Josh Chin and Liza Lin: China and the Era of Digital Surveillance

become a sustaining member of the Commonwealth club for just 10 a month join today hello everyone today’s virtual Commonwealth Club event I’m Jiayang fan a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine um and I would um and author of book that is currently non-existent um uh that hopefully will will come into being sometime um uh next year called motherland um the club would like to thank the Asian Pacific Affairs forum for supporting today’s event and it is my great pleasure to introduce Josh Chen and Liza Lin authors of surveillance date inside China’s quest to launch

a new era of social control Josh serves as the deputy bureau chief in China for the Wall Street Journal he is a national fellow at new America and recipient of the Dan Boyle’s prize uh medal awarded to investigative journalists who exhibited courage in standing up to intimidation and Liza is China um is the China correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and previously worked at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg television lizzo was part of the investigative team led by Josh that won the Gerald Loeb award for international reporting in 2018 for series exposing the Chinese government’s pioneering

Embrace of digital surveillance um I’d like to just encourage everyone to um uh please submit any questions for Josh and Liza throughout the chat um through the

chat on YouTube if um questions come to you and um Josh and lizzo are welcome um it is uh it’s so strange I mean I’m in New York um to uh still be doing to be doing um a zoom event when like just outside like literally in the bar below my apartment there are like a hundred people packed indoors um but let me acknowledge um the strangeness um of

um of the kind of the the the zoomness of this event but it’s quite fitting with the with the book um about um digitalization of control and um surveillance and uh I would like to um start by just uh asking um Josh and lizza how um you know you became interested in writing a book I know that you know um both of you have done terrific uh pieces on surveillance in xinjiang um and in China but what made it worth it for you guys to you know invest so much of your time and energy and

um into into putting this into um together into a book yeah right so um thanks John it’s okay it’s great to see I mean that the zoomness of this event at least allows us to be in conversation with you despite being halfway across the country which which makes it which makes it really uh worth it I think um so uh I’m just speaking for myself personally I mean I was a reporter in in China for um more than a dozen years and uh and you know I never I mean to be a journalist in China

is to think about writing a book right it’s one of those things that people ask you even if you don’t ask yourself like are you gonna write a book and um and uh I never wanted to write a just a journalist in China book and not because I don’t love the like the genre I love it but there’s just so many good examples of it already right I mean from the very beginning over decades they’re just Classics of that genre and it sort of felt like um you know it’s frankly just really difficult to top

those uh books right and so I always figured if I was going to write a book I wanted to be about something specific and you know in the course of you know I’ve done tons of stories over the year and some of them you know a lot of them have felt really significant but this set of reporting the series of stories that Lisa and I worked on um for the Wall Street Journal starting in 2017 was just so it just felt like it was scratching the surface of a really Monumental change right um in China

and and just you know the way that the Communist party was was altering it’s the way it governs China and and what that meant for Chinese people’s lives right there was just a fundamental shift in how and how Chinese people were being were relating to the government to technology to themselves to their own aspirations and it just sort of felt like the sort of it felt like the kind of thing that required more sort of space than you could get in a newspaper article right it just and and it was something it was a story

that I wanted to sit with for longer and I was hoping you know the readers would also kind of want to want to sit with as well yeah and I guess you know on my part like like Josh I’ve been in China for quite a while uh you know eight years in total and if and if I ever thought about writing in China book because I covered China Tech in China uh I covered the stories of Alibaba I covered the story itself tencent I never expect it to be this you know if I had to

focus on something I never expected it to be surveillance what really I guess nailed it for me that this was worth exploring and deeply researching was I think the fact that you know in 2017 um when when we stumbled on this company sense time which is China’s largest AI company that when we interviewed them and we went out to their showroom to see what surveillance systems they did about they were developing it was just so jarring that it felt like we were living in a movie people people who live in China always feel like they’re

living in some sort of bizarre kind of haphazard chaotic movie but this was absolutely different and I knew that it would have bigger repercussions down the road uh and these like AI enabled surveillance systems when they started popping up in seat down that was when I knew you know something really Sinister was a thought and we should have looked we should look closely into it yeah I mean I um I found this book so um uh educational out of and kind of expansive and um and um exploring sort of one of the most important questions

in China at a time when um when there is so much surveillance about I think just this very subject and this dampening of um of more than dampening I think this repression of free speech so to me this this book felt very um very timely at a time um when uh control I think extends to um you know the the birth of you know um of of of books on this subject um I also uh just love the way that um the net the personal narratives um whether someone kind of Trapped in lockdown during covid

or of um a weaker family is threaded with these larger questions of control and surveillance and what it’s what is it like to be living in and through um these systems can I mean can you and I I mean as a writer really marbled at the way that you guys um you know massaged kind of these two um the personal narrative with the exploration of these larger um socio-political questions I mean um I really Marvel that how how seamless it was can can you talk a little bit about I mean the writing the writing process

and how um I mean how kind of you made sense of the Beast that is inevitable inevitably kind of the process of book writing yeah that was a um that was a challenge right from the beginning you know I think that you know particularly when you’re writing about China right the the way that China exists in the American imagination or the Western Imaging imagination is really I mean it’s still you know often a kind of this monolithic strange exotic place across the ocean and so we knew that writing about this topic it would be easy

we knew this probably because there were sort of other books that had touched on it but we knew that it would it would be easy to sort of create a sort of detached kind of menacing but like one-dimensional or you know maybe two-dimensional sort of Big Brother sort of Apparition you know and and that people would be scared of and you know maybe that would sell books it probably would sell books but but you know like we really wanted to to sort of you know as people who have lived in China for as long as

we had right we really wanted to conjure China in as much of its complexity as possible I mean obviously it’s a country with 1.4 billion people you know you can never capture even a fraction of it in a book but but we wanted to try to do that as much as we could and we particularly wanted with this subject to look at how it affects lives right how it affects like what does it mean for an actual human being to sort of go through this and what do they think about right what are the what

are the questions that they weigh and um you know and and you know there are multiple aspects of a surveillance state in China right there is this really kind of dystopian just terrifying dark expression of it in xinjiang and in the Northwest part of China which you know I’m sure people watching are familiar but you know there’s a the Communist party has been running this this just unprecedented um really kind of shocking forcible assimilation campaign against against turkic Muslim uh groups there including uyghurs right and they’re using like using these Technologies to to just to

crack and categorize every basically every single individual in that region right and it is like this the the surveillance there is suffocating it is inescapable it is constant right and so what is that experience what is it like I mean how many people have ever actually lived in that probably actually no one right up to that point um when they were rolling it out the uyghurs it was a unique experience kind of in history um and so we wanted to explore that but we also wanted to see what it was like for people who lived

in like wealthier cities on the East Coast you know who had a totally different experience of the of essentially the exact same Technologies in some cases made by the same companies right and and like what are the how do they weigh the the costs and benefits of being tracked all the time and how are those calculations different and um you know the writing of it was a challenge right it was is kind of trying to how to balance you know how to kind of dive in and out of these narratives right so that the sort

of people are sort of keeping track of the big picture but not but also able to sort of stick with the story and that was you know that that’s partly why this book took so long to write um but uh but yeah that was what we were trying to trying to do and in terms of the Republic in terms of the reporting process like we want it to ground after in the narrative so how it played out would be we would interview dozens of people and eventually he said to want one person whose story we

felt really needed to be told and once that happened it was a matter of spending just a lot of time asking this person can you recollect you know what happened last week right down to the very detail of you know when you woke up and you saw when you got a phone call from uh government Authority and in this case I referred to a girl that I interviewed who basically she was trapped after she had left the Chinese city of Wuhan after covet had broken out there and government officials tracked her down using cell phone

signals know one of the users of the surveillance statement she she was asked to once she was tracked down she was asked to quarantine and isolate herself for 14 days so you’d have to ask her you know what what were you doing or where were you when you got that call um what does your room look like what does your room look like then or if you were eating what were you having then then that that all just made the book a much more richer experience um yeah I know that very much I um uh

I could I could tell kind of um uh that there was kind of this very delicate balance in the book between exploring the bigger questions and grounding them in you know narratives that made us appreciate what um uh what lives how these lives are lived but it also made me um as a writer um get a sense you know appreciate the difficulty of such a um such a pro project and given its difficulty I think um I think you guys were actually very expedient um um uh uh you know shorter you know less complex books

have taken um far longer um but uh so one you know um uh one you know thread throughout the book is this I mean which um uh you guys explore in length is China’s perspective especially the Chinese government’s perspective of equating stability with control and um and I think that is um that was really important and I think the book um made that really kind of gave us an ample um idea of why you know that is and how technology becomes uh instrument of control um what either kind of one of you um like to

talk a little bit about kind of the you know stability and control really kind of um give us a sense of the government’s rationale for drawing this equal sign between the two because I think this is at the heart of so much um how the Chinese government um justifies its Draconian measures yeah that’s a that’s a that’s a great question John I think like you know I’ve been thinking about this in particular now because we have Xi Jinping right coming up on uh the 20th party Congress this next month where he’s expected to you know

sort of basically be be named uh well people expecting you he will take a third term and essentially be the president or or ahead of the party for life right and so inevitably there are all these these comparisons to Mao right because you know she is is probably the most powerful um leader arguably the most powerful leaders since now and so I you know I think about the differences between the Communist Party under Mao and the Communist Party since right and Mao you know he’s sort of ruled by um you know like a lot of

revolutionary leaders just through through sort of sheer force of charm and will uh and Charisma and and and the and he was a really kind of chaotic uh influence or or you know a chaotic leader and China basically since then has the Communist Party since Mao since the cultural revolution ended has really prioritized stability over everything they’ve sort of made it um just a core a core element of how they rule and that and what’s interesting is that they’ve sort of they’ve changed the way that they go about cultivating stability right so you know in

the media kind of reform era starting in the late 70s early 80s it was all about economic growth right it was about delivering sort of economic well-being or at least the possibility of economic well-being uh to Chinese people so for and and it was extremely successful right for like three decades you know double digit economic growth you know a bunch of the time um everyone sort of felt like you know if they weren’t getting rich they had the possibility of getting rich and and or the and and they were watching their standards of living go

up and you know the the social contract at the time with the Communist party was we’ll do this for you just you know don’t call for us to be taken down don’t call for democracy you know don’t make too much trouble and that that and that’s that was a stable um extremely successful model for many many years but that model is kind of fraying now um you know and that’s partly natural you know there’s just no country in the world in in history has ever maintained the levels of economic growth that China has had so

it was it was bound to slow down and uh and then you know other factors like coveted for example or have sort of accelerated that that process right so China’s economic growth now is is close to zero um it might even be negative and so what do you how do you replace that if you’re the Communist party right how do you maintain stability and maintain legitimacy uh and you know really what they’ve been doing over the past few years as we discovered is is kind of offering a you know a technologically Enhanced Life that is

sort of safe and convenient and predictable right and so um you know they can use these Technologies to to kind of to make your life easier right to make try to make traffic flow better they make it easier to sort of you know you can scan your face to get on the subway you can make you can pay for basically anything you want to pay for on your phone and that you know that’s really the sort of new um that is what they that is what they are betting on yeah I mean it um it

uh I mean the line kind of in the book that really struck me was kind of how technology enables the party to anticipate the needs of you know the people rooting out the rest is power and occurred to me that it it was exactly the kind of um paternalism that underlies Chinese Communist party that has um underlied its control kind of since the um since the beginning um that at its best it’s it’s kind of this father-like figure who’s saying I will like you are my children I will know what you need before um before

uh before you do and it kind of reminded me um of um uh uh of how um a pair you know young friends of mine have just become parents in the age of digital digitalization where you can keep track of everything um on your on your phone in fact and um the baby’s like three months old and um everything that’s been fed and everything it has voided has been documented meticulously and has been and um I joked that if this baby ever became the president I mean the presidential archives would you know would require multiple

libraries because you would have since birth like from the babies you know first like would be um would be recorded and um and occurred to me that that is something I mean as these very you know these friends of mine are very very good parents and basically you know they explained they said well I need we need all this information basically quickly to make the best prediction of what how she will be possibly malnourished or like you know why is she acting cranky like all this the collection of all this information is to basically prevent

any like prevent medical crises from before they can even occur and I wondered if either of you could have had thoughts on um you know obviously there is uh like Draconian paternalistic um ideology at work here but is there an argument for um for I guess my friend my my my my um friends who are parents kind of way of thinking which is that collecting all this information will um ensure that um uh the baby never becomes um you know or toddler becomes um uh you know sick kind of Beyond you know the the the

um beyond the baby beyond the parents ability to kind of you know take it to the to the to the ER at the at the um at the earliest um uh you know at as early as convenience I mean is there an argument that it is you know preventing like crises from reaching a boiling point yeah so I I could probably take that I mean you’re what you’re referring to essentially would be the attractiveness uh of using surveillance to in in like ways that you know to actually help a city run more efficiently or help

keep Law and Order on the streets help create streets clean and and you’re right you know smart cities basically use the same sort of surveillance systems that do like racial profiling and xinjiang that do real-time tracking of the ethnic minority in order to oppress them that it’s like two sides of a coin uh the same sort of Technology can be put to different uses and and this is one of the more interesting findings from our research because we went into the boat thinking that state surveillance in China was inherently negative and Sinister the more we

dug into this and the more we spoke to people particularly in the wealthier city it’s a wealthy big cities on the East Coast for example the more I realized that there are our aspects to State surveillance that are very alluring and attractive right yeah so so to do to do that what we did was we profiled a city called Hangzhou and Hangzhou is on the eastern coast of China it’s not as well known as Shanghai but it’s actually home to the Chinese internet giant Alibaba and it’s also home to the world’s largest surveillance camera maker

which is called Hikvision um and because of this reason Hangzhou as a city government is just very embracing of using Tech to digitize every sort of like city um every every means of running a city so they’ve actually used the same surveillance systems um and made by often like Hikvision as well which made the same systems in xinjiang they’re using these systems to smooth out traffic for example so you would have cameras at every you wrote into section in Hangzhou and they would be you know figuring out what the density of the cars were at

that point in time and using that combined with other data such as GPS from the maps on the cars they would use that to optimize traffic lights so in days of heavy traffic your traffic lights will be green for a longer time um and and so on and I think the other really interesting thing that the interesting use that we found of image recognition and like surveillance cameras in these cities is the city cameras would easily spot for example cars illegally parked on the street and you know that would be some things those spot cars

parked on the street and they would flag it to the Law and Order officials who had come to essentially get rid of the car as soon as possible this would be something that would have in the past taken much longer because you had human patrols and in this in this case with surveillance camera and AI you have a petrol like someone patrolling 24 7. some were flagging out incidents in the city happening 24 7. and it wasn’t just that you could use the same AI systems to discover flooding in the city when in times of

heavy rain or missing manhole covers which can be very dangerous particularly if you have children running around so there were these very attractive aspects to State surveillance and the people that we interviewed in the city they knew that a lot of data was being taken but they’re very happy to make the trade-offs because they’ve got something in return yeah that was I mean one of the really I mean there was um uh really interesting questions that the book raises is the um is the value of privacy to the Chinese um I thought that was something

um I was I was very grateful that that subject was being explored because that was something having grown up in China um uh not really having known even the term um uh until um you know later later in life um it just didn’t uh it didn’t it it doesn’t quite have um the same uh value and importance to the average American as it does to the average Chinese and um and I you know in the in the book you know you very um uh you guys talk about how um I mean you quote a certain

you know um being a very well-known art um Chinese uh Artist as saying you know the idea of privacy largely belongs to you know it’s to the wealthy um and educated it’s the province of the wealthy um uh and the educated and I wanted to um uh to ask about how um that you know was that for the two of you you know through writing this book um was that a surprise to learn and that did that at all kind of affect um your view about the kind of mass surveillance that the government is um

undertaking that with the Chinese um have I mean at least some you know a good number a good fraction of the um of the population have such a different idea of privacy than um Americans yeah that was uh that was one of the most fascinating and I mean actually sort of difficult parts of this whole process writing this book right and many many sort of aspects of the story involved or swerved as we were writing it which is again partly partly why it took longer than we’d hoped but um yeah privacy was really fascinating and

actually shooting that story sort of evolved as we were reporting it right so the so the background of this is assuming is this this extremely well-known artist I think he’s got a MacArthur he’s a MacArthur genius and um and one of the things he likes to do is just he’s really interested in this idea of transformation um and of taking things out of one context and putting them in another and and so uh he had we had encountered him at an event and and he had just asked him you know what what he was working

on and he’s like oh I’m you know making a a movie out of surveillance footage and um and actually this is before we even were really looking in surveillance as a story but I’d sort of filed that away in the back of my mind and then you know when we wrote the book I went back to him and and uh and so what he you know he was really intrigued by this idea he wanted to do this because he thought people who appeared in surveillance footage seemed more real than than actors right and he just

liked that idea and he was intrigued by this notion that you could sort of somehow weave together if you could get enough surveillance footage you could weave it together into a fictional narrative and um and so I mean for years he tried to do it but he couldn’t because it was just too hard to collect you know he’s collecting footage on tape from friends and the police and like you know officials you knew it was just like not feasible but but eventually what he what happened was one of his research assistants searching the internet one

day and stumbled on this website that was basically was was set up by a a company called chihu 360 which is a internet security company but they also produce these sort of cheap um you know in-home security cameras right that are connected to the web and and they had set up a website uh platform right where if you owned a camera you could access the video the footage from that camera uh online and which is which is you know a lot of cameras do this but in chihu’s case they made the default setting public right

so that if you knew about this website you could go there and you could watch all of these people’s surveillance footage right then like and you know if they didn’t put a password on it you you could just you essentially watch watch what was going on in their homes or their businesses or wherever and so this is like you know a bonanza for him he immediately you know set about you set a bunch of computers was downloading footage you know 24 hours a day and then and then he had a bunch of his assistants kind

of weaved it together into this into this movie and I just thought that was fascinating he described it as sort of being like um you know that these cameras had turned China into the so like the version of The Truman Show you know the Jim Carrey movie about the the guy who sort of born in on a movie studio in a movie set but he doesn’t know it and um and so I thought it was just fascinating as a sort of statement about Chinese privacy that there were that there were all of these feeds across

the country people seem to not be bothered by them they were actually entertained by them you know and it was like surveillance television and uh and so we were sort of writing up the chapter on that basis right like you know here’s an example of how how little Chinese people care about privacy and um and you know shortly after we finished the film he was taking it on tour into these to various film festivals and all of a sudden the this controversy on blew up on the Chinese internet on Chinese social media over these sites

there are multiple sites um where a woman had had sort of she’d be watching the feeds and she pointed out like you know there were some inside like yoga studios right there like clearly scenes that people probably didn’t want in public right or like you know children dancing kind of creepy stuff you know where people having dates in restaurants where they were kind of like you know sitting close to bed together being intimate and uh and she wrote this this outrage post to the to the CEO of that company and it and it just exploded

it became this massive thing and within days uh the company had to shut down the site and every other company that had one of those shut down their sites right until we were like what is like what is going on you know um and I think what that pointed to was there is this sort of evolving privacy Consciousness in China but it’s new right and it’s really malleable and and unpredictable and you know the you know I mean it’s funny talking about not knowing the word for privacy until you were older you know the word

like the Chinese word for privacy didn’t appear in the xinjiang or the the xinhua Like official Chinese dictionary until the late 1990s right so I mean a lot of people didn’t you couldn’t even look it up right right right and so yeah so like I think now you have what you have is this very malleable malleable idea I mean it is powerful very powerful for some people but it’s you know it tends to be kind of directed mostly uh at companies um you know the government is sort of and the government has embraced it but

embraced it in a way that directs it in in areas that it wants it to go um which is never acting which is rarely at the government itself um so but uh but you know we also we could see this change I think a little bit with the covid pandemic you might actually start to see it shift again and it’s you know so it’s fascinating yeah I mean I think that the um in in in the book you guys talk about how it is um the government has conveniently welded the concept of privacy to um

to that of collective security of the people and that you know um you’re giving up kind of this abstract concept that like you barely had a word for you know in the dictionary even um a few decades ago and what you get is a safe and Serene life um uh which seems like a good bargain um if uh you know if if like privacy wasn’t something that was terribly important or even kind of like clear to you as a concept I mean not not too long ago um I like how you guys um uh maybe

Liza um can talk about this um uh uh um the cause um how you guys also bring um surveillance to the U.S and you know using it you know the way that um uh the American police force you know have to um scan for you know shoplifters or everything from shoplifters to you know generate January 6th um uh the facial recognition um uh software that allowed us or allowed you know the government to identify um you know the people who stormed um the capital so clearly America or the American government is also making is trying

to strike this delicate balance between um security and the preservation of um uh privacy how um you know uh where you know what was it like reporting that out and did it make you kind of change your mind at all about you know America’s position on the preservation of privacy did it did it did did the U.S seem like it’s persistent its position has been consistent in the as the technology for surveillance has grown and so the US is definitely one where we’ve seen its position kind of shift but it it the the difference between

the US and China is like the scale and and the breadth of the ambition that China is trying to achieve in the U.S a lot of the security cameras are privately owned uh they’re not government run so yes there are a lot of uh surveillance cameras in the US but it’s not all in the hands of the government whereas in China you have more than 400 million cameras on the street you know all streaming video all all basically data that national security agencies in China could easily get hold of I think the difference for me

when I was exploring surveillance in the US versus China was how you know the concentration of so much data and all these data feeds in the hands of one entity in the U.S surveillance is not a new thing you’ve had government surveillance and it particularly spiked after 9 11 and you also have what uh zubov has coined surveillance capitalism where a lot of data has been sucked up by internet companies like Facebook or Google the difference in China is that you know in so in the US it’s very fragmented the data is either with corporations

or with government entities or state state security agencies you know when I think of government entities with data you think of the DMV which has everybody’s driver’s license data um and then you know it’s very it’s very rare to see the data basically being shared between the DMV from shared freely between the DMV and Google and the FBI whereas in China what’s different is the Chinese government has access to a lot of the data that its internet companies have as well so if you think about what the Chinese government can gather it can gather data

from all its surveillance camera feeds it also has access to data from Alibaba for example Alibaba runs e-commerce so they know what you buy it also has access to data from China’s biggest social media app which is WeChat it’s kind of like a WhatsApp so the Chinese government wouldn’t know who your contacts are and all this because you know the laws in China just make it very easy for State security agencies to get that sort of data so the difference between like China and the US to me that really stands out is the ability to

concentrate that data in one place and how one entity which is the Chinese government has access to it all that’s not something you see in the US um yeah I would just I would just say on the on the Privacy aspect of sort of comparing the US and China um you know there are some new sort of universal things we noticed that were really surprising right when we were asking we were you know talking to people in China and um John I’m sure you’ve had this experience right but if you if you talk to people

in China and you ask them like what do you think about all of this what do you think about being tracked by the government the fact that they can read your WeChat messages and all that and like you know the sort of default response is what like well if you haven’t done anything wrong when you have the fear right and that was like that was really common you know we were talking you know we talked to you know we’ve got dozens of people hundreds of people just to get their feet their responses to this sort

of thing and I started to think of that partly because I’ve lived in China for so long it’s just like a Chinese response you know like it was like okay um but then you know when I went to the US and in the middle of writing this book uh I I just I remember this vividly standing in JFK in the airport in New York City in line and listening to a couple discuss um discuss a uh an article in in the western newspaper about China’s State surveillance and the and the wife being like Oh my

God can you believe it and the husband delivering the exact same line basically saying what like if you don’t if you haven’t done anything wrong you don’t need to worry about it right and it was just like it was so striking that that was you know it’s it’s sort of I think it’s a default for a lot of people around the world right I don’t I think it’s a really common attitude and so I think you know Americans in particular are I mean speaking of Google or Amazon Facebook Americans are very willing to give up

personal information for for convenience right um it’s just that they don’t it’s it’s not in the hands of the state right and so that the big difference is as Lisa says is you know in China it’s a much darker the pay the trade-offs are much darker right I I I liked I mean part of the um one of the things about you know the book taking full years complete is that you guys address the pandemic um and uh and I um and I think the pent I mean um uh I think the pandemic was um

an occasion for which surveil you know where you um these surveillance tools were both um able to show their advantages and um and kind of the disadvantage of being completely imprisoned by the information that they um that they that they yield um how did that I mean you um how did reporting kind of on the state of like did you guys go into the pandemic expecting surveillance to um you know um shape the um you know the the the pandemic response in one way what did this kind of or did you feel like yes like

you know in in in in case of a once in a century plague surveillance um has its uh upsides like what you know what was her thought process um as you were witnessing you know the the relationship between surveillance technology and response to the pandemic because the pandemic was really unexpected for us uh I guess you know like China nobody saw it coming so when the pandemic actually hit um we had no idea about the implications of State surveillance it was only as it started to unfold we realized that China was turning its entire State

surveillance apparatus against tracking the virus um because when the pandemic first broke out in the city of Wuhan uh they they had announced that they were going to shut the city at 10 10 a.m the very next day and because there were so many people worried about being shut in the city um in in the city itself and it was also Chinese New Year so it coincided with like the one time everybody travels back to see their family so before 10 a.m the next day hundreds of people rushed to the train station to leave hundreds

of people who would have been close contacts or possible carriers of the virus and what the Chinese government did next was really surprising uh and it shocked me but it realized how it showed me how powerful State surveillance was the Chinese government basically asked the state cow codes to hand over data of whose cell phone whose cell phone number was in Wuhan at that point of time and it’s in China it’s very easy to look your cell phone number back to the identity because in order to buy a SIM card you have to register with

ID card so every um the the government knows who owns this particular number and that was how they managed to catch the first wave of people who were leaving for Wuhan and to ask them to isolate themselves in order to prevent the spread of the virus and then that was really kind of eye-opening for me because in the past I’d always been researching how State surveillance was catching something physical a person for example you know a person of interest or a physical object like a getaway car and in this case the state surveillance system was

trying to track something that was completely invisible left no tracks and was way more contagious than you know police could react it was like a two year four day intubation period it was very to me it felt like a monstrous challenge but the Chinese government took it on and in the early days at least in the first year of Kobe they managed to keep covered down extremely extremely well so that was one of like the more interesting findings from covet the second really interesting thing to me that stuck out when I was um just watching

covet play out was how you know early in the days of our book research we used to talk to experts that would say that would tell us every sort of surveillance system you see in xinjiang every Sinister surveillance system will eventually find their way out of xinjiang to the rest of China and at that point I just couldn’t believe it I figured that maybe in the moral in the regions the communist government felt more restive that could be possible but not in like the wealthy cities like Beijing and Shanghai it just didn’t seem plausible but

with covid we saw like surveillance go from real-time surveillance of a group of ethnic minorities to real-time surveillance of everyone in China because ultimately everyone in China they were forced to download an app that tracked their movements for the past 14 days in order to assign a QR code for them and this QR code would essentially be a health score telling like officials on the street who are checking your QR code you know were you exposed to a covet carrier or not um and and this is like one of the big takeaways for Corbett for

me yeah um I can definitely I can definitely um uh I can definitely kind of you know see how that um uh you know effects just in kind of the the kind of both sides of um of of of um how it is a fantastically efficient instrument but also how um it kind of can easily be um uh it can be easily be misused I um have been have been asked to remind everyone to please um uh share you know questions you have over um YouTube chat and um uh and there’s one um I see

now uh to what extent has you know does the Chinese government um surveillance already extend to Taiwan um would either of you like to take that on sure I can take that one um uh actually I just recently I’ve been living in Taiwan uh actually recently because I was um since I was I was expelled from China in early 2020 in the middle of writing the book um yeah you know interestingly I mean you know China claims Taiwan is as as part of the Communist party claims Taiwan is part of China but it really isn’t

um and it really doesn’t have the ability on its own to conduct surveillance inside of Taiwan I mean it definitely conducts conduct surveillance of Taiwan sort of remotely um just like uh you know any country would with another could do with another country but you know where Taiwan is actually really fascinating is on this question of covid right because the way they handle that and you know one of the questions that the sort of hovers over this entire story is how are democracies going to deal with this right because China so China has a very

clear vision for how these Technologies fit into a system of government right and they sort of believe that governments should use these um use these technological capabilities and future technological capabilities to the greatest extent possible to maintain control and manage Society right it’s just very simple clear um Vision what like what do democracies do how do democracies confront these tools which are extremely powerful right as as covet has shown um but but can really obviously you know kind of just destroy privacy um and and sort of and have really interesting implications for for things like

free will right um and so Taiwan was really fascinating because when covet hit it did Institute surveillance but it did it in a very deliberate like deliberately limited way that was trying to protect as much privacy as possible uh while still being effective and so you know where China has apps um Taiwan deliberately did not build an app right because they felt like it wasn’t secure you know anytime you build a new app there’s all sorts of flaws in it you could be leaking data and and it really wasn’t necessary so instead they just used

cell phone data right so they could they could track they could do contact tracing through cell phone data it wasn’t as accurate but it was accurate enough right um and they did other things like you know if if people had to report um you know going to restaurants or bars but they didn’t want and they didn’t want to people to know uh where they what they were doing or where they were going they could they could leave like an anonymous email address instead of their own email address you know as long as the government knew

who it was connected to so things like that um and it and it it worked you know it was it was quite you know people accepted it um and and Taiwan was able to to control kovid quite well yeah um I mean I think you guys do address the you know that question of how um democracy um or at least you asked that question of how democracy should be handling um or could be handling these um uh these instruments of surveillance and one question I you know I had while reading was um how um long

can this bargain um you know the government has made with the people be sustained or and and and um in a way how um at what point or if you know the Chinese um will ever outgrow kind of their um you know their their the their um rather um that you know that their definition of um privacy and their sense of um it’s um limited kind of use like do we do did either of you think that you know in a generation or two um that the Chinese would evil that the people would evolve to

a point where they um ah prize privacy much more than they do now right um I you know I I don’t know I think you know that I mean obviously that’s sort of uh it’s always dangerous as anyone who writes about China knows to uh to speculate project too far into the future um you know I think it’s a really interesting question and people have asked this um you know people who who look at surveillance or privacy in China ask this question often right and and um you know covet actually is a good example of

this right where you now there are some people who are sort of who started to kind of Rebel a little bit against the zero code policies in China right because they’re so stringent and the technology and and the other control measures are so suffocating um and it’s also targeting wealthy people like the people people who we were talking about earlier uh who who would sort of in the in the cities well educated who had developed a sense of privacy they are starting to feel levels of surveillance and and scrutiny that previously you know only were

sort of reserved for minority ethnic populations or criminals or that that sort of thing um uh and you know so you are starting to get some pushback some pretty strong pushback and so one question is whether you know covet is actually going to be the you know if in the first phase it was this event that really spread surveillance around the country and a lot of people accepted it and now you know in the second phase is it going to be actually the event that turns people against surveillance it’s really hard to hard to answer

um yes go on oh no I was just going to add the you know the base of privacy awareness in China is currently so low I just can’t see it happening in the near future um I think the difference between like the US and Western democracies and China is really the Privacy awareness and in the US you know you had um from the 1890s like the right to privacy written by Samuel Brandeis and uh Lewis Warren it’s in China it’s only been in the last couple of decades that Chinese people have really started to understand

and grabs what it means to have your data taken from you and exploited um and the reason why I’m actually not very optimistic that uh this level of privacy awareness will grow quickly is because the bulk half of Chinese citizens still don’t live in the big cities yeah a lot of the Privacy awareness that we’ve seen have has come from people in the big cities and it’s really about the headspace right if you don’t have the Mind space to think about the idea of privacy why would you and if you’re not living in a city

you’re likely living in you know a more poorer County or in the rural Countryside where things like putting material where like material wants and physiological needs are are just way more prioritized and important than the idea of privacy so I’m actually not very optimistic on that front I think I might um agree with you um on that I um you know reading this book made me you know and um the idea of kind of the future of surveillance in China and um the the priority of privacy in um Chinese citizens Minds made me think about

how um helpless like how much more helpless one can feel if they um come to prioritize something that they cannot control like um I you know I remember when in the U.S when you know everyone suddenly found out if Facebook had all this data and there was just this kind of you know that that there were these mechanisms where like you could then switch the settings where like you could you know um um go to the media about how violated you felt and how um with surveillance I mean and with kind of your own opinion

about your like the value of your privacy there’s nothing you can really do about um how that’s taken from you in a you know authoritarian country and um and how it actually is to your like to the detriment of your mental health to to value your um to value your privacy because it’s not like then you wake up tomorrow and and have the tools to to engage with that right yeah you know that’s a I mean you know I think that’s one of the lessons of China right is that that things can come at you

fast basically right and like the the way that these systems have been rolled out especially now with with covid sort of not so that they cover everyone in the country is I mean it’s hard to imagine how anyone in China can resist right the the tools the Chinese government has now to exert control are just so pervasive and so fast right they’re just they’re so they react so quickly um and you know and you know sort of combined with with Xi Jinping you know China’s leader the the sort of his own willingness to to deploy

these Technologies kind of to the fullest extent it really makes it hard to to see how you can resist and I think that’s you know if you if you’re living in a democracy that is something to think about right I mean I think anyone who you know anyone who thinks about these issues realizes that democracies were sort of not prepared for Silicon Valley right we like we weren’t we didn’t see it coming we didn’t know how to react to it you know by the time we started thinking about it you know companies like Google and

Amazon Facebook they all had they all owned huge amounts of our data right and so it’s kind of too late to roll that back now and we have to sort of struggle to figure out how to manage it um there is you know we’re still kind of at the early stages of of the state surveillance rollout in the United States um I mean it’s there it’s and it’s not going to ever be reversed but I think that is the question that that hovers over democracies is how do they get in front of this or people

who live in democracies people who vote in democracies like how do you how do you get ahead of this and how are you going to manage it and and you know regulate it so that it doesn’t you know we don’t get to that point of no return yeah I mean um I think you guys mentioned you know having proportional responses which I thought I mean because there’s because there’s such a you know because because they’re there’s there’s no easy answers to this question kind of having you know do we do you need facial kind of

profile like profiling for um minor crimes um you know it is that is that um is that sacrifice of your privacy worth it versus um kind of you know when it means much greater harm to um to a large number of people and I guess most importantly who gets to make that decision about you know proportions um about about you know what um what activity is worth surveilling versus um ones in which you know we we would rather everyone would rather keep their privacy you know and some small minor crimes will will will fall um

through the net I thought it was um uh in China it was very interesting um when uh I did a piece um a few years ago on on um on uh on filters on kind of these facial filtering apps um and uh where you can basically give yourself plastic surgery kind of um uh um on the on the apps and now I see so so many of like so much of that is coming to the to the US I mean it’s really it’s really spreading like um uh it’s becoming very popular here but when I

would ask everyone you know whether they minded my taking picture of them you know kind of these people who are getting plastic surgery um or you know these young influencers um because that’s just what I had been accustomed to doing in the US and um everyone that I asked just thought the question they only thought the question was kind of um inexplicable because they just wanted to make sure they wanted me to take pictures of them but they just wanted to make sure that it wasn’t on the native camera on the phone that that their

faces were that that their face had them basically um uh digitally altered to be kind of their their most attractive and I thought that was so um interesting wasn’t like the question I was asking was about their privacy and you know and they were like no I just I don’t care if I look like myself I don’t care if people realize that like this this is me I just want to be my most attractive self um and I thought that was just such a that was such an interesting um uh I don’t know if it’s

a miscommunication but like just that diff like such an interesting example of this difference in values yeah yeah I know it’s fascinating actually and you know what what I mean an interesting fact to it is that the the companies that that build a lot of the technology that sort of automatically smooth out your wrinkles and kind of give you like digital Botox or um are the same companies that do facial recognition Technologies like the same it’s basically the same technology right um yeah yeah um uh and that um uh yeah I I you know back

I was thinking about how um uh because they’re so attuned to the faces and um how you alter your faces and just kind of um uh and how can you and you know how to be plot to look plausibly human while kind of changing every single feature I thought that must I mean how could that not you know be connected to facial recognition right it’s all um it’s all about about kind of um you know recognizing and also improving you know upon the improving upon the the face um well we have a last uh question

here with about five minutes remaining and um it’s about nevs which um are which I’m I’m I’m understanding could be new energy vehicles um and the question is you know with the rapid acceptance of new energy vehicles in China um uh you know there’s an ever-growing network of mobile cameras and sensors um which are in these uh in this in these vehicles what data is being sent to um uh new energy vehicle firms um and the Chinese government I know that’s not quite kind of in the you know in a scope of the book but

um you know would either of you want to give that a shot yeah that that is actually a tricky subject that wouldn’t really be in our expertise but you know I’ll take a shot at just kind of explaining because it really Falls uh it’s a similar corporate Dynamic that you see with other companies that you would see with the new energy vehicle industry I think with new energy Vehicles a lot of these companies are also trying um to improve like automotive technology with like on autonomous Driving Systems for example and because of that they’ve been

installing like mobile cameras and networks on um and and sensors on top of cars uh most of the data that’s being collected by these sensors and mobile cameras will be will be retained by the new energy vehicle firms simply because a lot of the data is used to refine whatever algorithms they’re using for example with autonomous driving just to make sure that you know the car is stopping when there is like a obstacle ahead or if there’s someone Crossing so a lot of the data would be retained just to reinforce and to feedback and to

make their algorithms better whether they actually share the data with the Chinese government it’s still a very open question and we haven’t seen any cases of it so far but what I could say is mapping data is extremely important and sensitive to the Chinese government so this means that at least with a new energy vehicle companies there would be under more pressure to keep their data secure and not exposed to like cyber security leaks for example because mapping data would give anybody data about military installations in China or where army bases are are kept and

this is something that the Chinese government does not want to share so it’s hard to say you know if the real-time data will be shared with the Chinese government and honestly I I don’t think so but what we can at least conclude is such data will not be made public and will be subject to more scrutiny right I mean actually I just one just wanted to add one thing here which is if you want to one I think sort of telling development in this space is that Tesla um Tesla vehicles which are very popular in

China uh and you know Teslas have no immense numbers of cameras all over them right and sensors they’re banned from since sensitive government compounds and military installations right because the Chinese government is worried that that data will uh the Tesla might end up sharing it with the US government so if they’re worried about that happening in the U.S um I think you can maybe infer what they themselves would like to do with that data in China oh that’s actually that’s very um that increasingly just the world over there are so few spaces um where you

are not surveilled in one way you know um in one way or another I mean even I live in New York City and um I live in the East Village and I asked my um super about you know like is the East Village like how you know I live really close to I live on the second floor and there’s um uh the fire escape ladder like you know anyone above like my height 5’4 can basically pull it down and um the land and the super looked at me like I was crazy he was like their

cameras everywhere like No One’s Gonna burgle you because like their their face will be so readily identifiable he was like it won’t even matter if there’s like a ladder directly from your bedroom window to like you know right like No One’s Gonna you know No One’s Gonna burble you like it was I mean it was reassuring but it was frightening at the same time like um yes like I mean like I I I guess you know like that reduces the chance of being burgled but it also made me think like I mean every inch of

this city is under under the lens of some um camera and what does it mean not to have like a single moment that’s not um that’s not documented and um and uh on that on that on that cheerful note um I really wanted want to thank um Josh and Liza I mean you know authors of this terrific book um surveillance State inside China it’s quest to launch a new era of social control and um please pick up a copy um at your local uh at your local bookstore um if you want to um if you

want to go you know deeper into the topics that we discussed um if you would like to watch more programs or uh support the Commonwealth club’s efforts in making virtual and impersonal programming possible please visit the Commonwealth Club um website that’s Commonwealth um club.org slash online um I’m Jay Young fan um take care and have a great evening foreign

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