None, Nick. I wanted you on my show and when
I invited you, you said yes. But there's a condition.
You want to ask me questions? I do indeed.
You know, it's been 16 years since I was lost in China at at
that time in my life, I spent quite a lot of time there
because I was starting up a business there, a subsidiary for
one of the South African banks. And so I won't say that I was
had an opportunity to be deeply steeped in the culture or
anything to that extent. But I did travel quite widely
and had a lot of meetings. And, you know, we were really
trying to understand as well as we could what the, the, the lay
of the land was. So it was a reasonable exposure.
And since then, I've had just an incredible paucity of
opportunities to talk to people who have, you know, be
thoughtful, people who have, who have visited China and done a
little bit of travelling and so on.
You get a lot of people coming back saying, well, you know, I
was in Shanghai and the buildings are amazing, you know,
Well, that hardly gives you any insight.
And you start asking them a question of or two about like,
well, tell me about the surveillance state.
Tell me about, you know, and they don't have any insight.
They haven't, they haven't even crossed their mind that, that
there was something like that to, to discuss, you know.
Well, look, this is the thing. So first and foremost, I just
want to point out because whenever we have a discussion
like this, people say, oh, but if you're just a tourist, it
doesn't mean anything. You don't get any insight.
No, I think you, you do, you get a keyhole, but it's a keyhole
nonetheless. It's it's better than nothing.
Yes, but, but I think what, what, what, yeah, what you can
definitely get very quickly is, is if a very false impression
has been created in the, in the eye of the, in, in the, in the
public imagination. You know, that, oh, every, every
time you move, you've got to swipe your digital ID.
And if you jaywalk, you get knocks off the you know, that's
the kind of impression that I think many people have.
I remember if we just go back, there were two crazy psyops at
in the early stage of the COVID phenomenon involving China.
The the first one, which is the one that had the biggest
impression on me was the the famous falling man video.
You know, where this guy's like walking along the street and
then all of a sudden it's and plunks, he falls over, you know,
and we are all, yeah, we're all meant to believe that this is
what the novel deadly virus does, you know, and, and from
from for many observers at the time that that was actually the
thing that that woke them up and said, hold on, what's going on
here? This isn't real.
Why is that? Why are we seeing this material
that's on Twitter, not, you know, a platform that ostensibly
doesn't really exist in China, that it doesn't appear to be of
Chinese origin. What, you know, who's, who's
circulating this material and to what end.
So that was the first one. And then the second one was the
notion of the, the, the draconian Chinese lockdown.
You know, it didn't take long to dispel that one completely.
A few phone calls to people to say, well, yeah, what's going
on? Are you guys locked down?
And no, no, we're not locked down.
It's, it's it, it looked like there was a real showboating
lockdown going on. And then The funny thing again,
the material purporting to record this draconian lockdown
did not appear to be of Chinese origin.
So, So what was going on? And, and, and so I think China
and conditions on the ground in China and the nature of the, the
surveillance state there, the nature of the Communist Party
and so on. We, we, we, we are once again,
as is often the case, swimming through a sea of diversion and
misinformation. And under those conditions, I
think a visit with by, you know, even remotely curious mind can
do a lot to spell these notions. I went to, I think 9 Chinese
cities and I spend most of my time in the province of
Xinjiang, which is by far the most militarised and the most
politically sensitive. And you get a very different
perception there than what you do in Shanghai.
So I think, I think Shanghai, we can all agree, is just a mega
city. It's very, very similar to any
other big city in the world. It doesn't have the kind of
draconianism that you would see on X.
At the moment. There seems to be this concerted
campaign, this anti China, what do you call it?
Sinophobic operation? This is very concerning.
It's clear to me that that China is a geopolitical target.
And in the same way that we have to always be vigilant with
everything that gets thrown at us, this is another one of those
that we need to be vigilant about.
And the the whole idea of digital idea has just suddenly,
like in Lord of the Rings, where where the focus of Sauron, the
eye just changes and suddenly. Yeah.
And, and what frustrates me, Nick, is I was there, I saw with
my own eyes and I and I spoke to people and I asked them all
these sorts of questions and still coming back home, people
go, it's all rubbish. This, this video on YouTube is
the truth. Yeah, that's it's, it's, it's
like this unbelievably tough nuts to crack.
Yeah, I mean, do do you remember there was this fellow who gave
off in every way the heir of ACIA asset, My Call singer, who
was yes, yes, yes, yeah. Trying to pin the entire COVID
phenomenon on China. And.
And it came out pretty quickly. It was irremarkably well put
together, you know, supposedly by a guy operating completely
alone with no support staff, no funding, whatever.
He writes this book and he also put these incredible pallets
together of social media posts that were being amplified in a
sort of human bot fashion. So yeah, there'd be actual real
S Africans, for example, promoting some posts about how
how we needed to we needed to lock down and we needed to do
the right thing and, and look after the elderly and whatever.
And the posts would have this remarkably similar language and,
and would suddenly appear, you know, people would pick up
amplify exactly the same message.
So I mean, the stuff was interesting, but he was a 1
trick pony. You know, you could say whatever
you want to do about the COVID phenomenon as long as it
implicated China. And so, so I think there's
that's part of the same phenomenon here.
Yeah, definitely. I remember, I think, I think I
was driving to the city of Kashgar.
I might, I might have my cities wrong, but I think it was to
Kashgar when you and I chatted on WhatsApp and you asked me, do
you see these things that are on social media?
And the answer is yes and no. And, and this is this is, this
is where you, I think I've hit the nail on the head so many
times. We're dealing with complex
systems. You know, if we, if we're
dealing with a country that has what, technically five time
zones or four time zones, and it's the size of the US and it's
got one and a billion people, you can't apply a single word
descriptor to the whole thing. It's just ridiculous.
Yes, you're dealing with the system as well.
Yes, massive. And just between the provinces,
you know, like Shanghai, it's got 30, it's got 30 million
people, right. Then you've got the, the the
province of Xinjiang. Just that province is 1 comma
three times larger than South Africa.
Yeah. So, so I mean it, it's a
fascinating thing that because if you speak to Americans that
they'll have no problem acknowledging that the culture
in San Francisco is very different from from the the
culture in Houston, you know, that that they can imagine very
easily and that life on the ground is quite different in
those two places. That's not a difficult notion
for them to comprehend or it, it's unremarkable observation,
you know, but at when when it comes to this unknown BLOB, this
massive space on the map, there's an imagined homogeneity
that is completely, you know, incompatible with just the, you
know, in any kind of country or reality.
Yeah, it's just this imagined, you know, uniformity and and I
think that that is kind of what's exploited when trying to
create this idea of a monolithic communist beast.
I noticed, I don't know if you saw this when you were in China,
but the Chinese people, when you speak to them, they don't care
about these words like communist or socialist or capitalist.
They don't care. They're just practical people
for the most part. They just want to make money and
they want to get things done. And historically, you, you see
this is what this is what people in the West struggle with.
They don't understand the historical context that led to
where China is now. If you talk to somebody who's in
their 50s in China, in Shanghai, they will, they will tell you,
which they did to with me. They chatted to me and they said
in the 80s we had food rationing, right?
We got a stamp and we would be given a basket of food.
Half of Shanghai was still rural and and they had mass amounts of
crime and poverty in 30 years. The government through a through
a series of central control mechanisms, turned everything
around. And whether or not you like that
is not the point. It's that they did do it.
And and you can understand when you talk to somebody in Shanghai
now and they go, we love our government because look at what
they've done. Shanghai is safe, it's highly
efficient, everything works. You can't say to them, Yeah.
I just want to pick up on one thing though.
Yeah, sure, sure. Sure, sure.
Yes, they had some central control mechanisms, but the
overwhelming story of China is that of Deng Xiaoping liberating
the SME sector, which had previously been subjected to
immense central control. And, and that basically led to
an explosion in economic growth as the, the, the markets were,
were liberalised. I'm talking about product
markets, not stock markets or anything like that.
And and commerce was allowed to flourish for the first time in
in many decades. So there's actually a profound
decentralising move that led to the growth.
And then when, when you, you find in recent years that
probably, let's call it the last 10 or so, some of those measures
have been tightened up again and, and the growth rate slows
down. But, but I think your point is
well taken that, that the, if the, you know, the, if the
experience on the ground is that of massively improved lifestyle
and reduced hardship, then people are not going to care
about the polity that they're living under.
What ISM is attracted to it. And I mean, I people say things
like, oh, but you know, you haven't got freedom of speech in
China. Well, we've just spent five
years proving that we don't have freedom, freedom of speech
anywhere. Because you know, the moment you
step out of the Everton window, the the media and social media
control mechanisms clamped down and, and yours, your your voice
is suppressed. So I go, OK, so we, well, we
don't have that here either. And what you know, do you have
freedom of movement? I.
Mean, yeah. It's relative though, Nick.
Yeah, it's relative. You can choose.
You choose your, your, your heel that you want to die on.
So if you want to be a political cartoonist in China, no, it's
not a very good choice, right? You're not, you're not going to
do very well there because you can't really criticise the
government. The government, the government
of China is incredibly insecure, right?
Incredibly insecure. You can't say anything positive
about the president and you can't, you can't say anything
negative about the president. They just don't want you to
acknowledge them at all, right. And they are very bad at
propaganda and they are very bad at marketing themselves.
But if you want to go there, what's that?
Yeah, You're very bad at propaganda.
Yeah. Yeah, they're definitely, they
don't do it very well. I mean, they, they, their whole
style is just very cheap. They're not sophisticated in
the, in the, in the propaganda output.
But what I was saying, what I was saying though, Nick is, is
if you want to be a political cartoonist in say, Europe, you,
you still got a pretty good chance in America.
You can do pretty well. You, you won't do well in China.
But let's say you want to be, I don't know, a historian like
David Irving and you want to research the Holocaust or World
War 2, whatever that you cannot do in Europe, but you can do
that in China. So, so it depends on what it is
you want to, to, to have freedom of expression around, so to
speak. But it's, it is relatively in
the sense that, I mean, it depends on what you want to
discuss. South Africa, we have, I think a
great deal of, of freedom of speech, if you think about it.
And if you compare to other countries, we're still pretty
good here in that sense because the government is so useless and
so inept that it's not, it's not really able to to crack down on,
on, on, on us saying, you know, dissident things.
The Chinese government is a lot more efficient at that.
But it doesn't really go around. And that's the other thing
again, it's always nuanced. It doesn't go around arresting
people and filling up its gaols. It just basically gives fines
and cuts off the social media access for two weeks or
whatever, you know? Yeah, yeah, sure.
Whereas whereas in the states you'll have you'll have the the
SWAT teams at 5:00 in the morning breaking down people's
front doors. Well, you really do.
Yeah. That's what you'll see on social
media. That might be the salient sort
of video. I often look at those things and
I just chuckle. Yeah.
The ones at the moment are that are classic.
Yeah. The British ones where you have
lots of handheld video. You know, somebody was shooting
from a cell phone. Ostensibly, the police have
arrived at the front door to arrest them for posting
something on social media. I look at those things and my my
intuition bells go up and say that doesn't look real queries
that somebody's going to be. Let's talk about something
actual, you know, like something that's real.
OK, so the first thing you notice when you go to Shanghai,
and you might have noticed this when you're in China already.
I mean, and The funny thing is that China works in sort of five
to 10 year blocks. So if you were in 2015, a lot
has changed. Yeah, sure, because they are.
So they are so fast at what they do, But nonetheless, the first
thing you notice is there are cameras everywhere and China is
quite technocratic. There's no doubt about it, it is
quite technocratic. Everywhere you go there are
cameras. I think Shanghai's got around
15,000,000 cameras installed, which is on.
I think it's a, that's about 1 camera for every two people.
That's a lot of cameras. I mean, I remember when I was at
the airport in Chengdu and I was waiting at my gate, I looked
above me and I counted 5 cameras pretty much looking in my
direction. It is insane.
But yes, the thing, Nick, and this is, this is where the tug
of war starts happening. London also has a lot of
cameras. I think, let's say 24 million
cameras, right? But there's a huge amount of
crime. There's almost no crime in
Shanghai. Is that attributed to the
cameras or is it just a byproduct?
I don't know. Yeah, but it's the political
will as well to do something, you know, to use the whatever
devices they have at their disposal to do something and,
and how this information is being used and processed, all of
that. You know, I remember in, in
2008, thereabouts, on one trip, I had the same experience
happened twice, which is we went out to dinner with, you know,
local businessman. And there were there were
questions that you ask in a restaurant where you could just
see them get all of a sudden uptight and nervous.
And that would sort of indicate to you with their hands, let's
just leave that for later. And then what happened in both
cases was they proposed a walk home, you know, walk back to
walk us back to our hotels. And on that walk, they then
answered your questions. So these were people who, you
know, 1617 years ago were concerned enough that they might
be surveilled in a in a restaurant because they were
talking to foreigners that that was actually a lively fear in
their minds. And it's not as if we were
asking them deep, dark political secrets.
You know, it, it was, it was entirely commercial kind of
questioning like, you know, is it difficult to get approval
permits or something like that? You know, how long does it take
to register a company questions of this nature?
I can't remember what they actually were.
We would have done quite a lot of homework before getting
there, but there would have been a few things that we were not
clear on, you know. So it was that kind of question,
some of those questions even just made them very nervous.
You know, you could, I don't want to, didn't want to be in a
position of saying anything negative.
You know, they weren't even sure sometimes whether the answer
would be negative, you know, or perceived negatively.
That is exactly what I experienced.
The locals still have AAI, don't see.
I don't know where it comes from, but they have a deep sense
of suspicion if you don't look like them, if you, if you're not
Chinese. And even within China, there's a
suspicion like with the Uyghurs and the Tajiks and, and the, the
other types of folks on the, on the, on the, on the western
side. And that's why there's a what?
I'm sorry. On the periphery, yeah,
Basically old peripheral nations, yeah.
Tibet, Tibet figures, Mongols, all these.
Yeah. And I'm not sure.
I'm not sure where that comes from, where that suspicion or
that or that paranoia that that could be a result of of, you
know, state indoctrination. But the thing.
Yeah. And what's that?
It could be results propaganda, you know.
Yeah, yeah. Othering in propaganda.
We don't. It's difficult, you know.
And again, you, you're dealing through the, the barrier of a
very different language and writing system.
So, so I'd imagine a lot is lost in translation when you're
trying to pause the, the propaganda or the the the
information structure, you know? But the thing that that I've
noticed is that people are very quick to criticise aspects of
the Chinese system. Now, one thing that is very
clear to me, Nick, is that the Chinese system is not trying to
impose itself on the rest of the world.
In fact, the Chinese government has said that.
What works for us might not work for for other countries.
But yeah, you have NATO countries that are trying to
impose their system everywhere else.
You know, let's bring democracy and they invade and they bomb.
I don't see that happening within, within the Chinese
system. They just kind of doing their
own thing. They are this.
They are this entity that exists that if the whole world around
them disappeared, they would still be OK.
Yes, yeah. I mean, it's not despite its
immense size and and and phenomenal sort of resourcing,
China's still still very dependent on the outside world.
Yes, but that's why you can. That's why you can access the
outside world. Sorry.
That's why you can access the outside world they don't
actually clamp down on on the Internet.
Yeah, Yeah. Unlike Russia in this regard,
you know, Russia's to a large extent or tactic in the sense
that they could literally just close the borders and they'd be
more or less fine. You know, there, there are very
few commodities that they they would not be able to obtain
themselves. And I think it's probably the
case that Russia's unique in the world in that regard.
But China's not like that, you know, that does rely on heavily
on imports of several commodities and and of course on
exports. So it it's a different beast
from Russia, I think. I was.
When I was in Shanghai, I visited a an economist friend of
mine. He's been living in in China for
29 years. He speaks fluent Chinese and his
wife's Chinese. I think he has enough St cred to
know about how the system works. And I asked him, We went for
dinner and I asked him. I said what in your view was the
primary vector that led to the turn around and his answer was
private property. For me, and for me, it's so
unremarkable to make that observation.
Of course it relates to what I was talking about earlier.
It was liberalisation and property rights becoming a thing
and people being allowed to practise whatever trade they
wanted. And you don't start whatever
business they wanted and interact with whomever they
wanted in the commercial space, you know, that that's your free
market sort of world inserting itself inside a society that had
previously been controlled in a very top down fashion or so or
so or so the story goes, you know.
Yeah. I I wonder though, you know, OK,
so, so your economist friend, did you ask him any questions
about whether he felt that his life was materially impinged
upon by any of the state apparatus?
And what did he say? So we had a very interesting
conversation and I recorded some of it on my phone just so that I
wouldn't forget about it if I wanted to reference him.
But just for the sake of because I haven't asked him if I can
mention his name, so I won't mention his name now.
But yes, what's really interesting.
So he said, look, he because, OK, so how it works in China is
you can't become a citizen unless you're Chinese.
There isn't really a path to citizenship.
Even if you marry a Chinese person, if you yourself are not
sort of ethnically Chinese, you're not really going to
become a Chinese citizen at any point in your life.
But you can be a resident. Chinese meaning Han Chinese or.
Han, Han, Han, Han. Yeah.
Because I mean, they, they are the Super majority, about 90% of
China's Han. And he said to me, he's little
boy, he's got a 2 year old kid. At the moment.
The American embassy wants him to apply for his British,
British, he's American passport and he doesn't want that.
He says he wants him to have a Chinese passport.
Because he says despite everything and despite the fact
that he does like some of Trump, what you know, Trump's policies
and some of the things that Trump says and does, he will
still choose Xi Jinping despite everything.
He'll still choose China as, as the better future for, for his
kid. I mean, I, I found that
absolutely fascinating. And I asked, you know why?
And he said because despite the fact that there is censorship,
he says that can change because he says in the early 2000s,
they, China was fairly, fairly open Internet wise.
And it depends on who is the president at the time.
And, and people also forget this.
You have, you have this party structure that that doesn't
change. The party is the party, but
internally the members change. And sometimes you might have a
more liberal president or you might have a more conservative
president, you know, legacy. Speaking currently, Xi Jinping
is not very good. And he says this guy is not,
he's not doing good things for the country, but the next
president might. Yeah, that, that is really
interesting. I, I'm not entirely surprised to
hear it. You know, I've heard similar
comments from from other people who've you've, you know, ended
up are working in businesses in China for many years, that kind
of thing. So that doesn't surprise me.
You know, they're similar, similar discussions to be had,
for example, about the Emirati cities and you know, people,
people talk about the there, there are definitely
circumscriptions of life that you have to put up with.
But you know, they're they're sort of tried that all for
whatever it is crime free, administratively,
administratively efficient life, you know, so people make these
traders all the time. And it's not not at all
surprising to me. But the thing for me is I could
never live there. So I mean, here's the thing, why
not you? You have to what's?
The thing? Culture, I think, Nick, I think
ultimately I cannot get past that language barrier.
I cannot get past the cultural barrier.
It's just too much for me. So I found if I'm just, I found
the place back in the 2000s to be intensely alienating.
And there were some things which were totally abhorrent to me
are, you know, just just for the benefit of listeners.
I mean, I know you know this, but I, I love the Wilds.
The Wilds, you know, I go to the Bush as often as I can and I'm
completely smitten by forests and savannas and so on.
Bird watching's a big hobby of mine.
The attitudes towards wild animals in China completely
freaked me out. Yes, yes, I found that too.
Yes, it's the sort of laughing at the suffering of animals and
things like that. Now, I'm far from like a sort
of, you know, what's the word animal rights activist or
something like this. I'm not a vegan.
I'm not a, you know, not trying to throw red paint on people who
are wearing fur coats or anything like that.
But there was something dispiritingly inhumane about the
whole attitude towards wildlife. And I've seen that outside of
China too. And I've gone to visit the
forests of the lower Zambezi River Valley and in Mozambique,
for example. And, and you, you arrive there
to find that some local official has made a deal with the Chinese
to Tara Road and presumably to receive a whole stack of brown
envelopes. And that road has been used to
strip the forests of the, of their hardwoods.
And the forest is completely gone.
They don't go do anything selectively.
They'll just raise an entire forest to the ground, drive
their trucks out, and with that, the road surface collapses and
the country is left with no trees, no Rd roads and a fat cat
that's now emboldened by his new found riches.
So you know, from that perspective, it's incredibly
rapacious. And I've seen that I'm giving
you one instance. I've seen that in numerous
countries and in multiple places within single countries which
this this very sort of predatory kind of in your face extraction.
And, and, and, and you notice this also in the, in the wet
markets, all the night markets, the food markets, there's just
no sense of, of, of respect. Well, I mean, yeah, it, I mean,
did you, did you spend much time in rural areas?
Did you talk to people? I imagine it's very different.
You would have needed to work through a translator and so on.
But I mean, were you, were you talking to people in rural
areas? Did you detect a difference in
the sort of agrarian world from the the the city world?
Definitely it will. Look in Shanghai, you don't see
any animals because it's just a huge mega city.
But when I was in Xinjiang, I mean, I was in a number of of
fairly small cities. And you still don't, you still
don't get the impression that they have a, a sense of respect
for for animals. It's almost as though the
animals are just commodities. Yeah, I was surprised when I was
in Shanghai to see an article in one of those English language
news sheets, you know, and, and, and, and the, the thing that
drew my attention was there was an image of of an, of an egret
in the, in, in on the one page. And the egret appeared to be
tangled up in something. And you think, oh, that's quite
surprising. Here's a, here's a story about
how they rescued the, a bird out of an entanglement.
And the article wasn't like that at all.
It was basically an article about how stupid the bird was
that it flew into this thing. And, and I, I was, whoa, what's
that about? You know, when do you get to
that? How do you get to somebody
thinking that that's the article you need to write and that will
be consumed? And that goes beyond weirdness,
you know, and that's what I meant by that sort of profound
sense of alienation. And in so many interactions are,
are just completely unrecognisable.
And, and you know, you, you and I are people who come from a, a
country that is, has remarkable ethnic and cultural diversity.
And, and so we're used to things not being done according to the
lights of your own immediate reference points and so on.
We're completely used to that. We're much more tolerant of that
kind of thing or accepting or able to navigate that kind of
thing. Then, then, then I think most
people in Europe and America are, for example.
But still, when you arrive there with all the will in the world,
you just find yourself hitting that brick wall of of of of the
alien you know? It's interesting though, because
I don't know if you remember, but when you order food, they
tend to bring the entire animal to your table.
And I think that is a a sign of trust is like this is what we're
going to give you to eat. So here it is.
I'm not used to seeing an entire lamb arriving on the table, you
know, or an entire duck. But.
But there it's been weird that because it also implies that,
you know, if they didn't do that, they would be doing
something. If they didn't show you the
animal, there would be some other con job being done in the
background. Or that the level of suspicion
of restaurant tours in the society is such that you have to
actually do that. I mean, Can you imagine going to
a steakhouse in Cape Town and insisting that the guy bring the
cow? You know, it's a kind of a
strange phenomenon. I'm not too sure that it speaks
very well of them. You know, Let me.
Can I ask you though? Yeah, sure.
This Let's go back to that the surveillance story.
Yes, yes, because we're going to get, we're going to get grilled
if we don't talk about that. Yeah, so let let, I mean, the
imagery that we are asked to swallow is of swathes of people
being locked out of their ability to purchase basic goods
and services because they've had too many traffic fines or
whatever, you know, and, and sleeping rough on the on the
streets. And I remember from the the
apartheid era how people sleeping rough were often, you
know, misrepresented or a picture was taken of a guy
sleeping in a park a day. And, and this is now a person
who's been killed by the security forces, you know, that
kind of thing. There's all sorts of
misrepresentations that can take place.
And I'm not saying that images even have to be fact, they can
be real images. But did you get a sense that
there there's a system that's alive and well and poised to
pounce on you and extract? You from No, no Nick.
So OK, all right, so here we go. So you have to break apart what
what social credit means #1 if you have a criminal record in
South Africa or in any country, you're going to struggle to get
a bank loan. Now that is a social credit
score right off the bat. It is based on your behaviour
and you have a negative score, right?
I remember in the early 2000s when I was in Sydney, I don't
know if it's still like this, but I remember then already that
they were implementing or they already had a demerit system.
So if you get like 15 points as a as a driver and if you violate
the road rules a certain amount of times, you lose all these
points and then you lose your ability to drive for six months
or 12 months or whatever it is. And then you have to apply for a
licence again or something like that, right?
That's also a social credit score because it's based on your
behaviour. Now social credit scoring, I'm
not saying is good or bad, I'm not giving a moral judgement,
but I'm saying that it is there and it is everywhere around us
to different degrees. So yes, there are social credit
scores in China. You will struggle to to get
certain loans from the bank, for example, if you have a criminal
record. But if you're talking about
jaywalking, so this is a this is a popular one.
I jaywalked all the time in Shanghai and in every city I was
jaywalking and why not? Because I was trying to be a
rebel, but simply because I, it's, it's not something that I
think about. I being a South African, I just
across the road where, where it's safe.
So I don't look for, I don't look for pedestrian crossing.
I just go, OK, there aren't any cars coming me quickly run
across the road. Now that's, that's technically
jaywalking and, and in most mega cities like Shanghai, they don't
really like that. Nonetheless, here I am.
I didn't get any fines. I saw people riding motorbikes
without helmets on. Apparently that is against the
law, but I saw it many times. People were jaywalking
everywhere. There are no big screens with
people's profiles appearing saying, well, this person has
violated the law. So yeah, yeah, let's make a
mockery of them. So none of that.
Yeah, OK. I guess the, the question is,
you know, I often just like to remind people that that social
credit credit systems have been in place for, for many years.
They're just not operated in a, in a very centralised way.
So like the, the, the entire social process of having a
reputation, you know, what is reputation?
It's credit, social credit. So if you're, if you, if you're
a Cape Town businessman and you, you develop a reputation for
sharp dealing, you might find that I hear about it.
And so when I get a phone call or an email from you, I'm, I'm
looking at and saying, what's the sky on about?
No, I don't think I'm going to have a meeting with him.
Whatever it, whatever's, there's no good that can come of it.
And so I've asked that person out of a segment of the economy
by virtue of my own just perhaps prejudicial responses to their
reputation or my perception of their reputation.
And so when social creditors for millennia operated at a very
local level and, and what's happening now is that the
technology is sort of starting to appear to maybe enable this
reputation management to be conducted at an intensely
centralised level. One where the, you know, you're,
you have no connection to the, the person who's making the
judgement or the device that's making the judgement, the
algorithm that's making the judgement.
And I, I look at that as a model and I say, well, that's going to
be horribly decoherent. That's going to collapse.
There will be so many contradictions.
Automating that kind of thing is not possible.
You know, the, the judgement I'm making about the businessman
depends on huge range of factors, the reliability of the
people telling me the stories about him, you know, or, or when
they stack up with my past experience or, or whether I've
heard something else that also confirms that.
You know, there's lots of intuitional material coming into
that decision about whether I exclude them from my commercial
realm. Whereas that stuff is all lost
in algorithmic systems and at the top.
But I also think it would deco here so quickly, the decisions
that would be being made that the system would become
unmanageable fairly quickly. Yes.
Also the thing, Nick, is, I mean, when I was in Urumji,
which is the capital of Xinjiang, I mean it's a much
smaller city, I think for 4 million people or something,
which by Chinese standards is not very big.
I did still see a lot of surveillance cameras.
But something that occurred to me while I was there is how do
you know that every single one of those cameras is operational?
We know that we have cameras here in South Africa that have
they're just empty boxes. They're just there as an
illusion to trick you into thinking there's a camera.
I mean, if so many people are jaywalking and not right wearing
helmets and all that kind of thing.
And it's it does sometimes look like chaos, like it's just the
streets are just a mess. Yeah, you go, OK, well, I don't
know. Do the are those cameras really
working? Is it just there for for for
appearances? This is and sorry.
And this is the other thing the the propaganda of of of the West
makes it seem like the Chinese government is unbelievably
efficient. Yeah.
And it's not. No, of course not.
And and also the Chinese businesses are unbelievably
efficient. I mean, I ran several
experiments there, you know, taking South African factory
managers through, you know, sending them on tours through
plants and asking them to register efficiencies at every,
every point in production. And the one businessman who's
still, I'm still very close to him, I'll never forget it.
Yeah. He came back and he said it's
not that they're inefficient in some areas, they're inefficient
in all areas. There were more people involved
each task. There was this.
There was less thoroughness in each task there.
There were more rejects. There was there were more
production errors there. There were more quality control
problems. You know, they, they, they
reported back in this way and, and yet we were all at that
stage believing that, that you couldn't compete with these
Chinese guys because they were so ruthlessly efficient and all
the factors of production cost less and everything that, that,
that didn't actually really stack up when you scratched
beneath the surface a bit. So you, you mentioned earlier in
the conversation the, the concept of paranoia or of
insecurity on behalf of the, the, the, the party, you know,
and, and I think people who sight of that, that the, the
main drive towards centralised control is perhaps not the
accretion of vast resources or, or an ego trip, but a
fundamental insecurity. That you know the reason you
want to see things centralised, as you're terrified about what
might happen in a decentralised world.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, Well, and but also the
last five years, one of the big talking points that we've heard,
you know, the sceptic folks talking about a sovereignty,
everything's about sovereignty. We've got to got to got to get
these foreign forces out of our country, OK?
But that's what China has been doing.
I'll link it back. Let me link it back to the your
observation about the lack of subtlety in the propaganda.
I think that's, you know, I'd mentioned the example of the
rapacious behaviour on the the forests, but I would never for a
minute believe that the destructiveness of Chinese
activities in Africa exceeded that of American activities.
You know, there what happens is you, there's no, you won't see
something, you know, naked like that.
Build a thin Rd, extract the forest, leave a sand Rd behind.
That kind of activity would not be typical of America's modus
operandi. But what is typical is the
undermining of governments and not because they're doing
something wrong or because they're they're infringing on
human rights simply because they're actually starting to
assert a degree of independence OR to offer the potential for a
country to become wealthier. You know, Americans want cheap
resources, so they want instability in Africa.
And they do that through an elaborate network of of of CIA
cut out organisations. They can turn that.
We've seen it around the world. You know, Georgia, Nepal, recent
being recent phenomena where where's there's just a kind of a
switch that's turned on and the the hand of the CIA is palpable.
And there you go. Suddenly everything's upturned
upended in that country. But I want to also point out
just on that surveillance issue which we haven't touched on yet
is the surveillance in China is very blatant.
It's in your face, right? It is everywhere and and they
have this approach where they want you to know that it's that
it's there. Let's compare that to Palantir.
Let's compare that to Stargate. Let's compare that to what's
going on on the other side of the world where it's all
subversive. You're not sure, you know,
you're not sure what's going on on your phone, for example, You
know what I mean? Now, we've all had that creepy
experience where you do a Google search and for the next three
days you're pelted with advertising for the thing that
you searched for. That kind of thing.
Yeah. And, you know, I see my
information is being used in a really quite arcane fashion, you
know? Yeah, I totally agree with you.
I find Palantir a much more creepier phenomenon than the
Chinese Communist Party. No question.
Let's take ourselves back in Europe a couple of 100 years.
Did the average person walking around in Europe believe that
somebody was watching him? I think he did.
There was a real visceral belief that God was watching them your
every move. So it was life very different
from for that European versus one in ours.
You can see the cameras. Somebody's watching him in some
ways that that sort of the, the, the dominant belief structure
was, was far more invasive because you had this like, if
you like a AGI, you know, not, not only watching you when you
were, when you had the camera pointing at you, but watching
you at all times and knowing your every thought and action.
And you know, if that sense of the world was still manageable,
then you know what, what, how, how different is that in
compared to the modern case? And I guess it comes down to
what is done with the information you know.
We all exactly. OK, so let me give you an
anecdote. So we were, we, we drove through
the Taklamakan Desert and most people don't even know what it
is. But it's, I think it's the
world's second largest moving desert.
I mean, it's it, it feels alive. The dunes are moving all the
time. It's it's an incredibly big
desert. And you forget that a
technologically advanced country like China does have deserts.
And we drove through from, so we did a cross section from the
north to the South of the, of the desert, which was about 11
hour drive. And we, we stopped off at what
they would consider a top of Grand Canyon, Very, very
beautiful rock formation that looks like a Grand Canyon
because of the way the, the mountain kind of runs parallel
to itself. It's it's gorgeous.
We are in the middle of nowhere, but there was a law, a by law
that stated for the two weeks that we were in Xinjiang in that
province, no drones were allowed across the entire province
because it was, it felt in into the time period of the 70th
anniversary of the autonomy of the Xinjiang province.
It's a big thing. Huge, huge celebrations.
Yeah, yeah. You're going to say.
No, no, no, I'm listening. Very interesting.
Oh, right, right. And, and, and Xi Jinping flew to
the province to to, you know, form part of the celebrations.
We were just there at the same time.
So for two weeks, no drones were allowed anywhere.
OK, But we now in the middle of the desert and we here by this,
this this mini Grand Canyon story.
And the, the, the guy that that we're with, or that's with us,
one of the film crew, he decides he's going to send he's drone up
in the sky and just get some beautiful footage.
I mean, we're in the middle of nowhere.
I kid you not, Nick, about 20 minutes later, the police pitch
up and they asked us who was flying the drone in the middle
of nowhere. All right, we'll come to that in
a second. So then they they, they took
down the information of the drone because you have to all
drones have to be registered and they took it down.
They asked to look at the footage.
No issues. Didn't have to delete anything
that they said. Look, you may not fly drones,
OK? Then we, we sat in the car to
was trying to figure this out. OK, so #1 it's a DJ.
Yeah, it's a DJI drone. So we think that because it uses
satellites to, to, to, to know where it is, it's sending that
information to, to the authorities.
That's I think what's going on. And it's fairly accurate.
The fact that they came straight to us and asked who threw the
drone in the middle of a desert, that is very, very creepy and
that I don't like. No, that that is rather speaky
here. I don't like the word communist
because I don't really know what that means anymore.
Nick, when you go to when you go to China, you don't see
communism. You do see it, but you don't see
it. It doesn't.
The whole thing doesn't make sense.
It does science and what is true.
Yeah, it has. It has features, yeah.
Capitalism, you know, So yeah, it's not a communist system.
No, but the government does control the banks, and it does
control. The utilities, enterprises,
etcetera, yeah. But yet it works.
And this is this is the tug of war.
The philosophical conundrum that I find myself having is that I
cannot make a claim that it's that is dystopian, and I cannot
make a claim that it's rainbows. Yeah, it could be the case that
that type of system will never see Chinese people have their
living standards elevated to the level of Europe or America over
the last 50 years or whatever, you know, because they're still
sitting at what, like a 10th of that level.
You know, and I always remind people, Can you imagine cutting
90% of your consumption? You know, just imagine, like
you, I said to you, look, you can live exactly the same way as
you always have, but you have to spend 90% less.
What? It doesn't even make sense.
You can't do it. So, so like a 90% cut in
consumption puts you, you know, in, in, in the, the position, if
you like, of a hypothetical Chinese counterpart.
That's a long way to catch up still.
And I'm not sure that it's going to happen under that kind of
system. That would be, my sense is that
they're actually have accepted a trade off between the, the
potential for growth and the, and the loss of control.
Did you ever encounter a sense of that they were regarding you
as sort of disgusting or, you know, some kind of racist
attitude towards you or looking at you as if you were like a
alien? You get that sense.
What do you think? It was fairly.
They were not. No, I don't think they looked
down on me. I certainly think that they feel
themselves to be very superior. I'm looking at the time now.
We're coming in for a landing, but I think there is, I think
there's a lot that we can learn from them.
Their big selling point is technological advancement.
I think there's a lot more to life than just that.
We spoke about wildlife and animals.
And like you, I prefer being in Africa.
I want to be able to go into the Bush and, and I don't want to go
through checkpoints to do that, you know, But I think there are
sort of cultural characteristics of the Chinese that I think we
should, we should adopt. I think when last five years,
the people that we've been chatting to have all been
talking about the importance of community and family.
Well, they, they have it. They, they do have it and we can
learn from them and that, but I think there are other things
that we can learn to avoid. And I, I think there's a lot of
sort of technocratic stuff there that that I just don't like.
Sure. Well, that's a good summary,
Chairman. That's been very interesting.
I I really appreciate it chatting to you and getting some
first hand reporting from a from a scallywag on the ground.
Nick, how can my audience follow you?
I'm on X at at Nick Hudson CT and also on sub stack with a
similar handle. So that's it.