censor that conversation, which it could try to do, as it does with a lot of other conversations, it actually embraced it. And I think it's reflective of a sort of understanding within the Communist Party of the malleability of privacy as a concept, right, if you ask someone to define what privacy is, it's almost impossible to do in one or two lines, right, you can take an entire book and sort of not be able to fully capture it, right? Because it's one of these as as important as it is, it's a really incoate, sort of concept. And I think, you know, the Chinese government intuited that, and what they've done is, whenever there are privacy controversies as there are, they direct them at companies. Right. And so so China now has, you know, it's a sort of regular pattern where some sort of privacy scandal will emerge. One instance, I remember, the CEO of Baidu of China's Google said at a tech conference once that, oh, China's a great place to run a tech company, because Chinese people don't care about privacy, and you can just take their data. And as soon as that kind of went out, it blew up, and he had to apologise. And, and it partly blew up because the People's Daily and China Central Television helped it blow up. So the government's really it's sort of taken, it's taken privacy and redefined it as, as a concept that applies to companies but not the government. And so they actually, you know, speaking of writing good laws, as Rogier mentioned earlier, China actually has one of the world's strictest Personal Information Protection regimes, legal regimes, anywhere, it's modelled on GDPR, to a certain degree in Europe, and, and if taken at face value, it's quite, it's quite restrictive. In practice, though, it has a lot of loopholes for, in particular, national security, which in China is a huge, broad concept that can apply to everything from an actual terrorist to someone who, who told an off colour joke about Xi Jinping on the internet.

Tracey Follows  47:23

Is this the cyber sovereignty approach, Rogier? 

Rogier Creemers  47:27

A bit a bit, I'm going to slightly sort of building on Josh's exposition and for those listeners, that you have suffering from severe insomnia, I actually wrote a 15,000 word paper on this, which I'm happy to put in the show notes. The interesting thing is there is a Chinese legal concept for privacy. And it's part of civil law. And it refers to, you know, it has this sort of tinge of information about you that might embarrass you, or that might be in some way morally connected. So, you know, indecent pictures of yourself, which are not illegal to take, but you know, you're not supposed to spread them. And that is part of the civil law. So that is where Chinese individuals can sue other Chinese individuals, for instance, for having leaked or disseminated their nudie pics or pictures from the inside of their house without their consent, you know, it's got a lot to do with shame or shamefulness, embarrassment, that sort of thing. The Personal Information Protection Law actually doesn't even contain the word privacy, because that is seen as you know, if privacy is just that very narrow thing, if you compare it with the European Union, privacy is a fundamental right, it is a right that I as a European citizen, enjoy vis-à-vis other individuals, vis-à-vis companies but also vis-à-vis the state as just said, you know, the US is a little bit is a little bit higgledy piggledy on all of this. So the EU is like a very interesting contrast. Now, whether or not the Chinese people care about privacy, you know, that's a very long culturalist argument. I approach it more from the sort of political structural side, which is that the very notion of a fundamental rights does not meaningfully exist within the Chinese legal political order, and hasn't existed there for the last two to 3000 years, at the very least. And so what you're dealing with when you look at personal information protection in China is the prevention of outright abuses, you know, illegal data trading, fraud, and so on and so forth. Increasingly, we see also the regulation of corporate business models, the use of data, for instance, for algorithmic content recommendation, and indeed, fairly wide exceptions for national security, essentially, you know, allowing state security bodies the Ministry of Public Security and so on and so forth to to do their job as they're supposed to, while at the same time, limiting the ability of because this used to happen a lot and maybe it still does, have sort of mid tier employees in the Chinese equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles to use their access to information about how people drive their cars, to essentially sell that information to insurance companies, because you know, hey, these people aren't necessarily paid very well, and a bit of moonlighting is lucrative. And so in that sense, you see that there's a such a sort of newly micro managerial approach of trying to identify the different ways and the different purposes for which data, personal information can be collected and processed and sort of micromanaging exactly what happens there, rather than starting from, as we do in Europe, a fundamental proposition that privacy is a fundamental right, and that the GDPR is primarily there to put meat on the skeleton of that fundamental right, to give guidelines about exactly what that means in the day to day business of companies, of governments, and so on, and so forth. So privacy really isn't the word that you want to be looking for. But it is the notion that Chinese people, in my view, quite understandably, do not want to be bombarded with spam. When you deal with China, you know, if you are a 60 year old in China today, that means that you were born, right after one of the biggest famines in global history, you lived through a very long period, where China was one of the poorest countries in the world. And suddenly these people are, you know, dealing with smartphones, you know, the learning curve there is incredibly steep. And I'm sure that we all have stories about our own grandparents trying to navigate the digital world. You know, in China, that challenge just goes up by multiple orders of magnitude simply because of you know, that that enormous income deficit, that wealth deficit, but that China had to deal with. And so it isn't so much privacy in our political sense of the word that the Chinese people care about. Or that we see these discussions being being had about, as it is, or certainly, as the government sort of moulds, the those debates into being, you know, protests over on the one hand, outright abuses, but on the other hand, also increasingly, corporate business models. 

Tracey Follows  52:23

And what about the notion of autonomy? Does that exist? If so, does it exist in the same way as it might be understood in the West, because lots of the conversations I have about technology and how it might be altering or influencing our notions, or our concept of the self end up as conversations about privacy, but it's not really privacy, the most of the time I'm trying to interrogate it's normally autonomy. But it kind of gets bundled up with the idea of user centric, which is both about autonomy and privacy. So is there a notion of autonomy? 

Rogier Creemers  52:57

Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to get even more into the weeds of sort of political philosophy. But there's a really good book out there by a British author called Tom Holland, not Spider Man, the other one. It's called, it's called Dominion. And essentially, it talks about how the mental world in which we live is deeply Christian. And it is, and in very many ways, our concepts about humanity, human life, values, or ideas about the good are deeply deeply Christian. You know, as a certain American document has it, we are all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. And what we've done with secularisation is we've stripped out God and Jesus, but essentially, we've kept the intellectual framework. And so the idea of autonomy comes from the notion that we, in the Christian tradition, are all created in the image of God. And we therefore carry within us a spark of the divine. And therefore, because we are all divine creatures, that's where that's really the roots of liberalism as a political theory, individual human beings should be able to pursue life as they see fit with as little encumbrance as possible, because we are all divine right? And the whole notion of autonomy, then gets into, you know, this notion of living your best life, as the kids would call it today, or being true to yourself. But it comes down to this notion that within you there is a core of authenticity. There's a real you that can be sullied by authoritarian political systems or other undue influences and your task is as a human being, or our task in our political systems is to liberalise as much as possible to set individuals free, as much as possible. Throughout Chinese political history that notion has never been there. Rather, the notion was that we are not born with a spark of the divine, but we are born as incomplete human beings, we cannot walk, we cannot talk, we cannot take care of ourselves, we cannot take responsibility. And so the task of a human being is to self cultivate, and the task of society is to socialise. And so that notion of autonomy as a fundamental part of the way that you see, human life is not really there, pretty much throughout Chinese imperial history, where it's much more this notion where you have to be socialised into your role, and it is your job to carry out that role. Combined with that is a very strong tradition in which, again, you know, going back way back when in Europe, and then, you know, the Europe based world, we had a very strict, we had a very clear separation between moral authority and worldly authority, where in Chinese imperial history, that authority was fused, you know, the emperor was always both Pope and King. And you still see that today, in the moral aspirations that the Chinese Communist Party leadership very clearly broadcasts where what they're not just trying to do is, you know, regulate a world in which human beings are then autonomous, to pursue the good life, but they actually are trying to, as you know, Xi Jinping's speech to writers says, you know, to engineer human minds, to improve the quality of the human being on the basis of a pre existing set of moral precepts. And so what you know, it's really, I feel like I have to dig into the depths of political theory here, because we really can begin to understand sometimes how different Chinese political tradition is from ours, if we don't go really into the foundations on which it's built, it's pretty much a sort of Windows versus Mac sort of incompatibility. 

Tracey Follows  57:01

That's amazing. That is a bit, I think that's a fantastic explanation, because I see it show up in the education system, I think, in China, where there's this belief in self improvement, and one can really, really improve through hard work. Versus in the West, where, well, you either a creative genius, you've either got it or you haven't. And it's kind of like why bother to self improve, one can't improve on something that one has innately or doesn't have innately. And so I can see exactly how it sort of reflects or echoes in lots of different areas. But I think that's a brilliant explanation, and helps our understanding about the the very notion of autonomy and, and what I mean, when I kind of put that to you, Josh, I'm sure you've got lots to add to that. 

Josh Chin  57:44

On the ground in China, what I think is really interesting about what Rogier has said, it is it is true, the Communist Party has always had this, this notion of cultivating better human beings at its heart, and it's always had a sort of moral as well, as well as political authority. But, you know, for a long time, it's sort of de emphasised the moral side of its authority, because it was prioritising economic growth. Right. And so for, I think, probably at least 25 years, including, including a lot of the time that I was there when I was younger, the Communist Party, you know, it paid lip service to proper behaviour, right, it railed against spiritual pollution from the West. And it it sort of gestured at that at its sort of moral aims for for the Chinese people. But it didn't really put a lot of effort into it, as much, right? It was this year, a lot of a lot of people talk about the the sort of social contract that that existed for many years in China and social contract might not be exactly the best way to put it, since people had to, for a contract to be actually legitimate, you have to enter into it voluntarily. But but there was a sort of tacit agreement, right between the Communist Party and Chinese people for many years, which is that the Communist Party will deliver, you know, historically, rapid economic growth and increased quality of life and Chinese people will sort of leave Chinese people to live their lives as long as they don't challenge the Communist Party politically. And what's happened with Xi Jinping, and in particular, in the last five or six years, has been a reversal of that. The Congress Party has reinserted itself into the lives of individual Chinese people in a way that we just haven't seen in many, many years and, it now has technology that allows it to do that much more efficiently. You know, in the past, it was sort of rely on on on kind of armies of underemployed Grannies to sort of go around neighbourhoods and keep an eye on people and harangue them if they were behaving badly, but now it has facial recognition cameras right? It has the ability to suck in data from your from, you know, your your smartphone, and and could really involve itself in individual choices in a granular level that it's never been able to do before. And I think so you now have this, you're going to start to see this, this sort of Mac and Windows contrast really start to, to to come to the fore in some interesting ways, I think.

Rogier Creemers  1:00:28

There is another element of this, which Josh has sort of hinted at, but I think deserves unpacking at greater length. And that is sort of that self spiralling nature of what then technology does. And there's a really good book just out by my friend, Mara Dykstra at Harvard University Press. It's called Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine. And this is about the 17th century Qing state, which has established itself and it's actually fairly competent. And so it starts asking local officials for more and more information, and lo and behold, what that information reveals, is actually that there are all of these abuses and cases of corruption. And then the central government sort of starts issuing all kinds of orders, including orders for more information, and lo and behold, you know, the more information reaches the centre, the more information there is about all of these abuses, which were going on anyway. But they simply weren't visible, which then leads to a sense of malaise, a sense of declineism, and it ends up being a political crisis, right. It's the sort of the self defeating impact of when a government is successful at surveilling, essentially, at seeing more of the society, the the polity that it controls. And I'm wondering to what extent there's something similar going on here, where, with the proliferation of social media, and Josh, you were there, when that all happened in the early 2010s, you know, people started having smartphones. And suddenly, there was this wave of scandals, and very often moral scandals that emerged on social media, because of images that had been captured in very many cases with smartphones as well. In some cases, that was about official corruption. But in some cases, it was also, you know, one of the most tragic cases was a toddler that was run over by a truck, and then the truck ran away without doing anything. And that really leads to a sort of moral crisis. And then you get sort of call and response where, you know, there is this sort of whole thing of, Oh, my God, look at the horrible society that we are, that is picked up by propaganda authorities, as you know, a way of putting themselves more in the spotlight. But then you have to do moral education. Right. So there is a sort of mutually reinforcing effect of the expansion of technology, greater visibility of society, moral crisis, and then that vast expansion of a system that tries to really eliminate or prevent that sort of immorality. But that will obviously then leads to the enormous in depth levels of surveillance that Josh and his co author have so so competently described in their book.

Tracey Follows  1:03:21

So, as we wrap up, then I wonder if the final question is, how can I put this? I was talking to Hans Georg Mueller, who'd written the book You and Your Profile, and one of his theories is that it's the end of authenticity. And that in in, in this new era, we have entered the age of profelicity, where obviously we are profiled unendingly relentlessly, one might say, through technology, not just on social media, but all kinds of technology that both of you work with and will talk about a lot. And that actually, it's sort of reminiscent of sincerity culture, and the idea of playing roles in society, and perhaps we might think of it in the West as code shifting. But I thought it was it's an incredibly interesting theory. And it made me wonder whether or not we do end up in a bifurcated world to go back to the geopolitical context. Or there is some decoupling, you know, and we've covered it a little bit, whose population, East or West is kind of better equipped for being a flourishing human being or having a population of flourishing human beings in the face of this kind of technology given given that, you know, it might be the end of authenticity and perhaps the beginning of profilicity? 

Rogier Creemers  1:04:43

Well, if I can be a little bit controversial, I think I think this is actually a sort of, we need to be in the middle sort of thing. What I think that in the West, you know, in the 2000s/2010s, we had the sort of techno optimist narrative where Digital Technology was an unquestioned good thing. And everything that technology touched would turn into gold. And it would bring democracy to the darkest parts of the world. And it would create all of these new and beautiful forms of doing businesses, and it would connect all of us. And we ended up where we end up where, in the United Kingdom, Meta has been found in a coroner's report to have contributed to the suicide of a 14 year old girl, right, this is now part of a legal record, I'm not quite sure if that's the reputation you want to have. China never had this illusion of techno optimism. It always was quite, quite optimistic about what technology could do. But at the same time, sort of quite vigilant in the sense of these things can come with hearts. And partially that is obviously informed by the fact that this is an authoritarian state, in which, you know, the notion that individuals should live their lives as they see fit isn't a fundamental assumption. But I do think that there also was a fairly healthy, lack of naivete about the intentions of what are in the end, you know, profit, profit pursuing businesses. And so for instance, one of the things that the Chinese government has done is very strictly limiting the amount of online gaming hours that under 18s can play. And obviously, we would see that it's very paternalistic within our legal system. But whenever I talk to people individually about that, particularly if they're parents of teenage kids, they think it's the best idea ever. Or more broadly, and I'm not saying that I have the answer here, but we have a phenomenal problem with online anonymity, right? If we talk about authenticity, we very often don't know whether or not the person posting, for instance, politically salient information on Facebook, or Twitter is actually a real person. In China, in the same way that we all need a unique identifier, a unique and coded identifier on the back of our cars, which we call a licence plate, to to be able to enable the police, for instance, to connect the car to the person owning it, or driving it. for instance, when they run through red traffic light, the Chinese government has said you simply cannot have an online account based service provided to you if the service provider doesn't know who they are providing it to. So it's sort of like a know your customer rule. And I'm thinking there is actually some sense to that. And we're now at the point where we go, oh, we cannot do that, because the Chinese government is doing it. You know, isn't that the way there is you can take this too far that you could that would be like saying, we're not going to have traffic lights in our town, because there are traffic lights in Beijing, and China is an authoritarian dictatorship that tries to tell drivers when to stop and when to go. So obviously, but my point is, we can have a very long discussion about what we think about the way that the Chinese government has responded to those questions. And I certainly have my own thoughts on that. But the fact that they asked the questions led them to being far less naive about what the datafication of society will entail, which means that in very many cases, also, when you look at it from the international perspective, they're first movers, what we haven't talked about is the data security law, which is a law that that intends to protect, not individuals against harms to themselves, but national security, the public interest, the collective good, however you want to call it from harms arising from any kind of data. Now, this is a question that governments around the world are dealing with, and China is the first mover, and maybe it will be an example of how not to do things. But an example it will be. 

Josh Chin  1:09:08

Yeah, that's, that's a really good point about China being a first mover the other way that they are a first mover that is really fascinating, is in their attempts to regulate algorithms. They've now the Cyberspace Administration of China passed a rule basically demanding that any essentially any internet company, any company that uses algorithms, handover those algorithms to regulators to be examined. And this is a really fascinating effort, right? Because clearly, China is there a lot of governments around the world that are very worried and legitimately so about the influence of algorithmic systems on everything from, from, from from politics to education. But none of them have gone up, gotten to the point of actually trying to directly regulate them. And there are there are real questions about whether China can actually do it. I mean, the thing about algorithmic systems, what makes them so frightening is that even their own creators don't know exactly how they work, right? They are black boxes, ultimately. And so there's, I think they're real questions about whether a bunch of bureaucrats can do an even better job than engineers and trying to figure out how these things work and control them. But China is, it is out front it is. It is blazing new trails, in sort of confronting technology and trying to harness it for state power. 

Rogier Creemers  1:10:31

If I might add to that, in Europe, we're also moving in the direction of algorithmic governance, that's part of the digital markets and services package that is now working its way through the Brussels sausage making machine. But you say something very interesting there, because, at least in Europe, and certainly in China, in the US, not quite yet, we've sort of broken through this narrative that you can't regulate the digital realm, and you shouldn't regulate the digital realm. You know that there's a process going on that I call The Great Normalisation, where, as big tech, it has lost in very many ways. It's its shine, its glamour, we are increasingly dealing with them as if they are normal companies. So Uber, for instance, because Uber happens to be a tech firm, it's been sort of getting out of treating its de facto employees as not employees. And, and that is all changing now. What we see with algorithms is, we have actually many regulatory techniques to deal with harm. And because of the fact that we had sort of put big tech in this special box where they were immune from the normal laws of gravity of state functioning, we simply haven't applied them. But there are big questions here. I mean, we we don't even begin to fathom how big the challenge we may be facing is, for instance, take TikTok the worst case scenario is if Beijing actually has something to say about TikTok. TikTok is essentially a million monkeys with a million typewriters, right, every imaginable form of content can be generated on TikTok. So what if Beijing goes to the Bytedance HQ and says, in this country, we want you to influence the algorithm in such a way that you prioritise content that is closer in line with what we want in this election, or what we want in this very important policy debate? It would be completely invisible. It would not require any content generation on the Chinese government side, right? It's World War era diplomacy. It's simply tweaking the buttons a little bit, you're not in any way dealing with anyone's freedom of speech. But you are drastically altering the availability of media content, and we have no way of identifying this, let alone dealing with this. Now, if I make a foodstuff, I don't have to put the actual recipe on the packaging, but I do have to put in the ingredients. And, you know, these are questions. You know, I agree with Josh, that it's incredibly complicated for bureaucrats to evaluate algorithms, but to at least sort of know what goes into them is a first step. And that is what China is doing, but it's also what Europe is doing. And it's it's an area where I see discussion starting with the US, but I see also a very significant degree of reticence of actually going there. 

Tracey Follows  1:13:25

Well, I know I have to draw us to a close, I could talk to you two for absolutely ages. I feel like it's just the tip of the iceberg. But we've had quite an in depth lesson. It's been well, an education. I can't thank you enough for spending so much time with me here today. I wonder, given that there is so much more we could explore for people who do want to where else should they go to find out a bit more of your work or any other recommendations? I mean, both of you've got kind of book recommendations there. I'm sure people want to know other references and recommendations, where should they go to find out more? 

Josh Chin  1:14:01

Well, I'll jump up and say on Rogier's behalf that you should go to Digi China, because it is an amazing, it's an amazing resource that I use all the time to try to figure out what's going on in China in tech and regulation and, and staying on top of it. So I heartily recommend that, I also of course, I would encourage people to visit the website of The Wall Street Journal, which I do think these days does genuinely have the best and most comprehensive of coverage of China, at least in English. And those are, those are mine. 

Rogier Creemers  1:14:35

Well, and obviously Josh has got a new book out which is very much worth your time. Certainly in my case, I'm writing a book but we all know what it means when an academic says that, you know, trying to finish it. But more broadly, I think both Josh and myself have Twitter accounts where we try and share and update as much as we can about this area which is in continuous flux. This is part of the problem with writing the book. It's sort of like trying to trying to trying to shoot a particularly hyperactive, Duracell bunny for your dinner and you just wanted to sit still for a moment. But our Twitter accounts are very good. But more broadly, what we see is that there are so many good sources. There is the China Project which used to be such China, which does a lot of very good thing about tech, there is The Wire China, which publishes regularly about it. And it just sort of blossoms out from there. 

Tracey Follows  1:15:36

That's brilliant. Thank you, gentleman. That was so enjoyable, you know, it was not nearly as dystopian as I thought it was going to be. Thank you so much, both of you. 

Rogier Creemers  1:15:47

Thank you. 

Josh Chin  1:15:48

Pleasure was all mine

Tracey Follows  1:15:57

Thank you for listening to the Future of You podcast hosted by me Tracey Follows. Do like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you don't miss a single episode. And if you know someone you think will enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. Also visit www.thefutureofyou.co.uk for more on the future of identity in a digital world and visit www.futuremade.consulting for the future of everything else.

Tracey Follows  1:16:23

The Future of You podcast is edited by Big Tent Media and produced by Emily Crosby Media.