TRIGGERnometry - ＂We Let China Have Its Way With the World＂ - Melissa Chen

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:00:07.660 I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:08.800 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:00:13.980 Our brilliant guest is returning for her second time on the show.

00:00:17.240 She is the New York editor of Spectator USA, Melissa Chen.

00:00:20.620 Welcome back to the show.

00:00:22.420 Hi, Constantine. Hi, Francis. Thanks for having me back.

00:00:25.340 Oh, it's so good to have you back.

00:00:26.640 Listen, we talked to you last time, I think it was about September 2019, we talked primarily

00:00:32.140 about China, the way it's using its power in the world, the impact that the CCP is having

00:00:37.940 on all of us wherever we live.

00:00:40.460 Well, one or two things have happened since then that have made that even more a thing

00:00:45.740 that is present in our lives.

00:00:47.000 Talk to us about what you've seen over the last year and a half.

00:00:51.160 I mean, needless to say, at the time that we were taping it, it was not on anyone's

00:00:55.760 radar, really, unless you were a China watcher or really focused on geopolitics. But somewhere

00:01:02.240 around October 2019, things were already brewing in Wuhan on the ground. And our lives were about

00:01:09.440 to be completely upended in ways that we just couldn't anticipate. And when 2020 hit, everything

00:01:16.620 hit the fan. And it's been a really interesting year. Coronavirus has kind of accelerated so much

00:01:25.300 of the trends. So, you know, almost every trend that we've seen, whether it's in work, you know,

00:01:32.800 working from home, whether it's on globalization, supply chain sovereignty, or even just the

00:01:39.620 concern about China and China's role in the world, all these trends have really been kind of

00:01:44.980 accelerated or at least brought to the forefront in the last year or so. And China's action since

00:01:52.560 then has has really not been that of a responsible world actor. And so stuff that I was talking about

00:01:59.140 in 2019 to both of you has really become relevant in a way that in 2020 made me seem like, you know,

00:02:06.780 I was some sort of like a sidekick or something. But but the trends were already there and the

00:02:13.280 signs were already there. And, you know, I would say like several people, you know, in even in the

00:02:19.180 Trump administration, had already acted in ways to counter China's increasing assertiveness.

00:02:26.700 But look at bipartisan agreement on China right now. Look at popular opinion in America. I think

00:02:34.920 90% of people in America actually agree that China is a competitor and a rival. It is not

00:02:41.960 a partner to the United States. We're not going to be able to develop and get rich together. We

00:02:48.680 are actually geostrategic rivals. And so all these have really kind of shifted in the last year.

00:02:55.300 And it's a very profound, like, paradigm shift. And you say it's a very profound paradigm shift.

00:03:01.700 And we've seen, you know, what's happened with the coronavirus. I mean, how much responsibility

00:03:06.980 should China take for this? Well, I mean, it's really interesting, because, you know,

00:03:11.820 we're talking at a time now when the whole lab leak hypothesis has been, you know, sort of

00:03:17.720 shored up again. And so it's percolating in the press, something that was completely,

00:03:24.040 apparently a debunked conspiracy for the last year. You know, since early on, I would say in

00:03:32.000 January, February, there were people talking about this. What are the odds that, you know,

00:03:37.200 in the city where there were two, not just one, there were actually two labs that housed BL4

00:03:43.500 facilities studying these bat coronaviruses would be the source or the first place where

00:03:51.520 COVID-19 shows up, the virus SARS-CoV-2. And, you know, Occam's razor, which is really,

00:03:59.500 you know, a very basic principle of parsimony that the scientific method is modeled on,

00:04:06.700 um really should have been at play right because what is the most obvious uh guess here and

00:04:15.620 instead of kind of investigating this possible theory as a hypothesis alongside others which was

00:04:23.480 you know the reigning theory of the day was really about the zoonotic transmission at the

00:04:28.520 Huanan seafood market from bats to some sort of mystery animal which was surmised to be a pangolin

00:04:34.300 And 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.

00:04:49.600 We 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.

00:05:00.460 the institutions that run on media really decided on gating this narrative and preventing people

00:05:07.720 from asking questions if you happen to you know zero hedge early on was banned from twitter

00:05:13.060 and all over facebook was banning you know anyone that was posting or removing posts

00:05:19.040 that even suggested it might have been a lab leak and and you know even without the lab leak

00:05:25.460 Even 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.

00:05:37.440 How we, you know, the country persecuted the whistleblowers and how it tried to kind of hamstring the investigations.

00:05:46.080 I 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?

00:06:04.240 more than one year, actually. And also after scrubbing the alleged crime of the scene,

00:06:09.940 which was supposedly the seafood market, which we know from interviews where the vendors did

00:06:17.400 not actually sell any of the meats in question, whether it was pangolin or bat. So there were

00:06:23.860 just so many questions and China's behavior ever since the pandemic broke out has just been

00:06:31.100 just very, very suspect and retaliating against any country like Australia that was suggesting

00:06:38.760 merely for an independent inquiry. And Melissa, I'm going to jump in there because as you were

00:06:43.520 listing off all the different meat, I was worried about Francis getting hungry. I am. But listen,

00:06:49.880 there's another aspect to all of this, which I find really interesting, which is neither you or

00:06:55.360 us who are particularly huge fans of Donald Trump. But how much of the failure to react adequately,

00:07:01.920 failure to investigate properly, failure to take the appropriate action in the circumstances

00:07:07.920 was simply about the fact that people hated Donald Trump so much that when he said we actually need

00:07:14.940 to shut the border to Chinese people coming from China, because that's where the virus is 1.00

00:07:19.280 originated from, when he said that we need to investigate whether this was man-made in a lab,

00:07:26.520 et cetera. When all of these attempts were being made, kind of the mainstream saw it through the

00:07:31.280 lens of Donald Trump and therefore failed to take action as a result. Whereas now many of the things

00:07:37.640 that he was saying at the time, particularly about the origin of the virus, calling it the China

00:07:42.780 virus, closing borders, this is something actually the left is now demanding.

00:07:46.740 Yeah, 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.

00:08:10.980 And 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.

00:08:29.660 So 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.

00:08:55.560 It didn't really help. He wasn't a excellent kind of like public health crisis kind of leader.

00:09:02.200 And, you know, he's not good at science communication either.

00:09:04.920 He's probably there were many comical moments during the press conferences.

00:09:09.260 But on the other hand, his instincts on many of these initial steps were right.

00:09:16.060 It played to his kind of his biases to to, you know, be to be a bit more restrictive on immigration and shutting down borders.

00:09:25.040 And 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.

00:09:35.680 But people flipped. Right. So initially, the Republicans were reacting very strongly.

00:09:41.760 This is serious. We need to shut the borders. You had Navarro and Trump kind of insisting on this.

00:09:48.400 And 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.

00:09:55.040 and of course the press was saying this was just racist i think joe biden also said it was

00:09:58.900 actually xenophobic um and and then you had this remarkable switch later on when you know

00:10:05.980 the trump administration realized also that shutting down lockdowns would actually hurt

00:10:11.280 the economy and the one thing that gets incumbents re-elected is always a good economy and and so

00:10:17.240 they started flipping their position and and now you know the the lockdown party became the democrats

00:10:23.000 And 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.

00:10:40.180 And so you see this ridiculous flipping, almost as if no one is holding any position based on principle.

00:10:47.620 And it's just a sign of how this political divisiveness and partisanship is making governance during a public health crisis so completely sclerotic.

00:10:59.500 It's a really good point, Mel.

00:11:01.240 But isn't it also the problem as well, you know, that we've bought into this idea of the globalized world being a universal positive?

00:11:07.800 You can get your goods from China, you can get this from India.

00:11:12.180 But what coronavirus has actually shown is that the more interlinked we are,

00:11:16.060 I mean, the more vulnerable we are as a society.

00:11:18.940 Yeah, I mean, you know, the nature of the virus doesn't respect any borders.

00:11:25.300 It's very progressive like that.

00:11:29.100 Well, and the two things that really popped up was PPE,

00:11:33.140 the issue of, you know, where our PPE were coming from.

00:11:36.120 And 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.

00:11:49.800 And 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.

00:12:02.660 And 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.

00:12:19.120 And 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.

00:12:34.760 And, 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?

00:12:45.500 So 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. 0.99

00:12:57.660 And 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?

00:13:06.740 Or do you think that when this crisis is over, we're just going to go revert back to the status quo?

00:13:11.160 I 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.

00:13:31.460 Right. 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.

00:13:47.140 their second wave. And he said, you know, the world has an interest in seeing Americans get

00:13:52.860 vaccinated before everybody else. And that was a response that you know that if this had come from

00:13:59.240 Pompeo's State Department, that that would have been like a complete public outcry and meltdown

00:14:04.280 over this terrible America First policy. But quietly, America First has been rolled forward.

00:14:10.820 We are taking care of, you know, our supply chains, our our needs first.

00:14:17.500 And 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.

00:14:27.140 And I think so many people have become aware of Chinese influence in, you know, in this open liberal society that we all live in.

00:14:36.360 And that includes, you know, basically all throughout the West, the members of the EU have also kind of woken up to this.

00:14:42.760 And, you know, they're thinking of cutting back on their trade deals.

00:14:46.520 And, well, I just to be honest, like the the American public has has kind of like woken up to China as a geopolitical threat. 0.69

00:14:55.860 And 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.

00:15:15.200 So, 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.

00:15:25.420 You 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.

00:15:43.420 So you're starting to see more legislative action and just more political will by people to say, no, enough.

00:15:51.880 We'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. 0.98

00:16:01.540 Not only did they not liberalize, but we've become more like them.

00:16:06.660 Their authoritarian model has been exported.

00:16:09.820 it. Well, I was actually going to ask you about that very point, Melissa, because I know you

00:16:14.740 watched our interview with Neil Ferguson, the historian, I should say, not the epidemiologist.

00:16:19.600 And this is one of the questions that I put to him, which is lockdowns, he says, have never been

00:16:26.160 done before in this way, and probably because we didn't have the technology to be able to stay at

00:16:30.500 home, but also for other reasons. And really, we've imported that from China. Unfortunately,

00:16:36.580 Unfortunately, copying China is a way of importing into free societies the kind of software of the unfree society. 0.99

00:16:47.300 I 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.

00:16:56.400 Because that's just an invitation to import totalitarian ways of doing things.

00:17:02.740 yes in the past in time of emergency we have restricted civil liberties we did it in both

00:17:09.060 world wars in quite drastically actually but everybody understood uh in the world wars that

00:17:14.940 it was a temporary state of emergency that would be ended as soon as the war was over

00:17:19.860 the problem with doing it in a pandemic is that it's quite easy to argue that in fact it's never

00:17:26.560 going to be over because the virus will always be out there and then this is one of the typically

00:17:32.200 totally totalitarian sounding slogans you hear, there's no safety, it's not over until there are

00:17:39.260 no cases at all anywhere in the world. Now, if you make that argument, you will be able to justify

00:17:43.760 COVID restrictions forever. And I do think this has been an opportunity for a power grab by state

00:17:51.720 bureaucracies. And I know that you're someone who cares about civil liberties a lot. How do you feel

00:17:58.860 about the fact that sort of like we look to an authoritarian communist dictatorship to decide

00:18:03.900 what we do in our countries now i think neil's point was interesting because he said what we did

00:18:10.140 in the west was kind of the worst of both worlds he said that you know we we didn't shut down and

00:18:16.260 then we had this like almost lockdown in perpetuity with different weird codes um you know i think the

00:18:23.220 problem is that you can't pick China's outcomes without China's system and at the end of the day

00:18:31.120 you know we don't have an oppressive surveillance totalitarian state not yet not not yet

00:18:39.700 um but but we just we just don't and you know if you compare the other kind of liberal democracies

00:18:46.500 that did lock down very hard um I would say New Zealand and Australia are very good examples um

00:18:52.420 You 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.

00:19:09.060 I 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.

00:19:22.960 I 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.

00:19:32.140 You 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.

00:19:43.600 Has 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?

00:19:51.540 you know surely this is something that we've already known now a year of of science and data

00:19:58.500 have been collected and and we know that this virus actually discriminates and it is by age

00:20:04.600 and so I think we're starting to at least be in a position to look back and say well maybe maybe

00:20:11.580 we shouldn't have done that but these are conversations that cannot happen in a place

00:20:16.140 like china you know i mean they're not allowed to have conversations like that and hopefully this 0.99

00:20:22.040 is something that we we can be honest look back and and learn from it i'm just not very you know

00:20:27.560 optimistic that that we will yeah and i i share your pessimism because i'm actually pessimistic 0.85

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00:21:59.760 did it surprise you how malleable people were and how readily they were to give up civil liberties

00:22:08.300 like in this country the right to protest just evaporated and we all went yeah what's the problem

00:22:12.880 oh depends on the kind of protest right so i think that was the hypocrisy was kind of aired

00:22:22.160 out very openly when um you know certain policies were applied very selectively and very very

00:22:28.520 hypocritically um you know things that were not okay under one circumstance were suddenly okay

00:22:34.380 and one of the effects of this is that i think the trust in our institutions have really crumbled

00:22:40.940 like the last year has has seen trust in media crumble trust in international organizations like

00:22:48.080 the who crumble the un um and and partly it's because of this selective application uh you know

00:22:56.260 one side's narratives favor the other side's no you can't protest um civil liberties for for me

00:23:03.480 but not for the that kind of attitude um and and it's just it's been very destructive and and you

00:23:09.520 know as society continues to evolve um and the trust breaks down i i just don't really know how

00:23:14.720 we're going to recover from that so i'm a lot less i know you ended that interview with with

00:23:19.080 neil and on a very positive note because we've been in darker places before um but i'm just i

00:23:25.380 don't I can't see a way out for us I mean it's very very succinctly put which then begs the

00:23:32.320 question how do we roll back can we roll back or is this just a moment in time where it's been an

00:23:39.180 unassailable rupture and there's no going back from it um you know I people seem to have um a

00:23:48.620 resiliency but I don't know how permanent these changes are you know you're starting to hear

00:23:54.120 people are going back to work they want to go back to work they want to go back to the pub

00:23:57.560 we need our apolitical spaces back like we need sports back but sports in a way that you know was

00:24:04.520 like before um without all the politics kind of embedded in it and all the nonsense um and and I

00:24:11.420 think it really depends on a lot of that um you know whether we have these spaces to come together

00:24:17.840 and sort of interact in ways that the more apolitical spaces

00:24:24.680 and common hobbies that we can engage in,

00:24:27.860 the better the chance we have to kind of get back to the way things were.

00:24:34.060 But I'm kind of afraid that that ship has really sailed.

00:24:38.280 You know, the wool has kind of been pulled from the eyes of most people.

00:24:42.840 The media has been, the media's hypocrisy has been laid bare.

00:24:47.040 You 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.

00:24:58.740 So I don't know if we're going to be able to come back from something like that.

00:25:02.360 And you mentioned President Biden. You mentioned that he's continuing many of the policies that Donald Trump had on China.

00:25:08.900 Are 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.

00:25:30.160 With all of that put together, do you think he will be able to manage this problem effectively?

00:25:36.460 You 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. 0.82

00:25:49.060 Biden, for example, in his first executive order signed, you know, an anti-Asian hate crime bill.

00:25:55.840 And a lot of this had been kind of posturing.

00:25:59.660 And several Republicans in the Senate voted against the bill, not because they were anti, you know, they supported hate crimes against Asians.

00:26:08.840 They 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.

00:26:29.660 And 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.

00:26:46.300 It'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.

00:26:58.040 And it's it's playing this like bigotry race card to to a very effective way to just silence criticism.

00:27:05.260 And 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.

00:27:15.500 You know, he is a Democrat, and I think he's more liable to that kind of influence.

00:27:21.780 The point you're talking about China deflecting criticism, it's the communist playbook.

00:27:25.600 The Soviet Union did this exact thing.

00:27:27.920 When America would criticize the Soviet Union, my ancestors would reply saying, well, what

00:27:33.640 about African-Americans in America having a rough time?

00:27:36.660 And that was the deflection that justified gulags and all the rest of it.

00:27:41.680 Right.

00:27:42.460 It's a very classic tactic.

00:27:44.580 And 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. 0.96

00:28:03.520 They weigh in on the Capitol riots on January 6th. They weighed in on George Floyd.

00:28:09.340 They're using these domestic issues in a way to to basically manipulate public opinion.

00:28:15.180 And it's actually very, very effective. It is very effective.

00:28:18.560 And we saw an example of soft power quite literally this week with John Cena.

00:28:22.780 He was in what, Fast and the Furious 938 or something like that.

00:28:26.500 And he had to do a public apology. Right.

00:28:30.060 and he did it in mandarin and it was posted on on chinese twitter it was so painful to watch um

00:28:37.020 you know it's i i i kind of made a tweet a joke about it because his signature phrase has been 0.95

00:28:43.920 this like hand wave where he's like you can't see me i'm like yeah like you can't see his balls like 0.94

00:28:48.400 he just lost his balls um you know just just kowtowing like that in in such a brazen way 0.99

00:28:55.680 But, you know, could you blame him? 0.97

00:28:58.860 You know, the Chinese market has long exceeded for international box office sales, has long

00:29:04.300 exceeded the U.S. market.

00:29:05.760 So China now is an expert in just using its economic leverage, just bullying countries 0.93

00:29:11.640 to toe its Communist Party line, whether the issue is Tibet, whether the issue is Taiwan

00:29:17.580 or Hong Kong.

00:29:18.940 If it doesn't like what you're saying, if it doesn't like that, you know, the website,

00:29:23.280 whether it's NASA, whether it's Delta Airlines or Marriott listed Taiwan or Macau as a country and not a territory as part of China,

00:29:31.280 it's able to use this economic muscle to just change that.

00:29:35.980 And if you want access to the Chinese market, you have to buck up.

00:29:39.720 You have to comply. If not, you're booted out.

00:29:43.120 And, you know, tech companies, our tech companies at least, have made that stance.

00:29:47.700 They are booted out. They are actually blocked from the Chinese market.

00:29:50.660 But but but, you know, brands, consumer brands like they they're liable, like they they have to participate.

00:29:57.560 If they don't, they completely lose out globally.

00:30:00.700 Melissa, I was going to ask you because we're having this conversation.

00:30:03.600 And look, you know, I agree with you about Chinese sort of soft power, what you might describe as soft aggression, influence, et cetera. 0.85

00:30:13.100 But I don't think none of us, no one watching this would want like another Cold War or a confrontation with China.

00:30:21.600 But do you think essentially there is no way to deal with China without confronting them? 0.99

00:30:26.620 Because there's no way to get them to behave, as you put it, more responsibly.

00:30:32.840 Well, I think decoupling was the way to do it.

00:30:35.180 You know, the Cold War, I mean, there's an argument to be had that the Cold War, actually, we didn't win the Cold War.

00:30:42.560 It didn't end.

00:30:43.520 China is the torchbearer. 0.93

00:30:45.160 But the analogy of the Cold War breaks down because we actually engaged with China economically.

00:30:51.660 And we didn't do that with the USSR.

00:30:53.860 You know, we let the USSR basically bleed out financially and it collapsed because of its imperialist adventures and eventually was just financially unstable.

00:31:03.820 But 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.

00:31:19.220 We'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. 0.92

00:31:40.620 So we just haven't really held China accountable to some sort of like international norms.

00:31:46.360 We've let them have a pass because we just wanted to trade with them.

00:31:50.260 And and in a way, we've really committed a terrible mistake.

00:31:54.960 It's not going to go the way of the USSR because we're now entangled economically.

00:32:00.260 But there are still ways to, I think, decouple there.

00:32:03.720 There are especially industries that we need to decouple for sure.

00:32:06.820 So 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.

00:32:19.760 You 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.

00:32:32.400 if we let China even contribute certain parts and decouple from that.

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00:33:29.120 description it's zingerberrybakery.co.uk and get your biscuits today i think i've eaten too many

00:33:35.340 biscuits never heard him say that before now we were talking about soft power grabs can you see

00:33:44.260 in the next few years china making a hard power grab maybe invading taiwan they've certainly had 0.99

00:33:48.860 their eyes on it for a long time now the uh u.s navy estimates that the chances are that china

00:33:55.640 would actually try to do that in the next seven years um and that's good news yeah you know and

00:34:04.360 it's one of those things like i think the u.s appetite for intervention military intervention

00:34:08.380 after afghanistan and after iraq is pretty much zero so i i don't know how you know u.s public

00:34:15.480 opinion would shape the the sort of capacity for our government to to do anything or the West to

00:34:23.300 do anything in general. But but an invasion of Taiwan is egregious. And if you don't stop China 0.95

00:34:30.420 there, where would you stop? I mean, Taiwan is democratic. It's it's independent. It's been,

00:34:37.680 you know, its own country for since 1949. Yes, it was a military dictatorship for a while,

00:34:44.020 But it liberalized the nationalists, liberalized in ways that makes Taiwan completely the most, actually the most vibrant liberal democracy in all of Asia.

00:34:54.400 It was the first Asian country to actually introduce and allow marriage equality, gay marriage.

00:35:00.280 So 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.

00:35:12.080 That's something that China has been repeating for a long time, the CCP, that, you know, Asian populations prefer collectivism. 0.69

00:35:21.620 But 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.

00:35:30.080 Those two countries are thriving in different ways.

00:35:32.340 And it's such an important counterpoint to China that it and, you know, beyond the fact that China sees it as rightfully there. 0.79

00:35:39.700 So the historical baggage all the more makes China wants to reunify and take Taiwan by force.

00:35:46.300 Xi Jinping has said this. There's just like this is one of those issues that has like zero wiggle room for the current regime.

00:35:53.280 And if they take China, if they if China does take Taiwan, what's next?

00:35:57.520 Japan is right there. You know, it's it's a power in the Pacific area.

00:36:02.500 You have Hawaii. It's really close to, you know, the west coast of the United States.

00:36:08.560 So it's a direct military threat. And I mean, personally, I'm in favor of intervening.

00:36:15.300 We have to intervene to do something if China ever takes Taiwan.

00:36:20.260 I mean, you say that we have to intervene, but we haven't so far.

00:36:23.940 We looked at the situation with Hong Kong. I mean, a couple of leaders came out.

00:36:28.040 You know, Boris Johnson said something. I can't really remember it, but it was largely pointless.

00:36:33.020 Can't you just see the West shrugging their shoulders again?

00:36:35.760 Well, 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.

00:36:45.220 China just sped up the process and disowned the agreement, did not grant 50 years of autonomy, one country, two systems to Hong Kong.

00:36:55.320 And so it was really just a matter of like time.

00:36:58.780 It just, you know, it did everything it was going to do in 2047, 20 years ahead of schedule.

00:37:03.660 So in Taiwan's case, there would be a very egregious military intervention that China, you know, that there's no agreement with Taiwan.

00:37:12.480 Actually, 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.

00:37:23.660 It just hasn't been solved. And I just don't see I just don't see those those two things as as similar.

00:37:31.660 Well, 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?

00:37:57.160 Has that surprised you, Melissa?

00:37:58.400 You 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.

00:38:12.520 An activist.

00:38:13.060 And, 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.

00:38:28.940 And 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.

00:38:44.240 And 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.

00:39:00.800 And that includes Pakistan to excoriate China for its oppression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

00:39:09.300 And 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.

00:39:22.780 in the case of countries like Saudi Arabia, it's even exporting its technology, you know,

00:39:28.540 the panopticon that it built, the techno surveillance state technology that China is 0.93

00:39:33.200 using. And so because of all these deals, I mean, if you look at how many of these countries look

00:39:39.320 to China as a model, you have two options in the world. Either you are going to liberalize and

00:39:44.100 become a liberal democracy, or you're going to go down the China route and become an autocratic

00:39:51.120 regime. And for many of these countries in the Middle East, it's pretty clear which model they

00:39:57.500 want to pursue. Philosophically, they're far more aligned with the Chinese model and China's paving

00:40:02.740 the way. So, you know, they're going to just quieten their criticisms. And that is a good

00:40:09.760 point. But it's also as well, China's model, let's be honest, is far more effective in many ways.

00:40:14.480 There's not this constant turnover of leadership. You can get a hell of a lot done with slave labor.

00:40:19.160 exactly no this is some i mean i grew up in singapore and and on the scale from

00:40:24.680 you know china to to the u.s singapore somewhere in the middle it's really kind of like this this

00:40:31.020 interesting hybrid and um um i've heard these arguments since i was a kid you know about um

00:40:38.360 the democracy is messy democracy is um you know it leads to very slow sclerotic inefficient kinds

00:40:46.940 of government. And something like the pandemic really threw this into very sharp focus, right?

00:40:52.420 We saw how effective some of these authoritarian countries were in clamping down, in nailing

00:40:59.360 people into their apartments and forcing social distancing, tracking. We can't even get vaccine

00:41:06.220 passports because, you know, half our people will revolt. And I mean, when Bill de Blasio,

00:41:13.560 you know put out a number saying like there's this hotline um all new yorkers if you see people

00:41:19.840 not wearing the mask outside not social distancing call this number and report and snitch on your 0.96

00:41:25.220 fellow new yorkers and people just saw that and they started sending him dick pics and i was i 0.98

00:41:33.000 was so proud of i was you know like oh we're kind of screwed but also very proud of america i mean 0.98

00:41:38.620 on one hand, that's, you know, that's bad in terms of the outcomes for the virus, but I'd rather live

00:41:45.960 in a place where people don't want to snitch on each other, on each other, rather than a place

00:41:51.580 where there's just so much distrust and, and that people are snitching on each other all the time.

00:41:56.940 But, but the reality is that, you know, one of these places is going to do a lot better. It's

00:42:02.280 going to have zero deaths. And it's, again, this kind of contrast goes all the way back to Benjamin

00:42:07.520 Franklin the trade-off between security and liberty. It's a very good point and well made 1.00

00:42:12.820 Melissa. I think we'll leave China there for now. We've got a little bit of time left and you talk

00:42:17.560 about New York and the United States and some of the things that have been happening there including

00:42:22.140 the certainly a wave of reporting about anti-Asian hate crime. I don't know how accurate. Tell us

00:42:29.140 is it has there been a massive increase or is it just something that people have been focusing on

00:42:34.420 more than before? So, you know, there's been an increase in violent crime all across the board

00:42:40.340 in America. In some cities, it's really stark. I think in Portland, it's been a 1600% increase

00:42:47.920 in violent crime. Well, they're reimagining public safety, aren't they? So that's good.

00:42:52.940 Oh, they are. And the police, right, which is related. And, you know, the data on anti-Asian

00:43:01.680 crime or, you know, the sort of like what we're observing, the discourse is based on

00:43:06.380 three sources.

00:43:07.500 One of them is just these social media videos that keep popping up, which are terrible and

00:43:12.600 heartbreaking.

00:43:13.360 You know, we're seeing these like elderly Asians kind of being mugged, being assaulted

00:43:16.900 on the streets, usually in urban centers like San Francisco or Los Angeles, and they kind

00:43:24.660 of go viral, right?

00:43:25.720 The 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.

00:43:42.340 There'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.

00:43:53.360 But 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.

00:44:19.720 And 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.

00:44:39.880 That, 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.

00:45:04.480 And 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.

00:45:25.340 But to put that number into sharp relief for anti-Semitic hate crimes, that there is more than 150 just in New York.

00:45:36.200 So the narrative about anti-Asian hate crimes, I think, is it seems like something is happening.

00:45:42.320 We're seeing these videos. Is this meaningful in a way that is this due to racial prejudice, explicit racial animus?

00:45:51.260 Or 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. 0.60

00:46:05.560 They're not using banking system. They live in Chinatowns. They're weak. They won't fight back. They don't own guns. 1.00

00:46:11.360 How much of this is opportunistic crime that's part of the ambient crime levels that are heightened anyway all across the board?

00:46:19.420 how much of it is actually racially targeted. And I think his name is Charles Lehman had done,

00:46:26.800 he's with the Manhattan Institute, had done some interesting time series. So he took that data that

00:46:30.920 I, the last data set that I described, the FBI data, and he looked at, he plotted that over time.

00:46:36.920 And so what you're seeing is an interesting spike in March of 2020, just a little tiny spike,

00:46:42.360 which could be attributed to things like the lockdowns and, you know, just kind of the

00:46:47.100 COVID-19 related kind of crimes, potentially. That was in 2020. But in 2021, when Biden is

00:46:56.240 president in Democratic-run cities, there has been another spike in March 2021. And so the idea that

00:47:04.180 this is somehow due to white supremacy, as the media has ran with this narrative, is completely 0.94

00:47:10.920 ridiculous because Trump is not even on social media. No one is out there spouting Wuhan flu 0.98

00:47:17.320 or, you know, Wu flu or China virus. And the idea that this is related to some sort of rhetoric is

00:47:23.920 just completely bollocks. But you can make some interesting inferences. Why is there a spike

00:47:28.940 again? And it's pretty significant in March of 2021. Now, if you correlate this with Google

00:47:35.760 searches, with media reporting, could it be copycat crimes? Could it be that just awareness

00:47:40.040 of the crime itself makes people report the hate incidents or the hate crimes in a way that you

00:47:47.200 know they just wouldn't have before so there are a lot of reasons why potentially you know there is

00:47:52.860 this weird spike in March of 2021 but but we don't really know but it's certainly we can say that it

00:48:00.580 has nothing to do with the the leading media narrative which is apparently white supremacy

00:48:05.320 well for a start quite a lot of the people that committing these crimes don't seem to be white

00:48:09.820 um so or exactly uh but do you think there's an element in terms of the way it's talked about and

00:48:18.120 the way that it's covered where it's like you know once you introduce identity politics then

00:48:23.580 it becomes in the interest of every single group to become the victim and so when jews get and you 1.00

00:48:30.040 know i'm allowed to say this because i'm from a jewish background you'll be allowed to say this

00:48:33.760 from an asian background like everyone would benefit from being in the victim group because 1.00

00:48:40.220 that's what society currently values and ranks higher than the non-victim groups do you think

00:48:45.000 a large part of it is like well people are attacking us let's you know let's make hay

00:48:49.240 yeah it's interesting because you're right i i do agree with the sort of like the

00:48:55.100 victimhood kind of correlating victim status correlating with moral status somehow in in

00:49:01.200 this society that we live in that, you know, has married intersectionality with critical race

00:49:06.560 theory. Um, but, but Asians in a way are, are just kind of like, I call it Schrodinger's white 1.00

00:49:12.680 people because, you know, you're white sometimes when it comes to, um, when it comes to college

00:49:18.480 admissions. And so, or even like, um, if you, if you're for college admissions, you're worse than 0.90

00:49:23.780 white. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. It is possible just for, just in that one context. Well, and 0.99

00:49:30.640 even like, uh, wages. So if you look at, uh, you know, income levels, Asians as a group are

00:49:35.820 actually out earn whites as a demographic in, in recent years. So, um, you know, under those

00:49:41.660 circumstances, Asians are considered whites and therefore have to be adjusted their populations,

00:49:46.880 you know, they're overrepresented because, and they're white. So they're, you know, either you

00:49:51.880 have to abolish the test or, or do something in a way to lessen their, their, uh, demographic

00:49:57.860 numbers in schools or at the workplace. But on the other hand, you know, they're suddenly people

00:50:03.460 of color when it comes to street violence, when it comes to, you know, this invisibility on TV 0.54

00:50:10.040 or whatever other sort of cultural elite causes that are being supported right now. And so you

00:50:16.740 see this like weird bifurcation and the cynic in me has always been, well, you know, they know that 0.90

00:50:24.160 the AAPI group, the Asian American Pacific Islander group, which is another ridiculous 1.00

00:50:29.120 bureaucratic racial category that was invented, is a useful voting block. And right now it's a

00:50:36.640 pawn in this political game because as CRT and sort of this narrative about discrimination in

00:50:44.920 college becomes more obvious to Asians, they're going to rebel against that and tend to vote 0.52

00:50:50.900 conservative and so the only way you're going to bring them back into the progressive fold

00:50:55.640 is is to drum up this narrative that they are targeted that they are victimized because of

00:51:00.880 their race um that is my guess about the dynamics that are going on politically um and so in a way

00:51:08.080 you know asian sort of uh elderly suffering you know on the streets um has has become a useful 1.00

00:51:17.280 way to kind of milk this issue politically when solving this issue is really just a matter of

00:51:24.660 solving crime if you prosecute it if if we you know provided mental health facilities for

00:51:31.460 many of these people who are attacking these agents are actually mentally ill but you know

00:51:36.660 our homelessness problem has skyrocketed because of the home because of the lockdowns crime has

00:51:42.000 skyrocketed and and we're not solving the very thing that can actually help these people you

00:51:48.220 know we're we're blaming it on on this entirely different um reason which is you know if you get

00:51:56.360 the the the reasoning wrong the root cause wrong you're going to get the policy wrong and the

00:52:02.140 prescription wrong and it's not going to do anything so that's kind of where my frustration

00:52:06.300 is right now and are people still thinking defund the police is a good idea of we all accepted that 0.61

00:52:12.680 that was a crap idea brought on by the insanity of a lockdown actually it looks like a tide has

00:52:18.440 been turning and even among african-americans you know the the ones who actually live in these 0.98

00:52:23.860 at-risk neighborhoods um the tide is turning people there is such strong data that shows that

00:52:30.620 you know stronger policing actually correlates with lower crime really wow and and um you know

00:52:37.640 like andrew yang has been kind of um criticized a lot by sort of asian activists you know the

00:52:45.140 kinds who went to ivy leagues um for for suggesting for merely suggesting that one of the solutions

00:52:50.780 to prevent to stop aapi hate is to increase funding for the police and and put more police

00:52:57.280 resources in these neighborhoods. And, you know, it's just so funny how these narratives shake out

00:53:03.320 because he's been targeted. He, you know, hit pieces were written against them for even

00:53:07.440 suggesting that because somehow these Asian activists are very aligned with the BLM narrative

00:53:13.560 about, you know, how police actually brutalize communities of color and that we must stand with

00:53:19.580 them. And if we don't stand with black lives, we don't stand with Asian lives, which again is 1.00

00:53:23.580 trying to connect these causes and and you know as the palestine conflict kind of erupted as well

00:53:28.920 you start to see how george floyd now intersects with palestine when obviously has nothing to do

00:53:33.740 with each other right so we live in a time of like globalization of narratives in a way where

00:53:40.100 every struggle has to be connected to some original struggle and and everything is

00:53:44.600 collectivized and we're not evaluating things independently and that's such a good point and

00:53:50.580 it's a fantastic place to end the interview uh melissa if people want to find you online where

00:53:55.900 is the best place to do that only fans that is how we will lead this interview and it is going

00:54:04.800 to get a million views do you know what there's probably about six losers on the internet we saw 1.00

00:54:09.160 that went great wasn't um the well the best way to find me is um on twitter which is my handle

00:54:16.080 at Miss, M-S, Mel, M-E-L, Chan, C-H-E-N. 0.52

00:54:20.020 Or you can read my stuff on the Spectator USA website.

00:54:24.320 That's probably the best way to find them.

00:54:25.920 And before we let you go, we have one proper question for you

00:54:29.120 and then we'll do some locals-only questions as well.

00:54:31.760 So as you know, our last question for the main interview itself is

00:54:35.020 what is the one thing that we're not talking about

00:54:37.840 that we still should be talking about?

00:54:39.620 One 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.

00:55:08.740 and sort of hedonism and try to, you know, downregulate pain and discomfort and how this

00:55:19.380 system, the Brave New World system in the U.S. and in the West in general in Europe,

00:55:23.700 compared to the totalitarian 1984 China system, how these two different systems actually end up

00:55:32.460 converging to look like the same thing, where we now, because of safetyism and the, you know,

00:55:38.620 of harm avoidance and not wanting to confront anything that makes us feel bad, has led us down

00:55:46.200 a weirdly totalitarian path that, you know, our systems kind of end up feeling, you know, we have

00:55:54.100 Yelp, for example, review systems that, you know, are steps removed from China's social credit

00:56:01.180 system, but not unlike it. And, you know, so I find that convergence interesting that we have

00:56:08.380 top down, top down versus bottom up kind of freedom, but or control, but they're meeting

00:56:14.700 in the same place. And, and it feels like we're still living in dystopia.

00:56:20.840 And it feels inevitable as well, I think, to me. But it's a very good point and something that I

00:56:26.960 think is going to come into sharper and sharper focus over the years to come uh which is when we

00:56:32.180 will have you back to talk about it some more melissa thank you so much for chatting with us

00:56:36.200 thank you cheers and thank you guys for watching at home we will see you very soon with another

00:56:41.520 brilliant interview like this one or or show all of them go out at 7 p.m uk time take care and see

00:56:47.260 you soon guys

00:56:56.960 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - June 09, 2021

＂We Let China Have Its Way With the World＂ - Melissa Chen

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