American Thought Leaders - China Uncensored: Exposing the CCP’s Narrative Warfare and Global Influence—Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

“The CCP is very smart at understanding the divides in American society, and it knows how to target both sides.”In this episode, I sit down with Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang, creators of the popular YouTube show “China Uncensored.”They’ve been covering Chinese Communist Party propaganda efforts and narrative warfare for more than a decade.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The CCP is very smart at understanding the divides in American society, and it knows how to target both sides. In this episode, I sit down with Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang, creators of the popular YouTube channel China Uncensored. Chinese people just are living in this propaganda. They live and breathe in this propaganda every day. They've been covering Chinese Communist Party propaganda efforts and narrative warfare for over a decade. There is a lot the U.S. can do to challenge the Chinese Communist Party.

The idea that, like, we can't because we don't want to risk nuclear war or any other kind of war. They want us scared. There's a lot the U.S. can't do, especially with China facing pretty unprecedented economic troubles right now. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Chris Chappell, Shelley Zhang, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's great to be here. Yeah, definitely. So I've been watching China Uncensored for years

and I couldn't help but notice that Scarborough Shoal or this whole region around the Philippines where the Chinese Communist Party has been operating in all sorts of interesting ways is back in the news. And I couldn't help but remember that you guys took a trip out there. Tell me about that. Yeah, this was in 2016, right? Yeah.

Yeah, we hired a Filipino fishing boat, one that had actually been rammed or water-cannoned? Rammed by the Chinese Coast Guard, but we didn't know that at the time. We didn't know that until we got on the water. Yeah. Well, we finally made it to the Scarborough Shoal. It used to be that Filipino, Malaysian, Vietnamese fishermen would all come and fish in these waters.

They would even eat together on the shoal. But in 2012, China asserted its claim and all that stopped. So, yeah, we went on this boat for three days on the open ocean to actually get to the Scarborough Shoal and when we got there there was the Chinese Coast Guard off in the distance. This was at a period where there was a bit of a lull in the tensions so we felt a little safer I guess except our producer there was Matt he has bright blonde hair so we had to put a hood on him so he wouldn't be spotted. We brought cigarettes and alcohol to bribe Chinese Coast Guard if we had to.

In case we met them. Yeah, I mean, in retrospect, what were we thinking? It was a very stupid, dangerous idea, but the conclusion was that we actually got out onto the shoal, which is submerged. The shoal is submerged, so we were like chest high in water. And then I planted the China Uncensored flag on the Scarborough Shoal. So this is what the media constantly misses, that Scarborough Shoal actually belongs to me. You can only see part of the shoal, but as far as I'm concerned, this territorial dispute is over.

Solid rock. Yes! The shoal has been kind of really taken over since that time by China. It was taken over in that time by China. It was taken over in basically 2012 after what's called the Scarborough Shoal incident. And this is a major turning point in U.S.-China relations. I think Chinese strategy changed tremendously because of this event. And what happened was the Scarborough Shoal is very close to the Philippines,

very far from China, but China claims everything in the South China Sea So their Coast Guard basically occupied the area the Philippines Coast Coast Guard came and it looked like there was gonna be some kind of confrontation So the US under the Obama administration, it was Kirk Campbell, right? Mm-hmm decided to you know, get in there and negotiate And they they got an agreement that both sides would withdraw. The Philippines withdrew. China did not. And the U.S. did nothing in response. They let them have it. And they had basically have had control to this day. They used it as kind of like a carrot and stick thing. So if the Filipino government was, you know, cooperating with the Chinese

Communist Party at the time, then they would let the fishermen in. If the Chinese Communist Party was upset with the Philippine government, then they would block it again. So that's kind of the situation that it's been in right now. They haven't started building an island there yet, but the current government of the Philippines is kind of challenging the CCP's claims more. So now you see a lot more confrontation, a lot more of the Filipinos like fighting back in different ways, trying to supply ships and stuff in these shoals, Scarborough Shoals, Sabina Shoal, fighting back against the CCP's, you know, narratives and saying like, well, the CCP doesn't claim these areas. These places are within the

Philippines' exclusive economic zones. We should be able to go there. And that messaging has really, I think, rattled the CCP. What the Scarborough Shoal incident did was it showed the CCP that if they push, the U.S. won't push back. And from that incident, you saw that's when they started ramping up the island building in the South China Sea, which again, Xi Jinping and Obama met. They made agreements. Xi Jinping ignored it. They kept building the islands. They militarized the islands. That was really the moment where I think it completely changed Beijing's calculus with how much they could get away with. So let's talk a little bit about what China Uncensored is.

I mean, as far as I can tell, you guys have been around for 12 years now. It's incredible how fast time flies. Tell me about what the idea behind this show is in the first place, just for the benefit of our audience. Sure. So I started it in 2012, which was a very different political landscape at the time. People were still thinking of China kind of fresh off the 2008 Beijing Olympics, that wonderful opening ceremony.

Oh, it was so interesting. It was so fantastic. People had a very skewed view of China and the CCP. You tell the story about how people you knew were like, it's a democracy. Oh, yeah. I mean, I worked with people who thought that, you know, and these were, you know, well-educated Americans who thought that, you know, China is a democracy, right? Because they have a president. Like, there was just a lot that wasn't known. And I think people also hadn't kind of really realized what they were doing geopolitically and how aggressive that they would become. So, you know, for a long time, it felt like we were just Cassandra screaming into the void.

The goal of the show was to help Americans see the Chinese Communist Party for what it was. And the president thing is a great example of narrative warfare that in English language media they'll call him President Xi Jinping. Specifically so, people in America hearing that think, president, somebody voted for him, right? Yeah, it's true that in Chinese, the term that they use for the leader of China is not the same word that they use for president of democratically elected countries. You know, they really do spend an inordinate amount of effort.

And I'd like you to help quantify that, too, on this narrative warfare. Controlling carefully the image of how the Chinese regime is perceived. There seems to be an unusual fixation here that goes above and beyond even our most, I don't know, the work of some of our most illustrious PR companies. Yeah, the Chinese Communist Party sees the United States as its biggest threat, its biggest enemy. And so it puts a lot of effort into shaping how Americans think about the Chinese Communist Party. The overarching thing they want Americans to think is that China, the Chinese Communist Party, is not a threat.

They are very good at, they looked at what happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War and they're very much like, we don't want to be in that position. How do we use our language, our messaging, even how they frame events in the world to be to their benefit, and then they can use that as part of their influence operations, you know, when they talk to American business people, American politicians, you know, even, you know, social media influencers, you know, they will take these messages from the CCP's narrative warfare and parrot them without even realizing that they're doing it. What was it that we saw today? There was a Twitch streamer. Yes. It was a guy who is a big gamer and political commentator for the

Gen Z audience. And he was talking about how China was right to take over Tibet because Tibet had slaves and China liberated them from this feudal serfdom. And this is 100%. CCP propaganda. Yeah, this is CCP propaganda. You know, something else just jumps to mind. There was a foreign ministry, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson who's, you know, criticizing America for the prospects of maybe shutting out TikTok. And she's saying, you know, there needs to be, you know, kind of openness of markets. And this is this seems so surreal, almost. How do you explain that? TikTok is a great example of the CCP's

narrative warfare because it's been very effective. They portray it as, you know, the US government interfering in the free market or trying to censor free speech, which is ridiculous because this is a Chinese Communist Party. They don't have a free market in China. They've banned all Western social media in China. But this has been very effective at getting certain parts of the US population to be like, oh yeah, I don't like the US government so much. Maybe they are censoring. Maybe the CCP has the right idea. Yeah, I think that's a good example of how the CCP can hijack, you know, things that like free speech and use it to argue that that's why, you know, TikTok should be allowed to

operate freely and stream Chinese propaganda into American phones, right? Because if you don't allow that, that's not, that's not free speech, but that's not actually the case. The issue is TikTok is a weapon of the CCP designed to shape how Americans think, as well as steal a tremendous amount of personal data on individual Americans. And the ban, the idea of the ban is kind of ridiculous because it's just like the Chinese company that owns and controls TikTok just has to give up control. And then TikTok would be allowed, but the Chinese Communist Party does not want to give up control, particularly because if they did, then whatever American company bought it would have access to the inside of TikTok,

to the algorithm, and actually get to see what really was going on behind the scenes. The CCP is very smart at understanding the divides in American society, and it knows how to target both sides. So for example, we were talking to Lord Chris Patton the other day, the last British governor of Hong Kong. And he said one of the things the CCP would say about Hong Kong is like, oh, it's been occupied. It's the British colonial powers. And, you know, that really taps into this sort of, you know, left-leaning ideology. But he said the reality was the only people that were occupying that area were people fleeing China, fleeing communism from China.

So they used that language to cover up the reality of things. And a more right-wing example, I have this theory China is doing this propaganda campaign that I'm calling China is based. You see all of these conservative commentators, like the CCP will put out a video of kids in China, young kids in kindergarten playing with machine guns

or fake rocket launchers doing this military training. And these conservative US commentators will be like, oh yeah, China's based. They're not pushing woke ideology on kids. And you don't realize like that militarization of children is insane. Like just it gets them to react against this one other ideological extreme for this other. Or another great example is in video games now. China just put out a game called Black Myth Wukong that is one of the most popular games. And I criticized it because it's got ties to Tencent, which is basically a Chinese company with a lot of connections to the CCP.

We don't want China controlling American video game industries. But the response was like, oh, I'm so sick of playing these Western woke games with woke ideology. I'll take this Chinese game. It's based. Because they said in the game that they weren't going to. They don't want you to talk about feminism. Yeah, they said they don't want you to talk about feminism. And then it was like also anything about the Chinese government. Chinese politics, COVID, et cetera, et cetera. The Chinese government.

But because they said feminism first, then it suddenly appealed to a political group in the U.S. who were sick of feminism. Yeah, and then it kind of covers up the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is heavily involved in ESG funding that is pushing a lot of this woke ideology in game. So China's kind of controlling both sides of this, and really it knows how to play Americans off of each other. So we're fighting each other instead of realizing who our real enemy is,

the Chinese Communist Party. I keep thinking of the term gray zone. In the South China Sea, there's no very limited kinetic sort of activity. Some of it's getting very close to kinetic and people wonder, but as long as it stays in this so-called gray zone, no one really wants to take a too serious position. And it almost seems like this term kind of fits into everything you've just been describing too. There's always some level of plausible deniability that there's a military objective, that there's a specific strategic objective. Tell me what you think about that. This is one of the greatest failings in U.S. policy towards China. We have this idea that,

okay, war is war, and then there's everything else. We can do business with China, but the Chinese Communist Party, as a Marxist-Leninist regime, does not see things like that. They are not just a mirrored reflection of us. They see the U.S. as an ideological threat that has to be destroyed. And so they will use any means to achieve that. It's not just boots-on-the-ground fighting. For them, warfare is anything. It can

be legal warfare, it can be economic warfare, political warfare, narrative warfare. So they have a goal in mind, which is to defeat the United States. But Americans and American politicians for decades, Republican and Democrats, have not seen it that way. They're just like, this is another country we can do business with. We can be partners or maybe competitors, but we're not enemies. Yeah, and I think that's the thing with, Chris, you make a good point about that binary, right, about war, not war. And I think that's the thing with gray zone warfare is that these gray zone tactics is that it doesn't just stop in the light gray of the gray zone right

like they keep pushing and pushing as long as they deem themselves to be in this gray zone they'll keep pushing and pushing towards that line to see where that line is and the more that there's no response to that or the more that they get away with it then that just expands their ability to actually do these kinds of different things, to blockade Taiwan, to challenge the Philippines and the South China Sea, all of these things, because there is a fear of overreaction on the Western side. Essentially, the CCP has trained us to react that way with their narrative warfare. You know, if you ever look at anything that happens with Taiwan, US selling, you know, military equipment to Taiwan or supporting Taiwan

in any way, the headlines in American media are always like, the US and Taiwan do such-and-such, comma, angering China. The headline is always about how, you know, you don't want to anger China. Like, that is, like, a threatening thing to do. We don't want to spark an accidental war with China. Yeah, so I think, but that is, I think, the result of the messaging that the CCP has built up over the years. That, like, we should be afraid of angering China, right? That's why this is a problem. These things are not good to do because

it might anger China. They have the threat of actual war or kinetic war dangling over us. So we don't realize that TikTok is a weapon. It's not a social media platform. It is a weapon. So can you quantify for me, give me some sense of the scale or effort that the Chinese regime puts into this narrative warfare component of their, you know, let's call it total war approach. Let me just give a big picture idea to show the success of this, at least in the business community. So COVID happened, the Chinese Communist Party spent the first initial month or two covering it up, specifically so they could buy up PPEs in America, stockpile it. They closed down domestic flight from Wuhan, kept international flight from Wuhan going. They wanted to spread it all over the world. The COVID pandemic is

entirely the Chinese Communist Party's fault. A few years after that, Xi Jinping went to San Francisco for APEC. The city completely cleaned itself up, got rid of all the homeless just for this communist dictator coming, and you had American business leaders giving him a standing ovation just a few years after they used the COVID pandemic against us. That shows just how successful they are at being able to get a certain class in American society on their side. This begins at all levels of society, in politics and in business. On the political side, Eric Swalwell is a great example. A Chinese spy was essentially grooming him when he was very early on in his political campaign.

You also see things like Eric Adams. Back when he was the governor of Brooklyn. When he was the Brooklyn borough president. Brooklyn borough president, sorry. China funds these trips for business leaders, congressional staffers, politicians, again trying to make it seem like China is your friend. We can do business. I mean, I think a few years ago it came out that China was spending something like $8 billion on overseas state-run media efforts. But I think that is just a drop in the bucket for when you talk about

narrative warfare, it's not just what comes out through the official state-run media and how they tried to use that to influence American media or media in different countries, but it's also these things that Chris is talking about, like how do you quantify these business trips or these friendship trips to China from U.S. politicians where then they get fed these narratives. Sister city agreements with towns, states, colleges. Yeah, it's pervasive through every aspect of the CCP's outreach to the wider world. So it's hard to say they're spending this much on it because it's part of everything they do.

Basically, you're saying it's embedded as part of every international activity because it's a key strategic directive, right, from the very top. Yeah, I think people talk about the three warfares, that book that was written by, or those three Chinese PLA. But one of the things in there is essentially narrative warfare. They call it something different. But you can also call it public opinion warfare, information warfare, all these things.

But it's all about controlling not just the information, but the perception of the information. It's very postmodern. There is no universal truths. There's just different perspectives, and whoever has the most force can get their message across. I remember when Epoch Times was started back in the early 2000s, the distance between what people understood to be the reality of communist China

and the reality of communist China that I was aware of being on the human rights side of things was so vast that it was almost like people would think you're a crazy person. You say, hey, do I need topic I would talk about? Right? It's wild. I mean, to be fair, it has shifted quite significantly. Yes. Especially in recent years. Yeah, there was just this phenomenon.

The Tiananmen Square massacre happened. That month, George Bush Sr. sent a secret delegation to Beijing to assure the Chinese Communist Party that it wouldn't hurt U.S.-China relations. The same month that the CCP massacred 10,000 students in Beijing. For years, we had experts, top politicians telling us that if we do business with China, it will reform them. They'll become a democracy. It'll help the US government. Even as towns across America were being gutted because we shipped all of our manufacturing to China, we had experts saying, this is good. This is still good. Look at how much our GDP has gone up. Meanwhile, Americans are struggling to make ends meet. But we listen to these experts

who have who knows what relation to China pushing this narrative that yes, we have to engage. And I think in, you know, a few years ago, we talked to Alex Jasky, who wrote a book on influence operations and he talked about how this type of narrative, the idea that China would reform democratically if there was economic reform, kind of came from the CCP where they had this message going out through channels that weren't official channels but it was as if a US official got to know Chinese business people who are connected with the CCP or even Chinese officials, lower level officials, or people who are maybe in

academia and they would say to them as if on the down low, that they were like, oh, well, this is what we officially have to say. We officially have to say that we're the Communist Party and we won't change or reform, but actually, secretly, we want to do these things. If we had more economic relations with you, that can only be better for us. It was really insidious.

These officials would be like, you really get China. You're very smart. Not like all the other people. You're a smart person. And you know, don't push too hard. We're on the same side, but if you push too hard,

then that means these far left extremists in the party, they'll be activated and then we can't deal with that. So just never push hard. Don't push publicly. So it was kind of, and people felt special, right? Because they felt like they were getting the real inside view on what, you know, the CCP officials actually thought, not what they had to say publicly. So,

but in actuality, this was part of their influence operations as part of their narrative warfare to try to make, you U.S. officials believe that that's what would happen if we just did more business with them. We were chumps. Recently, two officials from the Solomon Islands, Daniel Suidani and Celsus Talifilou, I had them on the show in early 2023, in part thanks to your fundraising efforts to bring them to America to tell their story. Tell me a little bit about that picture. Where do things stand now?

Just to tie this into the whole influence of the CCP, we did that fundraising campaign to be able to bring them to Washington, D.C. to warn U.S. politicians about it, also to raise their profile so they wouldn't be immediately arrested when they went back. Unfortunately, we did. Maybe just briefly just kind of explain what happened. Yeah. So the Solomon Islands, a very important strategic location in the Pacific. Major World War II battles were fought there. It's a very important strategic location. For years they had recognized Taiwan as opposed to the PRC as a legitimate government of China and they changed that in recent years to recognize the PRC and this was because

the president, the prime minister at the time, was getting a lot of money and a lot of close connections to the Chinese Communist Party. Now, the most populous province of the Solomon Islands, the Malaita province, was led by a guy named Daniel Sedani, a devout Christian. He saw what the Chinese Communist Party was doing to his home.

The Chinese were coming in. This is their MO everywhere. They extract resources, do not provide much for locals. They might build a hospital, but extract the wealth of the entire nation. He pushed back against the switch, as they called it. Ultimately, the prime minister and the Chinese Communist Party went hard against him. They denied him life-saving medical treatment. He had to get flown to Taiwan, thanks to support in Taiwan, to get his medical issues treated. Then they got him kicked out of his premiership. And they were in the media trying to portray him as

basically this troublemaker revolutionary who needed to be in jail. So it looked like he was going to wind up behind bars. And so that's when we began the campaign to get him to DC, this fundraising campaign. We raised, in a day we were able to raise $27,000 for his travel expenses, legal fees, because he had to defend himself in the Solomon Islands. We were using GoFundMe. They did not want to release the money to us. And this was a real problem because they were here. We had to pay things out of pocket at this point. They just would not release the money until we told them

that we were going to be testifying in front of Congress about what was going on and would have to mention that they were withholding funds. And then they released the funds to us after that. And we never used GoFundMe again. So unfortunately now the latest is that Daniel Cidane and Celsus Talfilou, who was also there, we also brought him over, he was an advisor, they have been arrested, they're out on bail, but it seems like they held off on going after them because there was that initial media attention and political attention on them. Now, a year or two later, I think they're hoping that that attention has shifted, especially with everything going on in the U.S. right now. So they are once again in danger of being persecuted. And this is a really important issue because this is a case of all the

CCP has to do is pay off certain, the right people in government around the world and countries around the world, and then they can take over. This is an example of just a few people fighting back. And if the CCP is able to crush him, if they're able to crush Dan Ocidani, that sends a message to countries around the world, to people around the world who would stand up

to the Chinese Communist Party. No one's going to come and save you. The U.S. won't protect you. So why risk your life, your family, just to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party? So this really is ground zero. It was an important place in World War II. It's now an important battlefield in Cold War II, whatever you want to call it,

but this is a war with the Chinese Communist Party. So what happens to Sui Don is incredibly important. So some of the narratives I'm hearing, Chinese nuclear proliferation has been going full tilt in a way that's been underestimated by Western intelligence. The military growth, the building of ships, all sorts of areas has been huge. Xi Jinping again recently openly talking about preparing the country for war, appearing in camo fatigues and everything else. It seems like a significant threat. Why risk war?

That is a powerful narrative they're pushing. First of all, Xi Jinping has been appearing in fatigues and saying to prepare for war since he came to power in 2013. That happens all the time. There is an unprecedented military buildup in China that should not be dismissed. I know some people are like, ah, it's all made in China. That's a dangerous way to take it. Or, you know, they have more ships than our Navy, but we have bigger ships. Better ships. Yeah, that's not a great way to approach it. But the Chinese Communist Party wants Americans scared. The idea of like, do you really want to defend Taiwan?

Is it worth the nuke in Los Angeles? Yeah, there was actually a few years ago an opinion article in the Business Insider that basically said that. It was about is Taiwan worth risking nuclear war? Everything in there was essentially exactly what the CCP would want to be out there because they want you to be too scared to make a move. And it's incredibly defeatist because there is a lot the U.S. can do to challenge the Chinese Communist Party. One great example would be to just expose

the corruption of top CCP officials. This would be a powerful narrative warfare tactic the U.S. could use because the Chinese Communist Party, say we just sanctioned China, the CCP would tap into the narratives like, oh, these imperialist Americans hurting us Chinese people, don't worry, the Chinese Communist Party will protect you. Shore up support for the Communist Party.

But if the US is specifically targeting the corruption of top leaders, they can't really use that line. Because the Chinese people see, oh wait, you guys at the top are actually pretty rotten. So that's just one example of a tactic the US could use. The US can do so many things to fight China. And the idea that we can't because we don't want to risk nuclear war or any other kind of kinetic war. They want us scared. But there is a lot the U.S. can do, especially with China facing pretty unprecedented economic troubles right now.

The Trump administration was great with the tariffs. The Biden administration kept those tariffs and did the CHIPS Act. There's a lot of levers the U.S. still has to solve the problem, I think. We're Americans. We don't have to give up. We don't surrender. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about public diplomacy and the lack of, frankly, most Western liberal democracies using that. It was a very powerful tool, notably incredibly valuable as part of the Reagan administration's efforts in seeing the end of the Soviet Union happen. But what you talked about right now was just a form of public diplomacy, because really you're communicating to the Chinese people.

I mean, I think when you look at what the CCP cares about with narrative warfare, you should look at the propaganda that they're putting out, but you should also look at what they're trying to censor. So there you know, there are social media channels even on Twitter X where people are posting all of these videos and things that are appearing on the Chinese instrument being immediately censored. A lot of them are things like, you know, lots of small protests against, you know, banks for financial malfeasance, companies for not paying their employees on time, real estate companies for the loss of people's investments in their homes and things like that.

And so you can see the cracks in the CCP society and what they've tried to build and the things that they're worried about that they're censoring and the things that Chinese people care about. So there is a lot of messaging I think we can do about this is the reality of what's happening because a lot of Chinese people don't know that there are these protests. They don't know that things like that are happening in China. And if the CCP keeps people in the dark like that, then there is this feeling like, well, it's hopeless to go against the CCP, right? There's

no point in speaking out or trying to, you know, improve things. But, you know, just exposing some of these things that are happening, telling the truth about the lies that the CCP has in their narratives. Many Chinese people don't even know the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened. A lot of young people, yeah. But things like that, those are things. Also, essentially refuting the CCP's narratives about America, I think, in a lot of ways. Because if you watch the evening news in China, the CCTV evening news, the third section of

the news is always about international news, and it's essentially always about how chaotic and dangerous the rest of the world is, especially liberal you know, liberal democracies. They're full of chaos and violence and things like that. And I've talked to people in China who are like, are you afraid of walking down the street in New York City because somebody might shoot you? And I was like, well, it's definitely not like that here. And so these are the kind of things that people think in China. So like just being able to talk about, OK, you know, America has problems, but, you know, the positive sides of America, you know, every year the CCP comes out with a human rights

white paper about the U.S. that's just it's kind of comical, actually, like, you know, what they put in there to try to make the U.S. look bad. And we never try to, you know. Respond, debunk. Yeah, I don't even know if you have to respond to that white paper, but it's kind of like, where is the impetus in the U.S. government to talk about why America is great? Yeah, I don't know why every politician and media organization in the U.S.

isn't like they're harvesting organs of prisoners of conscience in China. Like that just sums it up. China uses rape as a form of torture. That's a message that needs to be out there. The flip side of what Shelley is saying is it's not just messaging to the Chinese people, but it's also messaging to the American people. So Americans know the reality of life under communism in China.

And also, the same thing about the US has its problems, but the US and the Chinese Communist Party are not equivalent evils. That's something a lot of people believe. A lot of people believe the U.S. is actually worse. U.S. does not use rape as a form of torture. We are not harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience. And that's narrative warfare, to just say the truth. Saying the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

Chris, maybe clarify this use of rape as a form of torture. I don't know if that's something that everyone watching would be aware of. This is the other aspect of the Chinese Communist Party's narrative warfare. They care about psychologically breaking people. And you see in Chinese detention centers, especially for prisoners of conscience, just the use of sexual humiliation to break down somebody psychologically. The Chinese human rights activist Gao Zhisheng, who God knows if he's even alive, he keeps disappearing into whatever hole they put him in China.

He documented a lot of Falun Gong practitioners in China telling stories of incredible sexual abuse, electric cattle prods being shoved into their genitalia, women being stripped naked and thrown into a prison cell with a bunch of men to be gang raped. This is part of how they torture people, to break them down, to get them to be moldable and pliable. This is standard tactics for them.

I think when it first became more apparent what was happening to the Uyghurs, there was people who testified in front of Congress even about women being raped in these vocational education camps, detention centers, things like that, systematically. It wasn't just, you know, yes. Some guard abusing his position. This was condoned and perpetrated across the system. Especially with the case of, I know Falun Gong, they have meetings and experts

on how to break Falun Gong practitioners. So these are tactics they've developed and refined specifically to use. So again, this is not just some prison guard doing... Abusing a counselor. Yeah. This is the practice. And so this is why I think this is very powerful narrative warfare. If everyone understands, China uses rape as torture. Then when someone like John Kerry comes up and says, well, you know, we need to work with China on climate change. It's like China uses rape as a form of torture. We're going to work with them? Are they a trustworthy competitor or other nation? No.

So it's very interesting. We've been talking primarily about narrative warfare of the Chinese regime against the U.S. and perhaps against the Western world, more broadly speaking. But you just started talking about internal narrative warfare or internal use of narratives. And of course, that's also incredibly important, as you just pointed out, Shelley. Is there a greater focus on one or the other? I mean, it seems like this is such a central piece of how the regime operates. Well, I know for many years, China spent more on their internal security, their police networks, than they were spending on the military. For the Chinese Communist Party, the greatest threat is the Chinese people. That's why they spend the most amount of their time focused on propaganda internally

and punishing any kind of dissidence. And just controlling information internally, right? Just closing the Internet down. They've been focused on internet control for so many decades that it's refined to the point where it becomes harder and harder for people to get around the firewall or find out what's going on, access that kind of information. And sadly that was built up by Western companies going to China. I think narrative warfare inside China, it's kind of like the whole metaphor about

being a fish in water and you don't know what water is because you're just swimming in the water all the time. Chinese people just are living in this propaganda. They live and breathe in this propaganda every day. Any Chinese town, city, propaganda posters everywhere, you don't notice it. Banners, you don't notice it anymore. You learn in school, not just the CC,

you go to Marxist-Leninist classes, but also just in general, the kind of history you learn, Chinese history, it's infused with the CCP's propaganda about how, you know, without the CCP, there would be no new China, that kind of idea that the CCP is the same as the Chinese government, is the same as China, is the same as the Chinese people. So you learn to identify in a certain way your self-worth with the Chinese Communist Party. Even people who don't like the Communist Party, they can get pretty easily triggered if they feel like China is being criticized, which is really the Chinese Communist Party being criticized by the Chinese government. But they become sensitized to these things. Probably a good example is what happens with the CCP has been saying for years about

Japanese people, Japan, using Japan because of what happened in World War II when Japan invaded China, which many horrible, they did many horrible things in China. But, you know, the Europe in Germany, like, you know, everybody's kind of tried to heal and move on and from that. But the CCP will never let the Chinese people forgive Japan because they can use that for propaganda. When you're a kid, you watch movies that are about the Japanese invading China during World War II. There was this viral video that went around a few months ago where there was a first grade classroom where one of the kids drew a picture and he wrote, I love Japanese people on the picture. And the teacher filmed a video of himself hitting the kid, hitting his hand with a ruler for writing, I love Japanese people.

And he was like, see what all the other kids wrote. And everything else was like, every other kid wrote really patriotic stuff about loving China. And so he was like, why did you write, I love Japanese people? And the kid couldn't really give an answer. He was a little kid. He was six. So then the teacher punished him. And then he recorded

himself on a video talking very patriotically about how he felt this was his duty as a teacher to punish this kid for saying he loved Japan. Not even the government of Japan or whatever, just loving Japanese people is considered incorrect. And he was saying, you know, we need to educate the youth of today and make sure they understand why the Japanese are evil and they can't go around saying, I love Japanese people. And he posted this on the internet. And there were a lot of people who agreed with him in the comments. I mean, there were definitely people who were like, you shouldn't be hitting a child because of this. But there were other people who were like, very nationalistically,

you know, like, yes, that's correct. We must very nationalistically, you know, like yes, that's that's correct We must teach people that you know, the Japanese are evil And that is you know, one of the these things that's the narrative warfare So maybe like ten years ago there were Anti-Japanese protests where people were burning Japanese cars and things like that even more recently. There's been cases of Just deranged individuals attacking Japanese students in China. Yeah.

So there was a case at a Japanese school where a woman and her child were attacked. And a Chinese woman actually died trying to save them. And she was actually, to give credit where credit was due, she was kind of put up as like a hero, that she tried to save this kid. But there was another case more recently where a Japanese person was stabbed. And so this is a result. Yes, this was a result of... There's actually been a lot of knife attacks in China recently,

but that's a different subject. I want you to give me a sense of where things are at really then. Because on the one hand, I hear that the Chinese people have been completely brainwashed by the CCP to do these extreme things you're just describing as an example, not just around China, but Americans. Of course, there's this huge, consistent anti-American propaganda, anti-West propaganda, colonialism, whatever. On the other hand, you hear, well, actually the Chinese people are fed up with the Chinese Communist Party. They've had enough of it.

There's bubbling up dissident movements everywhere. Of course, with the economy being in rough shape, I don't think anyone disputes that even the CCP at some level, that this is all kind of metastasizing now of sorts. What's the reality? These are such disparate visions of what's happening there internally. Well, the reality is it's very hard to know what Chinese people in that system actually think and feel because there are real consequences for saying stuff, especially to foreign journalists. We saw with the COVID protests, people in China were actually directly calling for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to step down.

That was a pretty big shift. And what I saw within China and internationally, a lot of Chinese people felt like, oh, this is what I've been thinking the whole time. I didn't know anybody else was thinking it, so I never said it out loud. And then there were the white paper protests. Yeah, this is what I'm talking about, the white paper protests. But you know, after the fact, like a lot of those people were arrested and disappeared by the Chinese Communist Party. So it's just, it's very risky in that system to be able to speak your mind. So it's hard to know for sure. And probably it's, you know, there are probably people who are very, very brainwashed. And there are probably people who know exactly what's going on. I mean, I think, I think it's both true, right? Because it's not a block of people. You have

1.4 billion people. There's a lot of people who have different opinions on different things. They may also see through the CCP's narratives in some things and be blind to it in other things because it's complicated. Being a human in the world today is complicated. So I don't think we can say for sure that it's one or the other, but I think what you can look at is it's clear that Chinese people feel like their lives are worse off than they were. The rise of movements like lay flat, let it rot. Yes.

And also... Garbage time of history. What you see is people trying to get out of China, right? You see, you know, people who are wealthy trying to get their kids to... Like at an increased rate. Yes, at a very increased rate. You know, trying to move their money overseas in underground ways, trying to move their money overseas in underground ways, trying

to bring their kids, their families out of China, buying up real estate in the US and Australia and Canada, like all these places because they don't feel safe in China. And it's definitely at a very increased rate more recently. And I think, you know, that speaks a lot too, that the people who have those resources are trying to leave. And then there have also been reports of people having their passports confiscated. And we first started to see some of these reports during COVID where maybe certain low-level government officials or people would not, would get their passports confiscated. There was a report in the last few weeks that school teachers in one Chinese province were having their passports taken away so they couldn't

leave essentially without applying for permission to. And so when you see that kind of increased control, you can see that the Chinese Communist Party is worried. Chris, you mentioned a few different movements that are bubbling up. Could you clarify what those are? Sure. So particularly for young people in China, the situation is very grim. Youth unemployment exploded to such high levels that the Chinese Communist Party stopped reporting it and then came out with a new metric that made it much lower. And then even that metric skyrocketed. So these movements are expressions of Chinese people feeling like there's no hope in society. So there was a movement called the Lay Flat Movement, which is just where Chinese people

would photograph themselves just laying flat. There's nothing to do. Just lying down on the couch or a table or just random places because they're like, okay, it's hopelessness, right? Paralysis, really. There's another movement called Let It Rot, which is just the idea that everything is falling apart,

so just let it rot. People are calling it now the garbage time of history in China, which is a way of saying that things have reached a point of no return. They've crossed the event horizon. It's just all a downward spiral now. So very grim, hopeless things in a country that also has like 30 million more young men than women. It's very unstable. And just something interesting, like with the white paper protests, the idea, I think, is that you have some level of plausible deniability or something. What could be...

How can you arrest me for holding a piece of paper? But everybody kind of knows there's something going on. How can you criticize me for lying on the ground? Well, I mean, I can't, but everybody knows what's going on. I suppose it's the same with the others. But it's also like people becoming creative around expressing dissent as there is increasing sort of, you know, repression, I guess, against all these different forms. What would you guys say would have been like a high point or the high point of the show over the last 12 years? Being here with you, Jan.

Okay, another high point? Well, several notches down from that. I would say just meeting the fans and talking to people and seeing how much the show has meant to them and how much it's opened their eyes. We've had people who have written to us who have been like, yeah, I was a Marxist, and you opened my eyes to... Exactly what it is. What communism is, yeah, I was a Marxist, and you opened my eyes to what it is. What communism is, yeah.

Yeah, and you'd be surprised the people we reached. For me, I will always remember when we first went to Hong Kong in 2014. Back then, the show was a lot smaller. We had 66,000 subscribers. Chris was basically almost a one-man band. He was editing, writing, everything. I was working another full-time job, so I was just kind of doing it on the side. And so a friend of ours was like, you can go to Hong Kong, you know, because there were the

umbrella movement protests going on. They had occupied like a huge part of the Central Business District. And we were like, we could go go somewhere like we could go actually see what it's like so we actually you know we booked tickets and we booked an Airbnb next to one of the protest sites and you know we went and the first night we were there people started coming up to us in the street and saying that they watched China Uncensored and again we had 66,000 subscribers. Today we have 2 million. But at the time, so it was like if we had 10,000 views on an episode, that was amazing

to us. And to go to a place where multiple people came up to us, Chris was recognized all the time. And that was really surprising to us. And I'll never forget people telling us that their professors in universities showed our videos, that they really liked that we were telling people about what was happening in Hong Kong. It was just really moving. I think we've had multiple fan meetups in Hong Kong over the years. And we went back 2016 and then in 2019 for those protests as well.

And yeah, I think I will never forget, you know, going there and talking to people and having that experience there and seeing, unfortunately, what happened to Hong Kong. Yeah. Inhaling tear gas in Hong Kong and seeing what happened there, that's the low point. Well, I mean, I don't know. I'm spending three days on a tiny Filipino fishing boat in the middle of the South China Sea. But yeah, looking back, we were definitely a little reckless. Yes. There was extremely high tides because there was a supermoon. And so it was a boat that was essentially like an outrigger. So there was almost no, there was no shelter in the boat,

except for where the captain was steering the ship and all the electronic stuff was. And so we were sleeping on the decks. Chris was sleeping on top of these giant styrofoam coolers that they put the fish in. And so the waves would come up over the side. Splash us in the night. And splash us in the night. And that felt very safe. Yeah.

I think at that point I was just so exhausted that if I die, I die. So do you think you'd be welcome in Hong Kong today? I'm sure the Hong Kong police would welcome us with open arms and give us a free trip to mainland China and I could retire for the rest of my life. Realistically, most likely what would happen is we would not get... We would not be allowed to enter Hong Kong, most likely. We definitely do not feel safe going to Hong Kong because what a lot of people don't understand about the Hong Kong national security law

that essentially made Hong Kong just another Chinese city is that it technically applies to anyone, anywhere in the world. So anyone in the world who criticizes the Chinese Communist Party or the Hong Kong government could run afoul of it and might have a... Well, there's a reason the State Department cautions against Americans going to any part of China these days. Yeah. I mean, I think that the real danger also would be if we somehow manage to go to Hong

Kong and enter, we would put anybody we talked to in danger because they could be accused of colluding with hostile foreign forces. And so we actually, there's so many people we met and knew in Hong Kong that we cannot talk to because we do not want to. We even took, we had videos of our fan meetups in Hong Kong and they're not, they weren't anything like subversive, but we took them offline because we didn't want to get anybody in trouble. Even if it had been a fan meetup in like 2016 or something,

you know, just because you could get in trouble for whatever. Yeah. What would you say is the biggest thing or perhaps most important thing that you've learned newly over these last 12 years of running this show? One thing I have learned over the course of doing this show is there's this idea that we're at the end of history. That after the Cold War, the March of Progress had concluded and everything's, you know, we can do business with, like, Putin and China. Everything's fine. Democracy has won. The reality is most of the world is under dictatorship.

You know, the light of freedom and democracy is very fragile and it must be protected and fought for. Otherwise, darkness is always there, ready to swallow us up. And we can't give in to despair or attack our own values, allow the darkness to corrupt us and think that, oh, you know, maybe our society is actually the evil of the world. We need to embrace what is good because otherwise it won't last. That was really dark. But I feel like you pulled it out at the end. I was just like, oh won't last. That was really dark. But I feel like you pulled it out at the end.

I was just like, oh my gosh. I'm thinking like Aragorn at the face in the front of Mordor. Oh, I see. The darkness is overwhelming. Uh-huh. But there's that glimmer of hope and we have to stand and fight. I see. Okay.

Well, I have a more positive thing that I and fight. I see. Okay. Well, I have a more positive thing that I've learned, I suppose, which is that I think that more people care than I realized, right? Because I talked about how for many years we felt like we were screaming into the void, right? And over the years meeting fans of the show, I mean, we've met people in the strangest places. I met someone at an archaeological site in Israel who had watched the show. You don't really think about the fact that you do touch people in a certain way. And so many people have said that they really learned about China from us, they really learned about the Chinese people and have such admiration for them and really are upset very much at the Chinese Communist Party and want to do something. I think that's the thing. My favorite comment that I've ever gotten on one of our episodes was a guy who wrote and said that his nine and twelve year old daughters like to watch our show with him.

And he'd be like, you know, I would go, have you watched this episode of China Uncensored? And they're like, oh, yeah we've already watched that one, you know, dad. And I just love the idea of this dad watching our show with his daughters and having them care about this part of the world that may seem far away but you know that's that's I think something that I've really appreciated about doing the show over the last 12 years one of the reasons we use humor in our show is because it really does make things seem not as terrible and dark. You know, there's some kind of lightheartedness, there's some kind of humor so that you can kind of laugh at this authoritarian regime. And it makes it, you know, easier and more appealing, I think.

You know, something that just strikes me, we have talked a lot about sort of the darkness in communist China right now. And where is the light there that you see that you brush up against? Because you brush up against it. I mean, I would say that over the course of the 12 years we've done the show, we've seen such a tremendous change

in people's attitudes towards, not just the Chinese Communist Party, but communism in general. People are more aware of the evils of it. People, we don't really have people saying like, oh, China's a democracy, right? People are becoming aware. Is that just because of the sort of change of approach of the most recent, you know, the Xi Jinping regime? Or is it other, do you think there's more to it? Seeing what happened in Hong Kong, it's seeing what happened during COVID. It's things like Chinese secret police stations being put up in New York,

the Chinese spy balloon. People are seeing what happened. And I mean, I think the Trump administration does deserve credit for making it okay from the top levels to kind of expose these things. And that kind of made it okay for people across the political spectrum to start talking about China critically, instead of what we mentioned earlier, the idea that like, you should only say things quietly behind closed doors. It was good to publicly expose that. And that's why you saw broad consensus on China. Even in a very politically

divided time, China is something that people across the political spectrum can agree on. I do think that a lot of these things were happening before Xi Jinping came to power. But at the time, in the late 90s, the early 2000s, when the prevalent message was doing business in China is great, you can make so much money, a lot of these things were happening where American companies were having their intellectual property stolen, they were having lots of difficulties, but they were afraid to talk about it. They were maybe ashamed to talk about it because nobody else was talking about it. So I think that it's not that things only started under Xi Jinping, but that as things have

deteriorated over the years and it's become more visible and okay to say these things, then now people understand what's happening. There is a great danger of people putting all the blame on Xi Jinping. And I think this is another part of narrative warfare, that there are a lot of factions within the Chinese Communist Party that would love that that is the message

that gets out there. So that someday if we get rid of Xi Jinping, we can go back to the way it was under Jiang Zemin when intellectual property was still being stolen, when rape was still being used as a form of torture. It was exactly the same. Well, when the whole organ harvesting industry was being, you know, sort of scaled exponentially.

Exactly. The problem is the communist system. Xi Jinping is a product of that, but he's not the core of that problem. And that's something that I think it has to be understood. Because again, that's the survival of the Chinese Communist Party, right? What is the point of the narrative warfare? It's to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party survives and comes out on top. Ultimately, the system could sacrifice Xi Jinping as long as the Communist Party still rules China. Well, it's been an incredible conversation. A final thought as we finish? Men have gone door.

But it is not this day. Not this day. Well, Shelley Zhang, Chris Chappell, such a pleasure to have had you on. It was great. Thank you all for joining Chris Chappell, Shelley Zhang, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.