Welcome to the first monday in august, august 5, our first monthly program. These programs are a partnership of three organizations. The university of Southern CaliforniaAnnenberg Center for leadership and policy, the Public Policy the publicd Diplomacy Association of america , whose president is also here. Our speaker today is has many us. Gs to tell i know she has been trying to figure out how to cut it down, so i will cut my introduction short. Libby liu is the longest serving, by far, head of a network of u. S. International broadcasting. She goes back to the bush administration, which no one else i think can claim. Radio free asia, which is what she heads, brings journalism from the denied areas of china,orth korea, and other areas winning awards, and then, of course, turns around and sends journalism back to denied areas. Libby, in addition to being the longest serving network head in u. S. International broadcasting, i believe is the only one who has both an mba and a law degree , both from penn, so worn school ton school and penn law school. It is my pleasure to welcome to the podium, libby liu. [applause] libby thank you, adam, and thank you, everybody, for being here. I hope this is informative. Feel free to pipe up with questions along the way, i hate my own voice but i have tried to put a lot of material altogether here. As adam just said, we prepared a longer one than we have had. So we are just going to have to go with it. Go ahead. So what i am going to do is talk about radio free asia to get a rsa. Of what we do aat radio free asia, every single thing we do is based on article 19 of the universal declaration of human rights. The early, with we are thinking of programming and make strategy decisions, we always bring it back to article 19. This is our mission. Basically, our mission is to bring information to people in asia who would otherwise not have access to it. This came to a struggling light doing that 10 them in that tiananmen massacre. That is what started the u. S. Congress deciding they needed to create a Sister Organization which as you know, was very powerful and effective during the cold war in preserving freedom and democracy, and educating people behind the iron curtain. We were created by congress and funded by formally the bpg. We have three under the umbrella, radio free asia, news, and the open Technology Fund. I put the slide in because what we do is really basic. It is a very simple formula. Our goal is that people regard trusted source in their language, particularly important when something major happens. Like the earthquakes in shanghai that were built on shoddy construction and collapsed on children, all of the children in the chinese province. That was a disaster, and tragic. During that time, our numbers and our engagement went up dramatically. When there are things that happen like that, like the hong kong protests right now, we put all hands on deck and we do 24 hours of live tweeting and streaming coverage and this continues the situation in hong kong, which is now in taiwan. So basically know your audience, understand the context of where theyre coming from so you can talk to them in a way that they can understand and can conceptualize and relate. Know your adversary. In our case, our adversaries are the censors. We are the free press, and they are the censors. Deliver the truth, and never, ever deviate. For us, being the enemy of the states in which we operate, one mistake will kill us. So, we have to absolutely be rigorous in our ethics. And then, shoot for the epiphany moment. When you go up in a society where your state media is controlled from birth, it is sometimes really jarring to turn on a Radio Station like radio free asia and hear something that is completely different than anything you ever believed before. What we found in our audiences is that everybody has an thehany moment come at moment when you realize there is truth you are being denied, and that it matters to you. And it is your state doing it. We get letters and comments all the time from people telling us their personal epiphany moment stories. A quick one, i remember this woman who was a very, very successful corporate lawyer in shanghai. Very wealthy and very know,ntial, you socialized with all the important people, etc. Them a, and one day, her brother who was in college disappeared. Before that time, whenever people talked about radio free asia to her, she was like, they hate china, they hate Chinese People, they are just attacking us all the time. Then she started doing research, because she was trying to find her brother. And she realized that a lot of people who write on college blogs and chat rooms and Message Boards disappear when they Say Something the state does not like. So she went on a sixmonth intensive mission to find her brother. With all the connections she had, all the wealth she had, she couldnt find anything. He was gone and he never turned up. So she wrote me and said, i finally realized that everything you have said is true. I didnt want to realize it, because my life was so good. But it is. That is the epiphany moment, the moment a person who lives in a closed society and experienced that, it is difficult to live without it. I feel that the freedom of information, call the freedoms that states do neither citizens so they can stay in power freedom of information, association, religious freedom, these are elements of human dignity. Humans deserve their own dignity. So we try to give it back to them by providing information so they can make informed decisions about their own life. Operations. Radio free asia is a surrogate broadcaster. I know that a lot of you know a lot more about some of these things than others but i am trying to be wide, in scope. We do local news for local people in closed societies. This was originally mandarin, tibetan, uighur and in north china north korea, cambodia, and vietnam. None of these places are free. When we were created, we had a very, very short window, then we had only annual reauthorizations until finally in 2011, Congress Gave us permanent authorization. Because it was clear the trajectory of freedom and free speech in asia was not going in the right direction. We are in our fifth year of operation. It was created to counter extremist rhetoric focused at muslim, disenfranchised muslim communities that were being targeted by extremist rhetoric. Unfortunately, because of the violence of extremism at the time we started this, there was no room in these indigenous countries to do these independent news sites. Because their houses tended to be firebombed. So we realized that we had to do this from outside. We call it offshore. We created this brand to be service to these communities that feel disenfranchised. We looked at the causes of being vulnerable to extremist rhetoric and fundraising, and foreign ,ighter flight, and found that unlike in all things, it is really about not feeling like you are heard or not feeling like you matter. Issues that were particularly influential were corruption, unemployment, lack of education, you know, all of the things that make you feel dehumanized or not a part of a society. So even though these were predominantly very developed, and vital, vibrant environment, there were communities of people who were left behind, easy sitting targets. We are in our fifth year now and now we do a lot more than just countering violent extremism. They open Technology Fund. Yeare i dont know what we are in, we started in 2012. The thing about the internet, often times, people think about Internet Freedom in the case of news organizations as a pure access issue. This is a very serious issue, as you know. The great firewall of china is an ominously effective in blocking. Have an upcoming thatt from otf which shows Censorship Technology in china is now being used in 120 countries in the world. Access is a very serious issue but it is so much more than that. Because there is no ability for to create content unless we have access to sources and secondary sources and cant mission and photos and videos and, you know, documents that are found, or leaks, right . During the revolution, which radio free asia broke, i dont know if you remember scenes of monks going before it opened, we ran 24 7 during the entire movement and when it ended, every single one went to prison with transcripts of their phone calls to radio free asia. At that time, we decided that was not going to work anymore. We created the open Technology Fund. Its legislative mission legislative mission is to promote unrestricted access to the internet. We are talking about no censorship, no monitoring, and no interference. This is a very important concept. It touches everybodys life. Free societies, closed societies, anyone who touches the internet must have freedom for it to work. Next. To understand china come your adversary, you have to understand why they do what they do appear they want to take their rightful position in global leadership. What they do, they control the global narrative and global sentiments regarding china, and how. This is a complex, multilateral multilevel strategy. Many of us in this room know the various parts of this multilevel and synchronized thing. It is not coordinated in the sense that there is a planned, this is your job and your job, it is that everyone is moving their boat in the same direction. Everyone knows where the goal is. In individual lanes, they will drive toward the same place. Challenges. You all probably know this sorry about the colors. Press freedom has declined in the world. Journalists are being targeted. Authoritarian disinformation, and the decline of commercial journalism. You can see what i wrote here. Someone asked me how radio free asia is doing. It is fantastic but i have more journalists in prison today than i have ever had before. More family members have been disappeared or held to pressure our journalists than ever before. Our sources are in prison. People we profile are in prison. It is a very bad time. This is a great graphic done in our Freedom House. These are selected cases of what china has been active in doing. You cannot read it so i will talk about some of these. The top left corner is in sweden and russia, where the chinese have harassed and threatened critics of china. In germany, the former chancellor was found spewing Chinese Party lines about the detentions. In africa, the start times decides who is going to get state media. I could go on and on. I recommend you take a look at the graphic, in Freedom House online. It is very illustrative of the vast array of pressures that can be applied all over. Next. I will focus on the propaganda portion of it because united front does everything, including coopting citizens of the free world to act as their representative and push their interests. This is pervasive especially in western democracy. For our purposes, radio free asia is really about propaganda. Where we sit, there are three major concerns. One, obviously, domestic media. That is everything they control inside the orders, which is basically everything online, tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, everything. The second area is shaping the global narrative and what we have seen is, especially in these countries, they have bought up radio, tv, and have pervasive Information Operations in those third languages. A very serious concern that we have is how to counter chinese propaganda coming into a country in its own language, such as vietnam or cambodia or some of the countries that we deal with. The third area is chinese the crazy thing is people like my parents, who left in 1949 because of the communist regime, today, they watch cctv 24 7. I am sorry, mom and dad. I have to out you. This is insane and insanely effective. We will talk more about this later but those are the three areas im concerned about. Basically, these are all different ways to ensure domestic censorship. Some examples. You know, controlling all the state party lines, you have seen if you go to china, digital time, leaked Propaganda Department advisories on what can and cannot be said. You will notice during big events, the headlines are consistent across everything and you will see those exact headlines echoed in western media or international media, shockingly. This is something we pulled off of great fire. Org, and otf project. It gives you kind of an idea of what censorship looks like the the hind the great firewall of china. Sorry that was so fast. If you need me to slow down, say , could you hold it for a second . So, the global narrative. They have committed a committed strategy of making sure their views are representative and that and t ccp views are discouraged. Cri, china radio international, probably a few years ago now, there was an investigative report that basically outed enormous, covert, International Network of Radio Stations that hide the fact that they put on ccp state media, including in the united states. I bring that up because these things are purposeful. They are incredibly strategic. If you wanted to convince the American People that, you know, that china is a good guy, a good performer who will help you in your prosperity, etc. , you are getting these ideas that are state narratives. And i think it is super important that at least we in this room, when we read these headlines and these stories, just take it with a little bit of skepticism and ask yourself, who does this serve . Is it serving me with objective information or is it steering me against my country, my president , my congress, what . The interest of my nation. This is very significant. Next. Another example of this phenomenon is this. You have probably seen it before it is in the washington post. There are many people who read it and think it is a special section of the post even though it is clearly not it looks like it. It reads like western news. We have juxtaposed stories from the china daily english versus the chinese version of the story, specific terms and sentences are dropped out specifically so they appeal to whoever the audience is. The next one is super important. This is more finding from Freedom House 2018s report, the 2018 report, which i thought was significant. They expanded their influence to media everywhere. They have enhanced their ability to interfere because in democracy, people decide what our priorities are. They are trying to convince people that their state narrative is the right one. They influence through many ways, suppress criticism and push party lines, and they control and manage delivery platforms. For example, satellites. This is a good one. Recently, ccp has exerted, i would say, majority influence over asia and telstar, the leading satellites have a that have a footprint over china. They informed us immediately that we were going to be not renewed when our contract came up. This is a way to control the media platform themselves. Of course, the threat of our huwaii means that they will have even greater control and data mining opportunities. There are also massive amounts of other chinese members, students that go overseas, people that go overseas, tourists, workers, they are also targeting these with chinese language media. One thing i have noticed over time is newspapers that are local and chinese communities have and we think they are our own they suddenly start sounding , a lot like cctv state media. They have made a deliberate attempt, successfully, to either through economics or pressure or putting friends in the right places, influencing all of those journalistic lines. Even if you think you are consuming something that is independent, you are not. Because you get the same view from your local chinese newspaper as you do from chinese tv, it must be right. This is all part of an orchestrated strategy. So the most amazing phenomenon in this is something referred to as uber nationalism. If you have chinese blood, you need to be proccp. You would be amazed at how effective this is. I think a recent example, was when we had about a decade ago, this conflict where there was a violent clash, and this one, i do not know if you remember, one girl at duke university, she really wanted to bring tibetan students at duke with the Chinese Students at duke and have a dialogue. What happened is as she was the own eyes, her family actually ized, hers villain iced family had to actually go on the because theirng lives were threatened. But you saw a surge of uber nationalism and people at my parents who theoretically were not supportive of the communist party, turn red in the face of if you brought this up. They have the ability through a very longterm strategy to get anybody that has chinese blood in them to feel like they are, you know, beneficiaries and part of the whole china operation. Loyalty to china, loyalty to ccp. Next. This is a graphic from jamestown. Org. If you are not familiar, they do phenomenal work on china. This is just demonstrating the most recent reorganization of 2017 to target global from global diasporas from the united front. To show you how everything fits into this structure, next. Understanding your adversary. Im trying to think of a good example of this. How do you talk about your freedom of expression if you never know there was a universal declaration of human rights . How about you dont even know that they are considered universal human rights in the world . These ideas, which are inherent in our belief system in that we share with, you know, our allies and likeminded nations, are by nature dissident from what people in china understand. To understand where they are coming from, we have to look at their words and actions. Document number nine, still a winner after all these years. This was a leaked document from april 2013, which laid out in excruciating detail, threat of incorrect thinking. The Chinese Communist party is intent on eliminating the platforms and the ability to share incorrect thinking, and some of these ideas that are offensive or anticctv in their in their view are constitutional democracy, universal values, civil society, journalism. To see it in black and white from a government document saying these are a threat to us, is very eyeopening. It makes Everything Else makes sense. Because it is very hard to understand what the intentions are