The Jordan Harbinger Show - 763: Laowhy86 | China Uprising | Out of the Loop

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Laowhy86 (@laowhy86) — aka Matthew Tye, aka C-Milk — is a Westerner who lived in China for 10 years, and watched it change from an opening and liberalizing society into regression and authoritarianism. His YouTube videos explain China, Chinese culture, and Chinese politics, and decode Chinese propaganda so viewers are armed with the knowledge to identify and resist it. Welcome to what we’re calling our “Out of the Loop” episodes, where we dig a little deeper into fascinating current events that may only register as a blip on the media’s news cycle and have conversations with the people who find themselves immersed in them. Here, Laowhy86 joins us to share his Westerner’s perspective — with those of us out of the loop — on the uprisings going on in China right now over the government’s draconian lockdowns and ongoing human rights abuses. Listen, learn, and enjoy! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/763 On This Episode of Out of the Loop, We Discuss: Welded into an apartment building in China’s Xinjiang region to prevent their escape during the Chinese government’s strict “zero-COVID” lockdowns, 10 people — including a three-year-old child — were killed when a fire broke out. The violent crackdown by authorities during a candlelight vigil for victims of the fire escalated into massive protests against the government, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, across China — at a scale unseen since 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre. Coordinated across 79 universities in China, these protests have evolved to include demands for political reform and an end to corruption — a rare display of unity among a population so long repressed by a regime that traditionally punishes dissent with social stigma, imprisonment, and death. The intensity of these protests is surprising given the effectiveness of surveillance tools used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the past. This indicates that there is a larger sentiment for dissent among the population than may be visibly apparent. What this wave of protests portends for the future of China, its people, its historically inflexible authoritarian government, and its place on the global stage. And much more! Connect with Jordan on Twitter, on Instagram, and on YouTube. If you have something you’d like us to tackle here on an Out of the Loop episode, drop Jordan a line at [e-mail] and let him know! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with David...See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. A massive, huge crackdown. The real bloodbath is happening behind closed doors, behind the scenes. The government is making sure that anybody involved wasn't listened to. They're punished. They're arrested and their lives are over. They'll never be able to participate in society normally again. They'll never be able to join the government or get a state job or anything like this.

So they do not want to see more protests happen. Because what happens when more protests happen is maybe next time, the police actually join the protesters. Maybe next time the PLA and the riot police actually join with the people that are calling for the CCP to step down. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional four-star general Russian spy, former jihadi or Nero scientist. And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding

of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, welcome, or you want to tell your friends about the show, thank you. Our starter packs are the best place to do that. These are collections of top or maybe just some of my favorite episodes, organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Topics like China, North Korea, persuasion and influence, disinformation and cyber warfare, abnormal psychology, and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com. Start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, another installment of our Out of the Loop series where we explore topics current in the

news that might be covered poorly by mainstream news sources, maybe they're a bit complex, or maybe they just go in one ear and out the other for some reason. In this episode, we're talking about the China protests, the ones about zero COVID. And sure, these started with COVID lockdowns and bad zero COVID policies from the Chinese Communist Party, but they've evolved into something much more prolific. They're nationwide. It's very much an important event or set of events for the people and for the government of China. We're going to be doing a deep dive into that today with Lauai 86, former show guest, China vlogger, YouTuber, and good friend of mine who spent over a decade living and working in China

and traveling all over China by motorbike. Really interesting guy, tons of stories. His China-focused YouTube channels have well over a million subscribers. The dude knows China and follows Chinese news on the daily. This is what he focuses on day in and day out. This is going to be a really interesting look at the current unrest happening over there in China. All right, out of the loop, episode two. Here we go with Lau Y86. So thanks for coming back on the show, man. I know this is our Out of the Loop series. It's a little bit of a different format where we go over a lot of these news events that go in one ear and out the other. And with China, well, who better to talk to about China than you guys, but also it's a little bit confusing even for us China watchers because

China's been under zero COVID policy for a while. They went into lockdown. We didn't hear a whole lot about it. Dot, dot, dot, people throwing chairs at guys in white suits all over TikTok and Instagram. What is happening? Yeah, so I guess the biggest thing that really kicked this off was there was this fire that happened in Xinjiang. So this is all the way in Western China.

And I gotta be honest with you, like I was surprised at how much coverage this fire was getting because fires in China and then the firefighters and police and their lack of access to people in the building, that catch on fire is a very common occurrence throughout the entire country. This is not like a new thing. But for some reason, this specific event in Xinjiang just really triggered off a wave of protests of just people that wanted to show their solidarity with the victims in the building. People wanted to have candlelight vigils and things like this. And it was almost like the

violent crackdown from the authorities across the country for these candlelight vigils, for these protests was what really kind of created a reaction against the authorities. It created this situation where it happened in the city called Arumchi. They had kind of this protest or a candlelight vigil type thing on a road in Shanghai called Arumchi Road because it was symbolic of the area. And then when the cops started cracking down on it, people were like, what are you talking about? We can't have a candlelight visual. What are you talking about? We can't mourn over these people. And that's really what sparked this off. But it was a simultaneous thing. So for people who don't know, Xinjiang, that's where the Uyghurs live.

We've done shows on the Uyghur genocide. It's a little bit weird, and I'm grateful to hear it. I'm glad to hear it, but it's a little bit odd that a fire in a place where a lot of people in China think, oh, that's where the terrorist separatists live, that was the tipping point because you would almost think, and I guess this just shows how wrong I am about how people think about Xinjiang inside Shanghai, at least. You would almost think they would go, oh, well, well, those aren't real Chinese people. They're not Han Chinese people.

but that's not what happened. You'd almost think they'd let something like that go more because it is so far away from the Han Chinese areas. And to clarify, the reason so many people died in this fire is because, if I understand it correctly, the residents of that building were welded into the building because of COVID lockdowns. It's not like lockdowns here where they say,

please don't go outside. You're literally trapped in your own building like a prison. Right. So they didn't have access to it. And I would actually agree with you that it seems kind of weird that there would be kind of so much support from Han Chinese people elsewhere throughout China. However, I do want to counter, because I don't want there to be any misinformation. A huge chunk of Arunqi are Han people.

A lot of the discourse and stuff was coming from Han people within Arumchi. When I looked at the protests that were in on Arumchi streets, I saw the vast majority of people were Han Chinese people. So that's just something to keep in mind. There's another thing. It was a rare coordinated effort I saw throughout 79 plus universities around China. And if anything is going to happen in China, I always thought it's definitely going to happen from the educated populace.

It's going to be happening from the people that have access to VPNs or even just have a better understanding of what the outside world is probably like. And this coordinated effort, there was this white paper going around talking about all of the problems that the zero COVID policy has brought. There was insinuations that the Chinese government was doing things wrong. and this was a moment in something I hadn't seen since Tiananmen Square in 1989 where all of these students in all these universities pretty much at the same time stood up and had their speeches.

They had their loudspeakers. They organized protests. They had graffiti movements. All of these things came together to really paint the Chinese government in a very negative light. And I've never seen something so coordinated in a country that cracks down so much on coordinated efforts or demonstrations. So it was really the beginning. This is interesting because I think a lot of people go, so what, there's a lot of white paper, shwhite paper, there's all kinds of articles in

the United States about how our government screwed this up or that up. It happens in Europe. It happens in Canada. It doesn't really happen in China. You don't have coordinated efforts that say, hey, our dictator, our government, our infallible communist party is implementing a policy that actually really sucks and is wrong and is backwards and is incorrect and the result is bad. That just doesn't happen. No. And again, I think what people have to understand, too, is that you can't look at this through a Western lens or even a lens of any other country because China has spent the past few years

creating the most robust surveillance state in the entire world. Everything you do is tied to your national ID card. So everything you post online is not anonymous. Everything that you do in the streets, you could be facial recognized through the camera system. You have to use your QR code, which was starting. started during the COVID pandemic to allow yourself access to banks, restaurants, public areas, right? All of this stuff has been created to create levels of surveillance where no one can get away with anything. And the crazy thing is, is as big brother as this is, this is rarely used to

prevent actual crime. This surveillance state is rarely used to go catch a guy that stole someone's bike. This surveillance state is being used to stop gatherings of people. So that's why, to go back to the protest thing. It was so shocking to see this many people come together in a anti-government policy slash turned into anti-government protest. And to see that many people coordinate in a system that doesn't allow any coordination where they can stop a we chat group, which is the app that Chinese people use to talk to each other,

to stop it in its tracks before anyone can make plans. Hey, meet me on Nanjing-Lu over there. Hey, we're going to meet here at this time. They can stop all that before it even happens. before you people even come together, right? So it shows you these protests actually, without the surveillance state, these protests could have been massive,

like absolutely huge. So but to see that much coordination was shocking to me. I see. So since the government and security apparatus controls all the online discussion groups, the fact that these protests got so big with that control in place

means that without that control in place they could have been 10 times the size. This was just an unstoppable force, which is, again, highly unusual. And protests don't happen like this in China ever. You mentioned the last big one was 1989, Tiananmen Square. I don't know if you're a history expert on this off the top of your head, but do you remember the death toll of that event

and how big the scale of that event was by any chance? There's no way to know officially just because it was, it's been erased from the annals of history. But, you know, the estimates are anywhere from 1,000 to upwards of 10,000 students murdered during that protest, right? And the thing about that is that it's something that has been lost in the memory of all the Chinese people that weren't there because they weren't taught in school about this thing. But it's one of those things that's like the first thing you see when you get a VPN is like stuff about Tiananmen Square. It's just like it's almost like you're greeted with that.

That's like the first confrontational bit. Is that because people are looking for it because they've heard about it in whispers and they're like, okay, I finally have Google Tiananmen Square? I have no statistics on this, but I can say this. The vast majority of people, when I lived in China for 10 years, the vast majority of people that I knew that knew about it, which, by the way, was in the minority. The vast majority of people that did know about it found out because they either had a professor in a different area, so maybe in Hong Kong or Macau, that talked about it, or they had friends that studied in a different country that heard about it in their classes,

and then what they would do is that would inspire them to try to find a way to get a VPN. And that's one of the first things they would look up. But yeah, the vast majority of people I know in China didn't even really know about it. Or if they did know about it, it's kind of like, oh, that was like a bad, crazy group of students that got cracked down by the government. They were just separatists. It was a CIA color revolution. Right, yeah. I often will ask my Chinese teachers who are in China if they've heard of this protest.

And some of them say no. And some of them say yes. And then they don't want to talk about it. And others say yes. And then they'll talk about it. And then their internet gets disconnected. and our lesson ends, which I used to think that was a funny coincidence, but it's happened like 10 times and is definitely not a coincidence anymore,

which is the most 1984 thing kind of ever. In fact, one teacher, we talked about it, we got disconnected, and the next time we talked, and when I asked her something, I said, hey, what happened last time? She did like this with her mouth, and she was like, no, like just literally don't even ask me about this, because she probably had the police come and knock on her door and be like, maybe you don't talk about that anymore.

I have to look at your gas meter or whatever the euphemism is. and I've shown the Tankman photo on Skype to some teachers, and they've never seen it. This is such a weird thing. So Google Tankman, if you don't know what this is, but it's one of the most famous photos in the world. It's from Tiananmen Square. It's a man standing in front of a tank. And that man has never been seen again, of course, after that because he got disappeared

by the police or the secret police, whatever, in China, the Communist Party, after this photo was taken. And it's one of the most iconic photos. Like, if you had top 10 most iconic photos in history, that's going to be in there. And almost knowing, you can test this with friends. If you have friends who are in China, you can test this by showing them this.

And they almost certainly will have not seen this photo, whereas almost everyone in the rest of the world who has internet slash has gone to school for any length of time has seen this photo. Yes, absolutely. And I think when you look at a photo like this, when you see Tankman, you see something so iconic

that's not really permeated the zeitgeist in China, you'd have to say, like, well, it's crazy that, people aren't making comparisons in the current protests like in China to this, right? But I think the most important part of that photo is what happened to Tankman afterwards. Like you said, he was disappeared. Nobody knows where he is now, right? That's what's currently happening now.

And I think there's a huge, huge problem with, I hate using the term mainstream media or Western media. Yeah, because it makes us sound like those weird, like creepy left or right way. Tinfoil hat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, that's not where I'm going with this. Where I'm going is the short-sightedness of looking at these protests is dangerous.

I'll tell you why, it's dangerous for the Chinese people, and it's dangerous for future demonstrations as well. Because what happened at Tankman afterwards, he was disappeared. And I feel like that's really not part of the dialogue. That's not like, people look at that and they're like, oh, either assume he was like run over or, oh, like, this shows the brutality of the crackdown the protesters in Tiananmen Square. Nobody's talking about the aftermath of what's happening with a protest right now in China.

And what's happening is I'm turning on the news and I'm seeing people say, look, it seems like the protests worked. China's reducing their COVID restrictions. Look, China's rolling back COVID restrictions because of the protesters. And it's almost insinuating that the Chinese government is listening to their citizens and that it's some sort of reforming country that allows dissent and discourse to influence policy. And that's just simply not the case. And I can actually just say something that's fairly breaking right now. What's happening in Guangzhou? Guangzhou is a first-tier city in the south of China.

There was tons and tons of protests against zero COVID policy and against Xi Jinping and the CCP. First-tier city means what? Like over five million people? In the U.S. It would be New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, et cetera. Cities, everybody knows. Yeah. So first-tier city, there's only four of them in China.

There's Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing. Those are the big, big ones. It's less to do with population, more to do with, like, infrastructure and influence. So anyway, Guangzhou, one of the main city, we just say main cities of China, huge, huge area for these protests. Right now, literally right now, the police and secret police are doing a mass arrest of all of the protesters that participated. And I'm talking about from the people that were throwing the gates, like you said,

at the pandemic workers and the police, all the way down to the people that held up A blank piece of paper, an A4-sized piece of paper, the A4 Revolution, so to speak. Let's talk about that for a second, because I think people have probably gone on social media and seen people yelling at guys in white suits, and they don't necessarily know what those people are. It looks like kind of a B-roll from a pandemic movie, like a crappy, low-budget one, because a bunch of dudes in, like, kind of cheap-looking, not really has-mat suits, more like paint suits with a mask on, and they're getting temporary barricade chucked at them while people film on an Android phone.

And I'm making a joke out of it, but it's like, it's very serious, obviously, because these people are are fighting for the end to lockdown. But it went from these protests, I think the significant part here is that we may be missed is this protest went from, hey man, I got to go to the store and buy food. I got to get medicine for my baby who's got a fever. I've got an old person in here who needs health care, et cetera. The protest went from that because they've been locked down for months to, wait a minute. Actually, you know what?

What I want is for you to listen. me. Maybe I need more rights, not just the right to go to the grocery store because I'm in an authoritarian regime that has too strong of a lockdown. Maybe we need democracy. And the chance on the songs kind of went from just banging pots and pans because they wanted to be let out of their house to maybe we need a regime change because nobody's listening to us over in Beijing. People started holding up these A4-sized white pieces of paper. What's that all about? So there is this idea that, hey, if you're going to hold up slogans, like, I don't know if your audience remembers banner man. Banner man's a guy that stood on Sittong Bridge in Beijing and unveiled a banner with like a manifesto of sorts.

Say no to the lockdowns. Xi Jinping stepped down, you know, that kind of stuff? Yeah, which does not happen. That's like going, Kim Jong-il, you're not a good leader. We need elections. That guy was Tankman 2.0. So if you're going to unveil a banner like that, you're dead. You're just dead.

They will blackbag you and take you away and probably torture you and kill you, right? So the idea is that if you unveil a banner with something on it, that's what gets you arrested. But hey, how can you get arrested for just holding a blank piece of paper? Because everyone knows what you want to say. And so the implication was everyone knows what I want to say. But I'm not allowed to say it. But I'm not allowed to say it. So if I hold up that blank piece of paper and everyone does it, it sends a massive signal.

And then people will start looking it up, right? You got hashtag A4 revolution after that, A4 being the size of the paper. paper, right? So that became like this very easy to spread protest method. And one thing I wanted to mention, I think it's really important. You brought up a really good point. To go from saying, I don't want to be locked in my house anymore. To go from saying, like, I want to be able to go out and buy groceries to, I want Xi Jinping to step down. I want the CCP to step down as a pretty massive leap, right, especially in China. I think people, I got to understand, this is not like in the U.S. where you maybe change your opinion from.

I don't like a current Biden policy to like, I want communism in the country. You know what I mean? Right. Somebody who says, I don't want to have to get the vaccine, the COVID vaccine to go to work. And then the next week they're going, you know what? Actually, we need to blow up the White House and everyone in it needs to be murdered. It's like, whoa, whoa, man, calm down. Where did that come from?

And sure. That's what we're looking at with China because the bridge guy, banner guy, he threw that banner up there. And despite all of this being censored and shut down on social media in China, people still found out about it. And people were air dropping this message to other people, photographs of it, to the point where didn't Apple have to get involved somehow? Explain this, because this is crazy to me. Yeah. So for everyone out there that doesn't use Apple, AirDrop is a tool on your Apple phone that you can use, well, any Apple device that you can use to send files to other people with an iPhone or another Apple device.

And this doesn't use traditional internet, right? You're not uploading to some sort of server where the government could just see what's in that folder. It's phone to phone. It's phone to phone. So, like, I could send you a picture of Winnie the Pooh meme or something, right? So this was happening. This was happening all over Shanghai and Beijing where people were taking Banner Man's manifesto.

So all of his things, no more lockdown. war, Xi Jinping, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they were making stylized pictures and sending it to each other phone to phone through AirDrop. And what happened was actually I saw there was this post that was going around in China, say it was some sort of tech group that was run by the Chinese government talking about how they immediately needed to come up with some way to stop this. And that you, as a user, shouldn't accept any pictures or anything from AirDrop because

you could be politically liable. You could be liable for detention, things like this. So it was trying to scare people. Like there's a phrase that doesn't exist in the United States or the rest of the free world, politically liable. Yeah, correct. You could potentially be punished for something that somebody sends you, right? And so that was an effort to scare people. But then what we saw was Apple actually capitulate to the Chinese government in China

and turn off a certain feature of airdrop that means that you wouldn't be able to receive stuff necessarily automatically from a stranger, right? So it effectively stopped this whole AirDrop Revolution thing where they're trying to send these documents to each other. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, LaWai 86. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over atjordanharbinger.com slash course. The course is about improving your relationship building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. And the course does all of that in a super easy, down-to-earth, non-cringy, non-networky kind of way,

no awkward strategies, no cheesy tactics, really just practical exercises that are going to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, all in six minutes a day. That's really all it takes. Ain't nobody got time for more than that. By the way, many of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. And you can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to LaWai 86. Right, because right now, if I have AirDrop and I allow everyone to send me things, people can freely send me unsolicited dickpicks on my phone while I'm on an aircraft,

which is what happens all the time, by the way. Every time I'm on a damn plane, someone's trying to send me something with AirDrop, and sometimes it's a funny meme, and usually it's something disgusting because people are crazy. But you just leave it on and you can receive anything, and it says, do you want to accept this? And you're like, sure, whatever unknown user, who cares. That got turned off in China. I think now you can use airdrop, but it turns off automatically after like five minutes or something like that. So if your friend wants to send, yeah, 10 minutes. So if your friend wants to send you something, they can do it. But you have to know to turn it on, which effectively stops somebody

from hanging out at a park bench in the center of Beijing and just sending it to everybody who will accept it because nobody's got their air drop on. You can't just leave it on. And Apple rewrote that software for the Chinese Communist Party to be able to censor the free spread of information, which is mind-blowing, but also not terribly surprising because the consequences were probably either you don't sell a single iPhone here or make another one here ever, and we close all your stores, or you rewrite this piece of code and don't tell anyone. There's a bit of a double-edged sword because, like, they did that and then simultaneously made the announcement that they're pulling most production out of China.

Yeah, they just didn't want to do it. tomorrow, right, which is what they would have had to be phasing. Yeah. They were between a rock and a hard place because when you do a deal with the devil, you don't necessarily get to dictate all the terms. Like, that's the whole idea. So if you're using slave labor or near slave labor in another country to create a product, you can't be upset when the slave driver says, hey, by the way, I'm changing my policy

and you have no choice. That's what you're dealing with. That's a good point, actually, because that was one of the many efforts that the Chinese government was doing to stop this. They were trying to stop this from spreading all the way down to the minute detail, like something like airdropper, you wouldn't even think would be a protest to at that point. Sure. It's kind of like akin to dropping balloons of leaflets over North Korea.

I mean, the average person is not going to know about this. So the fact that they were going to that level and they're investigating all the people like putting up down with Xi Jinping, you spray paint in bathrooms, which to the average person doesn't mean anything, but in China is huge. They're sending their top secret police and investigators, like the equivalent. of the FBI to go figure out who's spray painted in a bathroom, right? Imagine you make it to the top of our class at Beijing University, and you're like a master of all of these different spy methodologies and tradecraft,

and they're like, all right, here's what you're going to be doing this week. Every public restroom in Beijing, we want you to inspect that thing, top to bottom. Get in there, man. Get in there. Yes. Here's a paint marker. But it shows you why the Chinese government does this. Yeah.

Because it can really, really change, right? So to go back, it goes from, I want to go grocery shopping and not be locked down anymore because I heard my neighbors starve to death to down with Xi Jinping. And I'll tell you, I watch this happen on video so that you can see clips where people in the crowd, they're so shocked already that there's a protest. They're like, holy shit, what is actually happening in my street here in China? There are people on the street protesting and throwing stuff at cops, right? That's already a shock.

You can hear people ask, what is this about, right? Oh, it's about zero COVID lockdown. Then the protests will say something like, you know, down with the Chinese government. Gongchandang shatai, like step down. Step down, yeah. And then all of a sudden, the, you know, 50, 60 year old woman behind the camera who's filming this protest goes, you know what? Yeah, yeah.

Step down government, you know. And it's that quick because there's so much repressed buildup of frustration. We're talking like almost three years of lockdowns that have created. People aren't stupid. They know where this is coming from. The Chinese government has tried so hard to say, oh, anytime there's bullshit happening where people are upset about the lockdowns, that's just a local issue.

They've tried this for so long and it usually works, but there is so much pent-up frustration when it finally affects that person. They say, wait a minute, this is happening to me too. And I did a sample, right? I talked to people that I knew would have no idea about these protests. They would have absolutely no clue. You're talking about Americans or Chinese people? No, Chinese people.

Okay. And I talked to people in China and I said, hey, is everything okay? I heard about these protests right in the midst of everything. And the person would say, oh, oh, yeah, that was just one road in Guangzhou, right? And in my mind, I'm like, wait, this is in like 100 cities. That was just a one road in Guangzhou. And by the way, that has nothing to do with anything.

Those were migrant workers. They were from Hubei. That's what my Chinese teacher said. Oh, it's just very local. It's very small. I've never seen it. Also, I think the audio on the videos that you're looking at is fake.

And I'm like, these are videos from people in crowds. This is not CNN fabricating a bunch of crap to make China look bad, but okay. So the idea was that, oh, if you can localize and place a blame on something that has nothing to do with you, right? Then all of a sudden it becomes a distant issue. And the Chinese government uses as dissonance

on purpose all the time. But again, during these protests is the first time I saw that breakdown. That kind of narrative broke down because I think the lockdowns became so prolific that it's not just, oh, just Wuhan's lockdown. Oh, just Guangzhou's lockdown. Now it's like, okay, we went through a bunch of lockdowns too and I'm tired of it. So all of a sudden, it becomes tantalizing to say, yeah, maybe this is coming from the top. You know what this also shows me is that, and this is

true for authoritarian regimes all over the place, North Korea, China, Belarus. You're just, in an authoritarian regime, you're just never sure how many people agree with what's in your head, especially if you're a dissident, you might get wasted with a college roommate or whatever you have and go, you know what, it's pretty freaking screwed up that we have to do X, Y, Z. And if you're seven whiskeys in, they might be like, yeah, you know what, this is a bunch of crap. And you sober up the next day and you go, do we talk about that? Do we want to pretend we don't remember that? And it's like, maybe we don't talk about that with everybody on the whole floor and the whole class. That's sort of a microcosm, right? Maybe a husband says something to the wife, but they don't

want to say it to the kids because it might come out at school. And you're just not sure. Do the other parents think this way? Or are we just weirdos that think, hey, our rationing system is kind of bullshit? And these protests really prove that many, many, many people are like-minded and they want big changes because a couple gutsy people go out in the street and say this. And everyone, like you said, the IE goes, you know what? While we're on a roll of this lockdown thing, I do agree with the fact that this is broken and this is broken and this is broken and this is broken. You're right. This is not good. And so you start to see in public, which is why the government always wants to prevent gatherings and people chatting online, you do see that a lot of people agree with you.

And it's in the Communist Party's best interest to stifle that discussion so that everybody thinks that they are in island and alone. And that's failing here. It is, and it's something that I saw often when I was in China is that there was always, let's say like when I was teaching university, there was always one kid in the class that was just like he didn't gel with the other people right and he would always be better at English and he would be better at kind of thinking outside the box he probably had a VPN he was reading outside news and stuff and that person was a weirdo that person was like not ostracized because it's like nobody's calling him a traitor or anything like this but he's just weird he doesn't blend in with everyone else right and that's by design

it's this kind of idea that you have to fit in right he's really woke. Yeah, you have to fit in, right? But at the same time, it's not that all the kids that ostracized him didn't agree with them. It's not that they actually thought what he thought was wrong. It's just because he stuck out, right? And that's what's necessary in China in a collective society slash in a society where everything is dictated by the government. If you have enough people come out and say it, then it turns out that a lot of people actually believe that. And so the Chinese government has done many things to preempt this. This is Harvard stuff. that they always use in talking about the satisfaction of the people, the 90% of Chinese

peoples are satisfied with the central government, right? When they don't actually have any perceived interaction with the central government. Most people aren't allowed to speak, but the ones that we allowed to speak and answered the survey were, by and large, very happy with the government. It's just flawed from the get-go because what you're talking about is a repressed society where people are not going to be transparent in that survey. Number two, they don't have their perceived image of Beijing or, Xi Jinping is very different than what they deal with, the bullshit that they do with at home,

with their local government. The Chinese government has successfully created this image of an infallible kind of palace in Beijing that dictates everything supremely, and it can't be wrong. But then anything you deal with, if you have any transgressions against government, there's a factory that's caused all the kids in the village to have cancer, and there's an unsolved rape case from a CCP official in your village, all the stuff that I saw when I was in China, that's just local. Again, that's just blaming the local populace, the local government, and that's nothing to do with Beijing. So the propaganda works to a certain extent. But when the protest kicked up, people kind of finally saw outside the box and stopped being

apathetic to the situation and said, wait a minute, there is some bullshit going on. I want to talk a little bit about the physical and technical controls over COVID in China, because I think people go lockdowns, okay, wait, but they're really locked in their building? It's actually worse than that in a lot of ways. for those of us that live in a free society, argue as we might about what we're free in and what we're not, physically being locked in your apartment is crazy. And also the barriers that are outside. So even when you do get a pass to go out, you can't just go wherever you want. I mean, there's footage on the China show, your show, where there are drones flying around between high rises. And there's a loudspeaker. And it says something like, please close your windows. Please do not bang pots and pans or whatever. And it's just the most Orwellian crazy.

dystopian cyberpunk whatever stuff that I've ever seen in real life. And I've been to North Korea. They just don't have the technology to repress like this. Yeah, I have to make the comparison. It's just North Korea with technology. It is. But yeah, a lot of you guys probably saw the footage of people getting welded into their houses and stuff. And obviously that wasn't the government standard or something. These are outlier cases. But there was enough to cause serious alarm abroad when those videos went out. The real stuff that people went through was the barriers, the gates around their complex, not being able to go to work,

to go to eat. They think about the lockdowns they might have gone through in America or in different countries. And I remember that was two weeks where I couldn't go on my favorite hiking trail. I couldn't go to my favorite restaurant. But they could still go outside.

They could still walk around. They could still, if they wanted to, they could still go interact with people. In China, what it meant is arbitrarily being stuck in your apartment, you can't go to work. You can't earn money in many cases. You can't buy food.

You can't do anything. Everything is at the whim of the government. So to zoom in on a place like in Shanghai, you had the government go, you know, we're going to lock you all down for months. And you're not going to be able to actually leave your apartment, but we'll make sure you're fed. And even that fell through. There were cases of people starving to death. People were getting rotten vegetables. There was corruption in this supposedly infallible system of China where, yeah, maybe we're a bit brutal and we're kind of like North Korea with technology.

But at least we take care of our citizens, we get stuff done, you know, big infrastructure projects or big movements like getting food to people. It all falls flat because there was corruption involved. People were selling the vegetables, selling all of the food. People weren't getting their deliveries. Deliveries were getting stolen and pilfered and sent to other places. So it just didn't work. And so people started to get worried.

It's like, okay, you can lock me down. You can cause me mental and emotional distress. You can cut me off from the rest of the world. but at least I can take care of my most basic needs. And the Chinese government simply just couldn't do that. So you had a situation where people were literally ostracized from all society, potentially for years. I mean, there was a place in Shanghai province.

This is kind of near Tibet where people for four months were locked inside of a wet market, like where you buy food and vegetables. Like they went to the store to go buy some food and then they just couldn't leave and they stayed there for four months. Yes. Imagine getting trapped in Costco for four months. Actually, that's not the worst place. I know.

It's not the worst. You're stuck in Dollar General for four months. That's where you're stuck for four months. Yeah, you're stuck in Dollar General. Yes. So jokes aside, imagine that. One anecdote gets out like this, how much this is happening throughout the country. And again, I think Shanghai and well-represented places got hyper-covered because there's

lots of foreigners there or there's just, it's well-known. but there are so many places in China in the countryside or outside the major cities where these people have been locked for months and months and months, literally in their tiny, tiny box in the sky apartment where they can't do anything or leave or even sometimes get fresh air. I mean, the Chinese government was trying to get people

to close their windows at some point and not let people sing out the window. It's truly dystopian, right? And again, I think that the Chinese populace is probably the one population of people that could really put up with a lot. We say in Chinese, you say, ch'i-cool, which means like eat bitter,

the ability to eat bitter and to suffer. I mean, the Chinese are unparalleled in their ability to do so. It's just been a repressive society for really all of eternity. And I think it's just gotten to the point where even the Chinese are like, this is just too much.

I think you're right. I wonder, in a competition to suffer and eat bitter, who would win the Chinese are the Russians, man? It's close. These are two societies that are like professional level take shit from their regime for decades slash centuries at a time. Sure. I think I'm going to give it to the Chinese just because is oppressive and repressive as Russia is,

China just takes the cake. Like there are so many things still that you could do in Russia that you can't do in China, right? The Internet is still just absolutely more blocked and cut off from the rest of the world than Russia is. Yeah, that's true. We'd have to add in the Soviet Union and everything, though, and then the great leap forward we got over in China. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a tough competition. Jokes aside, though. This brings up a greater point here, which is that economic freedom was one of the only actual freedoms, and I'm putting that in air quotes, that people had in communist China. And that's now he wrote it. The unspoken deal has always kind of been in the last 20, 30 years. Don't question the Chinese Communist Party. you can earn a living, you can start a business, you can engage in capitalism, and you can bring your family's standard of living up a zillion notches from this agrarian subsistence farming

that they were doing even in like the 80s, right? But you don't question the power of the party. You don't question the type of government we have. You don't question the officials. But this is starting to chip and crack because now the economic freedom is gone. You're locked in your apartment. You can't run your business. Your restaurant is closed. The government's not going to help you. They're not even going to feed you.

They're going to, like you said, send you rotten stocks of vegetables that have been stripped of leaves because the person who was distributing them decided to sell those for a profit and take the money for himself. And so that unspoken deal, that bargain is no longer even being held up by the CCP Chinese Communist Party. And so people are starting to say, well, wait a minute. We put up with your bullshit because you were allowing. us to do these other things, but now you're going to take those away and leave us with nothing?

Okay, fine, now we're going to throw plates out the window or whatever. You know, they were going to put up with the daily COVID testing that you needed. They were going to put up with the QR code. Actually, tell us about this, the QR code system on the phone. Can you describe this a little? This is also quite dystopian and Orwellian. Yeah, so there's a QR code system that Chinese people have to, or force to use, where you basically need a QR code on your phone to get into,

to anywhere, right? You're not allowed to get on a bus. You're not allowed to get on a train. You're not allowed to get into your work building. You're not allowed to go into a grocery store or a wetmark or anything. Every single facet of life needs this QR code. And you're only allowed to get into these places if that QR code is green. If it's yellow, if it changes to yellow, that means someone in the area, there's a case or there's at least a warning of a case. And if it's red, it means that you yourself have been directly in contact with COVID. So that means you're sent off to the quarantine camps, right? At least that's what it was until fairly recently. So this QR code system has dictated everyone's life for the past, I don't know, a couple of years that it's been implemented.

And it's really proven that this whole thing for the Chinese government was less about COVID and more about a control mechanism for the people because what has been demonstrated time and time again is that there have been protests leading up to what we've seen recently, the big ones. And what happens is, let's say a bank refuses to give people, their investments, right? All of a sudden, people crowd around the bank and they hold up placards and they're like, hey, bank, give me some money. What the government will do is they can manually, because let's be honest, is controlled by the central government, they can just turn everyone's codes to red. So then that protest gets dispersed. Everyone gets arrested. Everyone goes to quarantine

camps or everyone just gets scared and leaves, right? So it's a real control mechanism that has stopped people from going to places the government doesn't want them to, and also tracks everyone where they go. I mean, this is all tied to your locations as well. It's where you go, where you usually are, where you're going to be. And this is now handed over to the central government. This is all information to track every single citizen in the entire country. It's really just a dream come true.

What's wild about, and look, contact tracing on its face, hey, it seems like a good idea. You know, if somebody near you got infected, you can quarantine voluntarily, but that's not really what's happening with this QR code system. What's happening is the government is, of course, using it to track where people are going, but tell me about this bank protest, because this was just the most obvious glaring abuse of the QR code system for completely not legit reasons. This actually happened a ton of times throughout the country, but the bank protest is a good catalyst. So in Hennan, some people were protesting because the banks were basically scamming them on other money, for lack of better words. And so naturally in China, there are a lot of

of protests in China as long as they're not against the government. There's protests against, like, let's say your building management is failing, or let's say there's a thing that's happening with Japan. So you're allowed to protest against Japan. The government even stokes some of those things. And it gives this impression that, hey, yeah, protests are allowed in China. But there's never really protests against any sort of government body, right? We can go back to the same thread. China doesn't want people protesting against the government. So as Hunan bank protest thing happened, people started protesting the bank, but also protesting the local government for not doing anything about the banks, right, for not like getting their money, forcing the banks to give them their

money. So when the people protested, the government used the QR code to change everyone to red to disperse the protests, right? So this is another control mechanism. They've done this multiple times. When everyone's QR code goes to red, a lot of people are going to disperse, and then they actually have legal, on the face, legal ways to move people to quarantine camps and stop those protests. Crazy, right? So basically they'll just say, oh, look, everyone around you is infected. You better go in completely just for control. Like, we don't really want you protesting this. So what we're going to say is that you've been infected or that you are going to be infected. You can't go in transit. You can't go in restaurants. You literally just have to go home. And I would assume if the police

catch you outside and you have a red QR code, you get arrested or something. Yes, yes, yes. It's not necessarily criminal. It's more like you go to your quarantine cab. You go into those capsules, those basically 18-wheeler capsules that they've repurposed for locking people up. A huge chunk of the economy is actually running off of COVID testing and these kind of quarantine facilities now. I wondered about that, which is crazy because they're trying to implement a lot of changes in China to reduce some of the restrictions for the COVID policies, but they've built a huge chunk of their economy around this. And they've also, there is this unspoken rule that if you let people

make money or you let people have their business, they're going to have no reason to protest because, yeah, we can be an authoritarian country and yeah, you're not allowed to say or do what you want, but you got money, which means it's better than Mao's time. It's better than the Great Leap Forward slash Culture Revolution. It's not that bad. And if people have that recent memory in their mind about how life is so poor and terrible, then making money just makes everything better. And that's how China's kind of allowed their citizens to keep going. It's like, okay, yeah, as long as every year you get a little bit richer than you were last year, then everything's going to be fine. Nobody's going to actually have a problem. And that's by and large been the case. Not to say that people didn't have massive

transgressions with the government, but by and large, as a general huge populace, people have been okay to do that. And for the first time we're seeing under the current regime, that's just not the case. The economy is basically, just imagine a plane just nose diving into the ground right now. because what the Xi Jinping regime has done is completely forgotten why China's gotten to where it's been now. They've completely lost the plot. Western investment, foreign investment, foreign companies, experimenting with capitalism, opening up its economy to the rest of the world, is why China is where it is today. The fact that it was allowed to earn money and they allowed the people to earn money is why China is where it is today.

It's why it has global influence. And now, I think it's a delusion, but I think that all the, a lot of the top leadership, and Xi Jinping has surrounded himself with so many yes men, that it's gotten into a lot of people's heads that the only reason China's wealthy is actually because of the Chinese government. Right. It's actually because of government policy. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Lao Wei 86.

We're talking about the China protests. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support the sponsors of the show. All of the deals, all of the discount codes, they're all in one place. that works on your phone. We made it searchable. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

You can always search for a sponsor using the search box on the website as well over at Jordan Harbinger.com. Thank you so much for supporting those who support the show. It really does keep us going. It makes it possible for us to continue to create these episodes week after week. Now for the rest of my conversation with Lawi 86. This is the dictator trap, though. Yes, dictator trap.

This is always the dictator trap. They get rid of people who tell them, things they don't want to hear and people are afraid to tell them the truth from the ground up. So even if you have, let's say you have a couple good advisors around you who you say, look, really, I need to hear the truth from you. The people below them aren't going to tell them the truth or the people below them aren't going to tell them the truth. So if you think, look, we have enough PPE, right, masks and ventilators or something, or vaccines. Yeah, the program's going great. Well, how do you know that? Because the people under you lied and the people under him lied

and the people under him lied, and the local officials were afraid to tell the guys, there's 17 levels of people kind of bullshitting or kind of fudging or being afraid. And you have to make sure that there's no fudging and that there's accurate checks and balances and all those people, and none of that is in place. So even if you're surrounded by great advisors, are those people surrounded by officials that can tell them the truth? And are those mid-level people also working above a bunch of other people that can tell them the truth?

Because if there's a little bit of corruption at every level or even a lot, which there is, you really have no idea what your vaccination rate is or where the PPE is stored. And I think that's kind of what Russia is dealing with right now. You know, it's not necessarily that Putin is this crazy irrational guy. It's that he probably thinks he does have working tanks. He probably thinks he does have a bunch of missiles left because nobody's going to go, ooh, yeah, you know what? We sold those.

But we had a hell of a vacation in Monaco afterwards. And if those people would have told them the truth, well, would the commanders and the generals and the officers below them tell them the truth? No, absolutely not. So you end up with the same thing in China. Nobody knows what's going on at the top because the shooting of the messenger is a thing, especially in dictatorships. It is a real thing.

China had a semblance of checks and balances, nowhere near like a liberal democracy, but a semblance of checks and balances because there were different power clicks within the party. There was different gangs within the party that would keep each other in check and kind of come together and say, well, next term, we're going to appoint someone that represents this and this principle, right? And because Xi Jinping got rid of all opposition, all those clicks, all those people that held different ideals, maybe one guy was more like, I think we should have more communist principles that actually have social programs for the people in the countryside. Then another guy says, oh, we should definitely focus more on the coastal regions because

that's the economic driver of the country. They can come together and be like, yeah, we hate each other and we're not in the same click and we're actually diametrically opposed to each other and we're actually trying to like depose each other. But there's so many people involved that it creates this bizarre, almost pseudo-functional system within China that has been eradicated. It's like Congress. Yeah. They're shooting each other in the foot, but they both have to play the game.

Yes. So stuff actually ends up getting balanced at some level in a weird way. At some level, in a weird way, right? And it's near our liberal democracy. But it kind of works. It keeps China from going into chaos. And now we're looking at China where it's tanking its own economy, thinking that the government's the only reason. that it got to where it is. And the people are not getting that unspoken rule. They're not getting

returns on anything. They're watching their money dry up and they're watching more restriction come in, in return getting nothing for it. So again, huge catalyst for the protests. So why doesn't the government just scrap the zero COVID policy? Sheinging, look, the guy can watch international news. He at this point has enough data to know that this isn't working, regardless of what the people below him are saying, but there's obviously other reasons. And one of those has to be the vaccination rate in China. I know they make a domestic vaccine that doesn't really work. What else is going on here? Yeah. I mean, just to highlight that real quick, you know, people talk about how Americans were anti-vax or there were just not that many people that were getting vaccinated

compared to other countries that they use as examples. But China is a real example of how the elderly people just didn't want to get vaccinated. A huge chunk of them didn't. So that left a very vulnerable populace unable to handle COVID. And you have to understand, I think a lot of people have been affected in some way, shape, or form by Chinese propaganda thinking China is probably some sort of authoritarian first world country, a country that's built up. It's got well. But the medical infrastructure, China's infrastructure is terrible by and large throughout the country. I had better medical treatment when I went to Lao versus China. China's medical infrastructure, yeah, medical infrastructure is horrible. So to put a cap on that, an outbreak of COVID,

would kill a lot of people because of low vaccination rate, bad medical facilities, lack of care for a lot of other people in the country, especially in the countryside. So they can't risk that. Low vaccination rate aside, because there's going to be people who say, hey, the vaccine's not that effective now against Omicron and other variants. What's the difference? They're unprepared for even a regular outbreak of a light variant of COVID, potentially. Yeah.

I mean, that's definitely like an excuse used for the mass COVID lockdowns and stuff for sure. That's definitely a part of it. At the same time, also, the most important reason here to understand why the zero-COVID thing went on for so long is because every leader of China has to be known for something. So Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jentau, and now Xi Jinping, each one of those has something that they're known for. It's like a legacy to go forward. This leader did this, right? Chairman Mao is the easiest one to use an example.

that's what we use. He made the new China. It's called Xin Zhong Guo. Oh, I thought you were going to say killed 80 million of his own people. But you met a legacy that they want to be remembered by. Got it. So let's use legacies that they want to proliferate.

Xin Zhong Guo, new China. That is what China is now called. In China, Chairman Mao created that. He made it independent from other countries' influence. He separated it. He made it truly independent. It's not a puppet state, you know, as they teach in schools. So every leader needs one.

of these things. You have Deng Xiaoping who did reform and opening, open the economy and actually allowed China to have money. Every leader has its thing. And so Xi Jinping, when he was put into office, he never really had anything. There was nothing other than he kind of brought some state jobs back and put more into state enterprises and made the economy worse. There was only negative attributes. There was nothing that made him better than Huigintan the leader before him. There was nothing that made Xi Jinping stand out. So it was almost the perfect thing. It was the perfect event to have something like COVID where he sees the rest of the world being ravaged, his leadership, his cabinet, looks at the rest of the world and says, look at millions of people dying.

Millions people did die of COVID, right? It was devastating. If you use that as an example, you use a global pandemic, one of the most tumultuous times in our history, in modern times, in modern history, and you become the hero of that. You prevent your people. from succumbing to that death and destruction, then you are a hero. You're an absolute legend in the party leadership. Now, when you create something so, such a crazy control method like zero COVID policy,

when you create something so stifling and so, it looks so archaic and arbitrary and out of left field to the rest of the world, at least to your own people, you've convinced them that you saved their lives. When that starts to unravel, and when your own people say, wait a minute, this is bullshit. No one's getting saved from this.

We've just had three years of absolute torture and lockdowns, and our lives have been upended and nothing will be the same. Then all of a sudden, it looks really, really bad. Now the leader is actually guilty of something negative. That beautiful, positive thing that he could take for the rest of his reign and then, you know, the next leader's on. We'll look back at Xi Jinping for being the hero of this is now a negative attribute. It's now actually the worst thing.

It's the first time we've seen people say central government step down, right? And that's terrifying. The worst thing the Chinese government can do is lose face. A loss of face is the most dangerous thing for the Chinese government. So that's why this had to kind of keep going. So the Chinese Communist Party cannot appear to be wrong ever. In part because the legacy, the face element, which is especially prevalent, it's a very Asian sort of Chinese thing where you can't be embarrassed.

you can't show any sort of weakness or humiliation. Also, a lot of political capital and propaganda have been invested by the Chinese Communist Party in saying that the Chinese communist way of life is better than the West. Look, we have low deaths. We've handled COVID so much better. So stepping back is going to look like, well, wait, shoot, did we maybe overstep here? Did we do this for too long? Did we miscalculate? They can't afford to do that. Another thing is here, and to sort of tie this in with Russia, authoritarian regimes, Their mandate, when you get a dictator, when you have a super strong central authority like this, authoritarian regimes, their mandate is only or almost only based on strength.

Right? If you're a strong man, your mandate is that you're strong. That's why they call it a strong man. So you either stick to the zero COVID policy and piss people off or you loosen up and you have people question why this went on for so long. That's why Putin can't just go, you know what, this Ukraine thing, holy crap, this is a big mistake. What a mess I created. let's back out of this. He can't do that. His mandate is, I'm tough, we're tough, that's tough

this out. Let's get through this together. But if he says, you know what, maybe we're not so tough, then everybody goes, well, what the hell am I listening to you for then, man? The only value you have is that you're tough, that you're strong, that you know what to do. So they can't afford a single crack or stain on that image. That's all they have. That's all that's keeping them from getting hung outside from a lamp post at this point. That's exactly right. Spot on. So what is your prediction for how this plays out. You said this was morphing into something else. It is. What happens here? I'd like to riff off some of the headlines I keep seeing or some of the news comments I see. I think it really does a massive disservice to the protesters because what I'm seeing now in most media outlets

is that the protests work to some extent because the COVID restrictions are coming down or they're being morphed or changed or adjusted. And to a certain extent, that's correct. But it's actually the opposite of what's being portrayed to an outside viewer that's going to look at a headline. I remember, you sent me a headline the other day, right? Yeah, the other day. I said, like, hey, is this legit? It looks like they're capitulating. Not really. The article you sent me isn't wrong, okay? The article you sent me is factual. But the headline is really throwing people off because what it's doing in its own soft power way is convincing Westerners that China budged. China said, you know what? The people have spoken, the People's Republic of China have stood up and said, you know, no more of the zero.

COVID nonsense and the government listens and said, you know what people? Yeah, we listen to you. And in fact, that's just not what's happened. What's happened is a massive last ditch attempt to save face. What we are seeing right now, and I just want to go back to this, is mass arrests of anyone that went to the protests. Anyone that went near the protests are getting questioned. There are secret police and police busting down people's doors and arresting people that were holding up A4 sheets of paper, busting down doors of people that put some graffiti up or even just went to the crowd that was protesting against the zero COVID policy. This is what's currently happening and not being covered because it's kind of akin to what

happened to a tank man. We don't talk about what happened to him afterwards. That's what's happening now. A massive, huge crackdown. The real bloodbath is happening behind closed doors behind the scenes. The government is making sure that anybody involved. wasn't listened to, they're punished. They're arrested and their lives are over.

They'll never be able to participate in society normally again. They'll never be able to join the government or get a state job or anything like this. So what's happening now is that the government is finding the best way to avoid this from happening again. They do not want to see more protests happen because what happens when more protests happen is maybe next time the police actually join the protesters. Maybe next time the PLA and the riot police actually join with the people that are calling for the CCP to step down. People's Liberation Army. New York Times, the article that I sent you, which will link in the show notes, and other major media outlets, they haven't really been talking about this.

And let me know what you think here. Protests cannot be seen as a vector for change, just as you were saying. If the Chinese Communist Party changes course now, what they're saying is, all right, protests work. That's very, very bad for an authoritarian regime. Right? Mainstream media, again, I also hate that phrase, but they say the government can't be seen to be wrong. I get that. But I think in a media environment with censorship without free speech, you can spin whatever you want. Come on. You can spin that. The bigger issue is now that people are asking for democracy and transparency and other rights of communication, and if they're protesting for zero COVID to end and they get their wish that way, let's say they get zero COVID to end that way, they go, wait a minute, protests work. now, why go home now? We got zero COVID lockdown. And let's keep talking about democracy and transparency. That sets a really, really bad precedent because then people will say, great, okay, so if we want more rights, all we got to do is throw a big national protest and we might get

our way. Let's not stop at ending lockdowns. Let's get freedom like we failed to do in 1989. And that is the worst nightmare of the Chinese Communist Party is people thinking that if they just actually fight the government, they can win because they can. There's 1.4 billion people. I know a lot of are in the CCP, but, you know, how loyal are you when you can actually have freedom? I mean, we're talking about a huge number of people. It could get very ugly, very quickly if this gets out of control. And the way to get it out of control is to say that this might be effective. Yeah, so there's a dual-pronged approach. I think what we're seeing is the soft power they're allowing to proliferate in the West is to say, yes, Westerners, please believe we allow protests. In China, it's a show of

force. It's to say, hey, the neighbor that went to the protest just got disappeared. Hey, there's a mass arrest right now in Guangzhou, but anyone that held up a piece of paper from between November 27th to December 3rd, if you were there, then you're getting arrested, right? That's what they're showing in China. So there's two different kind of displays. Now, what they're doing to save face for the zero COVID thing is, yes, they are rolling out massive changes, but they're not saying that zero COVID was a failure. They're saying that zero COVID was a success. These three years were necessary because what they found after all this time is that finally, COVID morphed into something that wasn't dangerous.

And actually, the top medical experts in the country have found out that COVID's not even COVID anymore. It's actually just a type of flu. So no one has to worry that much anymore. And it's a way of saving face because Amicron's been out of Amicron for how long now, right? They've had state media go out there and say, Amacron doesn't actually exist. It's actually super, super dangerous. And now the state media is saying,

actually it's not that dangerous anymore. And now we can actually look at ways to kind of reduce some of the regulation and stuff. There's two things to take away from this. The government doesn't want to lose face and wants to justify what these three years of lockdown were. Simultaneously, the government wants to look like a hero for doing that and having all those measures in place for three years so that the people can say, oh, thanks for saving my life government. And then the second thing is that they already got what they wanted. They got the control mechanism and actually instituted it in every single daily facet of life.

Every single facet of life is revolving around government tracking and control and location services and QR codes. All of that stuff has been entrenched into society now. So the government does have a control mechanism for the future on from now to know and track every single citizen in the country. So it's almost like a win-win for them domestically. And then almost a soft power win for West. to look at the news and say, hey, maybe they actually, like, you know, gave into the protesters.

So do we have a prediction for how this plays out? Because I know before we heard that they were going to pretend to budge, I think you and I agreed on this, we were going to say the Chinese Communist Party has to change course, but then claims victory, moves the goalposts, then covers up the deaths and the infection rates among the public for the next three to five years. And so far, so good, I guess as far as my prediction being accurate, I wouldn't say it's good than any other way. I think I wouldn't adjust that. I mean, that's where we're at. There's no way they're going to do anything else.

I mean, they've already reported no deaths, right, from this. So we're going to be in a situation where it's just like the zero poverty, like the whole, like, Xi Jinping needs to go down in history for eradicating poverty. He gets on a podium and says, poverty is over. Did you hear guys? Poverty's over. And everyone's like, what are you talking about? Like, there's no running water in this village over here. You know what I mean?

There's abject poverty all over the countryside in China. but Xi Jinping made it illegal to say that there's poverty. Because then you're the laws, you're picking quarrels and starting rumors, right? This is what we're going to see with the COVID thing. There's not going to be any more transparency or any more opening up here. It's just going to be illegal to tell the truth. Just like always, there will be a government narrative. It'll be portrayed as this is how the government wants it to be seen going forward.

And if you speak out against that, then you're arrested. Well, I wish we had better news because when I saw that article yesterday, I was like, oh, maybe we'll be able to wrap this and we'll be able to have some positive news as a result of it. But it sounds like we're still on the same course we were before with a fresh coat of paint. I think really what it is is there is some positive news and that is the restrictions are being relinquished to some extent. There is a lot of it looks like it's going to happen throughout the country. I'm still talking to people that are like nothing has changed where they are. But it's predictably a mess.

There's very, very little continuity throughout China. It's really way more disorganized and messy and disconnected than people probably think just because they consume so much of China's propaganda that goes to the outside world. But what we're seeing is a huge mess. But I think the positive here is that, yes, the arbitrary, crazy, unbelievable dystopian lockdown stuff is probably changing and going away. It's just that we're not really pointing fingers at the right person. We're not blaming the right person.

and I feel like China's really trying to alter history here and spin this in a way that really serves their narrative and almost emboldens or empowers the top leadership. But I do have another prediction and that's people aren't stupid in China. This might go away for a little while and most people might be placated. But some people, educated people, people that saw through this that knew that this was from the top, that were protesting for the right reasons, they're not going to. changed their mind and think that everything's okay anymore. And I think this could be the start of a very fragile and tumultuous time for the CCP. Well, hopefully we see a regime change

there in a way that doesn't end up killing hundreds of millions of people in China. That's my wish. And I always say this in every episode that I do about China, which is this is not an anti-Chinese episode. It's an anti-Chinese Communist Party episode. And the victims of the Chinese Communist party always have and always will be primarily the Chinese people themselves. Yes, agreed. Thank you very much for coming on, man. Really appreciate the update. Thanks for keeping us and bringing us back in the loop. Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate it. Love the show. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with a human rights activist revealing forced organ trafficking that's going on right now in China. The government started the system, runs the system. It's simply hideous,

essentially taking the vital organs of heart, lung, liver, corneas, any important organ that we have from people without a trial. These people are never convicted of anything. They just are out working in these forced labor camps. They don't get paid. They live in a dormitory, some of them with 16 people. When their unlucky day arrives, somebody comes and drags them out over to the operating table where they're killed in the process for moving their organs. And selling these organs to wealthy Chinese citizens and to what we call organ tourists coming from places like America and Canada. If you arrive for a new liver, chances are you go to the number one people's hospital in Shanghai. The doctor comes up and sees you, takes your blood type and so on, and then he finds that somebody's a

matching organ for you in camp number 50, and that poor man is taken out of a dormitory and is taken in and his kidney liver and so on are taken out. He's, of course, killed in the process. They burn his body and they fly the organs to you in Shanghai, and you come home with a new kidney or liver. You're hoping that it didn't happen the way it did, but in fact, it did happen. I remember talking to one man from country in Asia who told me he had to go four times to get a kidney. That's four dead people. Four people died so he could get a kidney that appears to be now working. It's something that seems unimaginable to most of us in the 21st century that this is happening. This is beyond anything even the Nazis could have done.

To hear how much a healthy kidney heart or lung goes for in this immoral market, check out episode 497 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Hope you guys are enjoying the Out of the Loop series. It's hard to find these topics, but when they come up, they are really obvious when we need to do it. Now, I think this is one of those topics that has been covered so poorly by mainstream media. We always just see those videos of people throwing chairs at guys in white suits on TikTok or Instagram, and we have no idea, at least I had no real idea what was going on.

I hope this clarifies things. I hope you like out of the loop. I heard from a lot of you when we did the last one about Iran that this was right up your alley and right on brand with the show. So I hope this one did the trick as well. Links to all things Laowai will be in our show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, videos up on YouTube. Advertisers, deals, and discount codes all in one place, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals.

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Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. recently they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think the benefits of laughter why sports fans get so invested and what makes people like you or not the through line is always the same smart ideas you can actually use in real life something you should know has been featured in apple's shows we love and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting so if you want another show that scratches that i want to understand how people in the world really work itch search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts look for the bright yellow light bulb and start Start listening. You can thank me later.