Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
China veteran Kaiser Kuo of the Sinica Podcast moderates a discussion on how the US-China tension have an profound impact on the war in the Ukraine and the position of Taiwan at the Ukrainian platform for Contemporary China.
The speakers: Da Wei, Director of Center for International Security and Strategy; Professor at School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University; Dmytro Burtsev, Junior Fellow at A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Emilian Kavalski, Professor at Centre for International Studies and Development, Jagiellonian University in Krakow; Yuan I, Research Fellow, Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taiwan.
US lawmakers have started debate on a law that would ban the successful TikTok app. Political analyst Kaiser Kuo dismisses the effort as misguided at best, he writes in the ChinaFile. “In a sense, the threat of TikTok is real: In this crisis of confidence, and in a state of moral panic that we’ll look back on red-faced a decade out, TikTok is causing us to inflict grievous self-harm.”
Kaiser Kuo:
The bill that got through Congress on Wednesday to effectively ban TikTok—let’s not pretend either that this bill isn’t specifically about TikTok, or that a forced divestiture isn’t tantamount to a ban—is the latest example of a classic pattern of American behavior: In a panicked attempt to preserve the American way of life, we undermine that very way of life. This time, we seem to be falling over one another to sacrifice our openness, a cornerstone of American strength, out of exaggerated fear that a social media app owned by a Chinese company could be our undoing. As usual, this whole episode says much more about us than it does about China. We have a terrible track record of making bad decisions while in the throes of a moral panic, from Prohibition to the Patriot Act. A closer analogy can be found in the Trump administration’s moves to restrict Chinese STEM students and researchers from coming and working in the U.S., and the subsequent China Initiative. Out of a fear that Chinese industrial espionage would confer an advantage on Beijing, we somehow decided that we were better off if all that prodigious Chinese STEM talent went back to China or just stayed there.
If we accept that we ought to take preemptive action against threats to national security, even if they are only latent and potential, any actions should address those potential threats in good faith. In this case, the threats are data harvested by social media falling into the hands of the Chinese, and social media being used by China to advance a hostile agenda. The bill now making its way to the Senate does not address either of these threats. Instead, it takes aim only at one relatively minor potential vector. Not only is the preponderance of valuable data on TikTok out in the open—the content itself, not the metadata—and would be there just the same irrespective of who owned the company, but Beijing can easily either buy valuable data from brokers, vacuum it up from other social media properties, or just acquire it the old fashioned way, through hacking.
That the motive behind this bill is not, in fact, data security is driven home by the refusal of legislators to accept ByteDance’s own proposal, Project Texas, which was devised in consultation with the Austin-based tech company Oracle and The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and would see data localized and housed entirely on servers controlled by Oracle with oversight entirely by U.S. citizens vetted and approved by Oracle. Project Texas would make TikTok the most locked-down, secure social media property in the U.S., if not in the world. The notion that even under that plan, Beijing would still decide to squeeze ByteDance just to acquire data it could obtain far more easily, and in ways that wouldn’t seriously imperil the only Chinese social media company to have enjoyed any global success, is just risible.
And influence? If TikTok is a potent vector for Chinese propagandists, one has to ask: How’s that working out for you, Beijing? Across its years of popularity, American attitudes toward China have plummeted, not improved. If we’re looking for causation, it is clear enough that, if anything, it’s our low national opinion of China driving D.C.’s animus toward TikTok. In a sense, the threat of TikTok is real: In this crisis of confidence, and in a state of moral panic that we’ll look back on red-faced a decade out, TikTok is causing us to inflict grievous self-harm.
China veteran Ian Johnson published earlier this month China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future, “Based on years of first-hand research in Xi Jinping’s China, Sparks challenges stereotypes of a China where the state has quashed all free thought, revealing instead a country engaged in one of humanity’s great struggles of memory against forgetting―a battle that will shape the China that emerges in the mid-21st century.”
In the China Project, Ian Johnson discusses his book with Kaiser Kuo.
The China Project:
Ian: Well, I think that we have to realize that this state, currently under Xi Jinping, as powerful as it is, it has not crushed all free thought. That there’s still people in China today who are availing themselves of basic digital technologies and just person-to-person contact to keep alive a different vision of China. I will be giving a talk in New York with my interlocutor Gal Beckerman who wrote a book called The Quiet Before. It basically talks about the slow burn process of how social movements take off. They don’t take off all right away. They take off with slow person-to-person contacts. I think this is something that you can see from this book, that there is this group, tens of thousands of people, this small collective memory of a different kind of China that could be, and that they’re still at it and they’re still active.
If we’re looking for interlocutors in China, and people are always like, “Who do we talk to? We can’t talk with the Communist Party.” These are the kind of people we could be talking to more. We could be inviting them. It stuns me that there’s not been a major retrospective at a big film festival of Hu Jie, of his films. I mean, he’d made three classic documentary films. He’s made it more, but three of them are just outstanding. These kinds of things, I think we should be more aware of them. This would also give people a different view of China. There are so many people in the West who see China as this monolith with just bad commies running the show. And while there may be some truth to that, it’s important to realize that there are other people out there too, and that they’re significant in number.
They’re not all just beleaguered victims about to be arrested right away. They have agency and they’re doing interesting stuff, and we should try to engage with them. Go over, visit them, bring our university, start up university exchanges more. Especially us going there. All those things are takeaways that I put in the conclusion. And because I am working at the Council on Foreign Relations, I have to have a little bit of a policy wonk takeaway thing. That’s in the conclusion of my book as some things that we could consider as implications of these stories.
China veteran Kaiser Kuo, co-founder of the Sinica Podcast and editor-at-large of the China Project, discusses the current state of the US-China relations, together with Susan Shirk, introducing her latest book, Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise at the Richard M. Krasno Distinguished Professorship at UNC-Chapel Hill, presided by Klaus Larres.
China veteran Kaiser Kuo discusses the US approach of China, and how it should change, at the Centre of East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin.
Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.
Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.
China watcher Kaiser Kuo tries to make sense out of China, in a world where polarized views on the second economy in the world often lead to exchanges of opinion and less analysis of facts, he told at the end of 2021 at the Europa Forum in Luzern, Switzerland.
China watcher Kaiser Kuo describes at the Varn Vlog how US-China relations went downhill since the 2008 financial crisis, and how that did not improve after President Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump. Also: how the Red Deal in China is changing domestic relations in China.
Rocker and political analyst Kaiser Kuo looks at how China – often wrongly – is perceived in the West in an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC. While the country has gone in less than a generation through a massive upgrade of its hardware, the software is often lagging behind, he says.
China veteran Kaiser Kuo discusses the relations between the US and China, and here focuses on the splintering of the internet, at a wide-ranging interview at the Wire China. “I also think we need to recognize that our worries are more about us than they are about China. We have in this country a real problem with surveillance capitalism, as it’s been called,” says Kaiser Kuo.
Wire China:
Given that first narrative switch you described — the now-accepted idea that technology has not led to a more open political system in China — many people talk about the splintering of the global internet. Do you think a splintering is inevitable?
To some extent, we have to recognize that there has already been a splintering when it comes to a lot of popular services on the internet. A lot of that owes to China’s very severe regime of internet censorship. But I worry about the United States accepting this as a norm and simply going along with it and imposing these same types of objectionable ideas that run so counter to our core values. I think the impact of it is not so much economic as it is moral, and it would be a betrayal of our values to embrace this. I think we should all be working to have a more open internet rather than acquiescing, and proactively helping it toward this other outcome — a splintered, fragmented, and decoupled internet.
I also think we need to recognize that our worries are more about us than they are about China. We have in this country a real problem with surveillance capitalism, as it’s been called. Our concerns over Chinese tech have been amplified in large measures by our worries about how American tech companies are treating our data, and following our every click online and targeting us with greater and greater precision.
Let me put it this way: the Trump administration and its moves against companies like Tencent’s WeChat and Bytedance’s TikTok were clearly never about national security. They were never about data privacy. We’ve seen that now. It’s clear, at least to me, that they were about this broader project of suppressing China’s technology prowess, and were very much of a piece with what we’ve done with Huawei. There are important differences between them, of course. And I think from a national security point of view, you could certainly make a stronger case for Huawei being of concern. But when you look at WeChat, which has users only in the single digit millions in the United States, almost all of them are either Americans with strong connections to China or are Chinese nationals or ethnic Chinese. That national security case is very weak. With TikTok, it’s almost laughable.
The WeChat and TikTok ban is a good example of how many American lawmakers view the U.S.-China tech competition as a zero-sum game. Are there areas where you could imagine productive cooperation in technology between the two countries?
I think if you look back over the last 30 years, cooperation in technology has been fantastically fruitful. Let’s start with immigration policy. The Trump administration is going after H-1B visas and trying to restrict the ability of ethnically Chinese scientists, researchers or technologists to participate in research in the United States. All these things are shooting ourselves in the foot and surrendering, or deliberately blowing up, what is probably the single greatest advantage that this country has had in technology. You only have to look at the great companies of Silicon Valley, Seattle, or Boston, and look at a list of the surnames to realize what kind of contribution is being made by people who the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is targeting through its China initiative, that Homeland Security is trying to prevent from entering this country, and that the Trump administration is attempting to demonize. Part of productive technology cooperation would be stopping this utterly feckless policy and reversing it. We can do that and still protect American national security interests if we put a little more trust into the natural immune system of an open society.
China watcher Kaiser Kuo discusses Western narratives on China’s rise. Technology did not beat authoritarian regimes, he explains, just as other Western views on China were profoundly wrong. The Arab Spring uprising was the first sign technology did not bring repression down, but not the last one, he argues.
My wife and I returned to the States in 2016. We were very happy in Beijing. It was simply so our kids could get an American education. But it’s been sheer agony to watch helplessly as
I actually feel ripped apart, and not out of attraction to both sides but out of profound disappointment with both countries. Dialogue is still possible, and understanding one another’s perspectives is more urgent than ever. So as dark as things are, I’m still fighting the good fight, and platforms like SupChina and Sinica are more important than ever.
China watcher Kaiser Kuo opens a panel on innovation in China at the (pre-corona) AMR Festival 2019 discussing how the West had flipping narratives on how the technology works in an authoritarian climate. And both say more about the China observers in the West than China itself, Kaiser argues.
Donald Trump's plan to ban Tiktok from the US is straight-up Sinophobia, says former Baidu communications director Kaiser Kuoto Slate. Most successful apps in China will not make a decent following among consumers in the rest of the world, he argues, just because they are too much adjusted to China's internet rules and customs, he adds.
Slate:
Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese American tech journalist and podcaster, and former spokesperson for the Chinese search engine Baidu, agrees that TikTok’s data collection has been aggressive but feels surveillance fears are overblown. “We have not seen any evidence so far that they’ve done anything nefarious. This is about our deeply emotional response to China. It’s straight-up Sinophobia,” he said in an interview prior to Trump’s ban threat. “If TikTok, which is just pure greasy kids’ stuff, is drawing so much fire, it’s hard to believe that anything wouldn’t.”
It’s also not clear that China really wants to develop globally successful consumer tech products. Kuo notes that TikTok’s success is something of an anomaly, since “the really successful apps in China, the very things that made them successful would hinder them from success in other markets.” Baidu, for instance, may be an excellent search engine but its compliance with Chinese censorship laws makes it difficult to export.
The messaging service WeChat is an all-in-one swiss army knife app for its Chinese users, facilitating everything from payment to ridesharing to food ordering. Given its ubiquity, it’s also a powerful tool for surveillance and censorship, which is why the international edition is so pared down that it’s essentially a WhatsApp knock-off.
TikTok’s domestic Chinese counterpart, Douyin, also boasts some micropayment and search features—in addition to censorship compliance—that are absent from the global version.
China veteran Kaiser Kuo discusses the future of relations between China and the US, as disaster is luring, while cooperation is needed more than ever considering the problems of the coronavirus and climate change. On racism in the US, at the Oxford Political Review. Kaiser Kuo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form. Are you looking for more political experts on the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.
Veteran China watcher Kaiser Kuo discusses at the Wilson Center what China wants. Does it want to topple global order, and trying to impose change on the outside world? A wide-ranging discussion, also including Jiayang Fan. Is it exporting its ideology of just pragmatic?
At the China Speakers Bureau we have started to explore WeChat Work as a social platform, next to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Are you interesting in following us on this journey? Check out our instructions here.
China tech expert Kaiser Kuo discusses why China tech rise is unsettling the US. He calls back two narratives that did not work out as expected: tech did not liberate us, and did not lead to more political freedom, but rather the opposite.
The successful social platform Tiktok got into hot water when it comes to its relation with China, now the company goes international. Former Baidu communication director Kaiser Kuo looks at The Ringer how Tiktok thrived, like others, in this climate of uncertainty, fuzziness and unpredictability that is key for China's internet.
The Ringer:
“I just remember it was like yesterday that we were all so disparaging of China’s ability to innovate,” Kaiser Kuo, a journalist who has worked in the Chinese tech industry and cohosts Sinica Podcast, told me. “Freedom was not only the necessary condition for being innovative, but it was also even, more hubristically, a sufficient condition.” But in recent years, China has gradually disproved that theory with its mastery of dockless bikes and mobile payments. The two countries are now competing to control the growing sectors of artificial intelligence and global telecommunications. And in May, the Trump administration moved to essentially ban the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from the U.S. market...
From its launch, this lack of clarity has been apparent to TikTok users. Many teens have complained about being surreptitiously booted from the app. Others suspect their content has been intentionally kept away from the all-important “For You” feed. In late November, a 17-year-old Afghan American high-schooler named Feroza Aziz tucked a political message into a standard TikTok beauty tutorial. “Use the phone that you’re using right now to search up what’s happening in China,” she says in the clip, while curling her eyelashes. She then criticizes the Chinese government for keeping Muslim Uighurs in mass detention centers in the country’s far western region of Xinjiang. The video was briefly removed from TikTok, and Aziz was temporarily unable to access her account. But after the incident was picked up by news outlets, TikTok apologized, overrode her ban, and brought back the video, claiming these issues were due to a “human moderation error” and a separate, unrelated issue with Aziz’s account. Whatever happened, Kuo says this kind of lack of clarity keeps with standard Chinese censorship practices. When loading a forbidden website in China, users often encounter the same standard error page you might find with a weak Wi-Fi signal. “The line has always been sort of deliberately blurry,” Kuo said. “They deliberately keep it fuzzy so that the idea is if you’re not sure whether you’re going to step over it, you’re going to self-censor. You’re going to be more careful about what you say.”...
Kuo, who worked at the Chinese search engine Baidu, says companies’ willingness to censor is often just a means to an end. “When the Cyberspace Administration of China sends somebody over, or when they’re having these conversations about what videos, or search terms, or topics need to be censored, it’s not like these companies are saying, ‘Oh, hey, let me suggest a few more to add to this blacklist,’” he said. “They’re trying to comply as minimally as possible. What goes on that list will be different every time and it will change day to day.”
Media play a key role in portraying China, and not always in the best way, says media and China expert Kaiser Kuo, former Baidu communication director, in a (lengthy) interview for the U.S. China Perception Monitor at the Carter Center. "Our lack of historical perspective also tends to make us impatient. It’s easy to see how someone without a knowledge of history can look at China and see a very modern and developed state," says Kaiser Kuo.
The U.S. China Perception Monitor:
My primary interest has always been in addressing the perception gaps that Americans or other English-speaking people have toward China, and right now I’ll only speak about those, though I think it’s important that perception gaps going the other way also be addressed.
Part of the U.S. perception gap has to do with media coverage of China. Most Americans know what they think they know about contemporary China through watching, reading, and listening to news reports. And while I happen to think that, especially given the conditions for reporting in China, our media on balance does an excellent job of reporting, there are nonetheless structural realities about the way that news is created and consumed that end up contributing to misperceptions.
When I read the New York Times or watch an hour of network or cable news, even though there are many, many stories on any given day that might make me think the country is going down in flames – more chaos in the White House, the president’s latest inchoate Twitter rantings, another unarmed black man gunned down by police, another prominent man exposed for sexual misconduct – there are also the rest of the stories in the paper about really banal and quotidian things, as well as plenty of feel-good news: trend stories, food stories, scientific breakthroughs, your basic human interest fare. And more importantly, I also have the lived experience of the U.S., and I know that despite all the negative pieces I’ve just read in the paper, I don’t expect that when I open my window I’ll hear the din of street battles and smell burning tires.
Unfortunately, when I read that same newspaper or take in that newscast, the few stories I’m likely to encounter about China will focus on the unusual – and often, that means they’ll focus on the negative. This isn’t because there’s some plot among media elites to make China look bad. It’s fundamentally structural to the news business. Reporters write about the planes that crash, not the ones that land safely. They write about the bridges that collapse, and not about the ones that don’t. And so it’s only natural that they’d write about the repression of ethnic minorities, or elite conflict, or official malfeasance, or environmental catastrophe, or mass protest. The problem is that for an American reading these, without those other banal or even pleasant stories to offer a fuller picture, and without that lived experience of China, many readers – I daresay most – will come away with a picture of China that is disproportionately negative.
Reporting by American media outlets is, to the very best of my knowledge, quite accurate. There really is an atrocity underway in Xinjiang, where efforts to assimilate Uyghurs include extralegal detentions with no due process, where fundamental features of the Uyghur culture itself are under assault, and where sophisticated technologies are being used to monitor and track people in ways that clearly violate any reasonable norms of privacy. There really is horrific environmental degradation in many parts of China. There really is extensive censorship of all media, including the internet. The reporting on all of this – and much more – has been accurate. But accurate isn’t the same thing as realistic. It’s not, one might argue, the media’s responsibility to paint this more complete realistic picture. So I’m afraid this just isn’t something that can easily be fixed. All any of us can hope to do is to try and present more of the complete picture.
There’s another set of issues that contribute significantly to gaps in perceptions of China when viewed from the U.S., and these have mostly to do with the relationship Americans today have with history. We tend to see history as basically teleological – that it has a goal or an endpoint, that it moves in a particular direction. It’s really baked into our language, and it’s hard to transcend. We don’t recognize how contingent history actually is. This has been especially pronounced, I think, since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Communism. Having seen off two great ideological enemies, fascism and communism, we were more convinced than ever of being on the right side of history – and less apt to interrogate the assumptions undergirding our teleological view of history, less apt to recognize the contingency of it all. So we now stand on one side of what is a fundamentally historical chasm, looking across at China, and wondering why it can’t just cross over to where we are. We don’t bother to look down into that chasm and reflect on the tortuous path that got us to this side: all the narrow escapes, lucky throws of the dice, and all the blood and bodies along that path.
Our lack of historical perspective also tends to make us impatient. It’s easy to see how someone without a knowledge of history can look at China and see a very modern and developed state. Superficially, it could look that way. But lacking an appreciation for history, we don’t recognize how the impressive advances in China’s hardware – the gleaming infrastructure, the megacities, the high technology, all built in the span of this one generation – isn’t yet matched by the software. Those changes take time. In that regard, I think in all fairness China has already come a long way, but it’s the disconnect between the very modern facade and an interior political culture that, at least by our standards, isn’t commensurately modern that throws people.
