Melissa Chen returns for her second time on the show to talk about what she's seen over the last year and a half, including the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, and China's new role as a global power.
00:00:47.000Talk to us about what you've seen over the last year and a half.
00:00:51.160I mean, needless to say, at the time that we were taping it, it was not on anyone's
00:00:55.760radar, really, unless you were a China watcher or really focused on geopolitics. But somewhere
00:01:02.240around October 2019, things were already brewing in Wuhan on the ground. And our lives were about
00:01:09.440to be completely upended in ways that we just couldn't anticipate. And when 2020 hit, everything
00:01:16.620hit the fan. And it's been a really interesting year. Coronavirus has kind of accelerated so much
00:01:25.300of the trends. So, you know, almost every trend that we've seen, whether it's in work, you know,
00:01:32.800working from home, whether it's on globalization, supply chain sovereignty, or even just the
00:01:39.620concern about China and China's role in the world, all these trends have really been kind of
00:01:44.980accelerated or at least brought to the forefront in the last year or so. And China's action since
00:01:52.560then has has really not been that of a responsible world actor. And so stuff that I was talking about
00:01:59.140in 2019 to both of you has really become relevant in a way that in 2020 made me seem like, you know,
00:02:06.780I was some sort of like a sidekick or something. But but the trends were already there and the
00:02:13.280signs were already there. And, you know, I would say like several people, you know, in even in the
00:02:19.180Trump administration, had already acted in ways to counter China's increasing assertiveness.
00:02:26.700But look at bipartisan agreement on China right now. Look at popular opinion in America. I think
00:02:34.92090% of people in America actually agree that China is a competitor and a rival. It is not
00:02:41.960a partner to the United States. We're not going to be able to develop and get rich together. We
00:02:48.680are actually geostrategic rivals. And so all these have really kind of shifted in the last year.
00:02:55.300And it's a very profound, like, paradigm shift. And you say it's a very profound paradigm shift.
00:03:01.700And we've seen, you know, what's happened with the coronavirus. I mean, how much responsibility
00:03:06.980should China take for this? Well, I mean, it's really interesting, because, you know,
00:03:11.820we're talking at a time now when the whole lab leak hypothesis has been, you know, sort of
00:03:17.720shored up again. And so it's percolating in the press, something that was completely,
00:03:24.040apparently a debunked conspiracy for the last year. You know, since early on, I would say in
00:03:32.000January, February, there were people talking about this. What are the odds that, you know,
00:03:37.200in the city where there were two, not just one, there were actually two labs that housed BL4
00:03:43.500facilities studying these bat coronaviruses would be the source or the first place where
00:03:51.520COVID-19 shows up, the virus SARS-CoV-2. And, you know, Occam's razor, which is really,
00:03:59.500you know, a very basic principle of parsimony that the scientific method is modeled on,
00:04:06.700um really should have been at play right because what is the most obvious uh guess here and
00:04:15.620instead of kind of investigating this possible theory as a hypothesis alongside others which was
00:04:23.480you know the reigning theory of the day was really about the zoonotic transmission at the
00:04:28.520Huanan seafood market from bats to some sort of mystery animal which was surmised to be a pangolin
00:04:34.300And in the end, you know, we reflexively, the scientific community, governments and our entire media class dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as some sort of racist or just debunked conspiracy.
00:04:49.600We shouldn't even go there. And really, it's a failure on, you know, what Eric Weinstein would call our sort of communal sense making apparatus.
00:05:00.460the institutions that run on media really decided on gating this narrative and preventing people
00:05:07.720from asking questions if you happen to you know zero hedge early on was banned from twitter
00:05:13.060and all over facebook was banning you know anyone that was posting or removing posts
00:05:19.040that even suggested it might have been a lab leak and and you know even without the lab leak
00:05:25.460Even if this, you know, China was found to be to be lying, I think that if you look back at the initial cover up, enough damage had been done.
00:05:37.440How we, you know, the country persecuted the whistleblowers and how it tried to kind of hamstring the investigations.
00:05:46.080I mean, on what planet does, you know, the country that the pandemic started in gets to pick who gets to sit on the so-called independent inquiry that the WHO sent one year after the entire incident happened?
00:06:04.240more than one year, actually. And also after scrubbing the alleged crime of the scene,
00:06:09.940which was supposedly the seafood market, which we know from interviews where the vendors did
00:06:17.400not actually sell any of the meats in question, whether it was pangolin or bat. So there were
00:06:23.860just so many questions and China's behavior ever since the pandemic broke out has just been
00:06:31.100just very, very suspect and retaliating against any country like Australia that was suggesting
00:06:38.760merely for an independent inquiry. And Melissa, I'm going to jump in there because as you were
00:06:43.520listing off all the different meat, I was worried about Francis getting hungry. I am. But listen,
00:06:49.880there's another aspect to all of this, which I find really interesting, which is neither you or
00:06:55.360us who are particularly huge fans of Donald Trump. But how much of the failure to react adequately,
00:07:01.920failure to investigate properly, failure to take the appropriate action in the circumstances
00:07:07.920was simply about the fact that people hated Donald Trump so much that when he said we actually need
00:07:14.940to shut the border to Chinese people coming from China, because that's where the virus is
00:07:19.280originated from, when he said that we need to investigate whether this was man-made in a lab,
00:07:26.520et cetera. When all of these attempts were being made, kind of the mainstream saw it through the
00:07:31.280lens of Donald Trump and therefore failed to take action as a result. Whereas now many of the things
00:07:37.640that he was saying at the time, particularly about the origin of the virus, calling it the China
00:07:42.780virus, closing borders, this is something actually the left is now demanding.
00:07:46.740Yeah, it's 80 to 90 percent. The reason why I think, you know, we've kind of dropped the ball on this or that the press has, because if you look at how how a lot of the press frames these stories, anything that, you know, we're now judging whether a policy or whether something is true based on who is saying it.
00:08:10.980And this this phenomenon has really been exposed during the last four years during the Trump administration, where where if something is going to help or hurt the Trump administration, it you know, that's when the press decides to upregulate or downregulate the story and they decide the framing.
00:08:29.660So when Trump, you know, went hard on China, the press saw this as an opportunity to present it as Trump abdicating his culpability, which, to be fair to him, you know, I think initially he had the right instincts to shut the border, but he wavered on sort of later on kind of, you know, either downplaying the virus or saying ridiculous things during the press conference.
00:08:55.560It didn't really help. He wasn't a excellent kind of like public health crisis kind of leader.
00:09:02.200And, you know, he's not good at science communication either.
00:09:04.920He's probably there were many comical moments during the press conferences.
00:09:09.260But on the other hand, his instincts on many of these initial steps were right.
00:09:16.060It played to his kind of his biases to to, you know, be to be a bit more restrictive on immigration and shutting down borders.
00:09:25.040And so, you know, he got excoriated in the press and you saw this remarkable thing, which I still think, you know, I refuse to let the press memory hold this.
00:09:35.680But people flipped. Right. So initially, the Republicans were reacting very strongly.
00:09:41.760This is serious. We need to shut the borders. You had Navarro and Trump kind of insisting on this.
00:09:48.400And they were banning flights from Europe. And I remember, you know, these images at the airport, they were all showed on TV and it was chaos.
00:09:55.040and of course the press was saying this was just racist i think joe biden also said it was
00:09:58.900actually xenophobic um and and then you had this remarkable switch later on when you know
00:10:05.980the trump administration realized also that shutting down lockdowns would actually hurt
00:10:11.280the economy and the one thing that gets incumbents re-elected is always a good economy and and so
00:10:17.240they started flipping their position and and now you know the the lockdown party became the democrats
00:10:23.000And they wanted to to basically shut the borders. And I mean, look at today, Joe Biden's instinct was to shut down the moment that was this nasty variant that was going on in India was to actually shut down travel from India, you know, an act that was so-called racist just one year ago.
00:10:40.180And so you see this ridiculous flipping, almost as if no one is holding any position based on principle.
00:10:47.620And it's just a sign of how this political divisiveness and partisanship is making governance during a public health crisis so completely sclerotic.
00:11:29.100Well, and the two things that really popped up was PPE,
00:11:33.140the issue of, you know, where our PPE were coming from.
00:11:36.120And initially, China was shoring up the supply, knowing that this was happening, knowing that the West would actually have a harder time trying to react, given that most of the raw materials and the manufacturing capacity was actually in China.
00:11:49.800And so there was this moment when we had a hard time trying to acquire these things, not to mention the confusion over communication on masks and their effectiveness at the beginning, which obviously has caused a lot of problems.
00:12:02.660And later on, you know, when it came to vaccine raw materials, that's that's that's become another issue where, you know, even the EU is is is relooking at this issue because we've outsourced vaccine manufacturing to parts of Asia.
00:12:19.120And when, you know, this should all be seen as something that is part of, you know, national security, vaccines, PPE, in a world where pandemics can just kind of, you know, just spread like wildfire.
00:12:34.760And, well, if you look at also, you know, what happened in the last, I would say, in the last year is that the sort of e-commerce platforms kind of grew bigger, right?
00:12:45.500So your mom and pop stores really suffered. But your Amazons of the world, they are the ones that not only survived, but they got their power, kind of their market power got far more entrenched.
00:12:57.660And it did get far more entrenched. Do you think we're going to see a reversion back to people wanting to shop local, buying American products, buying British products?
00:13:06.740Or do you think that when this crisis is over, we're just going to go revert back to the status quo?
00:13:11.160I think there are really two forces. You know, it's interesting because Joe Biden has not actually rolled back any of Trump's policies vis-a-vis China. In fact, he's been kind of sticking to an America first policy that the press often excoriated Trump for for for supporting.
00:13:31.460Right. And, you know, I mean, in fact, Biden's deputy spokesperson at the State Department said that, you know, when when we were thinking of how to address the crisis in India, the pandemic has been raging.
00:13:47.140their second wave. And he said, you know, the world has an interest in seeing Americans get
00:13:52.860vaccinated before everybody else. And that was a response that you know that if this had come from
00:13:59.240Pompeo's State Department, that that would have been like a complete public outcry and meltdown
00:14:04.280over this terrible America First policy. But quietly, America First has been rolled forward.
00:14:10.820We are taking care of, you know, our supply chains, our our needs first.
00:14:17.500And and it's just interesting that, you know, when this administration is doing it, it's it's not receiving the same kind of pushback as the previous one.
00:14:27.140And I think so many people have become aware of Chinese influence in, you know, in this open liberal society that we all live in.
00:14:36.360And that includes, you know, basically all throughout the West, the members of the EU have also kind of woken up to this.
00:14:42.760And, you know, they're thinking of cutting back on their trade deals.
00:14:46.520And, well, I just to be honest, like the the American public has has kind of like woken up to China as a geopolitical threat.
00:14:55.860And I think, you know, given the bipartisan consensus, too, that that likely moving forward, people are going to be a lot more careful about, you know, pushing back Chinese narratives in Hollywood, Chinese influence in our universities, shutting down Confucius Institutes and even products.
00:15:15.200So, you know, I think there is potentially a bill that's going to be advanced about whether or not a product is like to label products where they come from.
00:15:25.420You start to see sanctions now on any products that might have slave labor, might have been, you know, parts of it might have been assembled in Xinjiang, which the United States under Pompeo and Secretary Blinken has declared as, you know, China has been committing genocide against the Uyghurs.
00:15:43.420So you're starting to see more legislative action and just more political will by people to say, no, enough.
00:15:51.880We've all woken up to the reality that it was such a terrible idea for us to engage with China for the last 40 years.
00:16:01.540Not only did they not liberalize, but we've become more like them.
00:16:06.660Their authoritarian model has been exported.
00:16:09.820it. Well, I was actually going to ask you about that very point, Melissa, because I know you
00:16:14.740watched our interview with Neil Ferguson, the historian, I should say, not the epidemiologist.
00:16:19.600And this is one of the questions that I put to him, which is lockdowns, he says, have never been
00:16:26.160done before in this way, and probably because we didn't have the technology to be able to stay at
00:16:30.500home, but also for other reasons. And really, we've imported that from China. Unfortunately,
00:16:36.580Unfortunately, copying China is a way of importing into free societies the kind of software of the unfree society.
00:16:47.300I dread to see any more articles of the form, we should learn from China, it's going to be the Chinese century, look how smart they are.
00:16:56.400Because that's just an invitation to import totalitarian ways of doing things.
00:17:02.740yes in the past in time of emergency we have restricted civil liberties we did it in both
00:17:09.060world wars in quite drastically actually but everybody understood uh in the world wars that
00:17:14.940it was a temporary state of emergency that would be ended as soon as the war was over
00:17:19.860the problem with doing it in a pandemic is that it's quite easy to argue that in fact it's never
00:17:26.560going to be over because the virus will always be out there and then this is one of the typically
00:17:32.200totally totalitarian sounding slogans you hear, there's no safety, it's not over until there are
00:17:39.260no cases at all anywhere in the world. Now, if you make that argument, you will be able to justify
00:17:43.760COVID restrictions forever. And I do think this has been an opportunity for a power grab by state
00:17:51.720bureaucracies. And I know that you're someone who cares about civil liberties a lot. How do you feel
00:17:58.860about the fact that sort of like we look to an authoritarian communist dictatorship to decide
00:18:03.900what we do in our countries now i think neil's point was interesting because he said what we did
00:18:10.140in the west was kind of the worst of both worlds he said that you know we we didn't shut down and
00:18:16.260then we had this like almost lockdown in perpetuity with different weird codes um you know i think the
00:18:23.220problem is that you can't pick China's outcomes without China's system and at the end of the day
00:18:31.120you know we don't have an oppressive surveillance totalitarian state not yet not not yet
00:18:39.700um but but we just we just don't and you know if you compare the other kind of liberal democracies
00:18:46.500that did lock down very hard um I would say New Zealand and Australia are very good examples um
00:18:52.420You know, is it worth it in the end, especially economically? These countries need to trade. They need their tourist dollars for their economy. And it's impacting their economy in a way that we haven't really ascertained.
00:19:09.060I think we're not good at talking about tradeoffs and and in the sense that we are still living in this moment and living in the crisis, evaluating whether or not all these policies have been worth tradeoffs.
00:19:22.960I hate this narrative that, you know, every time you you try to criticize something like, you know, overhandedness by the authorities, you will get, oh, you're just trying to kill grandma.
00:19:32.140You just don't like, you know, oh, great, like two people are dead or it's it's it's just such a terrible way to talk about, you know, on a macro level in society, whether a policy was worth it.
00:19:43.600Has it is it worth our kids being out of school for the last one year, more than a year now in some cities here in the United States?
00:19:51.540you know surely this is something that we've already known now a year of of science and data
00:19:58.500have been collected and and we know that this virus actually discriminates and it is by age
00:20:04.600and so I think we're starting to at least be in a position to look back and say well maybe maybe
00:20:11.580we shouldn't have done that but these are conversations that cannot happen in a place
00:20:16.140like china you know i mean they're not allowed to have conversations like that and hopefully this
00:20:22.040is something that we we can be honest look back and and learn from it i'm just not very you know
00:20:27.560optimistic that that we will yeah and i i share your pessimism because i'm actually pessimistic
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00:21:59.760did it surprise you how malleable people were and how readily they were to give up civil liberties
00:22:08.300like in this country the right to protest just evaporated and we all went yeah what's the problem
00:22:12.880oh depends on the kind of protest right so i think that was the hypocrisy was kind of aired
00:22:22.160out very openly when um you know certain policies were applied very selectively and very very
00:22:28.520hypocritically um you know things that were not okay under one circumstance were suddenly okay
00:22:34.380and one of the effects of this is that i think the trust in our institutions have really crumbled
00:22:40.940like the last year has has seen trust in media crumble trust in international organizations like
00:22:48.080the who crumble the un um and and partly it's because of this selective application uh you know
00:22:56.260one side's narratives favor the other side's no you can't protest um civil liberties for for me
00:23:03.480but not for the that kind of attitude um and and it's just it's been very destructive and and you
00:23:09.520know as society continues to evolve um and the trust breaks down i i just don't really know how
00:23:14.720we're going to recover from that so i'm a lot less i know you ended that interview with with
00:23:19.080neil and on a very positive note because we've been in darker places before um but i'm just i
00:23:25.380don't I can't see a way out for us I mean it's very very succinctly put which then begs the
00:23:32.320question how do we roll back can we roll back or is this just a moment in time where it's been an
00:23:39.180unassailable rupture and there's no going back from it um you know I people seem to have um a
00:23:48.620resiliency but I don't know how permanent these changes are you know you're starting to hear
00:23:54.120people are going back to work they want to go back to work they want to go back to the pub
00:23:57.560we need our apolitical spaces back like we need sports back but sports in a way that you know was
00:24:04.520like before um without all the politics kind of embedded in it and all the nonsense um and and I
00:24:11.420think it really depends on a lot of that um you know whether we have these spaces to come together
00:24:17.840and sort of interact in ways that the more apolitical spaces
00:24:24.680and common hobbies that we can engage in,
00:24:27.860the better the chance we have to kind of get back to the way things were.
00:24:34.060But I'm kind of afraid that that ship has really sailed.
00:24:38.280You know, the wool has kind of been pulled from the eyes of most people.
00:24:42.840The media has been, the media's hypocrisy has been laid bare.
00:24:47.040You know, the idea that like silence is violence and sort of gaslighting about racial narratives and things like that have really been sort of inflamed in the last year.
00:24:58.740So I don't know if we're going to be able to come back from something like that.
00:25:02.360And you mentioned President Biden. You mentioned that he's continuing many of the policies that Donald Trump had on China.
00:25:08.900Are you optimistic that he's, now that, as I said, the media is free to agree with him when he takes action on China, let's say, and other things, now that he has a bit more room for maneuver, he's certainly less provocative with his language and the way he talks than Donald Trump, which was never going to be a challenge to achieve.
00:25:30.160With all of that put together, do you think he will be able to manage this problem effectively?
00:25:36.460You know, he's less provocative, but he has some blind spots, which I think helps China, especially in the arena of propaganda and soft power.
00:25:49.060Biden, for example, in his first executive order signed, you know, an anti-Asian hate crime bill.
00:25:55.840And a lot of this had been kind of posturing.
00:25:59.660And several Republicans in the Senate voted against the bill, not because they were anti, you know, they supported hate crimes against Asians.
00:26:08.840They voted against it because they were concerned about very broad language that might implicate, you know, people when they're talking about COVID-19 and things like talking about the origins of COVID-19 could be considered racially discriminating language and therefore, you know, be considered a hate incident.
00:26:29.660And so, you know, these kind of broad, overreaching language in tackling anti-Asian kind of racism has, I think, been a boon to China because they know they can soften criticism abroad.
00:26:46.300It's kind of like the same forces you see when when people try to attenuate criticisms of Islam by saying that any criticism of Islam is Islamophobia.
00:26:58.040And it's it's playing this like bigotry race card to to a very effective way to just silence criticism.
00:27:05.260And China's deploying it masterfully. My issue with Biden is really on this front where I think he is more amenable due to his political position.
00:27:15.500You know, he is a Democrat, and I think he's more liable to that kind of influence.
00:27:21.780The point you're talking about China deflecting criticism, it's the communist playbook.
00:27:25.600The Soviet Union did this exact thing.
00:27:27.920When America would criticize the Soviet Union, my ancestors would reply saying, well, what
00:27:33.640about African-Americans in America having a rough time?
00:27:36.660And that was the deflection that justified gulags and all the rest of it.
00:27:44.580And if you look at, you know, the wolf diplomats, we're very active on Twitter. These are Chinese, you know, either ambassadors or state media heads. They are very aggressive in their rhetoric and very happy to point out and weigh in on U.S. domestic issues.
00:28:03.520They weigh in on the Capitol riots on January 6th. They weighed in on George Floyd.
00:28:09.340They're using these domestic issues in a way to to basically manipulate public opinion.
00:28:15.180And it's actually very, very effective. It is very effective.
00:28:18.560And we saw an example of soft power quite literally this week with John Cena.
00:28:22.780He was in what, Fast and the Furious 938 or something like that.
00:28:26.500And he had to do a public apology. Right.
00:28:30.060and he did it in mandarin and it was posted on on chinese twitter it was so painful to watch um
00:28:37.020you know it's i i i kind of made a tweet a joke about it because his signature phrase has been
00:28:43.920this like hand wave where he's like you can't see me i'm like yeah like you can't see his balls like
00:28:48.400he just lost his balls um you know just just kowtowing like that in in such a brazen way
00:30:53.860You know, we let the USSR basically bleed out financially and it collapsed because of its imperialist adventures and eventually was just financially unstable.
00:31:03.820But that's not the case for China. You know, China is empowered economically, in part because we're addicted to very cheap goods. And we didn't hold China either to its, you know, certain promises that it was supposed to keep when it joined the World Trade Organization.
00:31:19.220We've kind of let China have its way with the world on its terms and not held it accountable for things like pillaging, you know, intellectual property, corporate espionage, even these like massive cyber hacking sort of scandals, you know, stealing all the OPM data and things like that.
00:31:40.620So we just haven't really held China accountable to some sort of like international norms.
00:31:46.360We've let them have a pass because we just wanted to trade with them.
00:31:50.260And and in a way, we've really committed a terrible mistake.
00:31:54.960It's not going to go the way of the USSR because we're now entangled economically.
00:32:00.260But there are still ways to, I think, decouple there.
00:32:03.720There are especially industries that we need to decouple for sure.
00:32:06.820So if you look at anything that that involves, say, like making parts for the electric grid, these are things that are implicated in our national security to let China build our 5G networks.
00:32:19.760You know, that is why would you do that? Right. So so there are ways to at least identify the industries that are crucial, that are potentially, you know, kind of weak spots.
00:32:32.400if we let China even contribute certain parts and decouple from that.
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00:33:35.340biscuits never heard him say that before now we were talking about soft power grabs can you see
00:33:44.260in the next few years china making a hard power grab maybe invading taiwan they've certainly had
00:33:48.860their eyes on it for a long time now the uh u.s navy estimates that the chances are that china
00:33:55.640would actually try to do that in the next seven years um and that's good news yeah you know and
00:34:04.360it's one of those things like i think the u.s appetite for intervention military intervention
00:34:08.380after afghanistan and after iraq is pretty much zero so i i don't know how you know u.s public
00:34:15.480opinion would shape the the sort of capacity for our government to to do anything or the West to
00:34:23.300do anything in general. But but an invasion of Taiwan is egregious. And if you don't stop China
00:34:30.420there, where would you stop? I mean, Taiwan is democratic. It's it's independent. It's been,
00:34:37.680you know, its own country for since 1949. Yes, it was a military dictatorship for a while,
00:34:44.020But it liberalized the nationalists, liberalized in ways that makes Taiwan completely the most, actually the most vibrant liberal democracy in all of Asia.
00:34:54.400It was the first Asian country to actually introduce and allow marriage equality, gay marriage.
00:35:00.280So Taiwan is a beacon of freedom and a very important counterpoint to this narrative that, you know, Asians kind of need a different system because they're culturally distinct.
00:35:12.080That's something that China has been repeating for a long time, the CCP, that, you know, Asian populations prefer collectivism.
00:35:21.620But the Taiwanese and the Chinese have the same DNA and they're separated by, you know, a body of water, but they have two different systems.
00:35:30.080Those two countries are thriving in different ways.
00:35:32.340And it's such an important counterpoint to China that it and, you know, beyond the fact that China sees it as rightfully there.
00:35:39.700So the historical baggage all the more makes China wants to reunify and take Taiwan by force.
00:35:46.300Xi Jinping has said this. There's just like this is one of those issues that has like zero wiggle room for the current regime.
00:35:53.280And if they take China, if they if China does take Taiwan, what's next?
00:35:57.520Japan is right there. You know, it's it's a power in the Pacific area.
00:36:02.500You have Hawaii. It's really close to, you know, the west coast of the United States.
00:36:08.560So it's a direct military threat. And I mean, personally, I'm in favor of intervening.
00:36:15.300We have to intervene to do something if China ever takes Taiwan.
00:36:20.260I mean, you say that we have to intervene, but we haven't so far.
00:36:23.940We looked at the situation with Hong Kong. I mean, a couple of leaders came out.
00:36:28.040You know, Boris Johnson said something. I can't really remember it, but it was largely pointless.
00:36:33.020Can't you just see the West shrugging their shoulders again?
00:36:35.760Well, I think the problem with Hong Kong was the treaty that was signed at the end of the day, you know, by 2047, Hong Kong was going to return to China no matter what.
00:36:45.220China just sped up the process and disowned the agreement, did not grant 50 years of autonomy, one country, two systems to Hong Kong.
00:36:55.320And so it was really just a matter of like time.
00:36:58.780It just, you know, it did everything it was going to do in 2047, 20 years ahead of schedule.
00:37:03.660So in Taiwan's case, there would be a very egregious military intervention that China, you know, that there's no agreement with Taiwan.
00:37:12.480Actually, this is one of those ongoing conflicts that that just like Palestine and Israel that that have been, you know, since kind of the initial world order, really post World War Two.
00:37:23.660It just hasn't been solved. And I just don't see I just don't see those those two things as as similar.
00:37:31.660Well, speaking of things being similar or not similar in Israel and Palestine, have you been surprised at the difference between the way, you know, people who argue that Muslim Palestinians are being oppressed by Israel don't seem to be quite as upset about Uyghurs being butchered and imprisoned by the CCP?
00:37:58.400You know, it's funny. I actually thought of that. It's not something I ever tweeted or posted about, but that I got into an argument with none other than Mia Khalifa, the Lebanese former porn star.
00:38:13.060And, you know, I remember thinking to myself, like, because she identifies as Muslim, and, you know, why is this such a big cause, but these, you know, Palestinian activists are just so silent on this one issue.
00:38:28.940And it's just so interesting how these issues map onto political tribes, because if you were consistent, if, say, caring about Muslim oppression is something across the board that is a principle you hold, surely you would speak up about something like that.
00:38:44.240And it's interesting because, you know, if you look at the signing of the UN, the letter to the United Nations, I think it was majority of the Muslim majority countries in the Gulf, in the Middle East, did not sign the letter.
00:39:00.800And that includes Pakistan to excoriate China for its oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
00:39:09.300And the reason, obviously, is because China is doing a lot of business and deals and is involved with these countries in the Belt and Road Initiative, where it's, you know, building infrastructure, giving loans.
00:39:22.780in the case of countries like Saudi Arabia, it's even exporting its technology, you know,
00:39:28.540the panopticon that it built, the techno surveillance state technology that China is
00:39:33.200using. And so because of all these deals, I mean, if you look at how many of these countries look
00:39:39.320to China as a model, you have two options in the world. Either you are going to liberalize and
00:39:44.100become a liberal democracy, or you're going to go down the China route and become an autocratic
00:39:51.120regime. And for many of these countries in the Middle East, it's pretty clear which model they
00:39:57.500want to pursue. Philosophically, they're far more aligned with the Chinese model and China's paving
00:40:02.740the way. So, you know, they're going to just quieten their criticisms. And that is a good
00:40:09.760point. But it's also as well, China's model, let's be honest, is far more effective in many ways.
00:40:14.480There's not this constant turnover of leadership. You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labor.
00:40:19.160exactly no this is some i mean i grew up in singapore and and on the scale from
00:40:24.680you know china to to the u.s singapore somewhere in the middle it's really kind of like this this
00:40:31.020interesting hybrid and um um i've heard these arguments since i was a kid you know about um
00:40:38.360the democracy is messy democracy is um you know it leads to very slow sclerotic inefficient kinds
00:40:46.940of government. And something like the pandemic really threw this into very sharp focus, right?
00:40:52.420We saw how effective some of these authoritarian countries were in clamping down, in nailing
00:40:59.360people into their apartments and forcing social distancing, tracking. We can't even get vaccine
00:41:06.220passports because, you know, half our people will revolt. And I mean, when Bill de Blasio,
00:41:13.560you know put out a number saying like there's this hotline um all new yorkers if you see people
00:41:19.840not wearing the mask outside not social distancing call this number and report and snitch on your
00:41:25.220fellow new yorkers and people just saw that and they started sending him dick pics and i was i
00:41:33.000was so proud of i was you know like oh we're kind of screwed but also very proud of america i mean
00:41:38.620on one hand, that's, you know, that's bad in terms of the outcomes for the virus, but I'd rather live
00:41:45.960in a place where people don't want to snitch on each other, on each other, rather than a place
00:41:51.580where there's just so much distrust and, and that people are snitching on each other all the time.
00:41:56.940But, but the reality is that, you know, one of these places is going to do a lot better. It's
00:42:02.280going to have zero deaths. And it's, again, this kind of contrast goes all the way back to Benjamin
00:42:07.520Franklin the trade-off between security and liberty. It's a very good point and well made
00:42:12.820Melissa. I think we'll leave China there for now. We've got a little bit of time left and you talk
00:42:17.560about New York and the United States and some of the things that have been happening there including
00:42:22.140the certainly a wave of reporting about anti-Asian hate crime. I don't know how accurate. Tell us
00:42:29.140is it has there been a massive increase or is it just something that people have been focusing on
00:42:34.420more than before? So, you know, there's been an increase in violent crime all across the board
00:42:40.340in America. In some cities, it's really stark. I think in Portland, it's been a 1600% increase
00:42:47.920in violent crime. Well, they're reimagining public safety, aren't they? So that's good.
00:42:52.940Oh, they are. And the police, right, which is related. And, you know, the data on anti-Asian
00:43:01.680crime or, you know, the sort of like what we're observing, the discourse is based on
00:43:25.720The other two sources, one of which is an interesting group called Stop AAPI Hate, which really showed up at the beginning of 2020, and their statistics were thrown around in a way that made it seem really stark.
00:43:42.340There's been a 3,600% increase in Asian hate crimes, which sounds terrible, and if that were true, it would just really warrant some sort of severe intervention.
00:43:53.360But if you look at how they collected their data, it's very suspect. They are based on a completely self-reporting online portal. And many of the incidents that are collected don't even meet the threshold of what you would call a crime. Some of them are verbal shunning. Some of them are simply, I didn't like the way this person looked at me at the supermarket. So it's all based on self-reporting.
00:44:19.720And then the third one, which came out, I think it was one of the University of California was compiled sort of early 2020 crime data, looked at, you know, hate crime reporting by the FBI in 16 cities across the United States and found that there's been 150 percent increase.
00:44:39.880That, for me, is the more relevant data out of all of these. And because that is actually based on FBI statistics and it's preliminary data. We don't really get all of 2020's data till November of 2021. So we're still kind of early. But this is preliminary and they've compiled it. Again, this is from 16 progressive, most of them progressive run cities in the States.
00:45:04.480And it does look like there's an upswing. But numbers of Asian crimes actually very low in absolute numbers. So if you look at New York City, for example, in 2019, there were three anti-Asian hate incidents, three. In 2020, there were 28. So the percent increase from three to 28 is actually really high.
00:45:25.340But to put that number into sharp relief for anti-Semitic hate crimes, that there is more than 150 just in New York.
00:45:36.200So the narrative about anti-Asian hate crimes, I think, is it seems like something is happening.
00:45:42.320We're seeing these videos. Is this meaningful in a way that is this due to racial prejudice, explicit racial animus?
00:45:51.260Or is this part of, you know, kind of Asians being part of this urban environment, elderly, especially being a very vulnerable population, they know they probably keep their cash underneath the mattresses.
00:46:05.560They're not using banking system. They live in Chinatowns. They're weak. They won't fight back. They don't own guns.
00:46:11.360How much of this is opportunistic crime that's part of the ambient crime levels that are heightened anyway all across the board?
00:46:19.420how much of it is actually racially targeted. And I think his name is Charles Lehman had done,
00:46:26.800he's with the Manhattan Institute, had done some interesting time series. So he took that data that
00:46:30.920I, the last data set that I described, the FBI data, and he looked at, he plotted that over time.
00:46:36.920And so what you're seeing is an interesting spike in March of 2020, just a little tiny spike,
00:46:42.360which could be attributed to things like the lockdowns and, you know, just kind of the
00:46:47.100COVID-19 related kind of crimes, potentially. That was in 2020. But in 2021, when Biden is
00:46:56.240president in Democratic-run cities, there has been another spike in March 2021. And so the idea that
00:47:04.180this is somehow due to white supremacy, as the media has ran with this narrative, is completely
00:47:10.920ridiculous because Trump is not even on social media. No one is out there spouting Wuhan flu
00:47:17.320or, you know, Wu flu or China virus. And the idea that this is related to some sort of rhetoric is
00:47:23.920just completely bollocks. But you can make some interesting inferences. Why is there a spike
00:47:28.940again? And it's pretty significant in March of 2021. Now, if you correlate this with Google
00:47:35.760searches, with media reporting, could it be copycat crimes? Could it be that just awareness
00:47:40.040of the crime itself makes people report the hate incidents or the hate crimes in a way that you
00:47:47.200know they just wouldn't have before so there are a lot of reasons why potentially you know there is
00:47:52.860this weird spike in March of 2021 but but we don't really know but it's certainly we can say that it
00:48:00.580has nothing to do with the the leading media narrative which is apparently white supremacy
00:48:05.320well for a start quite a lot of the people that committing these crimes don't seem to be white
00:48:09.820um so or exactly uh but do you think there's an element in terms of the way it's talked about and
00:48:18.120the way that it's covered where it's like you know once you introduce identity politics then
00:48:23.580it becomes in the interest of every single group to become the victim and so when jews get and you
00:48:30.040know i'm allowed to say this because i'm from a jewish background you'll be allowed to say this
00:48:33.760from an asian background like everyone would benefit from being in the victim group because
00:48:40.220that's what society currently values and ranks higher than the non-victim groups do you think
00:48:45.000a large part of it is like well people are attacking us let's you know let's make hay
00:48:49.240yeah it's interesting because you're right i i do agree with the sort of like the
00:48:55.100victimhood kind of correlating victim status correlating with moral status somehow in in
00:49:01.200this society that we live in that, you know, has married intersectionality with critical race
00:49:06.560theory. Um, but, but Asians in a way are, are just kind of like, I call it Schrodinger's white
00:49:12.680people because, you know, you're white sometimes when it comes to, um, when it comes to college
00:49:18.480admissions. And so, or even like, um, if you, if you're for college admissions, you're worse than
00:49:23.780white. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. It is possible just for, just in that one context. Well, and
00:49:30.640even like, uh, wages. So if you look at, uh, you know, income levels, Asians as a group are
00:49:35.820actually out earn whites as a demographic in, in recent years. So, um, you know, under those
00:49:41.660circumstances, Asians are considered whites and therefore have to be adjusted their populations,
00:49:46.880you know, they're overrepresented because, and they're white. So they're, you know, either you
00:49:51.880have to abolish the test or, or do something in a way to lessen their, their, uh, demographic
00:49:57.860numbers in schools or at the workplace. But on the other hand, you know, they're suddenly people
00:50:03.460of color when it comes to street violence, when it comes to, you know, this invisibility on TV
00:50:10.040or whatever other sort of cultural elite causes that are being supported right now. And so you
00:50:16.740see this like weird bifurcation and the cynic in me has always been, well, you know, they know that
00:50:24.160the AAPI group, the Asian American Pacific Islander group, which is another ridiculous
00:50:29.120bureaucratic racial category that was invented, is a useful voting block. And right now it's a
00:50:36.640pawn in this political game because as CRT and sort of this narrative about discrimination in
00:50:44.920college becomes more obvious to Asians, they're going to rebel against that and tend to vote
00:50:50.900conservative and so the only way you're going to bring them back into the progressive fold
00:50:55.640is is to drum up this narrative that they are targeted that they are victimized because of
00:51:00.880their race um that is my guess about the dynamics that are going on politically um and so in a way
00:51:08.080you know asian sort of uh elderly suffering you know on the streets um has has become a useful
00:51:17.280way to kind of milk this issue politically when solving this issue is really just a matter of
00:51:24.660solving crime if you prosecute it if if we you know provided mental health facilities for
00:51:31.460many of these people who are attacking these agents are actually mentally ill but you know
00:51:36.660our homelessness problem has skyrocketed because of the home because of the lockdowns crime has
00:51:42.000skyrocketed and and we're not solving the very thing that can actually help these people you
00:51:48.220know we're we're blaming it on on this entirely different um reason which is you know if you get
00:51:56.360the the the reasoning wrong the root cause wrong you're going to get the policy wrong and the
00:52:02.140prescription wrong and it's not going to do anything so that's kind of where my frustration
00:52:06.300is right now and are people still thinking defund the police is a good idea of we all accepted that
00:52:12.680that was a crap idea brought on by the insanity of a lockdown actually it looks like a tide has
00:52:18.440been turning and even among african-americans you know the the ones who actually live in these
00:52:23.860at-risk neighborhoods um the tide is turning people there is such strong data that shows that
00:52:30.620you know stronger policing actually correlates with lower crime really wow and and um you know
00:52:37.640like andrew yang has been kind of um criticized a lot by sort of asian activists you know the
00:52:45.140kinds who went to ivy leagues um for for suggesting for merely suggesting that one of the solutions
00:52:50.780to prevent to stop aapi hate is to increase funding for the police and and put more police
00:52:57.280resources in these neighborhoods. And, you know, it's just so funny how these narratives shake out
00:53:03.320because he's been targeted. He, you know, hit pieces were written against them for even
00:53:07.440suggesting that because somehow these Asian activists are very aligned with the BLM narrative
00:53:13.560about, you know, how police actually brutalize communities of color and that we must stand with
00:53:19.580them. And if we don't stand with black lives, we don't stand with Asian lives, which again is
00:53:23.580trying to connect these causes and and you know as the palestine conflict kind of erupted as well
00:53:28.920you start to see how george floyd now intersects with palestine when obviously has nothing to do
00:53:33.740with each other right so we live in a time of like globalization of narratives in a way where
00:53:40.100every struggle has to be connected to some original struggle and and everything is
00:53:44.600collectivized and we're not evaluating things independently and that's such a good point and
00:53:50.580it's a fantastic place to end the interview uh melissa if people want to find you online where
00:53:55.900is the best place to do that only fans that is how we will lead this interview and it is going
00:54:04.800to get a million views do you know what there's probably about six losers on the internet we saw
00:54:09.160that went great wasn't um the well the best way to find me is um on twitter which is my handle
00:54:20.020Or you can read my stuff on the Spectator USA website.
00:54:24.320That's probably the best way to find them.
00:54:25.920And before we let you go, we have one proper question for you
00:54:29.120and then we'll do some locals-only questions as well.
00:54:31.760So as you know, our last question for the main interview itself is
00:54:35.020what is the one thing that we're not talking about
00:54:37.840that we still should be talking about?
00:54:39.620One of the things that interests me that I don't see much discourse on is how is it, how did it come to be that, you know, a system like in the U.S. where we have so-called a free society that's kind of more in line with a brave new world kind of utopia where, you know, we optimize for pleasure.
00:55:08.740and sort of hedonism and try to, you know, downregulate pain and discomfort and how this
00:55:19.380system, the Brave New World system in the U.S. and in the West in general in Europe,
00:55:23.700compared to the totalitarian 1984 China system, how these two different systems actually end up
00:55:32.460converging to look like the same thing, where we now, because of safetyism and the, you know,
00:55:38.620of harm avoidance and not wanting to confront anything that makes us feel bad, has led us down
00:55:46.200a weirdly totalitarian path that, you know, our systems kind of end up feeling, you know, we have
00:55:54.100Yelp, for example, review systems that, you know, are steps removed from China's social credit
00:56:01.180system, but not unlike it. And, you know, so I find that convergence interesting that we have
00:56:08.380top down, top down versus bottom up kind of freedom, but or control, but they're meeting
00:56:14.700in the same place. And, and it feels like we're still living in dystopia.
00:56:20.840And it feels inevitable as well, I think, to me. But it's a very good point and something that I
00:56:26.960think is going to come into sharper and sharper focus over the years to come uh which is when we
00:56:32.180will have you back to talk about it some more melissa thank you so much for chatting with us
00:56:36.200thank you cheers and thank you guys for watching at home we will see you very soon with another
00:56:41.520brilliant interview like this one or or show all of them go out at 7 p.m uk time take care and see