The Chinese Communist Party is looking at a new big-brother-esque tech policy that would assign Chinese citizens a cyber-ID for their online activity. Miles Yu details why this is another totalitarian move meant to monitor speech, control dissidents, and limit online freedom. Second, amidst Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her running mate, Miles talks about the Minnesota governor’s past ties to China. Finally, there’s unrest in China’s Belt and Road Initiative with mass protests occurring in countries like Bangladesh and Venezuela. Miles gives his thoughts on whether it’s a coincidence or not.
China Insider is a weekly podcast project from Hudson Institute's China Center, hosted by Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world’s future.
Episode Transcript
This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from the Hudson Institute's China Center. I am Miles Yu, senior fellow and director of the China Center. Join me each week for our analysis of the major events concerning China, China threat and their implications to the US and beyond.
Phil Hegseth:
It is Tuesday, and we've got another three topics for our resident expert, Miles Yu. First, we examine the CCPs newest big brother-esque tech policy that looks to assign a cyber-ID for Chinese citizens online. The government claims it's for online safety, but Miles details why this is more of the same totalitarian behavior meant to monitor speech control dissidents and limit online freedom. Second, amidst Kamala Harris's selection of Tim Walz as a running mate, Miles talks about the Minnesota Governor's past ties and connections to China, which included upwards of 50 trips there. He goes on to give us a brief history lesson of America's presidential China hands and how they helped form US-Chinese policy today. And lastly, we close with unrest inside the economic bedrock of China's BRI, as protest rage in countries like Bangladesh and Venezuela. Miles gives his thoughts on whether it's a coincidence or not. Alright, Miles, great to see you again.
Miles Yu:
Great to see you, Phil.
Phil Hegseth:
You're always on the road, but we still get you no matter what, which is great.
Miles Yu:
Oh, that's called the benefits of globalization.
Phil Hegseth:
That's true. That's true. We'll take that. So first up, we've got some real big brother type surveillance developments happening in China. You're going to have to break this down for us. But at the core of it, the idea is the CCP is working on a national cyber-ID. It uses facial recognition across dozens of platforms to try and credential anyone who's accessing the internet. Some of the biggest social media sites like WeChat and China are in on this effort and others, which are of course backed by the government. But I'm assuming that this is being heralded by the CCP as a step towards online safety. But critics could easily and rightly point out that there's a lot of dangers to privacy here. So why is this a big deal, Miles?
Miles Yu:
Well, first of all, every single repressive measure the Chinese government has taken is always announced as for the benefit of the people. Make no mistake that China has the world's most sophisticated dystopian internet surveillance and censorship system. The Chinese government wants to have a complete system, a totalitarian system of information control, but they realize there are two potential weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Number one, that is there are more and more Chinese internet users. They're using all kinds of ingenious ways to bypass the very draconian censorship system to register accounts on foreign social media outlets. For example, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Facebook. All of those were banned inside China. So there are more and more Chinese internet users who could somehow find a way to register those foreign accounts. So this basically spooked the Chinese government. They want to use this new system, this new cyber-ID system, by the way, for over 1 billion internet users inside China, everyone has it. So that is to say if you lock on the computer to register any accounts, and then you'll be tracked. Traced.
Phil Hegseth:
Yeah, you have to give your face, right?
Miles Yu:
That's exactly right. You have to be tracked. And this is secondly so far, the Chinese government realize that enormity of this censorship mission. So they mostly rely on all the major internet providers such as WeChat. You mentioned Tencent, to censor themselves on behalf of the central government. So far they've done a great job. All the Chinese internet providers are a hundred percent in line with the Chinese government's requests and efforts. Now, the government realize that probably is not good enough. So they want to further centralize the censorship regime by bypassing those internet providers by creat[ing] a central kill switch at the very top that basically can be done through this creation of a cyber ID system nationally, so that all the censorship will be done from a central switch. And that's basically the main purpose of this cyber-ID system. Now, the Chinese government tried to fake the fairness of this new system because they realized that there will be some kind of a national uproar. So they put out this regulation proposal asking for a period of national comments. But when people almost overwhelmingly or critical of this measure, they shorten the period and they're going to put into implementation within a matter of days when this broadcast is going public. And also they basically harass those commentators who make some very negative comments about this new system. There's one professor from Tsinghua University in China who made some critical comments about the system and his access to internet was wiped out. Geez.
Phil Hegseth:
If you play this out to its logical conclusion, you have a centralized kill switch. You've got everybody credentialed online using their face to be able to access anything. No government has that kind of control right now over the internet. What are the implications of something like that for their citizens going forward?
Miles Yu:
The implication is the establishment of a total and totalitarian cyber prison in China where if you violate the rule set up by the government for you and your entire internet ID will be eliminated, you'll be gone. You'll become non-person, cyber-wise. So that's the problem because remember, China always has a social credit system. This is basically the Chinese government said one strike you're out.
Phil Hegseth:
How easy would it be to shut down the online voice of any kind of dissident who would ever disagree with the CCP be so easy? Well…
Miles Yu:
I think for all totalitarian regimes like China, they always know one thing very well. That is either you have a hundred percent efficiency or you don't have it at all. And they cannot really consider the alternative of not having censorship at all, and therefore they're always going for the hundred percent efficiency. And that's what makes Chinese government model so scary because once you are authoritarian regime, the tendency toward the total control of the population to do bad things, to go to the deep end will be the only alternative.
Phil Hegseth:
Last question. You mentioned that they're in kind of a comment/feedback territory right now. Is there any world where this cyber ID doesn't get implemented?
Miles Yu:
There's no way, it's already going to go put into implementation within a matter of weeks.
Phil Hegseth:
Okay, so moving on. The big US political news, as of late, is Kamala Harris's pick for VP Tim Walz of Minnesota, and the next administration, Republican or Democrat is going to have to face challenges from China. But actually, I'm from Minnesota and I did not know his history of trips to China and his connections to China. So, could you paint us that picture? Give us the background on Walz and his ties there and what that could mean if he were to be part of an incoming administration.
Miles Yu:
Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota is a president with a very substantial China collection in 1989 and 1990, right about the time of Tim Massacre, he was in China teaching English in the southern province of Guan. So he has some reflection on that, and after that experience, he and his wife set up some kind of exchange program. Each year they send students to China. They have done that, geez, for many, many decades. And until I think 2003 and all together, Governor Tim Walz has made over 50 trips to China. So he will be somebody who has a very substantial China experience. Not only that, he served on the Congressional Executive Committee on China, the CECC, which focuses on human rights in China. So, he is considered some kind of China head in the Congress, in the US government. So this is very interesting. So of course this is follow the long tradition of Americans presidential politics that has something to do with China.
Phil Hegseth:
Yeah. So you mentioned a long tradition. Let's go back. It sounds like there is a storied past of China hands in presidential administrations. Who would you start with?
Miles Yu:
Well, I would start with Thomas Jefferson, our third president. But the story when before he was president of the United States in 1800 Thomas Jefferson, between 1794 and 1799, he was Continental Congress's ambassador to France. While he was in France, there was something else has happened just before his arrival in Paris, replacing Benjamin Franklin as American's top of Envoy to France, there was a British diplomatic mission, which was a huge mission led by Lord George McCartney that took place between 1792 and 1793. And Lord McCartney led a huge British diplomatic mission to China on occasion of the Chinese emperor Qianlong’s 80th birthday. So the McCartney mission was very, very interesting because the purpose of this mission was to seek a friendly trade deal with the Chinese Empire of Qing Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty was at the zenith of its power. Emperor Qianlong was the most robust leader of the world at the time. So because of the magnificence and the greatness of the Manchu Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty emperor Qianlong was very arrogant and heuristic. He basically flat out rejected British request to have a trade treaty and send 'em home and say, we are the country of great affluence.
And this was a quite humiliation for the British. This was then under King George III, who had just lost the American colonists to the independent United States. Thomas Jefferson heard of this news and he basically wrote a letter to Emperor Qianlong and he said, you imagine that you're absolutely right by rejecting the British for their request to travel a trade treaty. British were no good, which is for the war with them. How about you have a good trade treaty with the Americans? We're the good guys. We love the Chinese things. So we don't have any [inaudible] feeling towards China. So that was very interesting of Qianlong. So arrogant. He didn't bother to reply to Thomas Jefferson. But I found the letter in the Jefferson archives, which is very interesting. Now in the year 1807, president Thomas Jefferson imposed the embargo against the all trading activities overseas. No merchant ship from the United States can be allowed.
There was a Chinese merchant who lived in Philadelphia. He must send his goods back to China. So he begged the rude letter to Jefferson. He asked for an exception. Jefferson was so interested in this guy, so he gave him an exception. So that was very interesting. Just about that time, US-China trade began to take shape. So the next president that has a substantial China connection was the 16th president, the greatest president of US history. That is Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was involved in a civil war at the time, as we know, but he was very sympathetic to the Chinese immigrants in the US, mostly then was in, they were in the San Francisco area, and there were Chinese Coolies. So Lincoln equated the fate of Chinese Coolies with that of the slaves in the South. He sent one of the founding members of the Republican Party, a gentleman by the name of Anson Burlingame to China as his minister to the Qing Dynasty court.
Now minister those days is equivalent to today's ambassador. So Ambassador Burlingame was such a good guy, he was very, very sympathetic to the Chinese the Chinese loved him. When he retired, he was supposed to come back the United States, but the Manchu Court thought, this is a good guy. Why don't we just appoint him as a Chinese government official representative to negotiate treaties with foreign countries? So that's what happened. So this American ambassador, former ambassador was hired by the Manchu Emperor to represent the court to negotiate treaties on behalf of the Chinese government. Now, the government they had to deal with was the United States, first of all, Prussia, United Kingdom, Russia. Anson Birmingham was such a good friend to the Chinese court when he died in 1870, by the way, on his way to St. Petersburg, to negotiate treaty with Russia on behalf of the Chinese government, he died of pneumonia.
The Chinese government gave him enormous reward and gave him a lot of declarations post posthumously. So that is an in bi today, there is a city south of San Francisco named after him. That's the city of Burlingame, which is right next to the airport. If anybody you fly to San Francisco, you'll the city of Burlingame, which is right next to the SFO. There are many other subsequent president also had a lot of China connections. One of the most obvious one was Ulysses Simpson Grant. Grant was the president for two terms, right after the Civil War. And then after he stepped down from the White House, he actually went on a global tour and he visited many countries. And in 1879, he visited China and he arrived in China in early May, actually in late May, 1879. And he visited five cities. And finally on June 3rd, 1879, he arrived in Beijing, which is the capital of the Manchu Dynasty at the time.
And interestingly, Grant refused to see the Chinese emperor at the time the Guangxu Emperor because he thought he was an autocrat. But he did agree to meet with Prince Gong, who's kind of a reformer, and also the de facto premier of China. A gentleman by the name of Li Hongzhang. Now Li Hongzhang was widely credit for suppressing the Chinese rebellion, known as a TA rebellion, which also happened to end in 1864. So Mr. Li Hong Zhang, facing himself as equal to Great General Ulysses Grant for suppressing rebels rebellions from the South. So that's why he had a great time over there. And the grant war also was very amicable to Chinese request to be some kind of middleman between the Chinese government and the Japanese government of the issue of the Ryukyu island, which is a part of the Okinawa chain today. And this is fun.
This is a true encyclopedia. Who is next? Well, the next one was the Procurer case of Herbert Hoover. Herbert Hoover is from Iowa, but he went to Stanford and got a degree in geology. And then he went on to work for a British company, which was then based in Australia. So 1899, the 25-year-old Herbert Hoover who just got married, it was sent to Tianjin, China to become a manager of the joint ventures called Kaiping Mining Company. A few months later there was a huge outbreak of the xenophobic movement known as the Boxer Rebellion. So Herbert Hoover was almost caught by the Boxers and got killed, but he survived while in China. He was in China for three years. He actually learned the Chinese language and he made a lot of money over there too. So Hoover used the money he made from China to become one of the greatest philanthropists in American history. And in 1928, of course, he ran for president as a Republican and he won. So that's President Hoover.
Phil Hegseth:
And who would come up next?
Miles Yu:
Well, I think obviously we can skip many presidents such as FDR, but let's just say focus on Richard Nixon. He was the first president who visited China while in office. And of course, Richard Nixon was credited for establishing this very long lasting and profoundly influential US-China bilateral relationship framework. I normally call it the framework 1972, which dominate US-China relationship for the subsequent 50 years, almost half a century, until Donald Trump came along. We changed that. Richard Nixon, of course, was forced to step down almost exactly on this day, August, early August. He did make decision to step down on August 8th. Interesting about this three most significant American president that has a substantial China connection, Grant, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. They were among the worst president in American history. In 1962, American historians got together to rank the 35 presidents up to that point, Grant was ranked the second from the bottom, mostly for corruption under his administration. Now, historians always say, Ulysses Grant himself was not corrupt, he was corrupted. Let's just put it that way. Hoover, of course, was notorious for being the most ineffective president to deal with national crisis known as the Great Depression. And Richard Nixon, historians always rank him near the bottom, if not at the bottom, for the Watergate scandal. And he was the only president who was forced to step down while in office to resign. I don't know whether there's a pattern or not, but it's just very telling. It's a historical anecdote of interest.
Phil Hegseth:
Is there a good modern example that would bring us to today?
Miles Yu:
I don't know. I mean, hopefully Tim Walz will be the new fresh beginning and to distinguish himself as a non-scandal-ridden politician with substantial China experiences.
Phil Hegseth:
Alright, so we'll close with news of unrest inside China's alliance structure. Most notably, protests broke out in Bangladesh against the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which saw a government crack down the killed roughly 300 protestors. Hasina eventually was forced to flee the country via helicopter. And then on the other side of the globe, we saw contested elections in Venezuela and protests there as well. All leading to government repression of dissidents and political opponents. That's still ongoing. So is there any connection between all of these events in your eyes, Miles?
Miles Yu:
Well, I don't want to sound flippant on this issue, but if you look at the countries you just listed, Bangladesh, Venezuela, and I would also, I'd like to add Sri Lanka. Okay? And then just over the weekend, last week, there was a huge, huge anti-government protest in the nation of Hungary. Now, if you look at the four countries, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, and Hungary, there were all the most concentrated targets of China's Belt and Road Initiative. That is that the Chinese government has spent enormous [amounts of] money on those countries. And I don't know whether the domestic political chaos, political uprising has something to do with the China connection. I don't have any scientific evidence, but I see this is a very interesting coincidence. If you think about it, all these countries have some semi-autocratic rulers, and they all took a lot of Chinese money. In the case of Bangladesh, the lady who was overthrown, Xi Jinping gave her 1 billion dollars in aid.
Now, that money, of course, was not a hundred percent accountable. I think if you look at the uprising organizers in Bangladesh, they were predominantly students, young students, idealistic ,very young, they failed, their government has failed them by aligning recognition with a notorious government like China. This is a similar situation. So wherever Belt and Road Road Initiative touches, you create a domestic political instability. That's the point I'm trying to drive at. You look at Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka probably is a classic example of how China's Belet and Road Initiative corrupt the society. Every single presidential election involves around central issue of its relationship with China. China's bankroll in that place, and China has heavy investment over there trying to build Sri Lanka as some kind of satellite state of China. And Venezuela, Dictator Maduro is a hundred percent in the Chinese pockets. So China financed them, bankroll them. China was the first country to recognize Maduro's illegitimate election result. And Hungary, of course, is even worse because Hungary is openly sided with Russia on the issue of Ukraine. So does China, and Hungary openly treats China as its friend. You can see this is basically, I think the people have spoken about their nation's own fate, about their nation's own cozy relationship with bad regimes like Chinese regime. So people essentially are rejecting the Chinese model of governance, and I firmly believe that.
Phil Hegseth:
Yeah, they're speaking up and has China responded to any of these events?
Miles Yu:
China has, as I say, endorsed Maduro. China has condemned the West as the conspirator behind all these uprisings. China is always paranoid about their own motive of how people perceive them.
Phil Hegseth:
Well, we'll just have to see how those play out. So we appreciate your time even on the travel next for joining. We'll see you next week.
Miles Yu:
See you next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of China Insider. I'd also like to thank our executive producer, Phillip Seth, who works tirelessly and professionally behind the scenes for every episode. To make sure we deliver the best quality podcast to you, the listeners, if you enjoy the show, please spread the word. For Chinese listeners, please check our monthly review and analysis episode in Chinese. We'll see you next time.