Hello, everyone. Welcome to you, america. And this talk we have with josh chin and liza lin and from the wall street journal on surveillance state. Your new book. Im super excited to host is because josh and i were a longtime colleagues at the wall street journal and china. So first things first, a couple of housekeeping rules before we get into the meat of the audience, before we start. If you do have questions, do the event please submit them through the q a function and well get to them in the second half of the event. And of course, more importantly, copies of surveillance state are available for purchase to our bookselling partner, solid state books and you can find a link to buy a book on this page. So just click on that. A quick introduction for our two speakers josh chin is a new america fellow in 2020. Hes also the Deputy Bureau chief in china. The wall street journal. As i mentioned, he previously he and i were previously colleagues there in china. And he has, of course, gone on to do huge, huge things, including being investigated of team that won the loeb awards for International Reporting for a series exposing the Chinese Government pioneering embrace of digital surveillance. He is also the recipient of the dan balz medal given to investigative journalists who have exhibited courage in standing up against intimidation and id love to ask about that a little bit more in a second. Liesel lin is a has been covering data use and privacy for the journal from singapore and she was also part of the team that won the globe in 2018. And prior to that, lizas spent nine years at Bloomberg News and television too as well. So welcome both of you to this talk. Maybe ill just start first by asking you guys about the how things have changed, because when the time when josh and i were both reporting in china, were talking back india your 2000 to early station was a very different time. Yes. We as foreign reporters, we were surveilled. We were aware that most were being watched. But at the same time, there was a deep awareness at that time that a feeling that with the advent of the internet, that this would be a cover that would, you know, pry open the governments control and lead to a much more open society. And that, of course, has was a wrong assumption. So how did we go from that kind of utopian view to this decidedly more dystopian view that you present in your book . Yeah, i it it is remarkable to think back on those times and you know, and theres that experience. I think a lot of reporters have in china that when youre there, you think its the worst its ever been. And then three or four years go back and you and then go back and you suddenly liquid nostalgia, a sort of previous period. But yeah, youre right. You know, i remember, you know, when i first started interested in china and reporting on china was around when china was entering the wto in 2001. And bill clinton, you know, had delivered this famous line when he was trying to argue for chinas inclusion in the wto, which was, you know, he said, you know, if china joins the wto, the internet will know will start spreading there. And, you know, and and, you know, trying to control the internet is like trying to nail jello to the wall. Right. And so, of course, the communist party will never be able to do that. And eventually, you know, ideas about democracy and freedom and the rule values will spread through china. Right. And i think a lot of people believe that. I certainly believe that, you know, and i think and i think china was sort of believed it as well. I mean, i think a really afraid of the internet. They obviously censored it pretty heavily. But i think there was a kind of there was a turning point in china probably around sort of 12, 11, 2012 with the when when social media really started to spread in china quite widely. And i think that so it really freaked them out. And there were, you know, there were a couple of incidents. Theres one in particular in 2011 that some people may recall. There was a train crash, a crash outside of the city of when joe the of chinas high speed new high speed rail and this had been a high speed rail project of been a symbol of kind of chinas advancement as a country. And then after the crash, it became a symbol of china, of kind of the communist party, of of Economic Growth run amok and of corruption and of all these other problems in china and it was a huge explosion of public anger that i think caught the chinas leaders off guard. And it was right around then when you start to see them really get serious about using technology. So switching from offense or from defense to offense, right . Using technology to exert control rather than then erode it. Oh, what about, you know, when was the clicking point for you when you realized that this was absolutely taking a turn for the worse . So i think i would describe the changes that happened after you left me in three buckets. Firstly, the Tech Innovation and secondly, legal changes. And then thirdly, just a cultural shift. Ill start with the last one. I think at the beginning of 2010, you started seeing smartphone phones really start to flood the chinese market. And along with the smartphones, began a shift in Chinese Society to live their lives entirely on the phone. So everyone was chatting on the phone, on chat messenger. They were buying stuff off ecommerce, using your phone. They were using their phone to map out where they were going places or where they frequent to, you know, leaving reviews. All that leaves a digital data trail thats very, very much easier for the government to track. So that was already like one step. And then the second step that really aided this was the Tech Innovation, right . And the Tech Innovation i talk about is not just the mobile phone, but tech breakthroughs and deep learning and ai, which are allowing Companies Like tencent, which is chinas largest social media company, to essentially monitor messages that are sent from you know, you and i, if we were using that chat messenger so they would be able to do not just Voice Recognition because you can send a voice chat, but you could do character recognition. So tencent, actually the ai thats censoring your chats and monitoring your chest knows exactly what youre talking about. Even if theres no human behind it, theres a machine and the final bucket is really long after you love me. Like there were tons of new laws coming out, just tightening the governments control on what could be said and how much influence they had over tech companies. For example, the internet law would force Internet Companies to turn over terrorist material or potential National Security threats to the government. And they had to do it voluntarily. It wasnt something retrospective where the government could go to them for data. So it was just like bits and bobs theyd done that has just generally made this environment a lot more tense and a lot more controlled. Well, i definitely feel that you know, i definitely agree in the last part, particularly on the cultural issue, i, i remember at the time when i was covering that dawn event off of Credit Card Companies and things, we were like, oh, no credits china such a low credit society, this ecommerce thing will have all sorts of barriers to it. And now everybody has a qr code. You cant practically even use cash in china, but you know, even beggars have qr codes now. They wont even take cash. Right. Thats thats the story there. But one of the things that really struck me as really interesting, a book that i was personally very interested in, was the issue with your stories about the sort of the origins of harness Ring Technology for digital control . And some of this has, you know, linkages for our american audience or american audience, particularly. And the centers around the figure of interest and these very brilliant scientist who was one of the founders, i think, of the jet Propulsion Lab that caltech has. And during the mccarthy era, you know, where he was accused of being a spy, he he was basically so turned off that he went back to china, which i think some intelligence officers, the asset was the greatest mistake of the time. But what chen did was take his genius and brilliance and use it to apply to the issue of cybernetics and the idea of being able to use technology to for to harness for desirable behavior in society. And what we saw some of that happening was always proceed proteges in a very early stage was was the one child policy where the idea was to control and create technology and surveillance, to control peoples desire to have children and families, and that has obviously gone a long way. But of course, at that time, 30 years ago, there was simply not that level of ability to control to the to where it is now. So can you talk a little bit about how chen and this whole concept of cybernetics and social control and technology has blossomed forth, which is what you talk about in your book. So fascinating. Lee right. Yeah. Really glad you brought up chen mae because changes and hes i mean, hes one of these characters who really speaks to just the sort of the depth of the connections between china and the us when it comes to all of this sort of stuff. Right. And you know, i mean, chen, he was one of these he was this sort of genius chinese engineer who went to the u. S. Very early on on a u. S. Government funded scholarship and and started to build chinas right or the Us Rocket Program in conjunction with with theodore von karman and a few other people. And, you know, for all intents and purposes, it seems like he really wanted to be an american and its been applied for u. S. Citizenship before he was chased back to china in the mccarthy era. There are obviously parallels today with with chinese scientists in the us now, but yeah you know he one of the things that he did when he was he was under fbi surveillance for several years in los angeles and sort of couldnt work. And what he did during that time was sort of sit in his study in his house in l. A. And read books. And one of the books he read was by an american mathematician named Norbert Wiener called cybernetics. Right. And it was this book that was sort of basically created this whole field that was extremely just revolutionary at the time that examined how essentially how you use information to exert control. Right. And its you know, its very broad and it kind of applies to everything from sort of human beings and animals all the way to sort of mechanical systems. Right. And chen used these these insights just to kind of create a whole new approach to engineering, which he first use in missiles. He sort of helped build chinas missile system, but then he also he was extremely ambitious and he wanted to use these systems to wider society. Right. And so he sort of developed Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, was very skeptical that you could use this to to these ideas to control society. But but changed course and disagreed and thought like you could. So one of the first things he did, which was totally disastrous, was was advised he wrote a paper during the great leap forward in the 1950s in china, where he he he predicted. With basically zero knowledge of agriculture that the china could rat could exponentially increase its farm output. And a lot of people blame him partially for that because they think that he convinced mao to kind of go ahead with this sort of disaster. His Agricultural Policy that led to famine and then, yes, his protege, song jin, use those ideas to push the one child policy which you would you wrote about so brilliantly in your in your fantastic book. But you write so and so for a long time. These ideas about Engineering Society to kind of after especially after the one child policy they kind of hovered in the background and, you know, they were kind of being taught in the party school and and, you know, the Central Party school in beijing and communist Party Officials were sort of being steeped in this idea of systematic thinking, right, of thinking, of society in terms of engineering problems. But they never really had the tools to kind of implement it. And so as these as these are sort of alluded to, one of the big shifts here is that, you know, with advances in i sort of around 2010, especially in deep learning. Which is a which is a phrase, im sure people are familiar with, you know, it was it became possible to teach machines, to sort of learn like human beings by feeding them huge amounts of data. Right. And that was just it was one of these just critical technological advances that allowed china, the Chinese Communist party, which has access to huge amounts of data to to really start trying to engineer society in ways that change your and had had promoted and the ideas, you know, to kind of make it like a machine, like a self guided missile. Right you know, like its the correct stone path that like it sort of it doesnt really actually need that much effort to control. And so lets move on to talk about where this was really applied for. You know, it for the first time was disastrous efforts or effects on human rights. And this was with xinjiang, right syndrome was really the lab at which the big question of now you have this big ideas about social control using technology, and now you also have the tools of deep learning. And i and then beijing sees as a problem what they see as the separatists tendencies with the xinjiang province where you have a very large turkic weaker muslim population. And so they start applying this. Why dont you talk about how you unraveled it with your book . Whats how what sets off this spark in your thinking . What you start saying, hang on a minute. This, this is really getting to be a huge issue. Right . Right. So, you know, so we so we did this this investigative series in the it into surveillance into surveillance in china in 2017. And these and i started it right and at the end of the end of 2017, we were hearing stories from people about theyre like, oh, you know, people are coming back from trips to jinjiang. And they were saying, oh, you know, this Technology Writing about is everywhere that you really should check it out at a time. Really. No one no one was really talking that much about xinjiang and no one was quite aware what was happening there. So we didnt know what we were getting into. But, you know, a colleague and i drove drove a car in and into into the xinjiang. And it was just what we discovered was just mind blowing, right. I mean, it was you know, ive you know, ive been a journalist for many, many years at that point and was, you know, rarely shocked. You know, often surprised, but rarely shocked by things that id seen there. And this was just utterly, utterly shocking. Right. And you know what . It was what we discovered was that, you know, they had essentially blanketed the entire region in these technologies to the point where if you were a regular living in xinjiang, your entire daily existence is recorded and tracked and analyzed, you know, from the minute you leave your door and actually probably before you leave your door. And, you know, so if you wanted to go to a bank or a market or a hotel, you would have to you would have to scan. You have to go through a security gate that would scan your face and compare it to your id and sort of note where you were going and if you had done something wrong. Like we met a guy who had failed to pay his phone bills for a few months. And every time you went through a security gate, an alarm would go off and you wouldnt be allowed to pass through. So he was essentially imprisoned in his neighborhood because of an unpaid phone bill, you know, and they were collecting biometric data, fingerprints, dna, voice prints. Theyre making 3d images of peoples heads so they could be tracked by facial recognition cameras wherever they went. One thing that we you know, we had read about before we went to, you know, was the we didnt really believe was that they were in some places in xinjiang. They were if you bought a knife as a wigger, you would have to have your all of your personal information sort of laser etched into the knife in the form of a qr code. And then we just thought that was like ridiculous. But then we lo and behold, we went to this town and went into a knife shop. And it was and it was true. So, you know, and the end goal of all this tracking was to sniff out wiggers, who, according to, you know, calculations, we dont really understand, are seen as potentially threatening to the communist party in the future, not people whove committed crimes, not people whove done anything wrong. Right, but people whose sort of daily behavior is suggests they might someday resist the communist party and then sending those people to this network of internment camps right. And that was yeah, that was the second really shocking thing was you had this sort of 21st century Surveillance Technology being married with this 20th Century Institution that i dont think anyone ever thought would be coming back. Right. You know, sort of mass incarceration of religious minorities. Right. And so that was just totally shocking, i think, at that point, you know, just clear that we would need that. What was happening there was really new and really significant. And we needed a book to sort of fully unpack what was happening. Right. And i can imagine that i mean, and all these repressions happened, you know, right. Lee from the time that you started reporting and the many other organizations, nonprofits and some of my very colleagues to at Human Rights Watch like maya wong and sophy richardson happened document have now in some sense it feels it feels like some some form of validate and perhaps in a way that there was a recent u. N. Report on this that sort of you know thats that did confirm that these are, you know, quite lightly crimes against humanity, which is what we at Human Rights Watch have said. But that said, this process of documenting, writing about this comes at a terrific cost, not just to unfortunately, to the to the millions who are incarcerated, but also for those of you reporting on it, both of you are no longer i t