I often call you Scott in China. I think I'm going to change that to Austrian Scott. I quite like the sound of that and the lines, the lines quite nicely with the sub stack. None. So Austrian Scott, thank you for
joining me in the chances again. Well, I mean, there, there are a lot of, there are quite a few sources out there of, of people inside China trying to communicate to a Western audience a more, let's say realistic view of China than what you typically get from, well, certainly Western media, but actually it's most of what you get on Western social media. We also have a Chinese language production team.
So we actually most of our content we produce for China, inside China, but for the Western audience, every now and then we do do some of a few things. And I think that as with any country, China has all sorts of problems and some things go well and some things go less well.
And one of our goals that we set ourselves is to try and interpret what's going on in China from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics, which is somewhat known in China, but they're not very many people that are reporting from that perspective. And the Austrian School of Economics is kind of a toolbox more than anything else, helping you to use economics to understand what's going on.
And we try and do that for applying to China with a focus on, let's say, more our focus on the economy. But of course, the economy is interconnected with all sorts of
other things. But inevitably, you know, trying to communicate these what the reality in China to Western audience means that we also have to spend some time, as you often say, debunking myths, debunking propaganda is being spread in mostly Western social media, not so much the official media, because the official media is a little bit more careful. But social media, you tend to get a lot of pure propaganda.
And I think that's, it's a delicate thing because I don't want to create the impression that we're just, that's our, our sole mission is to debunk Western propaganda and say that, you know, everything in China is all rosy. I think that's also one of the things that that you, you appreciate, which not many people do. And is that we try and we try and deliver sort of a more balanced view of China without, without saying it's perfect, without any problems. On the contrary, it has lots of
problems. And, and that's one of the topics we've talked about times before. And that is that China is in that sense, it's really just a normal country. In that sense, it has some things that does well, some things that does less well. It's all those are problems. And it's not, it's not the the authoritarian dystopia that it's painted out to be, but there are some definite authoritarian tendencies there. It's not like that's that's all imagination either.
So I think that's, that's the kind of balanced view that we try and try and transmit. However, as we both know, that's that view is not appreciated by very many people. People want to have you really all be on one side or the other. And it's always amazing to me that people accuse you of being a shill for the Chinese Communist Party because you actually deliver a very balanced view, which is unlike most of
the people out there, right. And it's not really, it's not really the same thing when you see, when you, when you appreciate the the things that do go well and then at the same time and then see the other side as well. It's it's it's a puzzle to me how people don't notice it. But I guess it's probably because a lot of the people that do spend time attacking you probably do so because they are being paid to do so. Maybe, maybe not.
But I get that impression. That was when I read various posts, which may give me the impression that people are not listening, they're not paying attention. Yeah. So that's that. So I mean, that's that's one of the reasons why I started read evaluating my views on China. I just when I stumbled across your stub, your sub stack a few years ago and I realized it sub stack. What did I say? It's. It's still morning. Yeah, not that many more, although it could be more, it
could be fuller, but it's more. Yeah, one of the one of the things that caught me about reading the articles that you put out is that you weren't suggesting or haven't been suggesting that China is utopia. And you're also not suggesting that it's this totalitarian hellhole. And I mean, if you if you if you look at Western media as a whole, it is this totalitarian hellhole where everybody's got social credit scoring and you can't do anything. And and this is Great Wall. Well, you've sort.
Of had the message delivered? The people that live in terror of the government, yes, Yeah. And the people, one of the favorite phrases is that people are oppressed. I can't remember if I told you I was at a cocktail party with some in the USA while back. Well, not that long actually. Just half a year ago. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Just hold on. Let's just contextualize. You're not actually in the US, you're living in China. I'm actually in China. Yes, I'm in China. Yeah, OK. Sorry.
Go on. Yeah, this, this party was the high, high level political people. And, you know, I was trying to do my typical thing of trying to dispel some of the some of the myths. And I think we talked, we got to the social credit system, which this guy who allegedly has all these political connections, well informed and he completely believes the story and he he
believes the whole thing. And then he asked me this quite well, I won't go to that right now, but they have to say he said, so do you think the Chinese people are oppressed? And it was a kind of a difficult question, but I'd say in, in many respects, certainly they feel much less oppressed than the people in the US. And that was like, why that was the question. That was that was too much for
him. But I can understand because without the, without the information that you need to understand that then that that doesn't make sense, right? But certainly I would say that in general, people don't, Chinese people don't feel particularly oppressed. And that's just even that one statement is kind of a shock for people that read too much Western social media. I mean, you're in Shanghai right now and we are not using AVPN, so there's no Great Firewall of China.
Well, that's not true. No, there is. China does block some. That's that. China does definitely block some sites, although they block less and less. They used to block most of western media, at least that was my impression. But now, except for a few of the really bad ones like the New York Times, the BBC, some of the main propaganda organs of the West, most of the, most of the media is actually open. So you look at, I think CNS is open even now.
And most of the regional newspapers you can reach, they're a little bit less paranoid, I think about the propaganda. But ultimately the issue is that the Chinese government, and I'm quite sure of this, they just feel like their propaganda systems are no match for the
Western ones. And that's also kind of a little bit difficult for, for a lot of Westerners to get their, their, their hands around or their, their head around that this idea that the reason they might be blocking things is not because they're afraid of people getting on the truth. It's because they're afraid that they, they won't be able to match the Western propaganda systems.
And actually, I have to say, even though I don't agree with their approach, I think it's paternalistic and silly and, and self defeating in the end. But in that sense, they are right. Their, their propaganda systems are worse than the Western ones. There's just no doubt about it. Their propaganda organs are very clumsy and most Chinese don't, I can't say they don't pay very much attention, but they still pay a lot less attention than Westerners do to their own
propaganda systems. They're much more, much less in tune with what is in the Chinese media. I mean, most people don't don't watch television in China. The newspapers have practically disappeared. So most people get their information completely from the Internet. And the government's censorship systems, and maybe we'll talk about this in a bit, are not
very effective. They didn't try, they definitely try and censor things and, and they try and block things they don't, they think are make them look bad, but they're not very good at it. So in that sense, I, I, I know where they're, I understand where they're coming from, put it that way, which is not to, which is not to justify their,
their decision. When somebody starts rethinking their views on China, I suppose the obvious starting point is trying to re establish what the CCP or the CPC means and what its relation to China actually is. Well, that's kind of a, it is a sensitive talk about social media because you'll, you can really see if people on social media, particularly on X, they refer to the CCP, then you can kind of, you can usually guess where they're getting their
information from. Because that's not the official term that's used to describe the Communist Party, which is the Communist Party of China, CPC, not the Chinese Communist Party, CCP. That's a Western term. Not that it really makes that much difference, but it is kind of a hint at where they're getting information from. Because you have to know that there are these very well funded propaganda factories in the West.
And there's particularly this 1X account called Song Ping Ank that produces, I'm sure they must have 20304050. Thus far, I think they have somewhere around 4 or 500,000 videos that they've shared that are also basically 99% of them were either fake or completely twisted so that their content is has no relationship. Their alleged content has no relationship with what they're what, what is really being
shown. So they'll show you a video and they'll, they'll explain it in a way that is makes no sense. So for example, they had a, they had a video once they were a couple years ago, they, they showed a video of a fence and they said it was to keep people out from escaping out of China. And they showed people on the fence. But actually what it was showing was the opposite. It's defense there is to keep people from coming into China. So they just turned it completely around, right?
And then, but if you don't, if you're not used to that, expecting that, then they get away with it, right? They, they're showing you a real video, but they're giving you the completely inaccurate explanation of it. That said, I must say a number of them are completely fake, like a lot of the ones that refer to the social credit
system, so-called. They're completely fake in the sense they're showing you from this absolute relationship with what what they're talking about is ultimately, this is the social credit system. And they might show you, for example, somebody's credit score on their phone for a normal credit score, like most countries have. China has them as well. And they tell this is the, this is the social credit. It's of course incorrect.
But my favorite ones are the ones where they show people crossing the street and they say, if you jaywalk, then then there's the voiceover that claims this, right? Then, then you're, they show a picture of the, of the person on a big screen there. And this is persons they found you through the face recognition. And then they say you automatically get fined so on so much and it gets deducted from your WeChat account, which would be really incredibly sophisticated.
But this is of course complete fantasy. But if people would know, you know, they get they, they get away with it, right? And the people, of course, anytime soon as anybody comes to China and me, do they realize
that that stuff is not true. But if you don't know and you and you and you are here sort of predisposed, you have been fed this, this, this idea for the past 10 years that China's totalitarian dystopia or the government surveils everything and controls everything and is extremely capable of dealing with all this data, then you believe it, right? We all know it's that it's that bias. I believed it. It's understandable.
I mean, you, you've had this prop, this propaganda that has been constantly delivered since 2008. That's when it started. And you know, with 2008 to now or 2025, it's, that's a long time for some people. It's all of their lifetimes, their adult lifetimes. They've, they've had that from the since, since they, they began to try and understand the world. They've heard that. And so if you deliver anything along those lines, they think, well, that's what I've heard so
many times. It must be true. It's understandable, but that's the that's the that's the miracle of propaganda. And that's something the Chinese government is completely incapable of delivering that type of long term campaign. They just don't have that. They just don't have that level of sophistication or even perspective to deliver that type of long term type of propaganda plan. Not that they don't try, but that's way beyond their scope of what they're capable of.
I know you've dealt with this question a number of times, but Scott, it keeps coming up. So let's just premise the rest of the conversation on this. The Communist Party of China, the word communist, this gets everybody every time. And it, it happened again with me the last few days. Ah, but they have the word communist. They're commies. Well, yeah, yeah.
It's like it's we, as we often say, it's like you think just because the Democratic Party of of in the United States calls themselves Democratic, that they are Democrats, whatever that means. I mean, it's just a name, right? And I think that once if you compare it the situation in other places, you'll realize that's exactly what it is. North Korea also says Democratic. It's nice that they're democratic, right? In all the countries in Eastern Europe, they also call
themselves democratic, right? So whatever that means. But I mean, I think on objective standards, if you were if the differentiations between communist organization of society and let's say a capitalist organization, which is not the exact opposites, but just for the sake of argument, we'll pretend it is. Well then I'd say I think it's one can quite objectively say that China is less, is more capitalist and less communist than certainly any country in
the West by far. And that's just really in terms of the, the role of the state in society, which is the level of control that it has and the level of competition in China that you have in most industries is far, far more intense than in the West. And you also literally you have China accumulates much, much more capital than any any other Western country. It's a huge capital accumulation machine, which is really the, the essence of capitalism.
People often forget that. And so despite all this falls and China has a lot of waste, right? There's a lot of bad investment out there, but at the end of the day, it's still the amount of capital being accumulated is enormous. And if you look at the sad situation in places like the United States, for example, if there's any capital being committed at all, it's not much.
I mean, there is real investment there, but when you subtract out the the the replacement factor, what needs to be replaced, how much is on the net really going into new investment and productive capital in the USI guess it's probably not too high. OK, so let's just quickly hover around that for a second opening businesses doing business in China. Again, one of the tropes is everything is controlled by the by the Chinese government.
Right. Well, actually let me that, that reminds me of a story that we, we just mentioned prior to this discussion. And that is the story of the Smithfield Company or when I raised that to you, it's a, it's a American company that specialized in the, the swine raising industry. And I believe in the US they have like an 80% of the, the, the pig production. And that company was bought something like 15 years ago,
maybe not quite that. I can't remember these that it's something like that by a Hong Kong with a Hong Kong based company. That company was originally a state-run Chinese company back in the day 1995, but eventually privatized. And at the time when it when it acquired Smithfield and I'll get a minute to explain why how I'm
getting this. It was actually I think controlled by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs, they invested in it and this is about Smithfield and if they still own Smithfield now eventually Goldman Sachs cashed out. They went public in Hong Kong. Now it seems to be even the most part controlled by its leading managers. Think they have about 40% of the shares. But if you listen to the reporting about this company in the US, there's this constant discussion of how the Chinese
own all of our farmland. They're buying up all of our farmland. And just recently there was this, there was a piece by that RFK Junior did talking about this and he specifically mentioned this example of Smithfield. He said yes. And they, they control 80% of the of the pig production in the US and they all controls land and it's owned by the Chinese, right? The China owned by China.
I can't remember if he said China or if he said by the Chinese, but that's so typical is that all China is binded of China owns. It's not China. It's a Hong Kong listed company that partially belongs to BlackRock, right? It's so this is so typical. And then, you know, when we talk about the thing with China, is the topic of the discussion or anything related to China that this is oh, the Chinese bought or the Chinese owner or China owns. But no, it's just some person or
some Chinese company. It's not the same thing as the government, right? I mean, maybe the government in some cases has some share of it, but at the end of the day, most companies, so most of the productive companies in China are privately run. The figure is roughly 20. No, it's roughly 75%. That's of the of the value adequate in China comes from privately run companies, including foreign investment companies.
So 25% is comes from the state, but they're producing almost none of the new jobs, none of the very little of the export. Basically, they're, they tend to be state monopolies or very, very large heavy industry monoliths, like all steel, for example, British and steel or in the telecom industry. So those, yes, they're the state is heavily, heavily present, but they're not the ones that are driving the economy. And it just went, as we all know that wouldn't, that wouldn't
work, right? It wouldn't work. And people, it's so funny because you see people often on the right in the West talking about the this talking about China, the danger of China and so on. And it seems like they, they're you'd think that they would understand that, that if, if things were really as they seem to imagine that the state were running everything, it would never work. It would be a disaster.
It would be exactly what happened in China 4050 years ago when the whole economy collapsed. So yes, that that's what happened. The state was running everything and it was a disaster. And all the use of all the capital, people were starving. It doesn't work and everybody knows it doesn't work. So the funniest basis of funny thing that people imagine?
That could possibly work. And certainly that that that they somehow managed to imagine that China with this this setup that they seem to believe in or the state runs everything, actually managed to dominate most of the industry in the world and most, most sectors of the economy in the world are dominated by Chinese exporters. How could that be possible? Is it always because they pay subsidies?
No, you cannot. You cannot come to dominate the world's economy by paying tariffs and tariffs or tariffs or whatever. But no, you have the only way you can get this, by being competitive. You can't become the competitive by being run by the state. The state is absolute way beyond its scope of handling anything like that. Yeah, as I was saying, one of the triggers for me is why is China always the target of the
Western industrial complex? Is there industrial complex or is there is is the the political elite the political? OK, yeah, politically that's good enough. I, I mean, I'm not, I, I'm not Privy to their conversations, but I would, I would, I think we can all make a guess that it's for good reasons in the sense that they are afraid of China as a competitor. I think that certainly is the logical explanation. And there's that, that that's a
reasonable fear. But as Trump himself said back in 2016, you know, he said that we have China and the US have a have a bad deal. But I don't blame the Chinese for it. It was mutual. I didn't use exactly those exact words, but that's pretty much what it boiled down to. I mean, it was that this whole setup they've been running for the last 25 years with if China's been allowed to accumulate massive export surpluses and the US and and Western Europe to an extent have
deindustrialized. That was completely agreed on a high level between the leadership of China and the West. I mean, they were both in on it. It could not have happened without complete collusion on both sides. They all had to be on in on it. And I don't, I don't, my personal opinion, as you probably recall, is that it's not a very good deal for it's neither a good deal for China nor for the rest of the world. Why should China be dominating all of these industries?
Why can't their the play a little bit, a little bit more even and give companies in some other countries a chance to compete? I but I don't think it's you can, you can't blame that all in China either. It's really, it was both sides that were that were in on the steel. And where we are now, it is we're in a difficult situation because because of the economies of scale in so many industries, it is very, very difficult for Western companies to compete with China.
And but we have this bizarre situation where China in so many areas is producing everything for the entire world. And it's, it can keep doing that and and in return, it's accumulated ever larger amounts of debt, right. The rest of the world owes China. I don't see what's in it for China. I think that that it would be a much better deal to may even the playing field a bit, not with tariffs, but just by adjusting the exchange rate and giving the Western companies a little bit
better chance. But our government doesn't want to do that. So so there we are. But but you were you were alluding to the fact that the Chinese government is not actually all that brilliant. They make a lot of mistakes and bad judgement calls. I yeah, I'd say that's definitely one of them in my opinion. And because they, what they're doing is they're trying to, they're trying to harken back to their, their wishful thinking of a planned economy.
And they, they, they see that China is, there's a well, first of all, the, the, the government is running a huge deficit. And the reason that one of the reasons they're doing that is because they are not cutting taxes, because companies are not investing and, or they are investing, but they're investing less than they, they, they wouldn't in a real, in a real,
let's say, balanced economy. And the reason for that ultimately is because the Chinese government is still interfering too much, at least that's my opinion. They're still trying to favor certain sectors. And mostly what they're doing is they're, they're forcing A unrealistic exchange rate on the economy. So if they were to allow the exchange rate to compare to a normal level, that's which I'd say it has to be at half of where we are now, then there would be some adjustment.
And yes, OK, some of the Chinese Expo industries would drop off a little bit. But then there would be other competitions. You could things would become much more cheaper and much cheaper to import. We could import many more services from the West, not only product all the services and things would have a way of balancing themselves out. But if the government insists and saying, OK, what, so we have all these unemployed people and what are we going to do? And let's let's subsidized the
electric car industry, right? But to then the electric cars it grows and grows and grows, but then produces too much, right. So this is all the problem with central planning. I don't create the wrong impression to to give the idea that that China's central planet centrally planning everything. They aren't. But but the one that sectors they do try and centrally plan almost all basically create what in Austria in terms we would call malinvestment.
They're they're putting too much money in the sector and as a result, the in the electric car and in the car industry in general now prices in China are half the level they are outside of China. You get the exact same car here for the half of what you get in the rest of it. Not only electric cars, but even even petrol driven cars. It's because the competition is so intense here. So everybody's losing money, right? It's just, it's, it's, it's really, it's not a good
solution, right? It's all because the government is, is, has tried to push that sector. So it hurts the, it hurts the competition in the West, but also hurts China. It's nobody, nobody's profiting from this. So they should just, if the Austrian perspective, they should just let things go and the market will sort things out. They'll find useful things to do. But right now all these plants are occupied producing cars and people are occupied.
Free the people, free the plants, and they'll find something more productive to do, something that's profitable, right? That's the Austrian perspective. And I think at some point the government's going to do going to do wise nap to this, but they're not quite there yet. Yeah, In South Africa we have a massive influx of Chinese cars and they're a lot better priced than than the, let's say,
European cause. In fact, I think it was Volvo that put out a plea to our government a few months ago asking to put penalties on Chinese car imports. Really. But don't forget, Volvo is Chinese, Volvo is. Chinese then? Then maybe it wasn't Volvo, but it was a European manufacturer. I forget now who it was, I don't know. Volvo is Chinese, Is that true? Yes, it was bought by China, but they're one of our big customers, I know. So yes. I didn't know that.
That's fascinating. But anyway, the point I was making is that the old trope of Chinese goods being cheap junk is gone. I mean, Chinese calls are are incredible. They're incredible. My next call will be China, hands down. It is true. You're, you're right. And, and, and so there some of the parts of the world, no doubt in China as well. We also benefit from this from the, the, the intensive competition and you know,
quality goes up, prices go down. But I'm just saying, at the end of the day, those that would, that those funds, probably those resources could be used elsewhere better. There's too much, too many resources going into that industry. But yeah, of course, yeah, we all find that. We all probably all benefit from it. Yeah, the cars are wonderful.
And the, and, and you know, I used to long ago, I used to work for Mercedes-Benz. And we back in the day, we Mercedes-Benz, we had our own strengths, but we really look to Toyota as the example of how to produce things economically and be sort of cutting edge in terms of quality management. And that's now been taken over completely by China. And even now Mercedes-Benz is planning to use in the future, it's planning to use Chinese built engines for art for
everything. You mentioned Mercedes-Benz, they were one of the worst performing cars in South Africa in terms of sales, and it's Audi, not Volvo. Does Audi that that? Yeah, they contacted the government. Ridiculous though. I mean just make it. I mean the rest of the profits from and it is true. I mean they they are very efficient and they are like you say, I mean in terms of quality, in terms of the feature set, it's hard to beat, that's true.
There is censorship in China, there's censorship everywhere, there's censorship across Europe, in the UK even. I mean, look what's going on now in the UK. Yeah, I mean, I'm not in the UK, so I'm always hesitant to judge places that where I'm not personally and because I don't know how much I'm getting is propaganda and how much is that accurate. But it's certainly, it sounds pretty shocking when you read the numbers of allegedly several 1000 people in prison for comments on social media.
I think in China that would be unimaginable. Just as a point of comparison, I'm no big fan of Chinese censorship policy. In fact, as you probably know, I've ridiculed it many times because I think it's ridiculous. That's the only word that comes to mind. But while it's ridiculous, it's not particularly totalitarian. It's very rare for people to go to prison for something. They were on social media here. It's almost unheard of. I, I can think of a few examples I know of.
But really, these people were people that just kept at it. And the government would tell them like, oh, we're going to please cool it, cool it, cool it. And then and then like the ones that are parading on the street demonstrating. And so eventually, if you keep pushing them, eventually, yes, they will, but they will put you in prison. But you have to work really hard at it because they're just, it's not part of the Chinese system.
So what typically happens here, if they, you write something they don't like, then, well, first of all, the most likely thing is not just delete it, if they even noticed it at all. But I mean, there are so many billions of comments all the time. Most of the stuff never gets
noticed at all anyway. But if, even if there's something that that that gets noticed, first of all, they're likely to delete it. But if you keep doing it over and over again, the things that really irritate them, then eventually you might get a call. What they typically do is they'll call your employer or your parents and they'll say you know, XYZ If the person is, let's say under 30 or so is, you know, a little over over overdoing it.
Tell him to cool it over 30, more likely to come to his inmate, more likely to go to his employer. We actually gotten calls like that before one of our well, actually, actually actually I only know of two cases. One I can think of here in Shanghai where one of our employees talking about he was writing stuff about something about the Philippines and the situation there with them. And there was, I don't know, in that case, he was written
something they didn't like. So they written a message on multiple occasions. So they asked us to have a discussion with him and tell him be cool. That's kind of typical. This other possibility is that if you, they might actually call you to give a statement to the police. And so then the police call you out and they say, yeah, well, you said stuff, you know, it's difficult. Why don't you come down and have a talk with us? That's also happens.
I know several things like that, but it's quite civilized. I'm not mostly I'm not supporting this policy. But they don't, you don't come in like in the US, you don't have people coming in at 5:00 AM with the SWAT team to raid your house, breaking down your door. That just doesn't happen. They just call you and they say, well, you know, you come to the
police. They didn't get a statement, which is rather this device that said, of course, that as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the the restrictions are, are ridiculous. Like my favorite example is you're not allowed to mention the name of the great ruler, the the party secretary, dental secretary, President Paddock. You can't mention his name and you can't even elude to him with references. It's not it's because only the official media is allowed to do that.
I mean, that's that's just ridiculous. Why? That's the reason. I don't know it's I'm not Privy to their conversations, but it's just one of their rules, right? And even the police, even the police think it's stupid, right? So like I, I know the case someone they were in a, in a private group and they chat group and they were talking about, they were alluding to him by reference. And then as like the honored one
or something like that. And they got called the police and the police thought the whole thing was poor silly. Anyway, they said, why don't you just write that you'll never do it so it won't do it again. And that's over, right? And it's both positive and negative. You can't speak about him. Yeah, you can't and praise him, right? That's it's ridiculous. I mean, no other word to describe it, right? And everybody thinks it's ridiculous, right?
So I'm sure that in the UK you don't have that right. So, so you can't say it's all, it's all black or white. So in the UK you can talk, I'm sure you can talk about Starmer all you want. Well, maybe you can't, but you can probably at least get away with mentioning his name. But here you can't. So in that sense, China is much less free than the UK. But probably in the level, let's say in the civilized approach towards censorship, I'd say
China wins hands down. And there are also interesting topics that are very different in sort of Western countries. You you can't, for example, in most Western countries question the Holocaust or even, as Trump wanted to do recently, criticize Israel. He wanted to criminalize those.
He said he wants to criminalize anybody who who criticizes Israel. If, if, if, if those are things that you find someone finds, let's say, relevant to discuss, then China's a good place to do that because you will never get arrested here with that. And Chinese social media is full
of such disguise. However, one once again, once again, I mean, once again, like this, for example, one of the things that I would say about the current situation in the Middle East is that the Chinese government has done absolutely nothing in terms of deeds to back up its words. And I would say that's worthy of substantial criticism. But you won't find that in China's social media. You can't protest either like the Chinese government doesn't like people. Protesting.
They don't like people protesting in the street. They really don't like that. So if you really want to get yourself in trouble, then you go protest in the street. So it's difficult to be a political cartoonist in China. Yeah, you can. Well, there are a lot of cartoons. In fact, there's some really good ones that work for Global Times. They're they're they're they're outlet. They make a lot of really good cartoons ridiculing the West, but you can't ridicule things related to China.
That's true. So once again, I'm not a fan of that. I'm not, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to defend that system at all. I'm just saying if you, if you do do an objective comparison with other countries that are also practicing various forms of censorship, China doesn't come off all, all too bad. I'd say on average, the US is still the country with the least amount of censorship that I'm, that I'm aware of where you
really do the most. But in the US office, if you talk about forbidden topics, then the danger, of course, is that you face a loss of income and that you will be ostracized or, you know, deed taken off various social media sites and try to kind of do the same thing in a way, except that obviously, once again, like you mentioned, the topics are different forbidden. But if you, if you send too often, for example, you can get your, your WeChat account can be
prevented from making comments. Or in the worst case you can actually your WeChat account can get completely frozen and yes, you have to open up a new one, which case you lose all your contacts, but. You call that the Singaporean route, didn't you? No, that was the Singaporean model that was really referring to. That's one approach that Chinese takes towards keeping stopping people from saying things they don't like, and that is by
finding companies. There was that case that we reported about a couple of years ago where this comedy production company, one of their top comedians, had made some joke which was taken to be insulting to the army, and they fined them almost $2,000,000 for this joke and then banned them from appearing for a month or so. I think that was the This is Singapore universe because this is Singapore kind of I think they were kind of pioneers in that area of trying to suppress
political opposition by basically finding people out of existence. They're just enormous fines. The ability to OK, OK, I get it. I get it. They were like, well, they wouldn't imprison them, but they just make it economically to to the price too high. So China does use that approach as well, but more for companies like that for individuals, not so much for individuals. It's just like I said what I said story I told you before.
I think the undercurrent so far is that is that China is a, is a normal country. It's not special. It's not unusually different to any other country. It has its own challenges and it's good as good things and bad things. The government makes good decisions and makes bad decisions like every other country. Another bad decision was the COVID response in 2020. Yeah, I think and that's certainly true. It was, I think their initial response didn't work out as well, well at all.
But to be fair, I think if we go back and look at the record, we can see that what China did in February of 2020 was exactly what was written in that lockstep scenario that the Rockefeller Foundation put out in in 2010. And they obviously had that in their drawers, and they pulled it out of the drawer and just did exactly what was written there. And they did that for about two months. And then somebody said this is not working and we can't keep doing this.
And then they changed course. So like also the whole thing with the ventilators was obviously not working. And it took them about four to six weeks to figure that out. And of course, the amazing was by the time that China had figured it out that this ventilator thing wasn't working, that was when New York was saying we have to buy 500,000 ventilators, right? So the West went whole hog at the moment when China actually already figured out this was not
working at all. And also the whole lockdown thing was not, it was not sustainable, right? So the, and they, they pretty quickly figured that out.
So then they went to a much more localized approach, which in the end also ended up being unsustainable, but it was certainly much more sustainable than their their initial approach, which was the one they practiced in places like New Zealand, for example, where they actually locked down the whole country for long periods of time, which is getting incredible to believe that any, anybody could be so stupid as to believe that would actually work.
But it's like they were you, you look at what's going on, How can they be so dense and not realize this is not going to work? Right. Well, at least China realized that was not sustainable. So the other so they stopped and they went to a very, very localized and sometimes localized down the point of the individual like block area. They said it will quarantine just this individual block and that's it. And then we won't the economy would collapse. You can't do that.
Later on, they, I think they, they also made a really the, the one of the most stupid thing was that they did was they didn't realize. They didn't, Well, they did realize, but the central government refused to accept this whole quarantine approach was not going to work anyway, no matter what. Even the more, the more focused quarantine approach they use is also going to be ultimately a failure. And it was clear by even the beginning of 2022 that was not going to work.
And they just the, the, the central leadership in Beijing refused to accept the obvious, but eventually reality overcame them, as we know in 2022. And they they gave in and. But yeah, Scott, Scott, come on, we all know the Chinese government welded people's doors shut. Right, That was one. That's a very, that's a good example because that's a great example of the, the, the, the
effectiveness of propaganda. And it really it, it's a, it's a good example of the concept of, of, of generalization. I mean, I don't know if that even happened at all. It's possible maybe it did happen somewhere that somebody was welded in, which is almost impossible to leave, but maybe it did happen. But if it did happen, it, it was a massive violation of the fire, fire regulations.
And you'd have to be insanely that that would, that would, that would, that would be sustainable and certainly never happened on a large scale. And probably if it was actually happened, whoever did it was probably disciplined for it because it's crazy. It's insane, right? Another good example is an even better one. In fact, is the it's a story about the the pets being being killed. That was one of the other favorites that went around WW in social media for for probably
more than years. Yes, this the Chinese are killing all the all the house pets. Well, that story actually did that went back. There was a piece of truth, a brain of truth, and that it actually did happen once. In fact, it was here in Shanghai and some crazy official did actually apparently kill some dog and it appeared pretty quickly after that in the newspaper and the the government attitude was this this guy lost it and this is I was not acceptable.
We can't have that. But so it was actually in internally in China, it was over pretty quickly. It was recognized, reported on. No, this is something officially going overboard, but in the Western social media and not the mainstream media, but the social media that became what's that word called? What do you call that in English? When it's just that it gets repeated over and over and over and over and over again.
And then it was all of this very general state, like the Chinese are killing all the house pets is really was going back to one incident, right? And that is it was generalized
and people in their own sphere. They're they're, I think most people are aware of this issue of generalization, but when it's something from China far away that has this or this terrible reputation of the government controlling everything, then people are more likely to believe it, even though it's just a typical example of of over. Generalization. What's another example of over generalization within the Chinese context?
Cryptocurrency. I'm trying to think now if, if there is a there's an overlap there because that's a big topic at the moment with with the US and stable coins. I'd say that's another that's an example of the Chinese government's inability to face reality and to let's say their ambition in terms of control is much higher than their, their, their ability. So the cryptocurrency industry was really centered in China for many years until 2017.
And still even today, many of the largest exchanges in the world of Chinese, for example, finance is, is still one one of the that's probably still officially the the largest, which is it was usually originally based here in Shanghai. And then in 2017, the government decided they didn't like cryptocurrency anymore because they felt it was it was infringing on their control of financial flows, which is kind of true.
But instead of trying to regulate the industry, eventually they decided to just ban it, which I'd say it was a really big mistake because now did they destroy a bunch of their really good companies or or hurt them significantly? But then they actually made it impossible for them to work with the exchanges to deal with, for example, fraud. And we have a big problem all around the world, but certainly in China we also have a big problem with fraud to be
defrauding elderly. And then when they, when the fraudsters want to go along with that money, they, they typically launder it into stable, into USDUSDT stable funds, which is kind of the, the number one black market currency both in China and all across Southeast Asia.
So in the old days, what would happen is the police would just go to the major exchange and say, please help us, we have this case black money, whatever crime, please help us out and deal with it. But now they can't do that because it's all illegal. So now they have no, they have the police have no recourse. There's no official recourse.
Sometimes there, there's some, you know, they're unofficially, they say, oh, we know this person in such and such town is like the local money change and he'll do it. And then maybe the police know the guy and they'll work some deal with him in the, you know, back back office. But it's, it's makes it much more difficult to deal with. And that's that's I think it's a good example of of refusing, refusing to face up to the reality that this is going to exist whether you permit it or not.
You might as well come up with a system that allows you to actually work with the people in, in the industry instead of just, you know, pretending it doesn't exist. So once again, there, I guess you could say governments in general make that mistake because we what we intended, we, we, our intention was good, right? Well, don't, but you didn't look at the result.
The results is bad because it doesn't matter what your intention for that, You know, you in particular just going out right and banning things, that's rarely leads to good result. Same thing goes with the education industry where they a couple years ago the government said, oh, the children haven't studied too much. It's too much work and it's too expensive for the parents. They keep sending their kids to these external schools to, you know, get them ahead in school.
So the government basically banned the whole tutoring industry overnight, which is crazy, right? And so you destroyed a whole bunch of a whole bunch of of, of, of jobs. Didn't completely destroy the companies. Some of the companies survive, but still, it was a big, it was a big blow to them. But did did the tutoring industry disappear? No, no, no, I kept going. And of course, the Chinese are not going to stop tutoring their kids.
Are you kidding? The, the idea that anybody could have believed that they would actually ever work was, is, is ludicrous. Chinese are the most education oriented people in the world. They're not going to stop tutoring their kids. So what happened? Well, the prices went up. So what happened to the people that were a little bit poor? The family's a little bit poor. They got edged out of the market, so they couldn't afford anymore. That was the result.
It wasn't, it wasn't that the kids had less, less pressure or the parents got to save some more money. No, no, the parents had to spend more money now. So instead of looking at the results, they all our intentions were good. So of course, as anybody could have expected, a year or two later, the government, you know, we said well, OK, yeah, we have our parents that never.
But I think, Scott, that's the that's the other generalization that I was referring to earlier is that the the Chinese government is this well oiled machine that is always ahead of the curve. It's it's. Exactly right. And they're not at all they're they're not at all. And and I'll give you another example. We mentioned that earlier that, that this recent Tantrae case with the, the lead poisoning. So there you have a typical example.
There's all these these kids from this elementary, you know, it's actually kindergarten private 200 plus kids show up with some sort of POI symptoms of poisoning. Don't know what it is. Go to the local hospital. Local hospital says that they don't know what it is, what's going on. But actually they we found out, right? They probably didn't know what was going on, but they didn't want to say. And so some parents said, well, we don't believe you.
And so they took their kids to other hospitals in other big cities, Tianjin, I think. And Xian, this is in western China, in Tianjin, which is way out in the Goonies mid sized city. And then the the hospitals in the big cities said, yeah, they have lead poisoning, right? And so basically the government tried to cover it up.
And then they came up with this ludicrous story that the school was mixing in lead paint with this, with the food to make it more shiny or colorful, which is, it's so ludicrous. I can't, I don't know who thought of that story, but who could believe that? I mean, it's not water soluble. I mean, it's, it's just, it's a, it's a preposterous story.
The truth seems to be that what's really going on is they have a lead zinc, a lead zinc factory in the town and it's on the, on the, the balance of the river. And that they've been poisoning the, they've been contaminating the water tail with lead. And what the school did was because it was a privately owned school. And so the school, because they ran it for profit, they sank their own well instead of paying the high water rates. And so they took water from their own well.
And that's how people, that's, that's how the kids all got poisoned. But of course they couldn't reveal, the government couldn't allow that to come out because that would reveal the whole water table was contaminated. And why is the water they were contaminated? Because they didn't obey the environmental regulations. That's that prohibited this plant from being erected next to
the river. So they tried to cover the whole thing up and try to suppress the discussion so completely, but it all failed and it all came out and now everybody in the country knows, right? And so now they look really stupid. Not only they come with this really stupid story that is so preposterous to like, like how could anybody, how could they be so stupid? Anybody would actually believe that with the paint, right?
And then they're, they're trying to cover up they're, they actually, they actually coerced the hospital into covering up the truth and not telling the parents what was going on, which is itself a crime, right. And so probably the end result, what typically happen in case like this, they'll probably can the entire leadership of the all of the city and they'll all lose their, their, their career and the party because of this.
So the government makes themselves look stupid, but there is a correction mechanism and there's like a seated feedback method in the works. So it's not like there's like, so yes, the government does some stupid things, but there is a kind of a feedback this is no works and it kind of comes out and works just on the end. But of course, the only reason this feedback mechanism works is because their whole idea, their whole totalitarian concept of the government can only doesn't
work, right? If it did, then there would be no Fagin feedback mechanism. But because it doesn't work, there is and it does work, right. So it's a good example of, of how, yes, they have authoritarian tendencies and maybe that's an idealized world. They can control everything, but they don't.
And, and because there is no social credit system, people are not worried about writing things the government doesn't like and say, they say, oh, the government is, is tolerating, for example, this lead poisoning. Well, there is no social credit system. So they don't, they don't, people don't worry about that sort of thing. They just write what they write, whatever they think. Maybe if they write on their, if they write, if they write on their, their, you know, their,
their blog, whatever. The government down with the government. Government should be kicked out of office. Well, that wouldn't go over well, right? But if they just complain about the lead poisoning, nobody says no happened. To that, the idea of a social credit system is obviously quite nuanced. I think every country has it to some degree. Even here, if I'm applying for a car loan or a home loan, they do a credit check on you there that that is a type of social credit system.
To do some ways it's been sold in the West, right. In the West, it's been sold is this concept of, you know, whether you're whether you're politically correct, right. And that's, I mean, that does exist to sort of in every country because there are ways of, of discovering whether you're politically correct and that can influence your career and so on. But it's much more indirect.
Like so if you apply for a job typically in the West as well, as far as far as I understand, they'll look up your social media posts. And now even the US government's come out and said anybody that says anything bad about Israel or something is you will not get admitted to the United States, right. That's you got to watch out. But I, I'd say compared to what goes on in the West, China is probably much less systematic in doing that.
Maybe because you're kind of so many people, they just don't, they don't have the resources to try and do that on the scale that that seems to be going on in the UK. Certainly I say seems because I one thing I don't know, I'm not in the UK, I'd say I, I don't want to judge that, but it certainly seems like that level of supervision or surveillance is going on there. Social media is much more intense than in China. Am I wrong?
No, I don't think you're wrong, but if you watch some of these fear porn documentaries that have come out over the last few years, the social credit score that shows you these aerial shots of each Chinese citizen with the squares. You know, yeah, Little, little. Boxes. Yeah, well, I think I tell you, it's this, it's this Twitter channel, this this X channel called song being on the mixes, the videos, yeah. I mean, basically you're not going to get penalized because you buy meat.
No, no. And it's really not for jaywalking. People jaywalk all the time and nobody, nobody notices. And certainly there's no record of it. Every single time, Scott, I do a conversation like this, I always get somebody saying yes, but look at this YouTube channel. There's some guy called. Or serpent, Serpent, which is Serpent South Africa, Zod Africa. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He lived there for for 12 or 15 years and.
Those two, those two guys, they do well, I mean, I, I, I guess they're either being paid or maybe it's just through the YouTube because YouTube promotes them so, so heavily. I'm sure they get a lot of monetization from YouTube, but yeah, they seem to have made a career out of that. What can I say? But. I mean, are they're telling the truth or they are they're propagandizing the truth or what? I don't watch much of the production, I have to say.
I have to confess, In the old days, a couple of years ago, I didn't watch a few. But just for research purposes, yeah, I'd say it's pretty much all fantasy. I mean, they don't live in China anymore because they were, I think they would have difficulties if they were to try to come back. I don't think they would be letting our guy get a visa. But they've been gone now for over 10 years. So. But these people are really lowlife.
I mean, one of their videos they said, yeah, Chinese don't love their children. I mean, stuff like that. And this is, this is like from a guy that's married to a Chinese woman, right? I mean, I don't know, Lowlife is the only word that comes to my mind from people like that. And the point is, is that people should go, shouldn't they, and go see for themselves. Yeah, definitely.
I mean, particularly from the West, it's typically a shock for most people because they've never been in such a futuristic place really. And certainly and people, some people say, oh, it's just a big city. No, it's not. China looks like this all over the whole country. It's a beautifully paved roads and high speed trains and shiny metros all over the country.
Sometimes you could have to wonder if the government's investment is really, it's not overdoing in a bit, but in terms of the basic infrastructure, it's very good throughout the country. And, you know, because China is at the cutting edge of so many industries. Well, like the one we talked about, the electric car industry. Yeah. I mean, it's just you have a level of technology in society that is unmatched anywhere else in the world and certainly in society in China really works, right.
And it's particularly in a lot of Western countries which where things don't work and even, let's say places like South Africa where many things don't work. Yeah, it's, I think it is a shock to see that how things, how well things work in China. And it is, it is a superficial impression to a certain extent because there are things that don't work in China. You don't see those immediately, right? So don't get me wrong. But it is good to have that, that, that comparison.
And, you know, and it's not all, it's not all on China's side. You know, we don't have, for example, the right to carry arms here. We don't. And you can't go hunting here, which you guys can do there. So it's you have to sort of take the, you know, take the good, good side of it. But yeah, people should definitely come and see for themselves. And it's seeing is believing, as the saying goes, right? You can't really, you can't get it the same way from a distance.
And people it's I had a friend of mine that was thinking about coming here, but she says she was so afraid because here people, people so rarely use cash anymore. And she didn't like concept of using her phone to pay for things. Well, I mean, if that's if that's a really if that's a principle you want to, you know, you want to fall on you and that's then then that you want to make that allow it to decide where you go on in, in the world. And, you know, so be it.
But yeah, it's part of the deal. Well, actually just on that, a lot of people also misunderstand how these things work in different countries. In South Africa, it's not a good idea to carry cash. It's it's, it's a dangerous country. Carrying cash is a terrible idea. Yeah. Well, here you don't have that Problem, of course, is we have almost no crime or we have, no, there's no public theft of anything really. So you don't have that issue at all. It's just people.
People pay things with their phone for reasons of convenience, but it's been in China. There's some things that pay with cash and those might be large transactions, but small transactions all, all by phone, but not because not for fuzz of fear. It's just as easy in it. I mean, I've been for a long time. I would still carry some cash as well if I needed. You know, man, you never know when you minded. But I have to admit, I even two or three years ago, I, I kind of gave up on that.
And it's just all you need is a phone and it's really it's, it's phone base. It's not by facial recognition. There are a few places where you can pay by face if you signed up for that feature with one of the server payment providers, but it's pretty rare. A couple of years ago people I think did it for for for for kicks, a couple of a couple of stores, but it seems to be completely disappeared now. I don't. I don't see it at all anymore.
I did experience facial recognition technology when I was in Hong Kong though. Doing what? Yeah, well, for example at the airport. Oh yeah, well, that's all over the West too. In the US now, if you leave whenever you get on a plane, they all do facial recognition now to get on a plane. I don't know where they have a copy of my friend's face from. I'd like to know, but they do here in China.
We don't have facial recognition for the for, for at the airport that I know of. But yeah, I mean, there, there are systems in, in China is a lot of cameras. And that's a long story as to why that that happened, the whole terrorism thing. But but yeah, in China, if you if you're on The Wanted list, eventually they will catch you through via facial recognition. It's true. And that's also probably one of the reasons why crime crime is
still low. Yeah, we can't come in for landing because you mentioned cameras and somebody's going to ask about that so quickly. Tell me a bit more about that. Why are there so many cameras? Because there was a state of terrorism back in what was it 2008 to 2014 roughly, and the usual suspects. I think we can be pretty sure
we're behind that. I'm talking about people outside of China. That were supplying that organizing that they were mostly terrorists from Xinjiang from the from the western part of China and they blew up train stations and marketplaces and stuff and and the Chinese government, the war we got to do something to stop this. And so that's that was really what what what pushed to it go take it off. And so they put up facial recognitions all, all around the country to stop the terrorism.
And that was, and well, they did, they succeeded. I'm not sure whether it was it worth or not. I don't know. But I'd say if you asked an average Chinese, do they mind the Super, the, the surveillance? I'd say most people don't because you can see the obvious advantages because it's so the, it's so difficult to get away with the crime. This is committed in public because of the, of the surveillance. Even even smaller things.
For example, I, I had a couple of twice last year, I had run insurance with scooter drivers and then the call the police and the police said, OK, well, we'll get the video right from whatever it is, you know, nearby to saw, saw what happened then. And then they can use the video to just to make an assessment, which is handy, right? So they won one case and I think technically it was maybe my fault. But then the policeman said, but the guy was obviously speeding,
he was driving too fast. So you can't say it was all your fault. So at the end of the day, it was like, you know, OK, never mind. So that's handy, right? So I think most people are not, don't see that as something negative. But that's also because the government doesn't use it to as far as people's at least people don't have the impression government is easy to track them. And I know for a fact the government for the most part has no idea where people are.
But that's also something that's very hard for people in the West to imagine that there are hundreds of millions of Chinese living in cities where they're not registered and the government has no idea where they live, where they live and they don't actually care. They don't, they don't even try and track these people. And we know that for a fact because there's lots of evidence for this.
The government doesn't know. But if the if you do get on the on The Wanted list, they try and tracking it, then they use it. So that's, that's the difference. But people don't perceive the government's tracking them because they know from multiple examples in their lives, the government has no idea where they are.
So they don't have that, that let's say that paranoia that people associate in the West or the government's tracking me and they know, they know that as far as people's experience is that they what they do use the cameras for is see the track criminals or to figure out what happened in case of an accident. That's how most people interact with the cameras. OK, looking at the time, how can I follow your work? Well, yeah, I will share a couple of this.
As I mentioned earlier, we, you know, we do have a lot of production in Chinese as well, but we also do some things for the Western, Western market. And one of the projects that we've been working on for a while now is a project called Quantum Intel website is Quantum Intel dot me. And that's actually most for the Western market itself. Independent media provide provide a platform for
independent media. So you can find independent media, what independent media is talking about in all these different areas around all around the world. So like for example, you can check out UK columns. We have a library in that. The UK column is in there as well. I think I looked up the UK column today and I think U column is over 1000 entries actually. So you can actually go to the UK column and page in our on our website. And I think the UK column is 933-O.
That's the feed number. And then you can actually do a search. For example, you can see, let's say you look up for example censorship, you want to know what what UK column is, has had say about censorship in the last couple of years. And I looked it up today and UK column has 12 different episodes about censorship in the last three years and you can find out what they are.
So it's kind of a handy thing. But you could also look up and see what people are talking about in other countries, in other language zones. And so it's also really interesting to look up what other countries are not talking about. So, for example, a couple of years ago, we, some people, some listeners may recall there was a really hot podcast put out by Tiger Carlson they did with Darryl Cooper. And it was sort of the talk of the country in the USI don't know about the UK, but it was
some sensitive topics. And, and there's a lot of, there are a lot of articles about him. But if you looked at Darryl in the German press or the German independent media or in the French media, you would discover nothing. He was completely blocked out. So it's actually quite interesting to see what's not being discussed. But because you can do that content search through the platform, you can tell you can find that out. And we also have a translation function.
So you're not too comfortable reading German, then it will it will translate it for you. So that's also kind of candid. So that's one thing you can you can check out. And of course, you can also check out our Austrian China sub stack, which is Austrian China, Austrian with an N that's from the country Austria, Austrian, Austrian china.substock.com. What's the quantum URL again? Quantum Intel. Dot ME. So it's all quantum like, like quantum physics and Intel, like intelligence. dot ME.
And if you, if you enter 933-O there you'll see at the top on on search for that and you'll find that's the, that's the UK column, the main UK column fee. Although you you also search for UK column as well, but that's just the abbreviation. Austrian Scott, it is always a pleasure chatting to you. Thank you for joining me in the trenches. Thank you, Durham.