Digital Social Hour - China's Economic Time Bomb: What Entrepreneurs Must Know | Jan Jekielek DSH #1055

Episode Date: January 4, 2025

Discover the hidden truths about China's economic time bomb and what it means for entrepreneurs worldwide. In this eye-opening conversation with Jan from The Epoch Times, we uncover shocking revelations about China's business practices, economic challenges, and human rights issues that every business leader needs to understand. 🔍   From Jack Ma's disappearance to the truth about China's organ harvesting program, get an insider's perspective on why China's economy might be facing a slow-motion collapse. Learn how the Chinese Communist Party maintains control over tech giants, why traditional media often misses the real story, and what entrepreneurs must know about doing business with China.   Jan shares exclusive insights from his years of investigating China's regime, including never-before-told stories about the CCP's influence on global business, the truth about Chinese manufacturing dominance, and why understanding these dynamics is crucial for your business success. 🌏   This powerful discussion reveals why China's economic challenges matter to entrepreneurs everywhere, exposing the complex web of business, politics, and power that shapes global commerce. Whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, or business leader, this conversation provides essential knowledge for navigating today's complex global marketplace.   Get ready for an unfiltered look at China's economic reality and what it means for your business future. 💼   #chinastimulus #chinabusinesscrackdown #venturecapital #globalnews #chineseauthorities   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 01:49 - Organ Harvesting in China 05:02 - Trump Administration's China Policy 07:25 - China's Influence on International Institutions 09:18 - China's Long Game Strategy 10:32 - Falun Gong Movement 12:16 - Epoch Times Overview 18:09 - Truthfulness and Transparency 18:37 - Shen Yun: Reviving Traditional Chinese Culture 20:06 - Forced Organ Harvesting Survivor Testimony 23:34 - Attacking the Credibility of the CCP 25:37 - Getting Information to the Chinese People 26:48 - The New Administration's Approach 28:45 - Three Warfares Doctrine Explained 29:40 - Economic Warfare Tactics 30:25 - Legal Warfare Strategies 31:00 - Media Warfare Techniques 31:33 - Where to Find Jan   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Jan Jekielek https://www.instagram.com/jan.jekielek/ https://x.com/janjekielek   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. For those that don't know the background of Epoch Times, we were actually founded by Chinese Americans back in 2000.

And back then it was a completely different picture. Tom Friedman from the New York Times wrote a column, we should learn from Chinese governance practices because they're so efficient. It was unbelievable because I was sort of in the midst of the human rights side of things. That's what actually got me into Epoch in the first place. There's a whole organ harvesting regime. There's a whole business of using these people, murdering them for Oregon. I was saying, no, these are not good governance practices. We do not want to replicate

this. All right, guys, we are at Amfest. We got Jan from Epoch Times today. We're going to talk China, man. That's awesome. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. And we were just talking about how a lot of the media doesn't really articulate it in the right ways. No, absolutely. And first of all, you know, I'm thrilled to be here with you, Sean. We've been at this for years.

I mean, I don't for those that don't know the background of Epoch Times, you know, we were actually founded by Chinese Americans back in 2000. So almost pushing 25 years ago, right? With the express purpose to expose the Chinese regime for what it was. And back then it was a completely different picture of what China was about. I mean, people were writing, I still remember back in 2009, Tom Friedman from the New York Times wrote a column where he was basically saying, you know, we should learn from Chinese governance practices, right? Because they're so efficient and things like this. It was unbelievable because I was sort of in the

midst of the human rights side of things. That's what actually got me into epoch in the first place. And there's, there's, there's a whole organ harvesting regime. They take prisoners of conscience and there's a whole business of using these people, murdering them for organs.

And no one wanted to cover, you know, I was saying, no, these are not good governance practices. We do not want to replicate this. Right. So, you know, just was saying, no, these are not good governance practices. We do not want to replicate this. Right. So, you know, just to give you a little, little bit of background. So yeah, I'm ready to rock here. Wow.

So when was that order harvesting being done? So they're still doing it? So we learned about it first back in 2006, there were these two Canadian, one of them was a human rights lawyer and another was a former secretary of state. They got together. They were asked, Hey, can you look into this? We've heard rumors, right? They looked into it and they made a report in 2006, which

basically said, there's no other set of circumstances that would account for everything, the evidence that we do have. I'll give you an example, okay? There were newspapers that were advertising at the time. You could go to China and order a new heart, if you had 200 grand or something like that, in two weeks. They'd service you in two weeks for a new heart. Normally you had to wait years, right? Because someone has to die, but not be completely dead, right? They have to be brain dead, body alive, because you can't organ harvest from a cadaver except

corneas and things like this. So it was, you know, this was a big deal. This is just one piece of evidence. They actually found 17 that all corroborated that this existed. There was no smoking gun, but there was like, hey, this is whatever is happening here is grossly unethical. And you guys need to explain this. Of course, it was met with total silence and that you guys are evil. And this, you know, the typical response of the Chinese regime is to slander whoever it is. That's that's basically, you know, exposing it as opposed to actually deal with the substantive issue at hand.

Yeah. And they even go after their own people. I mean, look what they did to Jack Ma. A hundred percent. So that's actually very, that's very interesting. So let's look at that for a moment, right? Communist society is very unusual. It's hard for us to kind of imagine it in a way.

It's unbelievably hierarchical, first of all. Okay, so the top of the pyramid right now is Xi Jinping. He's the dictator. He runs multiple of these sort of central commissions at the top, including the military. And essentially any order that comes from him, it has to be implemented at every single level all the way down through to the bottom of society. And with some of these tech, basically very successful tech entrepreneurs like Jack, right? Jack became very successful in his own right, right? Of course, he was supported by the Chinese Communist Party. Everything kind of stems from what the Chinese Communist Party will allow or not.

So he was absolutely kind of like a little bit of a golden child, right, of the regime until he got pretty big and successful and kind of started to have his own thoughts. Yeah. Right, and then he just disappeared for a while and there's a whole sort of structural system where you could say high level officials or people at the level of Jack Ma will,

you know, he reeducated to make sure that, you know, when they reappear, they're following the proper, correct way of thinking. Yeah, he's a lot better these days. Well, exactly, right? And that's because what are you going to do? Like, yes, you're a billionaire, but that can disappear in one second. Yep. Just like that.

Every bank, you want to, you know, people have been concerned about debanking in Canada and the U.S. and other places. There's been a lot of talk about that. Mark Andreessen recently on Joe Rogan, amazing, amazing bit on there. And China, take that to the ultimate extreme, right? Where the, basically anyone in the Politburo can essentially shut you down on a whim

and everybody will go, yes, sir, why? Because they know what's happening if they don't comply, which is they're coming after. Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your back all season long. From puck drop to the final shot, Which is they're coming after. is going to love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your hockey home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a celly,

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with iGaming Ontario. To you too. Absolutely. Yeah. Do you feel like the Trump administration was the first administration to face China head on? I think that would be a fair characterization. I mean, there's, there's been good and bad policy. Okay. That's happened all the way along. But I think it was during the Trump administration where the narrative on China, this is the key, really started to change.

Okay. Because, you know, here's something, and this is something Cleo Pascal, a good friend of mine who's been on American Thought Leaders, my show multiple times has talked about. Chinese have this approach of, you can call it, I think she calls it gross national power. They measure themselves, they have all these different indicators

that come down to one number, and they measure themselves against every other single nation in the world along all those features, right? And so so America of course is that their number one competitor in their view now Xi Jinping is waging a people's war against America that's only a few years old but that's official he said we are waging a people's war against America now that doesn't manifest mostly as kinetic warfare it might manifest as all kinds of other ways okay yeah but But to make a long story short, what happened in the Trump

administration is to me, for the first time, with the imposition of these tariffs, okay, that Robert Lighthizer pioneered in a way to try to get the trade deficit into, you know, it's just this unbelievable trade deficit. Robert Lighthizer's, by the way, philosophy is, if there's a huge sustained trade deficit, that means that someone is gaming the system. He's not looking at it ideologically. He's just, he's looking at it as, okay, these guys are taking advantage of it in all sorts

of different ways. And I could enumerate that to you if you would like, but he put forth the first policy that said we're going to make you do something that you don't want to do. Okay. And the response, if you recall, was just all hell breaking. This is unbelievable, how could this possible and so forth. But the effect was the Chinese regime actually had to do something that was in America's interest

for the first time in quite some time. And again, some people would say, yeah, that's very, you're exaggerating here. I don't think I am actually, right? Because the only way you can really tell if you're doing something in the interest of America versus the CCP, they don't believe in win-win. This is what this gross national power metric tells us, right?

They only believe that they're winning if you're losing. Either you're suffering or they're growing much faster than you are. One way or the other, you have to be on the losing end of it. Yeah. Right? Well, I think they've harmed a lot of mom and pop businesses in America because you could just order the same product in China for half the price these days. You know? Well, and not even that, like the last Trump 45 was actually trying to deal with this. They kind of, they basically worked, there's something called the Universal Postal Union, okay? And that determines, for example, let's say you're sending a package from China, you want to send it to America, right? Something governs who pays for that. Because of course,

China has to pay for some of it and America has to pay for it. The way it works out, OK, under universal postal union euros, and I think it's still this way because I don't think they managed to change it, is the American postal system actually pays for the bulk of it. Oh, really? You see? So there's just all these, that's just one piece. I'm giving you an example of the different ways the CCP has really taken advantage of America by, for example, co-opting international institutions. Right. Or, let's just, if I don't want to be so cruel to say co-opting, seriously influencing them in huge ways, right?

Yeah. So yes, absolutely. The goods are cheaper. Sometimes they're cheaper for strategic, military, strategic purposes. For example, Huawei. You know, I remember a long time ago, I talked with a Polish diplomat and I said, you guys are implementing Hawaii. You guys are crazy. Like this is, you're giving your full access to your comms, you know, your

communication network to China. They could turn it off in a second. They're like, but, but it was such a, so much a better deal. She told me, right. And I was like, yeah, well, the reason it's such a better deal is because it's their strategic, I mean, I don't know if you could officially call it dumping, right? But they're making goods incredibly cheap in order to gain that market share and gain an unbelievable level of control.

OK, this is military strategy. This is not, oh, we have cheaper goods and, you know, we're providing the same surface than American business or say, you know, where a Norwegian or Swedish business would. Right. They're willing to operate at a huge loss at first, right? Exactly. On certain things which are of strategic importance to the regime.

Exactly. They're playing the long game. It seems like they've had this plan for a while, right? 100%. Exactly. Yeah. I feel like they're really a superpower. Like we're neck and neck.

Some would even say they're ahead of us. Well, and that we could talk about that. I mean, there's tons of indicators. I just had Kyle Bass, for example, on the show, who's, I don't know, probably one of the smartest guys on the realities of the Chinese economy. And he would say, well, the Chinese economy is in kind of a slow motion collapse as we say. Oh, really?

Well, you know, the housing sector, which is like 30% of the economy is dead struggling, right? I mean, there was this massive, massive bubble, the bank, yeah, yeah, exactly. All sorts of banks fails all sorts of these huge, huge state, you know, essentially any again, any very large corporation is in effect a state corporation, right in China, because again, the regime has complete on off and decision decision making or ultimately, right, in China, because again, the regime has complete on-off and decision-making ultimately, right? You know, TikTok would be a fantastic example of that. And these recent court ruling that came out actually speaks to that exactly, that issue, right?

It's like they're basically saying, well, the Chinese regime won't let us share the algorithm, right? Well, you're saying you're not a, you're your private enterprise, but the regime dictates whether the algorithm is something you can actually, you know, sell or not that that something doesn't compute here. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And they're really interesting because you know, I mentioned how we were founded by felon gong practitioners, right? With the express idea to expose the regime, we've made, you know, a project, if you will, of exposing

the realities of the regime, it was needed at the time, because at the time, you know, people like it was Kissinger doctrine. I don't know if you remember this, but basically the idea was you have to get into China. If you don't get in now, someone else will get that massive market. And we have these great methods for you to do it. And they set up all sorts of ways in which they could do it without great risk to themselves, but of great financial benefit to themselves. And so, you know, it just became the kind of the narrative, and you don't want to make them lose face.

We never really want to publicly say anything negative, because if we would say something remotely negative, they might have this culture of not wanting to lose face. So we won't do that. And that essentially was the doctrine until the Trump administration. This is another reason why the Trump administration 45 was kind of monumental because people were coming out and saying, you know, for example, Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, distrust and verify. Like, that's good. That's our approach.

What? Why would you distrust us? That's crazy. Talk about losing face. But it was incredibly important because it got people thinking, geez, there's something, there's a lot of things that are wrong here. But what, in effect, what Epoch Times has done, right, is we've kind of been this, I guess, initially a thorn in the regime's side. And then by helping change the narrative around China over the years,

we've become this sort of, you know, basically an organization that the regime really wants to destroy. Really? So they're going after you guys? They're going after us hard in all sorts of ways. Well, so well, let me actually broaden it a little bit. Okay. From the perspective of the Chinese regime, right, Epoch Times is basically a very successful operation launched by Falun Gong practitioners. And why, in the regime itself, I'll have to give you a little bit of background here, okay?

Basically, in the 90s in China, the health system collapsed. Again, for whatever reason they decided they wouldn't fund it, maybe they couldn't. And there was this sort of resurgence of traditional methods of health and wellness. And you could call them Qigong. This was kind of a catchall phrase they made for basically some things that are kind of like Tai Chi, even though technically Tai Chi is a martial art. There are all these different practices, thousands of them. And one of them became extremely popular and that was Falun Gong.

And it was also very unusual in the way it was kind of set up. It's very self-directed, truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. These are the things that people are living. These are the things that people that... And the belief is actually that really to get healthy physically, you need to live that. You have that in your mind and heart. And then there's these exercises that look a bit like Tai Chi that you do that will also help in that. So mind, body, spirit, kind of all functioning together.

By the end of the nineties, there were 70 to 100 million people by government estimate doing this practice across the country. And the thing about it that was really unusual too, was that it was, you know, it didn't fit into the, you remember I talked about how hierarchical communism is. It didn't fit into that at all because in Falun Gong, there aren't a lot of rules, like you're supposed to live by truth, compassion, and forgiveness. There's all these teachings that explain how to do that. But if there are some rules, I mean, one of them might be you have to understand the teachings yourself. You can't copy someone else's way of doing the teachings.

There's no worship, for example, in it. And also there's no hierarchy. So you're kind of, you know, you're a Falun Gong practitioner. I'm a Falun Gong practitioner. We're equal. We have our, we're equal on the surface. Of course we have our own progress in our cultivation. That's different, but we don't sort of front that. We have, I don't elevate myself and can tell you what to do, how you should do it.

Right? Yeah. And there's also no money collected for it, which is really interesting. One of the first examples we heard about that the Chinese regime institutions started going against Falun Gong back in the 90s was when basically they were refused the money for it because there's this Qigong Research Society, it was always called, and they were getting a cut of all the sort of fees for people doing things with all these different Qigong masters and so forth. And Li Hongzhu, who's the founder of this, said, you didn't really want that, right?

You wanted just to people to have their, to be able to better themselves in their own pace and so forth, right? So anyway, what I'm trying to say is it didn't fit into the whole regime's mentality very well. And suddenly there were only 60 million Communist Party members at the time. In other words, it was bigger than the Chinese Communist Party and it was all walks of life. It was people from like the Politburo, people from state security, and then migrant field workers on the other end and everybody in between. It was a huge, huge, huge movement. So the dictator at the

time decided we're going to eradicate this group, to use his exact terminology, right? And what did they mean by that? Well, from the regime's perspective, it could mean any number of things. Like if they can brainwash you or what they call euphemistically re-educate you, okay, into saying Falun Gong is evil or something like that, that might be enough. But if you resist that, well then any method, in fact, there was a rule, they arrested millions of people, put them in the labor camps, black jails, you know, re-education camps, all of this. And there was, the rule was basically any Falun Gong death in one of these places will be considered suicide.

Whoa. Because what that told, the message was, hey, we can actually do anything to these people to reform them, to re-educate, to what they, you've heard about these forced confessions sometimes that are taught by, to basically speak up publicly against what they had been doing. But it turned out these people were really resilient. And remember, so it's very,

like it's a very self-directed thing, and I don't think they could understand that because of this unbelievable hierarchical nature and totalitarian nature of communism. Wow, I didn't even know that happened. So what's the status of that these days? Well, so it's very, there's kind of two sides to it. On the one hand, and you can look up, for example, the Freedom House reports on this, on religious freedom in China. On the one side, it remains one of the most, if not the most persecuted group in China. And this is kind of what this new information, maybe I'll talk a little bit that we got from a Chinese dissident who's been in Australia

for years, is talking about. But so it remains one of the most persecuted groups simply because it dares to survive in resistance to the regime, okay? You remember? So I don't know if you remember, there was a huge thing about Tibet, free Tibet for years and back in 2008 I remember I was with the International Society for Human Rights in Poland at the time There were you know, basically the the Tibetans they did this huge action. They had this huge banner They took it I forget exactly where they unrolled it but they went to a bridge and they unrolled this Massive banner off the bridge that said free Tibet or soft. I can't remember exactly

But that was the moment when the Chinese regime said, we're going to wipe this out. We're going to elevate the level of resources we're committing. They want to wipe out every resistance movement, anything that remotely doesn't agree. But with them, they said, okay, we're going to wipe this out for good. And today, you don't even really hear much from Tibetans. And it's really terribly sad because Tibetans remain a hugely persecuted group. I'm trying to match it. Exactly, right? But at one point, you know, there was a huge, even Hollywood was behind, you know, Free Tibet and so forth. So my point is they're very, very effective at wiping out the resistance movements both within China and overseas, but the ones that are most resilient, and I would argue, I think Falun Gong has been by far the most resilient both to

infiltration for a bunch of reasons and also to you know in in in in America, right you have you know from again in their view Epoch Times, you know truth remember truth is the first principle of Falun Gong I like to say that it that's really influenced how we've operated over the years, right? Like we I Talk we can talk about our record I think we've been right on every major issue and there's a lot of media that have been very wrong on it. Why? Well, we just simply, we wanted to find out the

truth, whether that's China or otherwise. Okay. But there's also, you know, Shen Yun. I don't know if you've, you've, you've heard of Shen Yun, but Shen Yun is this incredible dance performance, which started, I think around 2006, 2007 in America. Basically Chinese Americans, many of them were actual Falun Gong practitioners,

started, they wanted to revive traditional Chinese culture and traditional Chinese dance where the art form was almost lost. Okay. And so they started this in Middletown, New York. And, you know, fast forward to today, there's eight traveling companies of Shen Yun. Each one has a full Western orchestra with some Chinese instruments. An amazingly unique sound. I don't know if you can, you want to be able to cut a little bit of that in here because

it's so, I find it incredible. My wife and I go every year and get like a ton of, you know, fantastic energy from it. And they get, they have a million audience every year with a tagline by the way of China before communism. So what they're showing, the grandeur, the beauty, the splendor of, and the complexity of traditional China, which from the Chinese regime's perspective, or any communist regime's perspective,

no, we're the ones that are responsible for everything that's good about China. Right. But this show basically epitomizes the idea, no, that's actually untrue. The truth is China has this grand history of 5,000 years and we're going to show it to you. And by the way, and we'll show you a little bit of how the Chinese regime is actually not, not so

good and isn't really responsible for much of that goodness. So anyway, so there's that piece and there's another piece, which I keep thinking about a lot, because this is an issue I've been covering for so long is this organ harvesting issue that we talked about earlier, right? There's actually about six months ago, a survivor of this forced organ harvesting came forth. Whoa.

And I, listen, that's how I feel, because I never thought we'd ever see one exactly, right? And so, you know, my father-in-law, he was a Holocaust survivor and his story, we made a field about it. There's all, every Holocaust survivor I've ever talked to, they have this story where there's this one step they took and it was almost death. Wow. But for whatever reason, they chose a path and it didn't happen.

And, you know, and goes back and forth like that. And out the end, they're like, oh my goodness, I'm in Canada and I'm free. How did this happen? It's, it's almost a miracle. Yeah. That's how this guy, Chen Yiming, that goes back and forth like that. And at the end, they're like, oh my goodness, I'm in Canada and I'm free. How did this happen?

It's, it's almost a miracle. That's how this guy, Chen Mingming, that, that is how he is, uh, uh, survived. Basically he almost died multiple times along the way. But the bottom line is he's got a 14 inch gash across his side where they took out part of his liver and part of his lung. Whoa. And he's alive to tell the tale.

And since that time, you want to talk about breaking narratives, right? This is one narrative that the CCP has been trying to smudge, basically slander the worst possible way. Because how can you admit to having a 10 or 9 to $10 billion organ harvesting industry in your country? It's not big, right? It's that big. I mean, this is, again, it's very hard to estimate the exact numbers.

I don't want to, but, but the estimate is 60 to a hundred thousand transplants every year with no real credible organ donor system. Wow. Okay. And that, and so how did this all happen? Well, what we think, and this is what the China tribunal that happened back in 2020 that have

asserted is that because of this fell and long persecution, see in the communist mentality, if you become the enemy of state, you're not really human anymore. In fact, it's doubtful whether they really think of you as human in the first place, but then now you become like matter to be used, right? For the benefit of the state in a way. So I think some very evil person thought to

themselves, Hey, I have a theory about who, I won't go into it here, but we can use this. We've got millions of these people in the camps and we have this budding organ transplant industry while the persecution of Falun Gong escalates. And the near simultaneously exponential growth in the Chinese transplant industry, new hospitals being built, all of these ads starting to happen. So we actually know it's been happening since the early 2000s, but we only really figured it out in 2006 that this was real because it sounds so outlandish. It sounds so beyond the pale. You know, actually one of the key researchers on it called it an evil yet to be seen on this planet. Wow. And we don't like to believe that people are capable of such things, but this

survivor, the regime really hates them. In fact, what they're trying to do is they're trying to lure him back to China now. And if they can't do that, there's some evidence that they want to kill him. Let's just say he's hiding in America, but I hope he'll come out for another press event soon. You know, it's a remarkable story and really important to know, because think about it. If we knew, if the American population at large understood that in China, this is happening, right? You wonder why some of these, you know, really

old and looking Chinese communist party leaders are living so long. Well, they have unlimited organ supply for each of them. If you're at the top of the pyramid, basically anything can be used to help you to survive or whatever. I'm not, I don't know of a specific instance

where that's happened, but I can tell you that's, that's how it works over there. Right. So I think it's incredibly important. It's a very interesting time where you have Shen Yun, you know, teaching America and frankly, the world about the beauty of traditional culture outside of communism,

which you have this organ harvesting survivor out there that's basically like, I exist. He doesn't even need to say anything. He's just like, look, I'm here. And they even admit they took those organs from him. That's crazy. Or they operated on him. I don't think they said specifically they took the organs. But that's the thing. And then, meanwhile, you have Epoch Times, which has become this huge truth- truth telling media and gained its own reputation and saw its own right. So what we're seeing is this huge push to basically attack

the credibility of all of this in an elevated way. And this, I mentioned this Australian dissident a little while ago, basically he got word in the last few months from his insider sources in China that in 2022 Xi Jinping, the dictator elevated this to having the Minister of State Security actually running this operation because it was so I guess, you know negative for the Chinese regime that they were losing their

credibility and they don't really have much more than you know, whatever for the Chinese regime, that they were losing their credibility. And they don't really have much more than, you know, whatever that is. I, I, there was this narrative for a very long time. And as, as human beings, we've noticed it's very hard to change the narrative, the collective narratives that are in our mind, I think, right? We're actually, I think we're experiencing a time right now where the collective narrative is shifting and I would like to see You know people realize their reality of communist China and by the way, and the one last thing I want to mention

Communist China the leadership is not the Chinese people and this is of absolutely critical importance What the regime fears the most is America and free countries speaking directly to the Chinese people Instead of to this evil regime that pretends to represent them. That's probably the biggest lie it's ever told is like, we represent the people, they do not represent the people. So there's a huge disconnect with the governments and the people. You know, one thing we found is propaganda, you know, you've been kicking around for a while, you know how effective propaganda can be in any country, right?

So of course, there's people in China that are, you know, that, that believe some of the things the regime will say. You don't know what else to believe. There's a, you know, there's a, what's called the great firewall of China, the most effective system. Yeah. They censor everything, right? 100%.

Of course, you know, we use a system called Freegate and another one called Itzl Shipp to punch holes in that firewall and get information across in millions. We deep talk times from inside China, all Chinese and English and in other languages. So there's ways to do that, but it's hard because it's a highly sophisticated, multi billion dollar system to keep the Chinese people to information away from them.

Right. But I do feel like we're really, because we're in this very interesting time where narratives are being shattered and people are becoming more open-minded the regime feels pretty and of course because of this economic You know kind of brewing disaster that they're facing they really want to stop The reality of all of that being exposed and we've been we've been kind of the tip of the spear on that Yeah, I don't think they'll be able to hold off all this information. I think it's gonna get there eventually Well, and and here's something, right?

We have a new administration. You notice that Kerry Lake has been nominated to be the director of the Voice of America, right? Voice of America's constitutional charter is basically to talk about America, you know, honestly, right, not from a political perspective, but just honestly. And also, you know, report on things like the

realities of communist China. That would also be a fit very nicely under the U.S. Charter. It's very interesting. You know, Carrie, I know her personally. She's been in media for decades, been incredibly successful, you know, broadcast host and so forth.

And I know she understands these things, right? So they fear that they fear this greatly. So you'll see, you know, unfortunately, the Chinese regime has huge amounts of money in Washington, DC, has a huge influence on various legacy media. And they're using, in my view, sometimes these, these people are being used in unwitting ways. Right. Okay.

And actually there's a, there's a great Chinese dissident from New York Chinatown that talks about this, you know, in the nineties, he, he says, I was one of these people. I was so pro China, right? Because I thought they had convinced me that being pro CCP is the same thing as being pro China. And also they were supporting all my efforts, which was very nice and convenient, right?

But then he kind of, it just, he, after nine 11, you know what the Chinese regime did, a lot of people still don't know this. They celebrated the attacks on the world trade center. They felt there were documentaries made that said, look, America deserves this. No way. Okay. Hundred percent. Right.

That's what opened his eyes. He's like, you know what? I've been on the wrong side. I need to tell the truth here. Right. Wow. But so there's a ton of people. I, this is what I mean.

I don't want to like, I, uh, there's some people that are getting paid to push the Chinese regimes, op options, but there's other people that are getting paid to push the Chinese regimes options, but there's other people that are just sort of kind of along for the ride. And maybe, you know, the incentive, you know, when, when you're incentivized in a very positive way, for example, financially, it's harder for you to think opposite to what that financial incentive is, right? Going into the, the three warfare's doctrine. We'll write up on this, but when I was growing up, when you thought of war, it was just physical violence, but there's much more to war than that, right?

Oh, 100%. So, well, this is, you know, there's a book that was written by two Chinese colonels who are now generals. This was years ago. It was called Unrestricted Warfare. And Unrestricted Warfare was a book that basically explained using a lot of actual traditional ideas from, for example, Sun Tzu, right, which you've heard about explaining how can we win a war without having to fire a shot, right?

And so this is it's worth reading this manual. I mean, it's kind of it's a mind blowing thing. But among what's in there, among other things, is what's called the three warfares. And the three warfares are psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and legal warfare. The combination of these three is incredibly effective. And it sounds, hey, are those really warfare? Yeah. Yes.

Right. And I might add economic warfare has been a huge play. You know how America has been hollowed out from the manufacturing side and the Chinese manufacturer You could say while the Chinese were just very smart and you know and a lot of people You know rich people in America made a killing of moving their manufacturing there or you could think of it as a as you said long game play to make America impotent from a manufacturing perspective and make the world dependent on China from a manufacturing perspective,

to the point where something like 20% of medical precursors in America, very important medicines, are now manufactured exclusively in China. They could cut those off. They threatened to do it during the pandemic. Wow. You see, talk about leverage from a now military perspective, right?

So legal warfare, lawsuits, right? So legal warfare lawsuits, right, it's just kind of the simplest way, drain things. You know, we're in the process of, one of our CFO had an issue a while ago. It's not related to the epoch times, right? But this, what I'm saying is this is very much in the CCP's interest. And there's been all sorts of other lawsuits that have been pushed out against Shen Yun and the fast. For example, you know, environmental lawsuits against the campus where Shen Yun was done, repeatedly rejected, but draining them to the tune of millions of dollars, right? That's just one example. You know, the media warfare and so forth, media influence, it's huge.

Especially when, and unfortunately, there's a strong correlation between a lot of the media that have been writing, for example, hit pieces about Epoch Times. And let's just say financial interests in China. I'm not saying that they specifically were told you have to do this. But I'm saying that that alignment exists. And of course these things influence us in various ways at a minimum. Right. And of course it could, it could be worse than that. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's been really fun talking to John and man, where can people find you

and keep up with you? Oh, well, well, American thought leaders is my show. Uh, it's on, uh, epoch TV, which is our streaming platform. I also have a YouTube channel, which actually, you know, you know, it was actually censored really heavily for a while, but we've noticed it's starting to kind of gain a bit of life there. So I've been putting 22 minute TV versions of my shows from Epoch TV on YouTube.

So you can check us out on YouTube. We have some great new episodes on exactly these issues right now. And of course, theepochtimes.com, that's the website. And, you know, please join us. We'll link it all below. Thanks for coming on, man. Thatachtimes.com, that's the website. And please join us. We'll link it all below. Thanks for coming on, man. That was awesome. Love talking with you, man. That was great. See you guys. Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your back

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