10/23/20 A very guest intensive show in GL today

Transcript

This episode is sponsored in part by LifeLock. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and right now is the perfect time to ensure you're doing everything you can to be safer online. Be cyber smart by taking these basic steps to help keep you and your family protected from identity theft, scams and other online dangers. Use a strong password like well if you're using password one two three four come out of the Dark Ages and update that one set up multifactor authentication on your accounts and regularly update the software on your devices. A lot of people are lazy about this stuff. Just not worth it, not worth the consequences. It's important to understand how cybercrime and identity theft are affecting our lives. Every day we put our information at risk on the internet in an instant. A cybercriminal could harm what's yours. Your finances, your credit. Good thing there's LifeLock. LifeLock helps detect a wide range of identity threats like your Social Security number for sale on the dark web. If they detect your information, they'll send you an alert. No one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses, but you can keep what's yours with LifeLock identity theft protection joined now and save up to 25 percent off your first year at LifeLock.com/ Jordan. That's LifeLock.com/. Join in for 25 percent off. Special thanks to Nissan for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show, a massive, huge crackdown. The real bloodbath is happening behind closed doors behind the scenes. The government is making sure that anybody involved wasn't listened to their punished. They're arrested in their lives are over. They'll never be able to participate in society. Normally again, I'll never be able to join the government or get a state job or anything like this. So they do not want to see more protests happen. Because what happens when more protests happen is maybe next time the police actually join the protesters. Maybe next time the play and the riot police actually join with the people that are calling for the CCP to step down. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger on The Jordan Harbinger Show with code the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional four star general Russian spy, former jihadi or neuroscientist. And each episode turns our guests wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, welcome or you want to tell your friends about the show, thank you. Our starter packs are the best place to do that. These are collections of top, or maybe just some of my favorite episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Topics like China, North Korea, persuasion and influence, disinformation and cyber warfare, abnormal psychology and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger RT.com Slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. Another installment of our Out of the Loop series, where we explore topics current in the news that might be covered poorly by mainstream news sources. Maybe they're a bit complex, or maybe they just go in one ear and out the other for some reason. In this episode, we're talking about the China protests, the ones about zero COVID. And sure, these started with COVID lockdowns and bad zero COVID policies from the Chinese Communist Party, but they've evolved into something much more prolific there nationwide. It's very much an important event or set of events for the people and for the government of China. We're going to be doing a deep dive into that today with Lao Wei, 86, former show guest China vlogger, YouTuber and good friend of mine who's spent over a decade living and working in China and traveling all over China by motorbike. Really interesting guy. Tons of stories. His China focused YouTube channels have well over a million subscribers. The dude knows China and follows Chinese news on the daily. This is what he focuses on day in and day out. This is going to be a really interesting look at the current unrest happening over there in China. All right, out of the loop episode two. Here we go with Lao Wei 86. So thanks for coming back on the show, man, I know this is our out of the loop series. It's a little bit of a different format where we go over a lot of these news events that go in one ear and out the other and with China. Well, who better to talk to you about China than than you guys? But also, it's a little bit confusing, even for us, China watchers, because China's been under zero COVID policy for a while. They went into lockdowns. We didn't hear a whole lot about it. Dot dot dot people throwing chairs at guys in white suits all over TikTok and Instagram. What is happening? Yeah, so I guess the biggest thing that really kicked this off was there was this fire that happened in Xinjiang, so this is all the way in western China. And I got to be honest with you, like I was surprised at how much coverage this fire was getting because fires in China and then the firefighters and police and their lack of access to people in the buildings that catch on fire is a very common occurrence throughout the entire country. This is not like a new thing, but for some reason this specific event in Xinjiang just really triggered off a wave of protests of just people that wanted to show their solidarity with the victims in the building. People want to have candlelight vigils and things like this, and it was almost like the violent crackdown from the authorities across the country for these candlelight vigils, for these protests was what really kind of created a reaction against the authorities. It created this situation where it happened in a city called Urumqi. They had kind of this protest or candlelight vigil type thing on a road in Shanghai called Urumqi Road, because it was symbolic of the area. And then when the cops started cracking down on it, people were like, What are you talking about? We can't have a candlelight vigil. What are you talking about? We can't mourn over these people, and that's really what sparked this off. But it was a simultaneous thing. So for people who don't know Xinjiang, that's where the wiggers live. We've done shows on the week of genocide. It's a little bit weird, and I'm grateful to hear it. I'm glad to hear it. But it's a little bit odd that a fire in a place where a lot of people in China think, Oh, that's where the terrorist separatists live, that that was the tipping point because you would almost think. And I guess this just shows how wrong I am about how people think about Xinjiang is inside Shanghai. At least you would almost think they would go, Oh, well, well, those aren't real Chinese people, they're not Han Chinese people. But that's not what happened. You'd almost think they'd let something like that go more because it is so far away from the Han Chinese areas. And to clarify the reason so many people died in this fire is because if I understand it correctly, the residents of that building were welded into the building because of COVID lockdowns. It's not like lockdowns here where they say, Please don't go outside, you're literally trapped in your own building like a prison. Right? So they didn't have access to it. And I would actually agree with you that it seems kind of weird that there would be kind of so much support from Han Chinese people elsewhere throughout China. However, I do want to counter because I don't want there to be any misinformation. Yeah, a huge chunk of Urumqi are Han people. A lot of the discourse and stuff was coming from Han people within Urumqi. When I looked at the protests that were in on Urumqi streets, I saw the vast majority of people were Han Chinese people, so that's just something to keep in mind. There's another thing it was a rare, coordinated effort I saw throughout 79 plus universities around China. And if anything is going to happen in China, I always thought it's going to happen from the educated populace is going to be happening from the people that have access to VPNs or even just have a better understanding of what the outside world is probably like. And this coordinated effort. There was this white paper going around talking about all of the problems that the zero COVID policy has brought. There was insinuations that the Chinese government was doing things wrong, and this was a moment in something I hadn't seen since Tiananmen Square in 1989, where all of these students in all of these universities, pretty much at the same time stood up and had their speeches. They had their loudspeakers, they organized protests, they had graffiti movements. All of these things came together to really paint the Chinese government in a very negative light, and I've never seen something so coordinated in a country that cracks down so much on coordinated efforts or demonstrations. So it was really the beginning. This is interesting because I think a lot of people go, So what? There's a lot of white papers, white paper. There's all kinds of articles in the United States about how our government screwed this up or that up. It happens in Europe, it happens in Canada. It doesn't really happen in China. You don't have coordinated efforts that say, Hey, our dictator, our government are infallible. Communist Party is implementing a policy that actually really sucks and is wrong and is backwards and is incorrect. And the result is bad. That just doesn't happen. No. And again, I think what people have to understand, too, is that you can't look at this through a western lens or even a lens of any other country. Because China has spent the past few years creating the most robust surveillance state in the entire world, everything you do is tied to your national ID card, so everything you post online is not anonymous. Everything that you do in the streets, you could be facial recognized through the camera system. You have to use your QR code, which was started during the COVID pandemic, to allow yourself to access to banks, restaurants, public areas, right? All of this stuff has been created to create levels of surveillance where no one can get away with anything. And the crazy thing is this as Big Brother as this is, this is rarely used to prevent actual crime. The surveillance state is rarely used to go catch a guy that stole someone's bike. This surveillance state is being used to stop gatherings of people. So that's why to go back to the protests thing, it was so shocking to see this many people come together in a anti government policy slash turned into anti-government protest and to see that many people coordinate in a system that doesn't allow any coordination where they can stop a WeChat group, which that the app that Chinese people use to talk to each other to stop it in its tracks before anyone can make plans. Hey, meet me on Nanjing Lu over there. Hey, we're going to meet here at this time. They can stop all that before it even happens, before you people even come together, right? So it shows you these protests actually without the surveillance, say these protests could have been massive, like, absolutely huge. So but to see that much coordination was shocking to me. I see. So since the government and security apparatus controls all the online discussion groups, the fact that these protests got so big with that control in place means that without that control in place, they could have been 10 times the size. This was just an unstoppable force, which is again highly unusual. And protests don't happen like this in China, ever. You mentioned the last big one was 1989 Tiananmen Square. I don't know if you're a history expert on this. Off the top of your head. But do you remember the death toll of that event and how big the scale of that event was by any chance? There's no way to know officially, just because it was what's been erased from the annals of history. But you know, the estimates are anywhere from a thousand to upwards of 10000 students murdered during that protest. Right? And the thing about that is that it's something that has been lost in the memory of all the Chinese people that weren't there because they weren't taught in school about this thing. But it's one of those things that's like the first thing you see when you get a VPN. Yeah, it's like stuff about Tiananmen Square. It's just like, it's almost like you're greeted with that. That's like the first confrontational bit. Is that because people are looking for it because they've heard about it in whispers and they're like, OK, I finally have Google Tiananmen Square. I have no statistics on this, but I can say this. The vast majority of people when I lived in China for 10 years, the vast majority of people that I knew that knew about it, which by the way, was in the minority. The vast majority of people that did know about it found out because they either had a professor in a different area. So maybe in Hong Kong or Macao that talked about it, or they had friends that studied in a different country that heard about it in their classes. And then what they would do is they would inspire them to try to find a way to get a VPN. And that's one of the first things they would look up via. The vast majority of people I know in China didn't even really know about it, or if they did know about it, it's kind of like, Oh, that was like a bad, crazy group of students that got cracked down by the government. They're just separatists. It was a CIA color revolution. Right? Yeah. I often will ask my Chinese teachers who are in China if they've heard of this protest and some of them say no. And some of them say yes, and then they don't want to talk about it and others say yes. And then they'll talk about it in their internet gets disconnected in our lesson ends, which I used to think that was a funny coincidence, but it's happened like ten times and is definitely not a coincidence anymore. Not which is the most 1984 thing kind of ever. In fact, one teacher, we talked about it, we got disconnected in the next time we talked. And when I asked her something, I said, Hey, what happened last time she did like this with her mouth? And she was like, No, like, just literally don't even ask me about this because she probably had the police come and knock on her door and be like, Maybe don't talk about that anymore. I have to look at your gas meter or whatever the euphemism is. And yes, I've shown the Tank Man photo on Skype to some teachers and they've never seen it. This is such a weird thing if you show so Google Tank Man, if you don't know what this is, but it's one of the most famous photos in the world. It's from Tiananmen Square. It's a man standing in front of a tank, and that man has never been seen again. Of course, after that, because he got disappeared by the police or the secret police, whatever in China, the Communist Party after this photo was taken. And it's one of the most iconic photos, like if you had top 10 most iconic photos in in history, that's going to be in there and almost no one. You can test this with friends. If you have friends who are in China, you can test this by showing them this, and they almost certainly will have not seen this photo. Whereas almost everyone in the rest of the world who has internet slash has gone to school for any length of time. Has seen this photo? Yes, absolutely. And I think when you look at a photo like this, when you see Tank Man, you see something so iconic that's not really permeated the zeitgeist in China. You'd have to say like, Well, it's crazy that people aren't making comparisons in the current protests, like in China to this right? But I think the most important part of that photo is what happened to Tank Man afterwards. Like you said, he was disappeared. Nobody knows where he is now, right? That's what's currently happening now. And I think there is a huge, huge problem with I hate using the term mainstream media or western. Yeah, because it makes us sound like those weird like creepy left or right tinfoil hat. Yeah, exactly. No, that's not where I'm going with this. Where. I'm going is the short sightedness of looking at these protests is dangerous, and I'll tell you why it's dangerous for the Chinese people, as dangerous for future demonstrations as well, because what happened to take afterwards he was disappeared and I feel like that's really not part of the dialogue. That's not like people look at that and they're like, Oh, either assume he was like, run over or, oh, like, this shows the brutality of the crackdown, the protesters in Tiananmen Square. Nobody is talking about the aftermath of what's happening with the protests right now in China. And what's happening is I'm turning on the news and I'm seeing people say, Look, it seems like the protests worked. China's reducing their COVID restrictions. Look, China is rolling back COVID restrictions because of the protesters, and it's almost insinuating that the Chinese government is listening to their citizens. And it's some sort of reforming country that allows dissent and discourse to influence policy. And that's just simply not the case. And I can actually just say something it's fairly breaking right now. What's happening in Gwangju? Gwangju is a first tier city in the south of China. There is tons and tons of protests against zero COVID policy and against Xi Jinping in the first tier. City means what, like over five million people in the US would be New York, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, et cetera. Cities everybody knows. Yeah, so first year city, there's only there's only four of them in China. There's Gwangju, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing. Those are the big, big, big ones. It's less to do with population, what to do with like infrastructure and influence. So anyway, Gwangju, one of the main city, we just say main cities of China. Huge, huge area for these protests right now. Literally right now, the police and secret police are doing a mass arrests of all of the protesters that participated. And I'm talking about from the people that were throwing the gates. Like you said at the pandemic, workers in the police all the way down to the people that held up a blank piece of paper in A4 sized piece of paper, the A4 revolution, so to speak. Let's talk about that for a second, because I think people have probably gone on social media and seen people yelling at guys in white suits and they don't necessarily know what those people are. It looks like kind of a B-roll from pandemic movies like a crappy, low budget one because they're a bunch of dudes and like kind of cheap looking, not really hazmat suits, more like patent suits with a mask on, and they're getting temporary barricade chucked at them while people film on an Android phone. And I'm making a joke out of it. But it's like it's very serious, obviously, because these people are are fighting for the end to lockdown, but it went from these protests. I think the significant part here is that we may be missed is this protest went from, Hey man, I got to go to the store and buy food. I got to get medicine for my baby who's got a fever. I've got an old person in here who needs health care, et cetera. The protests went from that because they've been locked down for months, too. Wait a minute. Actually, you know what? What I want is for you to listen to me. Maybe I need more rights, not just the right to go to the grocery store because I'm in an authoritarian regime that has too strong of a lockdown. Maybe we need democracy, and the chants on the songs kind of went from just banging pots and pans because they wanted to be let out of their house, too. Maybe we need a regime change because nobody's listening to us over in Beijing. People started holding up these A4 sized white pieces of paper. What's that all about? So there is this idea that, hey, if you're going to hold up slogans like, I don't know if your audience remembers Banner Man, Banner Man is a guy that stood on the Tong Bridge in Beijing and unveiled a banner with like a manifesto of sorts. Say no to the lockdowns. Xi Jinping stepped down. You know that kind of stuff. Yeah, which does not happen. That's like going to Kim Jong Il. You're not a good leader. We need elections. That guy was Tank Man 2.0. So if you're going to unveil a banner like that, you're dead. You're just dead. They will black bag you and take you away and probably torture you and kill you, right? So the idea is that if you unveil a banner with something on it, that's what gets you arrested. But hey, how can you get arrested for just holding a blank piece of paper because everyone knows what you want to say? And so the implication was, everyone knows what I want to say, but I'm not allowed to say it, but I'm not allowed to say it. So if I hold up that blank piece of paper and everyone does it, it sends a massive signal. And then people will start looking it up, right? You got a hashtag A-4 revolution after that A4 being the size of the paper, right? So that became like this very easy to spread protest method. And one thing I wanted to mention, I think it's really important you brought up a really good point to go from saying, I don't want to be locked in my house anymore to go from saying like, I want to be able to go out and buy groceries to. I want Xi Jinping to step down. I want the CCP to step down as a pretty massive leap, especially inside. I think people, I got to understand this is not like in the U.S. where you maybe change your opinion from. I don't like a current Biden policy to like, I want communism in the country. It's you know what I mean? Right? Somebody who says, I don't want to have to get the vaccine, the COVID vaccine, to go to work. And then the next week they're going, you know what, actually, we need to blow up the White House and everyone needs to be murdered. It's. Whoa, whoa, man, calm down. Where did that come from? And sure. That's what we're looking at with China, because the bridge guy banner guy, he threw that banner up there. And despite all of this being censored and shut down on social media in China, people still found out about it and people were air dropping this message to other people. Photographs of it to the point where didn't Apple have to get involved? Somehow explain this because this is crazy to me. Yeah. So for everyone out there, it doesn't use Apple AirDrop as a tool on your Apple phone that you can use or any Apple device that you can use to send files to other people with an iPhone or another Apple device. And this doesn't use traditional internet, right? You're not uploading to some sort of server where the government could just see what's in that folder, its phone to phone, its phone to phone. So like, I could send you a picture of Winnie the Pooh meme or something, right? So this was happening. This is happening all over Shanghai and Beijing, where people were taking Banner Man's manifesto. So all of his things, no more lockdown, no more Xi Jinping, blah blah blah blah blah. And they were making stylized pictures and sending it to each other phone to phone through AirDrop. And what happened was, actually, I saw there was this post that was going around in China, say it was some sort of tech group that was run by the Chinese government talking about how they immediately needed to come up with some way to stop this and that you, as a user shouldn't accept any pictures or anything from AirDrop because you could be politically liable, you could be liable for detention, things like this. So it was trying to scare people like there's a phrase that doesn't exist in the United States or the rest of the free world politically liable. Yeah, yeah. Correct. You could potentially be punished for something that somebody sends you, right? And so that was in an effort to scare people. But then what we saw was Apple actually capitulate to the Chinese government in China and turn off a certain feature of AirDrop. That means that you wouldn't be able to receive stuff necessarily automatically from a stranger, right? So it effectively stopped this whole airdrop revolution thing where they're trying to send these documents to each other. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest lady 86. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsor in part by better help online therapy. The holidays can be a really tough time between managing family dynamics, racing from one thing to another, braving the cold in the dark weather depending on where you live. It's normal to feel down. When I lived in Michigan, I, well, 20 20 hindsight. I had depression or seasonal affective disorder all winter, and it sucked and I didn't know what it was. But even if you're not experiencing any specific mental health conditions or serious problems, mental health counseling can be a useful tool to improve your communication skills, reduce stress, set healthy boundaries, deal with trauma, etc. And frankly, all of those things can happen around the holidays. Better help Online therapy is a great option. You can access mental health care from the comfort of your own home or car without worrying about office visits. Plus, if you've got a hectic schedule, online counseling gives you a plethora of options as the world's largest therapy service. Better help has matched three million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists 100 percent online. Plus, it's affordable. 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Customize the perfect system for your home in just a few minutes at SimpliSafe.com/ Jordan, go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20 percent off your order with interactive monitoring that's SimpliSafe..com/ Jordan. There's no safe, like SimpliSafe. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers and creators every single week, it is because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free. Over at Jordan Harbinger.com/ course, the course is about improving your relationship, building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. And the course does all of that in a super easy down to earth, non cringy, non networking kind of way. No awkward strategies, no cheesy tactics, really just practical exercises that are going to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. All in six minutes a day. That's really all it takes. Ain't nobody got time for more than that. By the way, many of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong, and you can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com/ course. Now back to Liow Way 86. Right, because right now, if I have airdrop and allow everyone to send me things, people can freely send me unsolicited dick pics on my phone while I'm on an aircraft, which is what happens all the time. By the way, every time I'm on a damn plane, someone's trying to send me something with AirDrop. And sometimes it's a funny meme, and usually it's something disgusting because people are crazy. But you just leave it on and you can receive anything and it says, Do you want to accept this? And you're like, Sure, whatever unknown user who cares that got turned off in China? I think now you can use AirDrop, but it turns off automatically after like five minutes or something like that. So if your friend wants to send, yeah, ten minutes. So if your friend wants to send you something, they can do it, but you have to know to turn it on, which effectively stops somebody from hanging out on a park bench in the center of Beijing and just sending it to everybody who will accept it because nobody's got their airdrop on. You can't just leave it on. And Apple rewrote that software for the Chinese Communist Party to be able to censor the free spread of information, which is mind blowing, but also not terribly surprising because the consequences were probably either you don't sell a single iPhone here or make another one here, ever. And we close all your stores or you rewrite this piece of code and don't tell anyone. It's a bit of a double edged sword because like, they did that and then simultaneously made the announcement that they're pulling most production of China. They just didn't want to do it tomorrow, right? Which is what they would have had to be facing, which is they were between a rock and a hard place because when you do a deal with the devil, you don't necessarily get to dictate all the terms like that's the whole idea. So if you're using slave labor or near slave labor in another country to create a product, you can't be upset when the slave driver says, Hey, by the way, I'm changing my policy and you have no choice. That's what you're dealing with. That's a good point, actually, because that was one of the many efforts that the Chinese government is doing to stop this. They were trying to stop this from spreading all the way down to like the new detail, like something like AirDrop, where you wouldn't even think would be a protest tool at that point. Sure, it's kind of like akin to dropping balloons of leaflets over North Korea. I mean, the average person not going to know about this. So the fact that they were going to that level and they're investigating all the people like putting up down roots, using ping spray paint and bathrooms, which to the average person doesn't mean anything. But in China is huge. They're sending their top secret police and investigators like the equivalent of the FBI to go figure out who spray painted in a bathroom, right? Imagine you make it to the top of your class at Beijing University and you're like a master of all of these different spy methodologies and tradecraft. And they're like, All right, here's what you're going to be doing this week. Every public restroom in Beijing, we want you to inspect that thing top to bottom. Get in there, man. Get in there. Yes. Here's a paint marker. But it shows you why the Chinese government does this. Yeah, because it can really, really change, right? So to go back? It goes from I want to go grocery shopping and not be locked down any more because I heard my neighbor starve to death to down with Xi Jinping. And I'll tell you, I watched this happen on video so that you can see clips where people in the crowd there are so shocked already that there's a protest too. Like, Holy s**t, what is actually happening in my street here in China? There are people on the street protesting and throwing stuff at cops, right? That's already a shock. You can hear people ask, What is this about? Right? Oh, it's about zero COVID lockdown. And then the protests will say something like, you know, down with the Chinese government going to Tandang Shabtai like, come step down, step down. Yeah. And then all of a sudden the, you know, 50, 60 year old woman behind the camera who's filming this protest goes, you know? Yeah, yeah. Step down, government, you know. And it's that quick because there's so much repressed build up of frustration. We're talking like almost three years of lockdowns that have created people are stupid. You know, they know where this is coming from. The Chinese government's tried so hard to say, Oh, any time there's bulls**t happening where people are upset about the lockdowns, that's just a local issue. They've tried this for so long and it usually works. But there is so much pent up frustration when it finally affects that person. They say, Wait a minute, this is happening to me too. And I did a sample. I talked to people that I knew would have no idea about these protests. They would have absolutely no clue. He's talking about Americans or Chinese people know Chinese people. And I talked to people in China and I said, Hey, you know, is everything OK? Heard about these protests right in the midst of everything? And the person would say, Oh, oh yeah, that was just one road in Gwangju, right? In my mind, I'm like, Wait, this is in like 100 cities. That was just a one road in Guangdong. And by the way, that has nothing to do with anything. Those were migrant workers. They were from Hubei. That's what my Chinese teacher said. Now it's just very local, very small. I've never seen it. Also, I think the audio on the videos that you're looking at is fake. And I'm like, These are videos from people in crowds. This is not CNN fabricating a bunch of crap to make China look bad, but OK. No. So the idea was that if you can localize in place the blame on something that has nothing to do with you, right, then all of a sudden it becomes a distant issue, and the Chinese government uses this dissonance on purpose all the time. But again, during these protests is the first time I saw that break down. That kind of narrative broke down because I think the lockdowns became so prolific that it's not just, oh, just Wuhan is lockdown. Oh, just quangos lockdown now it's like, OK, we went through a bunch of lockdowns too, and I'm tired of it. So all of a sudden it becomes tantalizing to say, Yeah, maybe this is coming from the top. You know what this also shows me is that and this is true for authoritarian regimes all over the place North Korea, China, Belarus. You're just in an authoritarian regime. You're just never sure how many people agree with what's in your head, especially if you're a dissident. You might get wasted with a college roommate or whatever you have and go, You know what? It's pretty frickin screwed up that we have to do x y z. And if you're seven whiskies in, they might be like, Yeah, you know what? This is bunch of crap, and you sober up the next day and you go, Do we talk about that? Do we want to pretend we don't remember that? And it's like, maybe we don't talk about that with everybody on the whole floor in the whole cla*s. That's sort of a microcosm. Maybe a husband says something to the wife, but they don't want to say it to the kids because it might come out at school. And you're just not sure. Do the other parents think this way or are we just weirdos that think, hey, are rationing system is kind of bulls**t? And these protests really prove that many, many, many people are like minded and they want big changes because a couple gutsy people go out in the street and say this and everyone, like you said, the air goes, You know what? While we're on a roll of this lockdown thing, I do agree with the fact that this is broken and this is broken and this is broken and this is broken. You're right, this is not good. And so you start to see in public, which is why the government always wants to prevent gatherings and people chatting online. You do see that a lot of people agree with you, and it's in the Communist Party's best interest to stifle that discussion so that everybody thinks that they are an island and alone. And that's failing. Here it is. And it's something that I saw often when I was in China is that there was always, let's say, like when I was teaching university, right? There was always one kid in the class that was just like he didn't gel with the other people, right? And he would always be better at English, and he would be better at kind of thinking outside the box. He probably had a VPN. He was reading outside news and stuff. And that person was a weirdo. That person was like not ostracized because it's like nobody's calling him a traitor or anything like this. But he's just weird. He doesn't blend in with everyone else, right? And that's by design. It's this kind of idea that you have to fit in, right? He's. Yeah. Yeah, you have to fit in, right? But at the same time, it's not that all the kids that ostracize him didn't agree with him. It's not that they actually thought what he thought was wrong. It's just because he stuck out, right? And that's what's necessary in China, in a collective society, in a society where everything is dictated by the government. If you have enough people come out and say it, then it turns out that a lot of people actually believe that. And so the Chinese Graham has done many things to preempt this and this this Harvard study that they always use in talking about the satisfaction of the people. The 90 percent of Chinese people are satisfied with the central government, right when they don't actually have any perceived interaction with the central government. Most people aren't allowed to speak with the ones that we allowed to speak and answer the survey. By and large. Very happy with the government, just flawed from the get go because what you're talking about is a repressed society where people are not going to be transparent in that survey. Number two, they don't have their perceived image of Beijing or Xi Jinping is very different than what they deal with the bulls**t that they deal with at home, with their local government. The Chinese government has successfully created this image of an infallible kind of palace in Beijing that dictates everything supremely and it can't be wrong. But then anything you deal with if you have any transgressions against government, there's a factory that's caused all the kids in the village to have cancer, and there's an unsolved rape case from a CCP official in your village. All the stuff that I saw when I was in China. That's just local. Again, that's just blaming the local populace, the local government, and that's nothing to do with Beijing. So the propaganda works to a certain extent. But when the protests kicked up, people kind of finally saw outside the box and stop being apathetic to the situation and said, Wait a minute, there is some bulls**t going on. I want to talk a little bit about the physical and technical controls over COVID in China, because I think people go lockdowns. OK, wait, but they're really locked in their building. It's actually worse than that in a lot of ways. For those of us that live in a free society, argue, as we might, about what we're freer in and what we're not physically being locked in your apartment is crazy and also the barriers that are outside. So even when you do get a pass to go out, you can't just go wherever you want. I mean, there's footage on the China show, your show where there are drones flying around between high rises and there's a loudspeaker and it says something like, Please close your windows, please do not bang pots and pans. Or whatever, and it's just the most Orwellian, crazy, dystopian cyberpunk, whatever stuff that I've ever seen in real life and I've been to North Korea, they just don't have the technology to repress like this. Yeah, yeah, I have to make the comparison. It's just North Korea with technology. But yeah, a lot of you guys probably saw the footage of people getting welded into their houses and stuff. And obviously that wasn't the government standard or something, this these or outlier cases. But there was enough to cause serious alarm abroad when those videos were not. The real stuff that people went through was the barriers that gates around there. Complex, the not being able to go to work, to go to. I think they think about the lockdowns they might have gone through in America or in different countries and there. Remember those two weeks or I couldn't go on my favorite hiking trail. I couldn't go to my favorite restaurant, but they could still go outside. They could still walk around. They could still, if they wanted to, they could still go, interact with people in China. What it meant is arbitrarily being stuck in your apartment. You can't go to work. You can't earn money. In many cases, you can't buy food, you can't do anything. Everything is at the whim of the government. So to zoom in on a place like in Shanghai, you had the government go, you know, we're going to lock you all down for months and you're not going to be able to actually leave your apartment, but we'll make sure you're fed and even that fell through. There were cases of people starving to death. People are getting rotten vegetables. There was corruption in this supposedly infallible system of China, where, yeah, maybe were a bit brutal. And we're kind of like North Korea with technology, but at least we take care of our citizens. We get stuff done, you know, big infrastructure projects or big movements like getting food to people. It all falls flat because there was corruption involved. People are selling the vegetables, selling all of the food. People weren't getting their deliveries. Deliveries were getting stolen and pilfered and sent to other places. So it just didn't work. And so people started to get worried. It's like, OK, you can lock me down. You can cause me mental and emotional distress. You can cut me off from the rest of the world. But at least I can take care of my most basic needs, and the Chinese government simply just couldn't do that. So you had a situation where people were literally ostracized from all society, potentially for years. I mean, there is a place in Qinghai province. This is kind of near Tibet, where people for four months were locked inside of a wet market like where you buy food and vegetables like they went to the store to go buy some food and then they just couldn't leave and they stayed there for four months. Yes. Imagine getting trapped in Costco for four months. Actually, that wasn't the worst place. It's not the worst. You're stuck in Dollar General for four months. That's where you're stuck for four months. U.S. Dollar General. Yes. So jokes aside, imagine that one anecdote gets that like this how much this is happening throughout the country? And again, I think Shanghai, the well-represented place has got hyper covered because there's lots of foreigners there or there's just it's well known, but there are so many places in China, in the countryside or outside the major cities where these people have been locked for months and months and months, literally in their tiny, tiny box in the sky apartment where they can't do anything or leave or even sometimes get fresh air. I mean, the Chinese government was trying to get people to close their windows at some point and not let people sing out the window. It's truly dystopian, right? And again, I think that the Chinese populace is probably the one population, the people that could really put up with a lot, we say in Chinese who say to cool, which means they eat bitter. The ability to eat bitter and to suffer. I mean, the Chinese are unparalleled in their ability to do so. It's just been a repressive society for really all of eternity. And I think it's just gotten to the point where even the Chinese are like, this is just too much. I think you're right. I wonder in a competition to suffer and eat better. Who would win the Chinese or the Russians, man? It's close. These are two societies that are like professional level. Take s**t from their regime for decades, slash centuries at a time. Sure. I think I'm going to give it to the Chinese just because is it oppressive and repressive as Russia is? China just takes the cake. Like, there are so many things still that you could do in Russia that you can't do in China, right? The internet is still just absolutely more blocked and cut off from the rest of the world than Russia. Yeah, that's true. We'd have to add in the Soviet Union and everything, though. And then the great leap forward we got over in China. Yeah, yeah. It's a tough competition. Jokes aside, this brings up a greater point here, which is that economic freedom was one of the only actual freedoms, and I'm putting that in air quotes that people had in communist China, and that's now eroded. The unspoken deal has always kind of been in the last 20 30 years. Don't question the Chinese Communist Party. You can earn a living, you can start a business, you can engage in capitalism and you can bring your families. Standard of living up a zillion notches from this agrarian subsistence farming that they were doing even in like the 80s. Right. But you don't question the power of the party, you don't question the type of government we have. You don't question the officials. But this is starting to chip in crack because now the economic freedom is gone. You're locked in your apartment. You can't run your business, your restaurant is closed. The government's not going to help you. They're not even going to feed you. They're going to, like you said, send you rotten stalks of vegetables that have been stripped of leaves because the person who was distributing them decided to sell those for a profit and take the money for himself. And so that unspoken deal, that bargain is no longer even being held up by the CCP Chinese Communist Party. And so people are starting to say, Well, wait a minute, we put up with your bulls**t because you were allowing us to do these other things. But now you're going to take those away and leave us with nothing. OK, fine. Now we're going to throw plates out the window or whatever. You know, they were going to put up with the daily COVID testing that you needed. They were going to put up with the QR code. Actually, tell us about this. The QR code system on the phone. Can you describe this a little? This is also quite dystopian in Orwellian. Yeah. So there's a QR code system that Chinese people have to forced to use where you basically need a QR code on your phone to get into anywhere right. You're not allowed to get on a bus, you're not allowed to get on a train, you're not allowed to get into your work building, you're not allowed to go into a grocery store or wet mark or anything. Every single facet of life needs this QR code, and you're only allowed to get into these places if that QR code is green. If it's yellow, if it changes to yellow, that means someone in the area. There's a case, or there's at least a warning of a case. And if it's red, it means that you yourself have been directly in contact with COVID. So that means you're sent off to the quarantine camps, right? At least that's what it was until fairly recently. So this QR code system is dictated everyone's life for the past. I don't know a couple of years that it's been implemented, and it's a really proven that this whole thing for the Chinese government was less about COVID and more about a control mechanism for the people. Because what has been demonstrated time and time again is that there have been protests leading up to what we've seen recently, the big ones. And what happens is, let's say a bank refuses to give people their investments, right? All of a sudden, people crowd around the bank and they held up placards and they're like, Hey, banks, give me some money. What the government will do is they can manually, because let's be honest, is controlled by the central government. They can just turn everyone's codes to red. So then that protest gets dispersed, everyone gets arrested, everyone goes to quarantine camps, or everyone just gets scared and leaves right. So it's a real control mechanism that has stopped people from going to places the government doesn't want them to and also tracks everyone where they go. I mean, this is all tied to your locations as well. It's where you go, where you usually are, where you're going to be. And this is now handed over to the central government. This is all information to track every single citizen in the entire country. It's really just a dream come true. What's why? Look a contact tracing on its face? Hey, it seems like a good idea. You know of somebody near you got infected. You can quarantine voluntarily. But that's not really what's happening with this QR code system. What's happening is the government is, of course, using it to track where people are going. But tell me about this bank protest because this was just the most obvious glaring abuse of the QR code system for completely not legit reasons. This actually happened a ton of times throughout the country, but the bank protest is a good catalyst. So in Hunan, some people were protesting because the banks were basically scamming them out of their money for lack of better words. And so naturally, in China, there are a lot of protests in China. As long as they're not against the government there, there's protests against like, let's say you're building management is failing or let's say there's a thing that's happening with Japan. So you're allowed to protest against Japan and the government even stoke some of those things. And it gives this impression that, hey, protests are allowed in China, but there's never really protest against any sort of government body, right? We can go back to the same thread. China doesn't want people protesting against the government, so this whole nonbank protest thing happened. People started protesting the bank, but also protesting the local government for not doing anything about the banks for not like getting their money or forcing the banks to give them their money. So when the people protested, the government used the QR code to change everyone to read to disperse the protests. Right. So this is another control mechanism, and they've done this multiple times when everyone's QR code goes to read. A lot of people are going to disperse and then they actually have legal on the face, legal ways to move people to quarantine camps and stop those protests. Crazy, right? So basically, they'll just say, Oh, look, everyone around you is infected. You better go in completely just for control. Like, we don't really want you protesting this or what we're going to say is that you've been infected or that you are going to be infected. You can't go on transit. You can't go in restaurants. You literally just have to go home. And I assume if the police catch you outside. Do you have a read QR code, you get arrested or something? Yes, yes, yes. It's not necessarily criminal. It's more like you go to your quarantine camp, you go into those capsules. There's basically 18 wheeler capsules that they repurpose for locking people up. A huge chunk of the economy is actually running off of COVID testing and these kind of quarantine facilities now. I wondered about that, which is crazy because they're trying to implement a lot of changes in China to reduce some of the restrictions for the COVID policies, but they've built a huge chunk of their economy around this. And they've also there was this unspoken rule that if you let people make money or you let people have their business, they're going to have no reason to protest because, yeah, we can be an authoritarian country. And yeah, you're not allowed to say or do what you want, but you got money, which means it's better than Mao's time. It's better than the great leap forward slash culture revolution. It's not that bad. And if people have that recent memory in their mind about how life is so poor and terrible, then making money just makes everything better. And that's how China's kind of allowed their citizens to keep going is like, OK, yeah, as long as every year you get a little bit richer than you were last year, then everything's gonna be fine. Nobody's going to actually have a problem. And that's by and large been the case. Not to say that people didn't have massive transgressions of the government, but by and large is a general, huge populace. People have been OK to do that, and for the first time we're seeing under the current regime, that's just not the case. The economy is basic. I just imagine a plane just nose diving into the ground right now because what the Xi Jinping regime has done is completely forgotten. Why China's gotten to where it's been now, they've completely lost the plot. Western Investment Foreign Investment Foreign company is experimenting with capitalism. Opening up its economy to the rest of the world is why China is where it is today. The fact that it was allowed to earn money and they allowed the people to earn money is where it is, which is why China is where it is today. It's why as global influence. And now I think it's a delusion. But I think that a lot of the top leadership and Xi Jinping has surrounded himself with so many yes men that it's gotten into a lot of people's heads that the only reason China's wealthy is actually because of the Chinese government, right? It's actually because of government policy. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Lao 86. We're talking about the China protests. We'll be right back. This episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show is brought to you by Nissan. As a pioneer in the electric vehicle space, Nissan is always looking for ways to deliver new, meaningful technology to EV owners. 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So even if you have, let's say you have a couple of good advisors around you who you say, Look, really, I need to hear the truth from you. The people below them aren't going to tell them the truth, or the people below them aren't going to tell them the truth. So if you think, look, we have enough PPE, right? Masks and ventilators or something or vaccines? Yeah, the program's going great. Well, how do you know that? Because the people under you lied and the people under him lied and the people under him lied in the local officials who were afraid to tell the guys their 17 levels of people kind of bulls**tting or kind of fudging or being afraid. And you have to make sure that there's no fudging that there's accurate checks and balances and all those people and none of that is in place. So even if you're surrounded by great advisors, probably those people surrounded by officials that can tell them the truth and are those mid-level people also working above a bunch of other people that can tell them the truth? Because if there's a little bit of corruption at every level or even a lot which there is, you really have no idea what your vaccination rate is or where the PPE is stored. And I think that's kind of what Russia is dealing with right now. You know, it's not necessarily that Putin is this crazy, irrational guy. It's that he probably thinks he does have working tanks. He probably thinks he does have a bunch of missiles left because nobody's going to go. Ooh, yeah. You know what? We sold those, but we had a hell of a vacation in Monaco afterwards. And if those people would have told him the truth, what would the commanders and the generals and the law officers below them tell them the truth? No, absolutely not. So you end up with the same thing in China. Nobody knows what's going on at the top because the shooting of the messenger is a thing, especially in dictatorships. It is a real thing. China had a semblance of checks and balances, nowhere near like a liberal democracy, but a semblance of checks and balances because there were different power clicks within the party. There was different gangs within the party that would keep each other in check and kind of come together and say, Well, next term, we're going to appoint someone that represents this and this in this principle, right? And because Xi Jinping got rid of all opposition, all those clicks, all those people that held different ideals, maybe one guy who was more like, I think we should have more communist principles that actually have social programs for the people in the countryside. And another guy says, Oh, we should definitely focus more on the coastal regions because that's the economic driver of the country. They can come together and be like, Yeah, we hate each other and we're not in the same click and we're actually diametrically opposed to each other, and we're we're actually trying to like depose each other. But there's so many people involved that it creates this bizarre, almost pseudo functional system within China that has been eradicated. Yeah. So Congress, yeah, they're shooting each other in the foot, but they both they have to play the game. Yes. So stuff actually ends up getting balanced at some level in a weird way, at some level, in a weird way, right? And it's nowhere near a liberal democracy, but it kind of works. It keeps turning from going into chaos. And now we're looking at China, where it's tanking its own economy, thinking that the government is the only reason that it got to where it is and the people are not getting that unspoken rule. They're not getting the returns on anything. They're watching their money dry up and they're watching more restriction come in in return, getting nothing for it. So again, huge catalyst for the protests. So why doesn't the government just scrap the zero COVID policy? Xi Jinping, like the guy, can watch international news. He at this point has enough data to know that this isn't working. Regardless of what the people below him are saying. But there's obviously other reasons, and one of those has to be the vaccination rate in China. I know they make a domestic vaccine that doesn't really work. What else is going on here? Yeah. I mean, just to highlight that real quick. You know, people talk about how Americans are anti-vax or they're just not that many people that were getting vaccinated compared to other countries that they use as examples. But China is a real example of how the elderly people just didn't want to get vaccinated. A huge chunk of them didn't. So that left a very vulnerable populace unable to handle COVID. And you have to understand, I think a lot of people have been affected in some way shape or form by Chinese propaganda thinking. China's probably some sort of authoritarian first world country, a country that's built up its got wealth. But the medical infrastructure. China's infrastructure is terrible by and large throughout the country. I had better medical treatment when I went to Lao versus China. China's medical infrastructure? Yeah, medical infrastructure is horrible. So to put a cap on that, an outbreak of COVID would kill a lot of people because of low vaccination rate, bad medical facilities, lack of care for for a lot of other people in the country, especially in the countryside. So they can't risk that low vaccination rate aside, because there's going to be people who say, Hey, the vaccine is not that effective now against all mcbrown and other variants. What's the difference? They're unprepared for even a regular outbreak of a light variant of COVID, potentially. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely like an excuse used for the mass COVID lockdowns and stuff, for sure. That's definitely a part of it. At the same time, also the most important reason here to understand why there's zero COVID thing went on for so long is because every leader of China has to be known for something. So Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and now Xi Jinping. Each one of those has something that they are known for. It's like a legacy to go for. This leader did this. Right? Chairman Mao is the easiest one to use as an example. That's what we use. He made the new China. It's called Xinjiang War. Oh, I thought you were going to say killed 80 million of his own people, but you made a legacy that they want to be remembered by. Yeah. Got it. So let's use legacies that they want to proliferate. Since Unguwar New China, that is what China is now called in China. Chairman Mao created that he made it independent from other countries influence. He separated it. He made it truly independent. It's not a puppet state, you know, as they teach in schools. So every leader needs one of these things. You have Deng Xiaoping, who did reform and opening open the economy and actually allowed China to have money. Every leader has its thing. And so Xi Jinping, when he was put into office, he never really had anything. There was nothing. Thing other than he kind of brought some state jobs back and put more into state enterprises and made the economy worse. There is only negative attributes. There was nothing that made him better than Hu Jintao, the leader before him. There was nothing that made Xi Jinping stand out. So it was almost the perfect thing. It was the perfect event to have something like COVID, where he sees the rest of the world being ravaged. His leadership, his cabinet, looks at the rest of the world and says, Look at millions of people dying. Millions people did die of COVID. It was devastating. If you use that as an example, you use a global pandemic, one of the most tumultuous times in our history, in modern times, in modern history. And you become the hero of that. You prevent your people from succumbing to that death and destruction. Then you are a hero. You're an absolute legend in the party leadership. Now, when you create something so, such a crazy control method like zero COVID policy when you create something so stifling is so look so archaic and arbitrary and out of left field to the rest of the world, at least your own people, you've convinced them that you saved their lives when that starts to unravel. And when your own people say, Wait a minute, this is bulls**t. No one's getting saved from this. We've just had three years of absolute torture and lockdowns, and our lives have been upended and nothing will be the same. Then all of a sudden, it looks really, really bad. Now the leader is actually guilty of something negative, that beautiful, positive thing that he could take for the rest of his reign. And then, you know, the next leaders on it will look back at Xi Jinping for being the hero of this is now a negative attribute. It's now actually the worse thing. It's the first time we've seen people say central government step down, right? And that's terrifying. The worst thing the Chinese government can do is lose face. A loss of face is the most dangerous thing for the Chinese government, so that's why this had to kind of keep going. So the Chinese Communist Party cannot appear to be wrong ever, in part because the legacy, the face element, which is especially prevalent, it's a very Asian sort of Chinese thing where you can't be embarrassed, you can't show any sort of weakness or humiliation. Also, a lot of political capital and propaganda have been invested by the Chinese Communist Party in saying that the Chinese communist way of life is better than the West. Look, we have low deaths. We've handled COVID so much better. So stepping back is going to look like a weight shoot. Did we maybe overstep here? Did we do this for too long? Did we miscalculate? They can't afford to do that. Another thing is here to sort of tie this in with Russia. Authoritarian regimes, their mandate when you got a dictator, when you have a super strong central authority like this authoritarian regimes, their mandate is only or almost only based on strength. Right. If you're a strongman, your mandate is that you're strong. That's why they call it a strongman. So you either stick to the zero COVID policy and piss people off or you loosen up and you have people question why this went on for so long. That's why Putin can't just go. You know, what does Ukraine thing? Holy crap, this is a big mistake. What a mess I created. Let's back out of this. He can't do that. His mandate is, I'm tough. We're tough. That's tough this out. Let's get through this together. But if he says, you know what, maybe we're not so tough, then everybody goes, Well, what the hell am I listening to you for that man? The only value you have is that you're tough, that you're strong, that you know what to do. So they can't afford a single crack or stain on that image. That's all they have. That's all that's keeping them from getting hung outside from a lamppost at this point. That's exactly right. Spot on. So what is your prediction for how this plays out? You said this is morphing into something else. It is what happens here. I'd like to riff off some of the headlines I keep seeing or some of the news coverage I see. I think it really does a massive disservice to the protesters because what I'm seeing now and you know, most media outlets, is that the protests work to some extent because the COVID restrictions are coming down or they're being morphed or changed or adjusted. And to a certain extent, that's correct. But it's actually the opposite of what's being portrayed to an outside viewer that's going to look at a headline. I remember you sent me a headline the other day, right? Yeah. The other day I was like, Hey, is this legit? It looks like they're capitulating. Not really. The article you sent me isn't wrong. OK? The article you sent me is factual, but the headline is really throwing people off because what it's doing in its own soft power way is convincing Westerners that China budged. China said, You know what? The people have spoken. The People's Republic of China have stood up and said, You know, no more of the zero COVID nonsense and the government listens. And you know what, people? Yeah, we listen to you. And in fact, that's just not what's happened. What's happened is a massive last ditch attempt to save face. What we are seeing right now and I just want to go back to this is mass arrests of anyone that went to the protests. Anyone that went near the protests are getting question. There are secret police and police busting down people's doors and arresting people. All that we're holding up A4 sheets of paper busting down doors, the people that put some graffiti up or even just went to the crowd that was protesting against the zero COVID policy. This is what's currently happening and not being covered because it's kind of akin to what happened to Tankman. We don't talk about what happened to him afterwards. That's what's happening now. A massive, huge crackdown. The real bloodbath is happening behind closed doors, behind the scenes. The government is making sure that anybody involved wasn't listened to their punished. They're arrested in their lives are over. They'll never be able to participate in society. Normally again, we'll never be able to join the government or get a state job or anything like this. So what's happening now is that the government is finding the best way to avoid this from happening again. They do not want to see more protests happen because what happens when more protests happen is maybe next time the police actually join the protesters. Maybe next time the play and the riot police actually join with the people that are calling for the CCP to step down. People's Liberation Army. New York Times. The article that I sent you, which will link in the show notes and other major media outlets. They haven't really been talking about this. And let me know what you think here. Protests can not be seen as a vector for change, just as you were saying. If the Chinese Communist Party changes course, now what they're saying is, all right, protests work. That's very, very bad for an authoritarian regime. Right? Mainstream media again, I also hate that phrase, but they say the government can't be seen to be wrong. I get that. But I think in a media environment with censorship, without free speech, you can spin whatever you want. Come on, you can spin that. The bigger issue is now that people are asking for democracy and transparency and other rights of communication. And if they're protesting for zero COVID to end and they get their wish that way, let's say they get zero COVID to end that way they go. Wait a minute. Protests work. So now why go home now? We got zero COVID lockdown to? Let's keep talking about democracy and transparency. That sets a really, really bad precedent because then people will say, great, OK, so if we want more rights, all we got to do is throw a big national protest and we might get our way. Let's not stop it ending lockdowns. Let's get freedom like we failed to do in 1989, and that is the worst nightmare of the Chinese Communist Party is people thinking that if they just actually fight the government, they can win because they can. There's one point four billion people. I know a lot of them are in the CCP, but you know, how loyal are you when you can actually have freedom? I mean, we're talking about a huge number of people. It could get very ugly, very quickly if this gets out of control. And the way to get it out of control is to say that this might be effective. Yeah. So there's a dual pronged approach. I think what we're seeing is the soft power they're allowing to proliferate in the West is to say Yes, Westerners, please believe we allow protests in China. It's a show of force is to say, Hey, the neighbor that went to the protests just got disappeared. Hey, there's a mass arrest right now in Gwangju. But anyone that held up a piece of paper from between November 27th to December 3rd. If you were there, then you're getting arrested, right? That's what they're showing in China. So it's two different kind of displays. Now what they're doing to save face for the zero COVID thing is yes, they are rolling out massive changes, but they're not saying that zero COVID. It was a failure. They're saying that zero COVID was a success. These three years were necessary because what they found after all this time is that finally COVID morphed into something that wasn't dangerous. And actually, the top medical experts in the country have found out that COVID is not even COVID anymore. It's actually just a type of flu. So no one has to worry that much anymore, and it's a way of saving face because I'm a has been out of Comic-Con for how long now? Right? They've had state media go out there and say, Amazon doesn't actually exist. It's actually super, super dangerous. And now the state media saying, Oh, actually, it's not that dangerous anymore. And now we can actually look at ways to kind of reduce some of the regulation and stuff. There's two things that take away from this. The government doesn't want to lose face and wants to justify what these three years of lockdown were. Simultaneously, the government wants to look like a hero for doing that and having all those measures in place for three years so that the people can say, Oh, thanks for saving my life government. And then the second thing is that they already got what they wanted. They got the control mechanism and actually instituted it in every single daily facet of life. Every single facet of life is revolving around government tracking and control and location services and QR codes. All of that stuff has been entrenched in society now, so the government does have a control mechanism for the future on from now to know and track every single citizen in the country. So it's almost like a win win for them domestically and then almost a soft power win for Westerners to look at the news and say, Hey, maybe they actually, like, you know, gave in to the protesters. So do we have a prediction for how this plays out? Because I know before we heard the. They were going to pretend to budge. I think you and I agreed on this. We were going to say the Chinese Communist Party has to change course, but then claims victory moves the goalposts, then covers up the deaths and the infection rates among the public for the next three to five years. And so far, so good. I guess as far as my prediction being accurate, I wouldn't say it's good any other way. I think I wouldn't adjust that. I mean, that's that's where we're like, that's there's no way they're going to do anything else. I mean, they've already reported no deaths right from this. So we're going to be in a situation where it's just like the zero poverty, like the whole like Xi Jinping needs to go down in history for eradicating poverty. He gets on a podium and says poverty is over. Did you hear Guy's poverty is over and everyone's like, What are you talking about? Like, there's no running water in this village over here? You know what I mean? There is abject poverty all over the countryside in China, but she's made it illegal to say that there's poverty because then you're the laws, you're picking quarrels and starting rumors, right? This is what we're going to see with the COVID thing. There's not going to be any more transparency or any more opening up here. It's just going to be illegal to tell the truth. Just like always, there will be a government narrative. It'll be portrayed as this is how the government wants it to be seen going forward. And if you speak out against that, then you're arrested. Well, I wish we had better news because when I saw that article yesterday, I was like, Oh, maybe we'll be able to wrap this and we'll be able to have some positive news as a result of it. But it sounds like we're still on the same course we were before with a fresh coat of paint. I think really what it is is there is some positive news and that is that the restrictions are being, you know, relinquished to some extent. There is a lot of it looks like it's going to happen throughout the country. I'm still talking to people that are like, nothing has changed where they are, but it's predictably a mess. There's very, very little continuity throughout China. It's a really way more disorganized and messy and disconnected than people probably think, just because they consume so much of China's propaganda that goes to the outside world. But what we're seeing is a huge mess. But I think the positive here is that, yes, the arbitrary, crazy, unbelievable dystopian lockdown stuff is probably changing and going away. It's just that we're not really pointing fingers at the right person. We're not blaming the right person. And I feel like China's really trying to alter history here and spin this in a way that really serves their narrative and almost emboldens or empowers the top leadership. But they do have another prediction, and that's people aren't stupid in China. This might go away for a little while, and most people might be placated. But some people, educated people, people that saw through this, that knew that this was from the top, that people were protesting for the right reasons. They're not going to change their mind and think that everything's OK anymore. And I think this could be the start of a very fragile and tumultuous time for the CCP. Well, hopefully we see a regime change there in a way that doesn't end up killing hundreds of millions of people in China. That's my wish because and I always say this in every episode that I do about China, which is this is not an anti-Chinese episode, it's an anti Chinese Communist Party episode. And the victims of the Chinese Communist Party always have and always will be primarily the Chinese people themselves. Yes. Great. Thank you very much for coming on, man. Really appreciate the update. Thanks for keeping us bringing us back in the loop. Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate it. Love the show. You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with a human rights activist revealing forced organ trafficking that's going on right now in China. The government started the system runs. The system is simply hideous, essentially taking the vital organs of heart, lung, liver, corneas, any important organ that we have from people without a trial. These people are never convicted of anything. They just are working in these forced labor camps. Don't get paid. They live in a dormitory. Some of them are 16 people. When they're unlucky, day arrives, somebody comes and drags them out over to the operating table where they're killed in the process for moving organs and selling these organs to wealthy Chinese citizens and to what we call organ tourists coming from places like America and Canada. McHugh arrived for a new liver. Chances are you go to the number one people's hospital in Shanghai. The doctor comes up and sees you, takes your blood type and so on. And then he finds that somebody has a matching organ for you and camp number 50. And that poor man is taken out of a dormitory and is taken in and his kidney, liver and so on are taken out. He's, of course, killed in the process. They burn his body and they fly the organs to you in Shanghai. You come home with a new kidney or liver. You're hoping that it didn't happen the way it did, but in fact it did happen. I remember talking to one man from a country in Asia who told me he had to go four times to get a kidney. That's for dead people. Four people died so he could get a kidney that appears to be now working, something that seems unimaginable to most of us in the 21st century that this is happening. This is beyond anything even the Nazis could have done. To hear how much a healthy kidney, heart or lung goes for it in this immoral market. Check out episode 497 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Hope you guys are enjoying the out of the loop series. It's hard to find these topics, but when they come up, they are really obvious when we need to do it. And I think this is one of those topics that has been covered so poorly by mainstream media. We always just see those videos of people throwing chairs at guys in white suits on TikTok or Instagram, and we have no idea. At least I had no real idea what was going on. I hope this clarifies things I hope you like out of the loop. I heard from a lot of you when we did the last one about Iran that this was right up your alley and right on brand with the show. So I hope this one did the trick as well. Links to all things liow. I will be in our show notes at Jordan Harbinger dot com transcripts in the show notes videos up on YouTube advertisers deals and discount codes all in one place. Jordan Harbinger RT.com Slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you wherever you might be. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same system, software and tiny habits that I use every single day. It's our six minute networking course. 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