China's high tech spying and trade zone control points can only aim at world domination
Episode Stats
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Summary
Today's episode of the Ezra Levant Show is all about China's new high-tech weapons and spying on its own people. It's not hard to see how China is using these weapons to dominate the world, but it's even harder to see them being used to spy on other countries.
Transcript
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Hey Rebels, oh boy, today I wish you had the video version of the podcast.
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I'm going to take you through about 10 short videos about Chinese high-tech,
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about how it's used facial recognition, gait recognition, how you walk, emotion recognition,
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I think you'll get the gist of it from the podcast, but boy, if you had the premium video,
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And especially on shows like today, I really want to show you what they're doing in China
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with TikTok, with Huawei, with drones, things that we don't yet see here in Canada and the
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Tonight, yesterday I showed you China's new aircraft carrier.
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Now let me show you how they use high-tech to spy on their own people.
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It's December 18th and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
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Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
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There's 8,500 customers here and you won't give them an answer.
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The only thing I have to say to the government, the wire publisher, is because it's my bloody
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Yesterday I showed you how China's aircraft carrier program is coming along.
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They've just commissioned their second aircraft carrier, the Shandong.
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What I'm showing you here is their first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning.
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They have a third one under construction and I doubt that will be the last.
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That's what you do when you want to dominate the world, the waters around China itself,
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when you want to lay claim to islands that aren't yours, to fishing rights that aren't yours,
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when you want to utterly dominate Vietnam and Taiwan and the Philippines and frankly any
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But it's also what you do when you start to put your thumb on the scale farther away from
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Right now, when a U.S. Navy carrier battle group sails into the Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean
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Sea, it immediately becomes the biggest military force in the region, whether that's aimed at
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They practically own parts of Africa like Sudan, for example.
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Much of the world put sanctions on Sudan because of their genocide in Darfur, but China didn't
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Actually cared a lot because it got to buy oil at below world market prices.
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Same thing happened with the sanctions on Iran.
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So they bought that sanctioned oil at a deep discount because the West wouldn't buy it.
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What happens, though, if there's a big conflagration in Sudan or Iran or, heck, even parts of the
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Remember when Donald Trump mused about buying Greenland from Denmark?
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China had been trying to build major airfields in Greenland.
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And those were proceeding until American intervention.
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That tweet from Trump might have looked like a laugh to the Trump-hating media.
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But imagine if China were to have had access to air bases in Greenland.
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And I think Trump's tweet stopped some of that ambition on their part.
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Imagine if China parked its navy off the coast of the Panama Canal.
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China controls about half the free trade zone around the canal.
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China is by far the largest military threat to the West.
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It doesn't have the same nuclear missile arsenal that Russia has.
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But I think it's much more likely that China will use its military against the West and
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our allies than Russia would ever use its nukes, don't you?
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Well, the thing is, aircraft carriers and other weapons of war are what you use against foreign
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America still is, and America's ally, the UK, is too.
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And hopefully, India can rise to become a proper regional counterweight to China.
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And hopefully, Japan will take its responsibilities, and South Korea and Taiwan, too.
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But a battle that is happening right now is being fought in a different way.
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And I'm talking about China's war against its own people.
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We've seen a taste of that in Hong Kong recently.
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Remember, Hong Kong is absolutely, legally, constitutionally a part of China again.
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There's a boundary, but that's just an imaginary line.
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And China wants to stamp out the freedom virus in Hong Kong before it spreads.
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I think world opinion would be so shocked that the diplomatic and trade reaction would be so
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dramatic that China would immediately fall into a recession, and that could actually lead
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And I think that unlike the heart of Beijing, where Tiananmen Square is, where the democracy
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protesters in Beijing were limited in number, and I think they were somewhat unsophisticated,
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And there's so many of them, and they're so unanimous.
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So although it would be an extremely lopsided battle, modern tanks and guns versus literally
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bows and arrows, that's what Hong Kongers were using at a protest that was stormed by
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Chinese police last month, I think Hong Kongers would actually win that military battle, however
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But what about China nipping things in the bud before they go pear-shaped, as the Brits
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say, before there's a democratic wave in China proper?
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What if China could have a battlefield not of guns and aircraft carriers, and even bows
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and arrows, but a battlefield of the internet, of apps, a battlefield of the mind, really?
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I've shown you this clip before from a Chinese bullet train.
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Dear passengers, people who travel without tickets or behave disorderly or smoking in
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public areas will be punished according to regulations, and the behavior will be recorded
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To avoid any negative record of person operated, please follow the relevant regulations and help
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with the orders on the train and at the station.
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So everything is linked in China to your database.
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If you do anything wrong, not just crimes, of course, but anything antisocial, like on the
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train, it goes on a central government file that you can never erase.
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And the government there even brags about how it uses the database, denying people train
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tickets, plane tickets, denying them the ability to rent an apartment.
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Now in Beijing, you have to be visually scanned, your face scanned, even get internet hooked up
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You can't live somewhere or get on the internet because of something you said online once, some
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Now there are some amazing and positive uses of high technology even in China, but there
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If you think of man's purpose in life as just being an atom in the world, just a cog in the
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machine, whose real purpose in life is to obey and produce and consume and be part of the
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establishment and think of proof thoughts and just be an economic unit, just add to the GDP.
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You'll love China these days, but otherwise it's a bit like a sci-fi dystopia.
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I don't know if you saw that movie way back in 2002 called Minority Report, where Tom Cruise
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is, there's this one scene where he's walking through a mall that has not facial recognition,
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And so the mall had speakers that called out Tom Cruise's name as he walked through it because
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It was creepy and freaky and in that scene he was actually running from the police so he
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I know it was sci-fi, but pretty much has come true in less than 20 years.
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We don't have retina scanners in malls, I don't think.
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No, we have full facial recognition everywhere, which is why Hong Kong protesters wore masks
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But I recently discovered the social media feed of someone named Matthew Brennan.
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He's a commentator and pundit on technology in China, and he publishes little videos and
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We'll invite him on the show, and I hope he accepts.
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I wonder if he'd be comfortable being on Rebel News, given our views on Hong Kong freedom
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and how closely Brennan himself studies Chinese surveillance technology.
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But let me show you some videos I've simply culled from his social media feed because they
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This Chinese app is a teenager's worst nightmare.
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It's a way to track people you love and when they move.
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Yeah, so it could be a way to make sure a child is at school or the child is now done school
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Or obviously it could be a way for police to track you.
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But how many surveillance cameras can track you just like that?
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Chinese artificial intelligence company MegV's intelligent class solution.
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Facial and emotion recognition powered cameras track students' every move and expression.
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通过对学生面部表情进行识别,如高兴,困惑,厌恶等,反映学生学习专注度,对教学内容的接受情况,帮助老师了解学生的课堂动态情绪变化及心理特征,以便调整教学内容和教学进度,实现对学生针对性教学指导,为学生带来更好的学习体验。
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Now, so far, according to this video, it's just a proposal, but to literally scan the faces of students all the time, all the time.
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Now, there was happy music in the background, but imagine your every move, your every expression, your every glance, your every word being tracked.
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Now, these are students, so they're minors, but of course, they'll do this to adults, too.
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Same technology. I hope you put duct tape over your webcam and your laptop like I do.
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This video is pretty clear about, you know, the implications of living in a world of ubiquitous AI-driven facial recognition and computer vision.
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Class monitoring system clocks you in the minute you walk through the door.
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You're late, it clocked you in. You leave early, clocked you in.
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Now, I can see the use for tracking people sometimes, like children, to make sure no one other than kids gets entry into a school,
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to make sure a kid doesn't run away, like here.
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Chinese Elementary School Facial Recognition System in Action, Shenzhen.
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Elementary School Deployment of Facial Recognition Technology, Nanjing, China.
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But don't think they won't use that for grown-ups, too, to get onto a bus, a subway, a plane, a train, to cross the street.
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Look at this. Chinese Facial Recognition System to discourage minor traffic violations.
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Cross the road when you shouldn't, and a picture of you with your name, ID card, number, pop up on the big screen for everyone to see.
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So you're being named and shamed, and of course that's being added to your database, your social credit.
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Here's a vid where they have some sort of spray, some sort of lasers.
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Chinese cities experimenting with tech to stop jaywalking pedestrians at busy intersections.
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Even if you cover your face, they have something called gate recognition.
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You can sort of tell by how someone walks, who they are, right?
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Different people in our family, we can tell who's walking up the stairs just by how it sounds, how they walk, what they look like.
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Even without face recognition, you can still be tracked through gate recognition.
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Data on the clothes you wear can also be used by stores to provide accurate product sales recommendations.
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I mean, Chinese Fire Service testing drones as a way to help fight fires in high-rise apartment buildings.
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In China, it's possible to get KFC delivered to you by drone.
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KFC Subway Chinese noodles delivered by automated drone within 25-kilometer radius, Hangzhou, China.
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Sure, there's places in America, I just don't live in one.
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But you doubt that in China, authorities use flying drones to spy on you, too.
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Whether it's in an apartment window or on the ground, well, of course, they do already.
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Chinese traffic police using drones with loudspeakers.
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Now, obviously, Huawei, China's leading tech company, is at the forefront of much of this.
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Huawei phones tailored for use by Chinese police.
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The mobile phone can collect and identify faces in real time, verify ID cards, and has multiple hardware and software features to ensure information security.
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They're not even pretending that they're not part of the state security apparatus.
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It's like IBM was for the Nazis, Huawei is for China's dictatorship.
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They'll get rich by enslaving their countrymen, and maybe ours.
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Chinese viral deepfakes app, Zhao, clip of myself as Sheldon, generated in a few seconds from a single picture.
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You know, it occurs to me, you could solve all your problems by obtaining more money.
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So I don't know if you get what was going on there.
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I think that was Third Rock from the Sun, or I forget what show that is.
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But you can put your own face into a TV or a movie, a TV show or a movie, just from a picture.
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It's a fun app, obviously, but imagine the government uses of that, not just to harvest every face in the country through the app,
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but imagine the disinformation, the fakes, the lies as necessary, the compromising videos they could fake.
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China's largest video platform, Tencent Video, 97 million paying China subscribers,
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will begin inserting extra ads into movies, series that didn't exist in the original.
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Here's one of the richest men in China, Jack Ma.
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Jack Ma confirms the truth of an old Chinese internet saying,
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Alibaba makes their money from women, Tencent makes their money from kids.
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Yeah, that's the secret source of Alibaba success.
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Even today, more than 60% of the shoppers on Alibaba, they're women,
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but they buy things for their husband, for their parents, for their kids.
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All right, but you don't make it rich in China off women or kids without doing whatever
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the Communist Party tells you to do, including handing over all your information.
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I do worry about people being put out of work by machines,
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but I guess that's happened since the time of the steam engine,
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The legendary space capsule-style hotel, Shenzhen, China.
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But I suppose living in a pod like a bug is better than living like a peasant in a hut.
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I suppose that kind of crony capitalism is better than crony communism.
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Search someone's face to find more videos of them.
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Search in-video products or clothes and buy directly.
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So you just see a face in a video and you touch it,
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That's very powerful, powerful for police, too.
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China dominates tech more than I knew, maybe more than you knew.
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A lot of those companies you probably recognize.
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A lot of them are for commerce and chat and are big in China.
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But TikTok, the number two app in the world right now,
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sold on Apple phones and Android phones, it's Chinese.
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And it's used by people across Canada, United States, Europe, the world.
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And all that data is going back to a Chinese company.
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Did you hear a while back about Facebook considering launching its own currency?
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Imagine if you had thousands of dollars in Libra currency
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and suddenly you were deplatformed by Mark Zuckerberg for political reasons.
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People's Bank of China may be the first central bank in the world
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Vice Chairman of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges.
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Everybody wants to get rich, like Mark Zuckerberg does.
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A Chinese digital currency used by every Chinese person on their Chinese cell phones,
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That would rival the American dollar, maybe even exceed it.
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But more than that, it likely wouldn't be a cryptocurrency.
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They said digital currency, not cryptocurrency.
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Cryptocurrencies are designed to be untraceable, untrackable.
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I'm guessing a Chinese digital currency would be the opposite.
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So the government would know every penny, every yuan you ever earned,
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you ever spent, who you spent it on, and on what, and when, and whom,
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Imagine if your money could talk about you, digitally speaking.
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You're spying on yourself through your actions, your phone, your face, your money,
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There are so many funny videos on there, most of them 15 seconds long,
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And all of that data, billions of views sent right back to China.
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I think cell phones, the internet, celebrities, games, fun.
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But at least opium itself never told the police everything you said and did and looked at.
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to keep them down on behalf of the Chinese government.
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But the internet is also ready to pounce on any Chinese person
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And as more and more Americans and Canadians use Chinese tech
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well, don't think you won't be under their thumb, too.
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Well, one of our good friends has been on a sort of partisan political leave from us
00:26:28.820
First, he sought the nomination of the Conservative Party of Canada.
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What a great catch, a star candidate he would be for them.
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Alas, he was blackballed by the party without explanation.
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it's because he was too moderate, too progressive on the subject of Islam.
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He then ran as a candidate for the People's Party of Canada.
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Our friend, Salim Mansour, who joins us now via Skype.
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I was thrilled when I heard you were seeking the nomination of the Conservative Party
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because I think you would be such a resource for them
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Yeah, I had my nomination paper submitted in 2018
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I should now call him the former executive director