Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the 244th episode of the Atlas Society Asks. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have investigative journalist Jeffrey Kane join us to talk about his new book, the Perfect Police, an undercover odyssey into China's terrifying surveillance dystopia of the future. Jeff, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Wonderful to be here, Jag.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: So you are an international investigative journalist. You've reported from myriad Asian countries, including North Korea. Author two books, Samsung Rising and the Perfect Police State, which we're going to be talking about today. You're also a jazz trombonist. I wasn't expecting that. How did you pick that up?
[00:00:53] Speaker B: I just come from a musical family. It's something that we all do. And I started piano at a young age, picked up trombone a bit later. I played various different instruments. But before I became an investigative journalist, I spent some time as a roving, touring jazz musician. I played in some rock and funk and jazz bands, and we would play around New York and Washington, D.C. and those sorts of places. But, you know, it's a life of its own. And I decided that journalism was my calling, so I took that route. And it's been a fascinating time.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Absolutely. As we were just saying before we jumped on live, we live in the most interesting timeline possible.
So a decade ago also, you took a train trip across North Korea. How difficult was it to gain permissions to make that journey?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Surprisingly, it was not that difficult. But this was possible at the time. This would have been back around 2015, 16.
So the North Korean government welcomes journalists. They welcome outsiders, diplomats, even tourists who just want to visit. And the reason is because, you know, it is one of the worst authoritarian regimes in the world. It's absolutely a horrible government, but they want to show what they would believe to be a good side of the country. They want to give you the propaganda and try to convince you that North Korea is actually not a great place or, sorry, not a bad place. Of course it is, you know, an absolutely horrible government. But if you, you know, as a tourist, as a journalist or whatever you might be, wanted to go to North Korea, it is possible. I went as a journalist, which meant that, you know, I was there to try to uncover facts and figure out what was going on. Didn't get many facts because, you know, North Korea is all about propaganda. That's just how it is. But it was an interesting experience nonetheless. Took a train across the country from Pyongyang, the capital, to the Russian border, finished up there, and then Took the train back and flew out into China. That. That was eye opening and just fascinating to see. You know, what. To see what we could. To see what we could see in the country. Despite not being going very deep, just to be able to go there and see it was quite a trip.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Now, I would imagine that you would have been pretty closely watched.
What was maybe the most poignant experience or impression that you had there?
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Well, we were watched constantly 24 7. The government assigns a team of minders to each group. I was in a group. It wasn't just me alone. And they, they go with you everywhere. There's really, you know, nothing that you can do there on your own. And then on top of that, in the capital, Pyongyang, they put us all in a hotel. The hotel was on an island on the. On the river. So you actually can't, like, you can walk outside of the hotel, but you can't actually leave this little island. And if you try to, you know, walk out of it, the. The plainclothes police will stop you and bring you back into the hotel. So you do have to, you know, I'm not saying that it's safe. It is a risky trip to take, take. Luckily, if you're a journalist, you do have some protections because, you know, they do want you to report on the country. But after I was there, there was an American citizen named Otto Warmbier who came about a year after me, and he ended up in a coma under mysterious circumstances, was sent back to America, and unfortunately died. Nobody really knows for sure what happened with him. It was a horrible story, but, you know, like, that's the kind of thing that you really got to be careful about if you do decide to go, that when you're in North Korea, the government can really decide to do whatever it wants with you.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: All right, well, I'm scratching that off my bucket list.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Good idea.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: As well as what also happened to you in 2017 when you were sensationally accused of spying by the news media aligned with the Cambodian People's Party. That must have been pretty frightening. What happened?
[00:04:57] Speaker B: That was a bizarre incident. And I mean, you know, it's just if you're a reporter in authoritarian countries, you get targeted by these governments all the time. The Cambodian government decided that it was going to crack down on the opposition leader and they were going to try to put him in prison. They put him under house arrest in the end, but they needed to drum up evidence. They needed to find their spy ring and find some people who they could accuse of being CIA or trying to topple the government. Now, what had happened was that I was reporting on a protest movement in South Korea. And then I flew into Cambodia after that for something else. And then I flew out of Cambodia and then I was. I was in Thailand for another assignment I was working on. Thailand is right next door to Cambodia. After I left Cambodia, these news reports started getting published. It was in, in like, the top newspapers of Cambodia. It was on primetime tv. Somebody had gone into my Facebook page and somehow, you know, got access to my private page and they were snapshotting posts of where I was and what I was doing. And they tried to build a case that, you know, this was evidence that I was a spy. And I was sent by the US Government to topple, you know, topple the government of Cambodia. And then they were trying to connect me to the opposition leader.
You know, they use this as evidence in the trial against him, you know, to try to prove that he was running, he was working with an American spy ring. So they did put him under house arrest. A horrific situation, you know, for the many people involved. I, I'm personally safe. I mean, I, obviously I haven't been back to Cambodia since then. I don't think I can go back. But there was an Australian citizen who was accused of similar spying allegations to me. I mean, like, he was flying a drone over a protest and he was filming a documentary, and they actually put him in a Cambodian prison for a year. I mean, he was in the end pardoned by the Cambodian king. You know, he got out in the end. But a year in a Cambodian prison, that's scary. And, yeah, like, if I were in the country when this happened, that could have also happened to me. So, you know, luck was just on my side in that one. I just happened to have left already and was all right.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: So all of this, though, in light of what has been coming out of USAID, a lot of the stuff that Mike Benz and Doge has unearthed about these kind of shadowy NGOs, actually in many cases funding either state media or opposition media or whatever, trying to use soft power to influence events in countries where the US wouldn't mind if there was regime change. Were you surprised by all of these revelations or was it something that you had a sense was. Was going on behind the scenes?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: So, to be totally frank, I haven't been following the. The whole USAID and DOGE topic recently.
And the reason is just because I'm working on some other big projects right now and they're really time consuming. I've. I'VE been taking a little, taking a little break from, from following politics lately and trying to focus on things that I need to get done. But I do have to say, you know, when I was overseas, especially in developing countries, there is a global humanitarian aid industry, you could say, that does get a lot of donor money. And you know, there are people who do good work. I don't want to, you know, put down the people who are actually doing good work out there. But there is a lot of bureaucracy and, you know, there is a lot of self perpetuating, you know, a lot of self perpetuation that goes on in which some of these aid organizations do, you know, want to work on projects that might not have much impact, but it continues, it keeps the money flowing and it keeps the institution growing, which is unfortunately one of the goals. So I have seen a good deal of that. I spent time, just like in Cambodia, the country I just mentioned, it's one of the countries that receives the most humanitarian and developmental aid in the world on a per capita basis. It's a, there's a huge amount of international money going in there and yet it remains one of the poorest countries in the world and a one party state, you know, where people don't enjoy political freedom. So all this aid unfortunately has not done much to help the country. And I really do think there needs to be a better way of handling this.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: So turning now to your book, the Perfect Police State, an undercover odyssey into China's terrifying surveillance dystopia of the future. Talk a bit about the process in researching the situation. Interviewing victims of communist state persecution. Was it difficult to get people to open up and speak with you?
[00:10:00] Speaker B: It was at first. But that's just a fact of life when you're covering authoritarian countries. When you're in any place, whether it's Burma or China or, you know, certain places in the Middle east, the default is not to talk to outsiders and also not to talk to citizens of the country too. And the reason is because in a lot of these countries there are secret police everywhere. They're, you know, everybody, your neighbor might be reporting on you, your cousin might be snitching on you. You know, people have, the Chinese government keeps files on people. There are files that follow them their entire life that they're not allowed to see. And you know, this is just an example of how authoritarianism works in these countries. So what you really have to do is to really get deep into what's really happening in these countries. A lot of what journalists would do is speak to the refugee community.
Refugees who've recently departed a country, say, such as China or, or Syria or whatever country it might be, they will have on the ground insights. They've seen what's really going on there. And then to top it all off, they will often have on their phones, on their computers, they'll have data, they'll have documents, they'll often have photos or videos that they've taken on the ground, often with GPS data that can help locate what's happening. And a lot of revelations come out that way by just looking at the kinds of things that they're bringing out of the country. One of the toughest situations as a journalist is, you know, the. The ethical quandary of not being able to really be in the country and ask these kinds of questions inside the country. Once you go around a place like China asking these questions to local people, you're putting them in danger. You know, even if you just ask what seems like a harmless question about politics to you, you know, the local security services might not see that way. And even if you ask the question, even if they don't answer, they might see that as an infraction on their part. So you've got to be really careful with that. I, you know, I don't really like in North Korea, for example, I didn't ask any local people about politics. I think that would be just a horrible thing to do to them. But in this particular case, when I was working on China, most of the work I did was with refugees in Turkey, but then also some refugees in Washington, D.C. gathering their stories.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: So in your book, you describe how since 2017, an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and people of other Muslim minorities have been accused of harboring, quote, ideological viruses and, quote, terrorist thoughts and taken away to hundreds of concentration camps in the largest internment of ethnic minorities since the Holocaust. You write that quote, even if you don't get taken to a camp, daily life is hellish. So walk us through what a day in the life of a Uyghur man or woman might look like.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: So, yeah, it's.
So think about it this way. Imagine you're reading a science fiction novel, say, by Philip K. Dick, who, you know, wrote. Wrote the movie that became. Wrote the book that became Blade Runner or another. Another good example is the. The sci fi film.
Sorry, the name escapes me. It was A Minority Report. So that was also a novel by Philip K. Dick. And it's, you know, the film is with Tom Cruise. It's about. It's about These, these human, these, these psychic humans that are able to foresee the future. And then based on that information, the, the police engage in this pre crime system. They go in and arrest people based on, you know, what, like what is predicted, like this murder that's supposed to happen in the future with no due process, nothing of that sort. So this is the life that local people live in China's Xinjiang Project Province. So Xinjiang is a region in western China. This is the setting for my book where I had spent some time. And this is home to the Uyghur people. The Uyghurs are an ethnic group in this region of western China. They're, they're distinct from the majority Han Chinese people. They speak a different language, they come from different ethnic roots, and they're treated as subhuman citizens. They're treated as, you could say the bottom rung of, you know, of Chinese society, treated as if they're terrorists and they're, you know, criminals and this or that. It's a stereotype of them in China. That's truly unfortunate.
And because of this, because of the structure that the Chinese Communist Party has set up, they are subject to 247 surveillance at a level that hasn't really been seen anywhere else before. So you could literally wake up in the morning and you'll wake up, and this is something that the party did a few years ago. They would send party cadres to sleep in either the same beds or the same rooms as the women in these households to keep an eye on them. You know, that's what they would claim, to keep an eye on them. But, you know, you can literally wake up next to your party minder who's there to watch your thoughts and watch your words and your ideology.
You would wake up at the same time every day, because if you don't wake up at the same time every day, the system might flag you because you're doing something unusual or strange. You have to work on routine. So there will sometimes be, say, a camera in your living room, in your home. This is a government police camera. This is something that I documented from refugees who told me all about this. And the camera, you know, will be watching you. It'll, it'll, it'll be gathering data on you. And if there's anything amiss, anything strange going on. So let's say maybe you're religious and you want to, you know, read a religious book like the Quran if you're Muslim, the Bible if you're a Christian, that will get flagged, and that will be something that the Communist Party will look into.
So let's say, you know, you could go to work, it might be 9am you go to work at 9am if you're an hour late for work, let's say you have the flu, you're sick, you need a doctor's note that will be flagged by the system. The police might show up at your door and double check to make sure that you're telling the truth. You actually have a flu. You know, this is just, just some examples of what's going on. If you go to the local grocery store, let's say you have to stop and pick up something, pick up some groceries. Everything that you purchase will be monitored. You'll use your phone to purchase that food. The purchases are monitored. They're sent back to the police. The police can see them. The police can kind of figure out what you're doing. And then, you know, there are many other, other examples like this if you're texting people. We do know that the Chinese tech companies that operate in this region have handed over mass data to the government on request. You know, there's no, no due process here. And so if you're talking on your text messages and you, or your apps and you, like, you know, something that could sound either religious or, you know, civil liberties related or democracy related, you know, or if you say a word like gun or bomb, but you're saying it in a different context, that will get flagged and the police might show up at your door. Now, the, here's the thing. In this region, like in most, in a lot of China, you don't have to be actually convicted of a crime. You can actually be detained by police if the AI system decides that you might commit a crime in the future. And this goes back to what I said before about Minority Report. If the AI and the name of the AI system is Skynet, this is the national AI system of China. If it, if it has reason to conclude or to suspect that something is amiss about you, that you have a criminal future, the police will come to your door and they can take you away. They can take you to a concentration camp. There have been hundreds of these set up over the years out in the countryside of this region, Xinjiang. And, and they will re. Educate you. That's the term they use. They will try to purify your mind of ideological viruses and terrorism. These are the exact terms that they use. And they'll say that you have to spend a few years at these institutions where you get brainwashing, indoctrination every day. And the goal is to form you into a good citizen, somebody who is a loyal, unquestioning member of the Communist Party who will not go out of line, who will think the correct thoughts, and will certainly not be a criminal or terrorist in the future. So the goal here, the Chinese government has been trying to create a total security state. It's a total security state in which everything you do, every place you've been, every message you send, every, every item you buy is documented and monitored. Now you can say that's happening in the west too. A lot of our data is monitored, but here you're actually accused of a pre crime and brought away to a concentration camp. Based on this data. There's no charge, there's no criminal accusation. It's merely the suspicion that you will be a terrorist based on artificial intelligence that leads to these outcomes.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Well, the situation also seems particularly invasive for women, including mandatory birth control, enforced sterilizations. I mean, is this part of some kind of ethnic genocide?
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Yes, yes. Well, the U.S. state Department has declared it a genocide and numerous other parliaments around the world have called it a genocide. And they point to this specific atrocity that you're talking about. It's the, the oppression of women's reproductive rights, it's the attempts to try to depopulate the region to stop women from, you know, from having more children. And, you know, these children would be Uyghur, they wouldn't be Han Chinese. The goal is to slowly erase the population, to slowly erase the culture. And this also comes in tandem with the cultural erasure too. So they're, they're eradicating mosques. This region is predominantly Muslim. They're, they're taking down various cultural artifacts and replacing them with parking lots and skyscrapers and so forth, symbols of modern life.
And this. So, so it's these two effects, the population control and the cultural erasure, that when you add it up, actually many legal experts argue, does amount legally to genocide under, under international law. So it's a truly alarming situation. And there's one more factor to this. You know, in the past, this is what makes this so insidious in the 20th century. Genocide, authoritarianism, it was a different business altogether. That was the age of the gas chambers, the mat. The, the outright massacres, the shootings, the, the mass graves. Genocide and authoritarianism in the 20th century was much blunter and much more in your face. It was a direct threat to your immediate safety, to your life. Whereas the way that authoritarians keep control now in the 21st century, Xinjiang, China is the, it's, it's the first theater where this is happening. And this, we're going to see a lot more of this in different places around the world. The style of authoritarianism is, is more, it's softer and hidden. And you don't see the bodies, you don't see the bloodshed. You see systems of control. You see technology that controls and, you know, humans who commit these atrocities can hide behind the technology. They can say, well, you know, it wasn't my decision. It was, you know, know, the AI that decided. I just, I'm just executing the suggestion. So what we're seeing now is a shift in the way that authoritarianism works from this, this, you know, this 20th century, you know, the Nazis and the Soviets of the 20th century to the Chinese Communist Party of the 21st century, which is the slow moving, the slow burn, genocide, the slow erasure of a people. And that's what really makes this scary.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: So let's back up and look at the historical precedents leading up the current situation. After the Chinese communist takeover in 1949, was there a strong desire of a separate Uyghur identity, a desire for independence? And what about instances of violence that provided the Chinese with a pretext to crack down on the population at large?
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Sure. So the Chinese Communist Party has been in power now for about 70 or 80 years. And from the beginning, it was atrocity, it was famine. The Communist Party kicked off its rule with a major famine and then went into a series of mass atrocities against its people. You know, like all Communist parties, like all authoritarian parties, it's paranoid. It wants to keep power at all costs. And it built this authoritarian system under the original Chairman, Mao Zedong, who's the father figure of China, you know, similar to somebody like Stalin in Russia.
So, you know, China was always in this position of communist authoritarian rule. But what really started to pick things up, you know, for what we see today in more recent times with the Uyghurs was interestingly, the war on terror. Now, the US War on terror. Now, I'm not saying the US caused this. The US was not the instigator of these atrocities. But the US did take Uyghur suspects to Guantanamo Bay and use this language of anti terrorism counterterrorism that was seized on by the Chinese Communist Party. They saw an opening and they saw that they could accuse, you know, these people of terrorist sympathies and they could use that language of the war on terror to justify the oppression that was going on.
So it was really 2001 that started to show the turning point. And then over time, the oppression continued and grew. In 2008, Beijing hosted the Olympics that was supposed to be the coming out party. But after that it was quickly followed by mass protests in this region, Xinjiang, and also in Tibet. These protests were extremely rare in China. You don't see protests on this level, but the government moved to shut them down. The government moved to put the instigators in prison, the protest leaders in prison. And this was the moment when the crackdowns really began. There were some terrorist attacks in China that the Chinese government has accused Uyghurs of perpetrating. The only thing though is that there's no way of proving whether or not they were actually behind it. Because the legal system in China is so opaque, the Chinese Communist Party can make these accusations, make these claims, and use it to justify a broader crackdown. We actually don't know, you know, for sure who was really behind these attacks. The Chinese government claims Uyghurs, but they haven't really shown evidence that would prove that. But the fact of the matter is that they use this to build their narrative and to create this authoritarian state that now exists today under the chairman Xi Jinping.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: Well, I'm going to get in trouble with our audience if I don't get to some of these questions and comments. Here's a comment from actually LinkedIn. Brian Kyle says, I personally know someone who was persecuted by the ccp. He was a lawyer who attempted to defend another lawyer who wanted to defend individuals on human rights matter. He lost everything and sought refuge in Canada. Wow, it's pretty scary tale.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Scary and common.
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Okay, my modern Gault asks, what sort of training lessons did you need to learn to maximize your safety as a journalist in other countries?
[00:25:58] Speaker B: So my personal safety, I, when I was in these countries, I never felt personally threatened in the sense that somebody would assault me or make me disappear or, you know, something horrible like that. What I was more concerned about was the safety of my data, especially data as it relates to the people who I might be talking to. So I would always have a separate pair of systems. I would have one system that I would use, you know, when I'm in a place like China, and then a separate system that I would use when I'm outside of China. So whenever I was in China, I always carried a burner phone and a burner laptop. I never loaded my, you know, my Gmail account. I always use a vpn, never loaded my Gmail account or, you know, any of my personal data. There. And whenever I exited the country, the moment I left, I would destroy that laptop and destroy that phone, just get rid of it and, you know, make sure all the data is erased from it. So everything, you know, kept absolutely separate. You know, I would also take a lot of, you know, take a lot of measures to ensure that subjects are anonymous among the refugee communities. So, you know, one of the challenges of interviewing refugees is that they often have family back in the country that they're talking about. And you know, by publishing their story, the authorities might harass their families back home. So I would often take, you know, major steps, you know, with the help of experts in this field. I'm not just doing this alone. It's not like my, just my own, you know, like my own whim. It's. There are experts who look at this and you know, we would often remove key details and sometimes back off and you know, like not, not reveal time frames as they actually happen. So, you know, my, I might, you know, this is just to protect their safety when I'm writing the story. Sometimes, you know, there might actually be a gap of a month or two between two events, but I would often, you know, not reveal that gap or where it was and, and not reveal the chronology of what, what went down. And that's just, these are just, you know, ways to throw off anybody who might be trying to figure out who these, these sources are. So that's always key. And then also, you know, anonymous names. If, if somebody tells me that, you know, they have nothing to fear, that they're fine having their name out there and their name has already been published, then I will go ahead and use their name, but only with their approval and only if they've already appeared on the BBC or on CNN or something. I won't reveal their name. And then, you know, people who need to be anonymous stay anonymous, you know, with many details obscured.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: All right, we have another question. YouTube, lock, stock and barrel asks what is the most extreme invasion of privacy that China conducts on its citizens? I remember the drones looking at people through windows during the COVID lockdowns. Well, I don't know, I mean, mandatory birth control for sterilization, having a minder come and sleep in your bed, being arrested on the basis of pre crime. I don't know if there's any more awful invasions of privacy than that, if you have any ideas. But one of the things that struck me in your book, it was maybe not a really violent invasion of privacy, but the authorities mandating that a Uyghur family that had to set up a camera in their living room, that they had to repaint their house from blue to red. That was pretty ridiculous.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: It, it was ridiculous. But that's the logic of the Communist Party and that's the logic of authoritarianism. There's, there's no normal logic is suspended. The, the everyday logic that you and I deal with is suspended with the goal of replacing it with its own logic. And that logic might be that red, the color of communism, is a color that shows loyalty, that shows passion for the ideology, for the cause, whereas blue is a symbol of local independence movements. It's, it's used by Uyghur independence fighters historically, who wanted to have their own nation, their own state. And so anything that's blue, despite it being a traditional color used in many settings, should be erased and replaced with red. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot, there's. There are so many examples like this that are nonsensical to us but make sense under the system.
And, you know, one thing I should add is that when I was writing my book, I was writing my book just as the pandemic was coming on. I mean, this was. I finish it around the time of the pandemic, around kind of early to mid 2020. And a lot of what I was documenting in this region of China started spreading across the country in the form of pandemic lockdowns. Now, if you thought what was happening in America was bad, if you thought staying home and social distancing was tough, what they went through in China was intense and mirrored a lot of these privacy invasions that we've been talking about. So I have a lot of friends in China. They told me stories about how people would be sitting on their balcony in a skyscraper in the capital of Beijing, and they're just sitting on their balcony alone with nobody around, they're smoking a cigarette, and a government drone will come by and take a snap of them and use facial recognition. And then the police would show up and either give them a fine or take them away for detention because they were outside on their balcony during the pandemic. The pandemic in China was wild in terms of the things that the government did to keep people oppressed and second guessing themselves constantly. But there was backlash. There were protests, you know, and there was discontent over the way that the CCP handled a lot of this. And I think it's a good sign, you know, that, that people, you know, people in China, this is not something that, you know, us sitting in America, we can talk about Freely, it's not only about us here, but people in China, they're, they're getting frustrated with a lot of this and they're upset and they do feel that the government has not been representing their best interests. So I'm not saying that China will become a democracy or, you know, anything like that tomorrow, but it's not a matter of, you know, people simply following the party. There is discontent there over all of this.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: So speaking of intrusions, describe how it started out as a proliferation of security cameras grew into a full blown system able to identify individuals, individuals using facial and voice recognition, even DNA.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: Right. So this was the CCP's plan in this region. They ran a surveillance system called the ijop. And the ij, the ijop, it would gather data from apps, from purchases, from text messages, from, you know, like what people have on their phone. Also from police observations, the police could put in data into this system and it would, you know, the system using AI would learn more about, about each citizen. Also they would use, you know, these intrusive cameras in people's homes and living rooms. I was personally in a tea shop in this region and you know, the tea shop was, was like, it was like it was a tea shop inside a person's home, which is common in this region. People use their homes to open small businesses. And there was a camera pointed at, right at me. I mean I saw the flash and I turned over and I realized there was a camera looking at me and my helpers and you know, clearly watching and clearly, you know, perhaps taking in our conversation. So you have to be really careful what you say in this region. But all this is all, everything that is, you know, put out there is being sucked up into this IJOP system used by the police. And this is what they use to figure out these pre crimes, who they're going to detain, who they're going to take away.
And this includes concentration camps, but also forced labor. So ever since I wrote the book, forced labor has grown as an issue. And you know, this is something that is truly unfortunate because a lot of this forced labor ends up in products that are being shipped to the US via Shine and Table and Chinese companies like that that we all order our shopping from. So my point with all this is that this is how the system was built. It started with novel technologies, it started with the help of technology companies and it slowly expanded into a system of concentration camps, a system of full intrusive data gathering, including biometric data, DNA taken at police stations, and then slowly as the government got more and more control over a very fearful and scared population, you know, forced labor came into the equation. People were taken away and told that, you know, to prove your loyalty to the country, you have to stitch shoes for 15 hours a day with no pay, and you have to do it for three years to prove that you're a loyal person.
So that's the system in a nutshell. It's a mixture of economic coercion of political coercion and technological coercion all coming together into one massive system that's very hard to resist and fight back against.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: So tell us about Mason, the young Uyghur woman whose story dramatizes the dystopian experience of living in a police state that you so painstakingly detail. First, how did you find her?
[00:35:28] Speaker B: So it was a long and winding road.
You know, I was in Turkey. I lived in Turkey for three years, and I spent a lot of time among the Uyghur community there. And, you know, I was listening to a lot of the horrific and harrowing stories of how they got out, how they arrived in Turkey, which is a common location for refugees for this region. And as I got deeper and deeper, you know, kind of getting to know people in the community, it was my good friend, Uyghur man named Abdoulaye, who's a literary scholar in his field.
He wanted to introduce me to her because he felt that, you know, she was truly somebody who was an intellectual on a different level, somebody who, you know, had managed to resist the severe brainwashing that goes on in this region of China and, you know, that had spent some time in a concentration camp, but had somehow managed to come out of it and to restore her mind and to stay sharp and to stay independent. She was a voracious reader. She read everything from, you know, George Orwell in Western literature to Central Asian poetry to Persian poetry. Very traditional, you know, traditional works from 800, 900 years ago.
And when I met her, I found her story, you know, tragic, of course. I mean, horrific. But her ability to.
To. To recover and to, you know, to. To return from what she had been through was something that I. I just. I mean, I just. I. I just couldn't imagine how she did it. I mean, you know, I was just trying to put myself in her shoes or trying to think, you know, like, if. If this had happened to me, would I be able to recover in this way and to, you know, to come out of being in a concentration camp and to, you know, to heal in the way that she did. And I, I thought, no, like, I, I don't think I would actually. I think that, you know, I would probably be, be broken. I mean, I would be Iraq. And so I, I came to truly admire her steadfast. Her steadfastness and her deep ability to emerge and to, you know, to show what it means to think independently and to reject, you know, what the government tells you, even under the most atrocious of circumstances.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: So she's reading Orwell. Maybe she should next read Ayn Rand.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: Oh, yes.
And, yes. And, and when I met her, she pulled out Orwell. She had Orwell in Turkish and said that she's been reading this and said, I, I'm just so surprised that, you know, this, this author from 70 years ago in England can describe, can describe my life so accurately today in China. And yeah, maybe, maybe Rand, is that.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Are you still in touch with her?
[00:38:22] Speaker B: Not lately. So I purposely try not to stay in touch with people unless they reach out to me first. Just for security precautions. I keep a strong cybersecurity system at my home to make sure my data is not being messed with by the Chinese government or whoever might try to mess with it. But somebody, you know, somebody overseas in a country like Turkey, which is an authoritarian country, I don't know if, you know, if they're doing anything with the data of refugees there and just to protect them.
I don't reach out to them unless they reach out to me first and they need something specific.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: All right, so Mason is a bright, bookish student pursuing her studies in Turkey when in 2017, she decides to return home to visit her family. Tell us what happened.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: So because she had been studying overseas in Turkey, she returned home and she was taken to a concentration camp. She was taken away for no clear reason at all, except for the fact that she had been overseas studying and also for the fact that she had been a voracious reader, reader of none party literature. The fact that she had an enormous library of books was already enough to flag her for suspicion. But when she went overseas and she pursued her studies, she was immediately labeled an enemy of the state and taken away to a concentration camp. So she spent about seven days, if I recall correctly. Yeah, it was seven days in a camp, which, you know, I gotta say, like a mixture of her ability to, you know, to her ability to get out. Her ability, you know, she had a mother who was very helpful in getting her out and using, you know, using whatever resources she could, but also, you know, just like her ability to stay sharp in this, in this whole situation designed to crush you. She was able to get through those seven days and she was able to come out of it. You know, she had, she had a lot of psychological and mental problems coming out of it, but she was able to get out and she was able to get home through a very convoluted system. You know, she was able to play the bureaucracy and get out and get home. She went through India, she was able from there to escape back to Turkey, and she was able to reunite, you know, with people in Turkey and then went through a process of healing.
[00:40:50] Speaker A: So we hear a lot about the Chinese social credit system. How similar or how different is it from what the Uyghurs are experiencing and how pervasive is it throughout China? Is it just concentrated into certain regions or is it kind of being rolled out at scale?
[00:41:11] Speaker B: So when I wrote the book, it was about four years ago now that this was all starting and the credit scores in China were still being rolled out, were still being tested. And to top it off, there was no single one centralized credit score in China yet there, you know, this was really a different distinct set of companies all offering their own credit scores for this or that factor. You know, like, how often do you travel? Do you repay your debts? You know, have you paid your rent this month? There were all kinds, you know, like what, what school do you go to? All these different credit scores would be used by various companies and the government to decide on your trustworthiness to the state. And so, you know, if you're somebody who, you know, who pays off your credit card, you know, that's the most obvious example, including here in America. But also, you know, if you're somebody who pays the rent every month, somebody who shows up to work on time every day, another one is, you know, if you travel or fly and you're not a rude or disruptive customer, your credit score can go up. So this is, you know, this is different from the debt based credit scores of America. You know, you're looking at somebody's financial trustworthiness. This is something different altogether. It's a behavioral credit score. It's looking at, you know, psychological traits and, you know, the way that you act in public and whether you're a good employee and, you know, what does your boss say about you, what does your landlord say about you? And this sizes you up and turns you into, you know, like, if you have a good credit score, it means that you're a good, loyal Communist party citizen, whereas if you don't have a good one, you're not trusted. And the government can use this against you because they can stop you from leaving the country. They can stop you from booking flights, they can stop you, you know, from visiting certain villages. You know, say you want to go see your family out in a village, in a province somewhere. They can make that really hard too. You can't get on the train. There are a lot of levers that they can use to make life difficult. And that's how this authoritarianism really functions.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: So you write that in 2018, use of the social credit system resulted in travelers being blocked 17.5 million times from buying airplane tickets and 5.5 million times from buying train tickets. People were blocked 290,000 times from being a corporate lawyer or senior management.
And that this rollout was well received by the Chinese people. Why is it popular?
[00:43:50] Speaker B: See, and that's something that I think most people would not expect, that a lot of these social credit systems originally were somewhat popular among Chinese citizens. And part of the reason is that it boils down to trust. So China is a low trust country. This is reflected in many polls. You know, people don't really trust each other beyond their immediate family or their immediate circles. And one of the big challenges there is that the country for a long time didn't have great access to things like credit cards, you know, or, you know, that sort of thing. So, you know, like the way the country was structured, there would be big cities where, you know, a lot of people have a credit card, but then there would be lots of rural villages where people just don't really have access to the same banking institutions. And so they had to find a way to leapfrog that, like, how can you help people out outside of the cities? Leapfrog credit and, you know, like leapfrog the problem of not having credit because they don't have credit cards, they don't have debt. How can they get past that and then enter the banking, the banking system and kind of join modern society in China? And one of the solutions that the government came up with was the idea of the social credit score. So it's a way of scoring people seeing that you can trust them based on all these other factors that are not credit card or debt related. And then if you trust them, you know, they can enter the banking institutions, they can, you know, get jobs at big companies.
That, that's, that's the thinking behind it. And so this is part of why it was somewhat popular in China. But, you know, like I said, a lot of this was being rolled out almost 10 years ago. I mean, we're talking about eight years ago now. And there is more discontent these days. I truly believe post pandemic, the country has been through a lot. There's been not only the pandemic itself and the lockdowns, but lots of economic turmoil, lots of internal social problems arising. And so these social credit scores, I would guess, and I don't have data to prove this, I would guess that they're not as popular as they used to be now.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: So what's been the role of US companies, tech companies, but also US Manufacturers that might be using forced labor in abetting the current situation?
[00:46:13] Speaker B: Well, one of the most shocking things that I found in my reporting was that some US Companies were indirectly helping the situation. They were there, they were complacent, and they were going along with the needs of the Chinese government in exchange for market access. So one of the things about China that I think everyone has to understand is that it is a remarkable economic success story in the sense that it has a massive consumer market and a massive middle class compared to 20, 30 years ago.
And so as a result, all these US and European companies, they have been courting the Chinese Communist Party, courting the Chinese government, trying to win their goodwill, trying to do what they can to secure access to this market. One example of a company that has done this pretty egregiously is Microsoft. This is a company that I've documented in depth. Microsoft, through a laboratory that it started in Beijing, has been deeply involved in building and spreading a lot of the AI technologies now being used across China. And now, I'm not taking, I'm not saying that Microsoft directly built it and then handed AI to the Chinese Communist Party. What happened is that they trained many of the key people who, at this elite laboratory owned by Microsoft, they would leave and they would go on and found their own startups and found their own companies. And a lot of these companies later went to be sanctioned by various global governments because of their involvement in human rights abuses, genocide, and national security threats. So these are the same companies that went into Xinjiang, China, and developed these AI surveillance systems that, that sold the. The equipment, the equipment used to gather DNA on the local population for surveillance that, you know, that created the voice and so facial recognition software that was used to surveil and track the population.
These Chinese companies. You know, like, if you were to look at many of the key people who helped build these companies and build their technologies, a lot of them were trained by American firms. They were trained by Microsoft. You know, being a big Example, and trained by a few other firms, too. So this has become a problem in America because, you know, America, like, we're supposed to be a democracy, and, you know, we're not supposed to be selling people technology that, that they're going to use to go and commit genocide, you know, against a minority group. It's just, it's. It's truly atrocious. And one of the big challenges out in the States in the last five to six years has been how do we separate, you know, a market that is intensely authoritarian, that is not a free market, and keep the US a free market here at home? You know, how do we have, you know, how do we have a free market here that's not going to bolster dictators overseas? Because that's where it gets dangerous.
[00:49:12] Speaker A: So Alan Turner has an observation. The amount of manpower required to keep track of all of that surveillance and data must be staggering. And it kind of plays into a question that was forming in my mind as I was reading your book, thinking about not just the detention centers, but also the enormous amount of labor that gets diverted into the neighborhood system in which neighbors are incentivized to spy on and report on each other. Is there any awareness in the Chinese Party leadership on how economically wasteful this is, how it's a tremendous drain on productivity, even aside from the surveillance state, Looking at the Chinese economy more generally, if China wants to be a great economic power, than any awareness on how having all of these layer upon layer of bureaucracy from the Chinese Communist Party is embedded into industry, and how that really detracts from not just efficiency, but creativity overall.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: Right? It's extremely wasteful in the economy. It's so the sheer amount, and it's wasteful in a lot of ways, but the sheer amount of energy, the sheer amount of electricity, the manpower, the training for that manpower, just the artificial intelligence and all these modern advanced technologies take up huge, enormous resources that are just not sustainable in the long run. If you're going to be putting this towards surveillance systems that are clamping down on the population and scaring them and, you know, not allowing them to, say, publish a scientific paper that could revolutionize a certain way of doing things or a technology that's being put out, you know, if you're clamping down on their freedom of speech and not allowing them to innovate and to think freely, what the Communist Party is essentially doing is sucking up these massive, massive amounts of resources to projects that are backfiring against it, because now they're losing out on the Innovations that potentially everybody else is getting. One of the big, big problems facing China right now is how to get access to semiconductors, advanced semiconductors that the US well, to some extent the US but more specifically Taiwan, South Korea and Holland are three countries that produce many of the world's most advanced semiconductors and the equipment to make those semiconductors. Semiconductors are the most complicated thing that humankind has made and they're required in vast numbers and vast amounts of processing power to keep these AI systems going. China can barely get them because they're being sanctioned left and right by these countries that produce the semiconductors. Nobody. I mean, the US Government, the government of Taiwan, which is being threatened by China, if they realize that if these chips end up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party, which is committing genocide against its own people, then that's going to come right back and threaten them. Taiwan, a small country, is, you know, is going to be invaded. China is going to unleash all kinds of, you know, AI driven, you know, cyber, cyber warfare tools against it is, you know, going to do all kinds of things. So it's a scary prospect. And what really the Chinese Communist Party has done is shoot itself in the foot with these surveillance policies because it's wasting resources on projects that are detracting from what the real goal should be, which should be free market innovation.
[00:52:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think backfiring in more ways than one. We had on the show a couple weeks ago a scholar, Timur Karan, and he was describing how there's been a decline in Muslim religiosity throughout the Middle east, but particularly concentrated in countries where the authoritarian leaders like Turkey are trying to impose more religiosity. In those countries, people are stepping back from religion. So in China, where they're kind of trying to intentionally push people away from religion, they may in fact be having the opposite effect.
So speaking about other countries, I'm thinking about, well, the Chinese have perfected the surveillance state as you describe in your book. What about other countries where authoritarian leaders might similarly want to surveil their population but just haven't managed to get their act together. Do you see a future in which other countries like Iran or even Venezuela might roll out similar systems?
[00:54:02] Speaker B: Well, they already are. So Iran, Venezuela, numerous countries in Sub Saharan Africa and Central Asia, they have been enthusiastic customers of Chinese technology and specifically technology designed to surveil the population. We've seen a lot of instances of this which I documented in the book and since the book was published, many more instances. I was, I was reading A report a couple years ago, and it was a report about the company Huawei, which is a Chinese, major Chinese telecoms firm. And one of the things that this report said, so there was a cyber security audit in the nation of Papua New guinea, which is a small island nation in the Pacific that was purchasing these Chinese technologies for their own cyber security. But they hired outside auditors, come in and look at the systems. And the conclusion was that there are so many flaws and so many holes in these Chinese systems that they can only have put, been put there purposefully that there's no way that this was an accident. So the Chinese government is using these systems to, you know, to sell to, to, to help authority, to help authoritarian regimes oppress people around the world. But they're also using this to infiltrate the systems around the world. Even here in America, the FBI has put out notices and statements saying that they believe they have evidence that, that Chinese hacking within US Infrastructure has gone deeper than many people anticipated it would. And one example, just to give one example, so the FBI stated that text messages sent between iPhone and Android phones are vulnerable to Chinese interception. And the reason is because there's a security vulnerability in that crossover between the two operating systems. And so, you know, if the Chinese government did want to target people using, sending messages in that way, they would be able to read those messages. I mean, there would be no way to stop it. So this is the worry that the, you know, I wrote my book, published it four years ago, and since then the authoritarian arm has been reaching further and further around the world and trying to infiltrate nations everywhere and societies using this technology. So my advice to everybody, I am a huge fan of cyber security. I run a very, I can't state the details here on the podcast, but I do run a very, very sophisticated cyber, cybersecurity system at my home. You know, very kind of high level. And it's these, these kinds of things, they're actually not that hard to put together. I think it's more important than ever to protect our data because we don't know how that data is being watched and how it can be used. We don't know really what the end game is quite yet with AI and what it's going to be doing with this data. So autonomy, personal autonomy, personal liberty around your devices, around your data, around, you know, what it is that you use in your day to day work. I think that's going to be really important in the times that we live in.
[00:56:56] Speaker A: So, final question in our couple of remaining minutes, the situation that you Describe really sounds pretty hopeless. I do an Instagram takeover every week in which atlas Society Instagram users from all over the world send in questions and I give a one minute answer. And I frequently get questions from young people that are living in totalitarian countries like Iran or Venezuela, wanting advice on how to push back on authoritarian control and ameliorate their situation. I sometimes struggle actually in coming up with those answers. But what kind of answer might you give them?
[00:57:40] Speaker B: I struggle too, because it's not looking good. We don't live in the most democratic of times worldwide. And you know, the, the major dictatorships of the world have been on the march and they have been expanding their power globally. I think that the first consideration is just to stay safe. You know, I think that these governments do have, they have intruded on people's personal lives and personal freedoms in much darker ways than I think that we know about publicly. I think that, you know, they, they know a lot about activists and dissidents around the world. More, more than we assume, I think. And so I think safety is key. I think that, you know, before anybody goes out to a protest and essentially throws, throws their body at the situation or the cause, I think it's more important to pull back and just ask the question, am I safe doing this? And once the situation perhaps improves, maybe that's the time to go out. So I'm sorry I can't give a more optimistic answer. I do think that the nature of the times we live in really do call for people to be discreet and to find networks, find ways of communicating with each other in ways that these governments cannot figure out and, you know, to find ways to form communities that, you know, remain away from the eyes of the government. And, you know, hopefully as things improve in the future, if they do improve, there will be moments to come out and to become more public with these, these democratic causes.
[00:59:11] Speaker A: Well, this has been fantastic. Jeff, final question. What's next for you and where can our audience follow your work?
[00:59:19] Speaker B: So I'm on, I'm on X at Jeffrey Kane, that's my name. G E O F F R E Y underscore C A I N. That's my main venue where I post. I'm also on LinkedIn. Just, just shoot me a note over there. But I'm always happy to, you know, hear from viewers if you ever want to shoot me a note. My DMs are open and always happy to chat. So next I'm doing some work on technology writing. I'm a technology journalist and I'm Right. I'm working on a biography of a major technology figure in the US that's going to show him in a different light. Can't reveal who it is yet, but it's going to, it's going, it's going to be coming out in about a year.
[00:59:55] Speaker A: Well, we'll definitely have you back on then and hopefully get to meet you in purpose in person before then. So thank you.
[01:00:02] Speaker B: Thank you, Jack.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: Great to be here. Thanks to all of you who watched, asked your excellent questions. If Mason is out there or if any of you know young people who would like to be connected with like minded peers, please encourage them to come and join us in Austin, June 5th through 7th at our Galt's Gulch Student Conference. We still have scholarships available and we'd love to see you there. Meanwhile, please be sure to join us next week when Professor Joshua Mitchell is going to join us to discuss his book, American Awakening, Identity Politics and Other afflictions of our time. We'll see you then.
