1 00:00:11,280 --> 00:00:16,240 And we're very happy to have our own uh Professor  Fiskesjö here tonight to speak with us. Professor   2 00:00:16,240 --> 00:00:23,200 Fiskesjö finished his Ph.D. at Chicago with a dual  degree in Anthropology and East Asian Languages   3 00:00:23,200 --> 00:00:30,320 and Civilizations uh in 2000, uh he then went  back to his native Sweden where he uh was the   4 00:00:30,320 --> 00:00:36,960 Director of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities  in Stockholm for a couple of years? Five years.   5 00:00:36,960 --> 00:00:45,760 Five years. This is a very famous museum. He then  went to uh the Institute for Advanced Study which   6 00:00:45,760 --> 00:00:51,040 is in Princeton, uh not at Princeton, I think  that's technically the right way to say that,   7 00:00:51,040 --> 00:00:57,680 uh where Cornell then quickly nabbed him off and  brought him here in 05, 2005? That's right. Uh   8 00:00:57,680 --> 00:01:03,600 where he's been teaching ever since. Professor  Fiskesjö speaks, studies on a broad range of   9 00:01:03,600 --> 00:01:08,400 issues. He's a member of the East Asia and  the Southeast Asia Program. He studies, uh   10 00:01:08,400 --> 00:01:15,840 among other things, the Wa minority, who straddle  China and Burma, has worked on human trafficking,   11 00:01:16,480 --> 00:01:22,160 and has worked in fields as old as mine,  the ancient, most ancient, historical   12 00:01:22,160 --> 00:01:28,480 dynasties and as contemporary as now, and I  think now is what we're hearing about tonight. So   13 00:01:28,480 --> 00:01:33,440 I will leave the rest of the time to him  to talk to us about TV Tears Made of Fear. 14 00:01:34,720 --> 00:01:42,720 Thank you. Alright, thank you for that  introduction, Robin. Well, without further ado,   15 00:01:42,720 --> 00:01:49,920 the spectacles of forced and televised confessions  that we have been seeing on Chinese TV over the   16 00:01:49,920 --> 00:01:56,080 last few years are part of a wider picture in  China of the government's, communist government,   17 00:01:56,080 --> 00:02:03,680 silencing alternative and dissident voices by  censorship, intimidation, disappearances, arrests,   18 00:02:03,680 --> 00:02:09,840 and the trumped-up judicial punishment inflicted  on dissident and others. We should acknowledge   19 00:02:09,840 --> 00:02:17,440 that this trend, uh that this new trend, is not  wholly unique to China, but sadly fits with   20 00:02:17,440 --> 00:02:23,680 an ongoing worldwide authoritarian turn. We are  witnessing how in many countries around the world,   21 00:02:24,480 --> 00:02:31,840 just as, at similar turns in history in the  past, authoritarian strongmen are either taking   22 00:02:31,840 --> 00:02:37,840 power by force or, where elections exist,  getting themselves elected with the help   23 00:02:37,840 --> 00:02:43,200 of voters who are apathetic or frustrated with  democracy and longing for what seems simpler,   24 00:02:43,760 --> 00:02:51,200 a strong man. We note how today's authoritarians  share many things. They congratulate each other   25 00:02:51,200 --> 00:02:59,600 on their efficiency in getting things done and in  telling it as it is as they reject democracy and   26 00:02:59,600 --> 00:03:04,480 dispense with democracy. They share especially  a contempt for the freedom of expression   27 00:03:05,200 --> 00:03:11,840 and equality before the law, without which of  course there can be no democracy. And they seek   28 00:03:11,840 --> 00:03:20,160 to censor and to "guide" public opinion in these  directions. Authoritarian China currently seems   29 00:03:20,160 --> 00:03:26,240 ahead of all the other authoritarians in curbing  and managing public opinion. Especially now that   30 00:03:26,240 --> 00:03:30,960 they are successfully harnessing the new digital  universe of technologies to do this ever more   31 00:03:30,960 --> 00:03:36,800 effectively. The forced and the televised  confessions in China are closely related to   32 00:03:37,360 --> 00:03:42,400 a key element in this authoritarian term,  and that is to go beyond the mere silencing   33 00:03:43,120 --> 00:03:48,560 or censoring of alternative voices and opinions  and seek to determine the facts, to shape reality   34 00:03:48,560 --> 00:03:55,520 so that it conforms to state orthodoxy, to the  preordained teleology or set course of history,   35 00:03:55,520 --> 00:04:02,960 which I will get back to later. Yes, I will begin  by talking about the Causeway Bay Bookstore, where   36 00:04:02,960 --> 00:04:11,360 five book sellers were taken away, abducted,  um starting October 2015. One of them taken   37 00:04:11,360 --> 00:04:16,720 from Thailand, where he was vacationing,  three from China, where they were visiting,   38 00:04:16,720 --> 00:04:23,120 and one from inside of Hong Kong. This is one  of the many so-called second floor, this was   39 00:04:24,240 --> 00:04:29,600 one of the so-called second floor bookstores in  Hong Kong that sell books on Chinese politics   40 00:04:29,600 --> 00:04:36,560 that are forbidden in China but are very much  sought after by Chinese customers who are visiting   41 00:04:36,560 --> 00:04:46,320 from the mainland, and you can see the signs for  it there on the second floor. Uh the first person   42 00:04:46,320 --> 00:04:54,720 to be abducted, that is from Thailand, is an old  friend of mine that I have known since the 1980s.   43 00:04:54,720 --> 00:05:01,680 His name is Gui Minhai (桂民海) or Ahai is the  nickname that I usually know him by. He uh was   44 00:05:01,680 --> 00:05:08,720 abducted in October, as I mentioned, and then  uh disappeared from Thailand. He left behind um   45 00:05:08,720 --> 00:05:14,080 unused medicine lined up on the on the table and  so on in an empty apartment, his computer's still   46 00:05:14,080 --> 00:05:20,880 on, and so on. And he was apparently then taken  through Cambodia and flown back to China, where he   47 00:05:20,880 --> 00:05:28,880 was held in detention incommunicado, and without  uh any news to family or friends or anything   48 00:05:29,440 --> 00:05:37,920 until suddenly on January 17, 2016, he was put  on Chinese State TV confessing to certain crimes   49 00:05:37,920 --> 00:05:43,840 that had happened more than a decade earlier, and  which seemed to have been resolved at the time,   50 00:05:43,840 --> 00:05:49,680 but now had been dug up again. Uh and now were  being used against him. I have to tell you that   51 00:05:50,240 --> 00:05:57,440 it was very painful. Uh I still have trouble  watching this video that they put on show,   52 00:05:58,240 --> 00:06:05,200 because they know the person who is there. This is  him, the way he looked in the 1980s when I first   53 00:06:05,200 --> 00:06:10,400 met him, and when he went to Sweden to study. This  is where he changed from his Chinese citizenship   54 00:06:10,400 --> 00:06:16,640 to uh Swedish citizenship, so he's a compatriot  of mine, which uh makes this issue especially   55 00:06:16,640 --> 00:06:22,960 fraught because he's being held and uh denied  access to his embassy, the Swedish embassy.   56 00:06:24,240 --> 00:06:30,240 This is the picture of him recently having  put on some weight, and in his new life as a   57 00:06:30,240 --> 00:06:38,240 writer and publisher in Hong Kong where I last  saw him at a dinner there in 2012. We had not   58 00:06:38,240 --> 00:06:45,200 kept close touch uh over the years but I have  been following the news ever since this happened.   59 00:06:47,040 --> 00:06:52,400 The British newspaper Guardian have done a lot  of good journalistic work following up on this as   60 00:06:52,400 --> 00:06:57,920 he's going to his vacation apartment, checking on  those pills on the table, and so on and so forth.   61 00:06:57,920 --> 00:07:05,040 And this is their page, their page graphic of  illustrating the sequence in which these uh   62 00:07:05,040 --> 00:07:14,000 disappearances happened, and uh it uh was first  unknown to the world that these disappearances   63 00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:22,400 were happening, um and it blew up uh first in  November when the news came out, but especially   64 00:07:22,400 --> 00:07:31,440 since the last days of December 2015, when uh the  last one, the fifth one of these collaborators,   65 00:07:31,440 --> 00:07:37,120 associates, colleagues apparently was taken from  within Hong Kong, which caused an enormous stir   66 00:07:37,760 --> 00:07:44,240 because, as you know, there's a promise from China  to respect the judicial autonomy of Hong Kong   67 00:07:44,240 --> 00:07:52,880 until 2047, and this would be a flagrant breach  of that. So it became uh much more of a news   68 00:07:53,440 --> 00:07:59,280 than before this, this Lee Bo, the  gentleman who uh caused this to became   69 00:08:00,480 --> 00:08:08,160 so much bigger in the news, and these are  the four other um booksellers as each of them   70 00:08:08,880 --> 00:08:14,880 turned up uh in their confessional  videos shown on Chinese state television.   71 00:08:16,800 --> 00:08:23,840 This, uh this series of events, especially  then starting January 2016 uh caused,   72 00:08:24,720 --> 00:08:29,120 provoked a lot of protest in Hong Kong because  of the worry about the future of Hong Kong,   73 00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:37,360 and here you see people uh holding posters and uh  demanding the release of these people involved.   74 00:08:39,040 --> 00:08:46,160 Some form of uh protest also continued by trying  to continue this, to sell the kinds of books that   75 00:08:46,160 --> 00:08:54,000 these bookstores were uh selling before. Uh books,  this bookstore Causeway Bay is not the only one,   76 00:08:54,000 --> 00:09:00,320 but one of several, that did this, and, of  course, these protests also connected up   77 00:09:00,320 --> 00:09:08,240 with a much larger movement in Hong Kong of  suspicion of China's motives in perhaps scrapping   78 00:09:08,240 --> 00:09:14,960 the one country, two systems deal with the freedom  of expression and judicial autonomy for Hong Kong,   79 00:09:16,640 --> 00:09:24,400 so such that even some of the Hong Kong  dissonance, dissidents became surprised that their   80 00:09:25,280 --> 00:09:30,800 efforts caught such enormous attention around the  world, which is what happened with Agnes Ting.   81 00:09:34,160 --> 00:09:40,200 Hong Kong's Chief Executive, which  is, uh who is appointed from China uh   82 00:09:42,400 --> 00:09:48,480 was in a fix. Because he operates under a  mini-constitution that says very clearly that   83 00:09:49,280 --> 00:09:54,320 there is freedom of speech, freedom of prayer, of  the press, freedom of publication in Hong Kong,   84 00:09:54,960 --> 00:10:00,080 and no Hong Kong resident shall be subjected  to arbitrary or unlawful arrest, detention, or   85 00:10:00,080 --> 00:10:08,960 imprisonment. So, he came out and said um that if  it were true indeed that one of these booksellers   86 00:10:08,960 --> 00:10:15,200 were taken from inside Hong Kong, that would  not be acceptable, and he also expressed worry   87 00:10:15,200 --> 00:10:26,480 about the others. The protests that continued  sometimes turned to humor, and when the Chinese   88 00:10:26,480 --> 00:10:32,560 authorities on the mainland produced messages  from those abducted saying that they were okay,   89 00:10:33,600 --> 00:10:38,240 that there was no case, that they were not  disappeared, that they were not kidnapped,   90 00:10:39,600 --> 00:10:48,080 the people in Hong Kong used this to produce  uh mock statements from a supposedly kidnapped   91 00:10:48,640 --> 00:10:55,200 uh Hong Kong governor, the Chief Executive of Hong  Kong, uh writing to his wife and saying I'm not,   92 00:10:55,200 --> 00:11:02,800 I'm fine, I'm getting the my favorite tea, my  abductors are really nice to me, the special   93 00:11:02,800 --> 00:11:09,520 committee in charge of my case are being really  nice to me. So this is a kind of a protest that   94 00:11:10,080 --> 00:11:17,520 is possible in Hong Kong, satire, and  mocking this kind of attempt from within   95 00:11:17,520 --> 00:11:22,320 China, from the Chinese authorities, to  coerce these people that had been abducted   96 00:11:22,320 --> 00:11:28,160 and taken away, to produce such statements  that people could not believe were real.   97 00:11:29,200 --> 00:11:35,440 In Sweden, at the same time, mass media uh has  been following this case very closely, because   98 00:11:35,440 --> 00:11:42,800 this is a Swedish citizen that has been detained  since October under very unclear circumstances,   99 00:11:42,800 --> 00:11:48,080 how he was abducted from Thailand, so  our government has made communications   100 00:11:48,080 --> 00:11:52,480 with the Thai government, as well as with the  Chinese government, and demanded to see him,   101 00:11:52,480 --> 00:12:00,640 and demanded that uh he's given a due process  under the law, but he's been, um he's been denied   102 00:12:01,440 --> 00:12:09,840 access to the embassy, except for twice that  he's met uh embassy officers from our country.   103 00:12:11,360 --> 00:12:17,680 He has a daughter who is a university student  currently doing an M.A. at a university in   104 00:12:18,480 --> 00:12:25,280 England, though she grew up in Sweden and speaks  uh completely idiomatic Swedish. She's Swedish,   105 00:12:25,280 --> 00:12:33,040 just like me, and she has become a campaigner  on behalf of her uh father and uh for a while   106 00:12:33,040 --> 00:12:37,840 she was silent, but, and she was very frightened  by this this situation, where she was getting   107 00:12:38,560 --> 00:12:44,560 contacts from her father, which were clearly also  under duress, where he would not say where he was,   108 00:12:45,120 --> 00:12:50,880 he would not spell out the circumstances uh under  which he was held, he would only be limiting   109 00:12:50,880 --> 00:12:56,880 himself to, to very brief messages of concern.  Clearly, as he, there was a policeman sitting   110 00:12:56,880 --> 00:13:05,840 next to him while he was talking to his daughter.  Now, one of his colleagues is Lam Wing-kee, who's   111 00:13:05,840 --> 00:13:12,640 both a writer of political books and the store  manager of this bookstore. He was detained inside   112 00:13:12,640 --> 00:13:19,360 China when he was visiting there, he was taken on  a train blindfolded to Ningbo, uh another part of   113 00:13:19,360 --> 00:13:27,800 China, and there he was uh imprisoned in isolation  for a lengthy time, and during which the uh   114 00:13:28,720 --> 00:13:35,680 people held him, they also forced him to practice  a statement, a confession which he would read,   115 00:13:36,720 --> 00:13:47,840 and this he did on February 28, 2016, along with  several other colleagues, and this also involved   116 00:13:47,840 --> 00:13:53,600 accusing his former colleague Gui Minhai of being  the ringleader that the blame should be put on.   117 00:13:54,640 --> 00:14:00,240 Well, so far, uh this is playing out in  a very sad way. Then came a high point.   118 00:14:01,040 --> 00:14:05,360 Uh there were these three other colleagues, uh  Gui Minhai is still held, three other colleagues   119 00:14:05,360 --> 00:14:09,680 have been, have been allowed to return to Hong  Kong, they have come out insisting they were not   120 00:14:09,680 --> 00:14:14,080 abducted, there's no case, there's nothing to talk  about, and they've been silent, but Lam Wing-kee,   121 00:14:14,880 --> 00:14:20,160 he came back apparently on orders to retrieve a  customer database to provide that to the Chinese   122 00:14:20,160 --> 00:14:26,480 authorities so that they could trace every  customer of the bookstore, and uh instead   123 00:14:26,480 --> 00:14:32,240 he decided according to him under uh it was a  decision he made after arriving in Hong Kong,   124 00:14:32,240 --> 00:14:37,440 I will not go back, and instead he sought out  local politicians and arranged a press conference   125 00:14:37,440 --> 00:14:42,960 at which he told all about his ordeal, how this  was done to him, the way he was blindfolded,   126 00:14:42,960 --> 00:14:47,760 the way he was put on a train, the way they talked  to him, everything they did to him, and how this   127 00:14:47,760 --> 00:14:55,840 confession was manufactured and forced unto him  under threat and under intimidation. And this   128 00:14:55,840 --> 00:14:59,600 was the first time that the international  community could hear an uncoerced   129 00:15:00,400 --> 00:15:05,520 message, a testimony from one of these  abducted people not under the control of   130 00:15:07,360 --> 00:15:12,560 the authorities in China, and that's been  written up, he wrote that up after that, in   131 00:15:12,560 --> 00:15:18,560 very in a very detailed fashion, and it's one of  the strongest testimonies that we have anywhere of   132 00:15:18,560 --> 00:15:26,000 how this is done, how this kind of confession is  produced, the steps that the authorities that do   133 00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:32,560 this take when they do it, and that's available  now at online at places like Hong Kong Free Press.   134 00:15:33,360 --> 00:15:41,040 He then took part in protests openly in Hong Kong,  speaking against these abductions, and for the   135 00:15:41,040 --> 00:15:46,160 freedom of the press, and so on, along with other  people in Hong Kong and then came a low point   136 00:15:46,160 --> 00:15:52,800 which was then, when the authorities in China  that had done this to him sent out a statement   137 00:15:52,800 --> 00:15:58,720 that he would face the worst consequences if he  didn't come back right away, which made him say   138 00:15:58,720 --> 00:16:04,800 I'm probably moving to Taiwan, because if Hong  Kong is not safe, I will seek safety elsewhere.   139 00:16:05,760 --> 00:16:13,120 So we can ask why is this happening, and that  question can be broken down into multiple   140 00:16:13,120 --> 00:16:19,360 questions. You can say: why the crackdown  on Hong Kong bookstores, and why start with   141 00:16:19,360 --> 00:16:25,040 this bookstore, there are others, why were they  singled out? And of course the broader question   142 00:16:25,040 --> 00:16:29,120 that I want to get to after trying to answer  those first ones: how is this related to the   143 00:16:29,120 --> 00:16:35,840 wider crackdown in China on the expression of  alternative use since uh the last few years?   144 00:16:37,680 --> 00:16:44,080 Some possible answers are that there are top  government and communist party leaders who have   145 00:16:44,080 --> 00:16:52,160 a very thin skin. They want to cultivate an air  of infallibility; they could do nothing wrong.   146 00:16:52,880 --> 00:16:57,840 And so the stuff that's in those Hong Kong  published books that accuse them of doing   147 00:16:57,840 --> 00:17:04,080 this and that, being corrupt, having girlfriends,  things like that, is unacceptable and infuriates   148 00:17:04,080 --> 00:17:08,160 them and therefore they want them shut  down, so they send out an order saying   149 00:17:08,800 --> 00:17:13,920 uh: shut them down. And there is a disturbing  rumor, which is related, which says that   150 00:17:16,480 --> 00:17:20,240 there are factions within the Chinese  leadership, and they put out some of   151 00:17:20,240 --> 00:17:24,960 these books to make life more difficult for  people in the other faction within China.   152 00:17:25,840 --> 00:17:32,480 This, of course, is speculation. Another  possibility is that there are, at the higher   153 00:17:32,480 --> 00:17:37,040 echelons of government, second thoughts on the  buildup of the rule of law in China that has   154 00:17:37,040 --> 00:17:42,000 been going on since the 1980s. Should we really  be doing this, is what they may be thinking,   155 00:17:43,680 --> 00:17:48,160 and they might be thinking that instead we  should be reviving communist and homegrown   156 00:17:48,720 --> 00:17:51,760 traditional authoritarian spectacles of power,   157 00:17:52,800 --> 00:17:59,120 parades, and including these kinds of forced  confessions to reinforce the regime by   158 00:17:59,120 --> 00:18:04,960 intimidation and openly reject democracy.  As we have heard many times, recently,   159 00:18:06,800 --> 00:18:13,440 which also fits with this global turn-away from  the institutions and the fundamentals of democracy   160 00:18:13,440 --> 00:18:20,640 as I mentioned at the outset. Speaking to the  thin skin or infallibility obsession, I noted   161 00:18:20,640 --> 00:18:26,560 recently a very strange little incident. There  was a speech that the Party General Secretary made   162 00:18:26,560 --> 00:18:31,680 at the G20 meeting in Hangzhou, and he  had one of those teleprompters, I believe   163 00:18:31,680 --> 00:18:36,560 that Americans also have, and he was supposed  to say: "Qīng guān yì dào, tōng shāng kuān   164 00:18:39,200 --> 00:18:44,960 nóng" (轻关易道, 通商宽农). Instead he said "kuān yī  (宽衣), and this is because these two characters   165 00:18:44,960 --> 00:18:49,440 are very similar. Can you see this one, and this  one over here, so if this was in the teleprompter,   166 00:18:49,440 --> 00:18:55,760 you might miss out and read the wrong one. But of  course one speaks to a more open agricultural   167 00:18:55,760 --> 00:19:02,240 trade policy, and the other seems to say loosen  up your clothes, or take your clothes off. And   168 00:19:02,240 --> 00:19:08,880 therefore there was an edict that came out, this  is being monitored by the chinadigitaltimes.net,   169 00:19:09,520 --> 00:19:13,680 people leak these censorship  edicts, so you can read them, and they   170 00:19:13,680 --> 00:19:18,880 say right after that no one can allude to this,  no one can discuss it, no one can joke about it,   171 00:19:19,440 --> 00:19:24,160 no one can mention it, and if anybody does, it  must be immediately deleted from everywhere.   172 00:19:25,200 --> 00:19:32,400 And to me, that suggests uh a thin skin, because  this is a misspeaking, which to me is not a big   173 00:19:32,400 --> 00:19:40,800 deal, but it suggests a certain mindset which  connects to what I said about infallibility, and   174 00:19:40,800 --> 00:19:47,200 I see this also in the current policy vis-à-vis  the media, which is also new. The top leader made   175 00:19:47,200 --> 00:19:57,200 visits to the main state media outlets in this  February, and the slogans promoted were that   176 00:19:58,160 --> 00:20:03,520 the last name of our television station is the  Communist Party. This is uh China's expression,   177 00:20:03,520 --> 00:20:09,040 which basically suggests a coincidence that  we're one of the same, the Communist Party   178 00:20:09,040 --> 00:20:14,720 and the TV station is, is one and the same. It's  not like TVs has some kind of independent mission,   179 00:20:14,720 --> 00:20:21,440 no. We will be absolutely loyal, and we invite  you to inspect us, and this is what was happening   180 00:20:22,080 --> 00:20:29,040 at this moment. It's a very strange kind of  slogan. Another kind of example among many was   181 00:20:29,040 --> 00:20:36,400 the sudden censorship of this book, which seems  and not directly related to contemporary affairs,   182 00:20:36,400 --> 00:20:42,480 because it's about the late 19th century, and  the first years of the 20th century, when the   183 00:20:42,480 --> 00:20:49,200 imperial dynasty was overthrown and China tried  to move towards a constitutional uh political   184 00:20:49,200 --> 00:20:54,000 organization, and this book was originally  approved, there's a censorship, very harsh   185 00:20:54,000 --> 00:21:01,200 censorship, it passed that. It was in all the  bookstores being sold, and then suddenly somebody   186 00:21:01,200 --> 00:21:08,640 high up must have seen this book and decided  that we can't have this, so an order went out to   187 00:21:08,640 --> 00:21:14,640 confiscate it and move it off all the shelves, and  now you cannot buy it anymore. Evidently, this was   188 00:21:14,640 --> 00:21:20,080 a sudden order from somebody higher up overriding  this machine, and this again suggests to me,   189 00:21:21,120 --> 00:21:29,200 and, um, individuals high up with power, in  power taking it upon themselves to make arbitrary   190 00:21:29,200 --> 00:21:38,720 decisions as they fit, based on the moment, and  that uh inevitably leads to uh the suggestion that   191 00:21:38,720 --> 00:21:43,200 the same officials doing that must be itching  to do the same in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan,   192 00:21:43,200 --> 00:21:50,080 because there is a huge market for publishing in  Chinese, uh in those places, and there's a huge   193 00:21:50,080 --> 00:21:56,160 demand from mainland visitors who go there and  want to buy those books. This is just an example,   194 00:21:56,160 --> 00:22:02,240 a former, another general secretary of the  Communist Party, who is dead since several years,   195 00:22:04,960 --> 00:22:10,560 had a collection of speeches put out, and  that's not available in mainland China,   196 00:22:10,560 --> 00:22:15,040 either, but you can buy them, as you can  see, in Hong Kong. Now to the question:   197 00:22:15,840 --> 00:22:21,920 why this bookstore, Causeway Bay, which  has now mysteriously changed ownership, and   198 00:22:21,920 --> 00:22:28,000 according to reports, all the books they had have  been pulped, and that is destroyed. It could be   199 00:22:29,920 --> 00:22:34,640 the first salvo of a drive to bring censorship  to all of Hong Kong; let's start somewhere;   200 00:22:34,640 --> 00:22:41,200 this bookstore will be shut down first. But then  there are also these other rumors that suggest   201 00:22:41,200 --> 00:22:46,240 it was because of plans, unconfirmed rumor,  it was because of plans to publish a book on   202 00:22:46,240 --> 00:22:51,280 the former girlfriends of Xi Jinping before his  current military-singer wife, who is the First   203 00:22:51,280 --> 00:22:55,600 Lady of China, since he is the President  and General Secretary of Communist Party.   204 00:22:56,480 --> 00:23:03,280 The rumors also say that one of these former women  in Southeast China, in Xiamen, is said to have   205 00:23:03,280 --> 00:23:06,480 disappeared from the public eye. You  cannot find her, you cannot meet her,   206 00:23:07,520 --> 00:23:13,440 and if true, this would suggest uh again  a certain kind of thin-skinnedness,   207 00:23:14,240 --> 00:23:23,040 uh inability to have anybody discuss these things.  And I would say that if Gui Minhai was freed,   208 00:23:23,600 --> 00:23:29,440 that would be an excellent way of dispelling  the impression that China is worried about   209 00:23:30,480 --> 00:23:38,080 writings about former girlfriends. And it  would also dispel the now widespread impression   210 00:23:38,080 --> 00:23:44,160 in the world of thin skin disrespect for the  freedom of expression and for the rule of law,   211 00:23:44,160 --> 00:23:48,800 at home and internationally, by disrespecting  other nation citizens such as ours in Sweden,   212 00:23:49,520 --> 00:23:56,000 which I would say is unworthy of a great nation,  没有大国气派 (mei you da guo qi pai), you could say in Chinese. Uh   213 00:23:56,000 --> 00:24:01,840 and I would say that damage increases the longer  Gui and others are detained. He-his daughter   214 00:24:02,480 --> 00:24:08,400 uh is a really quite um extraordinary  young lady. I think she is 22.   215 00:24:09,200 --> 00:24:15,120 And this came very suddenly to her, she  was not a very public person before that,   216 00:24:15,120 --> 00:24:19,680 but now she has taken it upon herself to speak  for her father here. She is at the International   217 00:24:20,400 --> 00:24:26,000 Publishing Association in a meeting in Frankfurt,  an association that China had just joined,   218 00:24:26,000 --> 00:24:30,800 and which has a Freedom to Publish committee,  and she is talking about her father's situation   219 00:24:30,800 --> 00:24:37,680 as a publisher. She has also started up a new  website that you can go to: freeguiminhai.org.   220 00:24:38,720 --> 00:24:45,840 And she's also on Facebook doing the same thing,  and I have to say that I very much admire her   221 00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:55,840 bravery and her being so capable and  articulate in speaking to all these   222 00:24:56,640 --> 00:25:01,920 public audiences about these issues even  though she must be suffering. I know that   223 00:25:01,920 --> 00:25:07,920 she's suffering, because I've also spoken  to her, in the situation that she's in. 224 00:25:11,200 --> 00:25:19,360 That's the Causeway Bay Bookstore. Now, to widen  the perspective, not only these booksellers, but a   225 00:25:19,360 --> 00:25:25,520 wide range of other people, have been paraded and  seen to incriminate themselves on tv, outside the   226 00:25:25,520 --> 00:25:32,480 law, and this is even though, as I said before,  uh for years uh China's government has been saying   227 00:25:32,480 --> 00:25:40,640 that we will build up the rule of law, courts, due  process, uh etc. lawyers, and so on. So there's   228 00:25:40,640 --> 00:25:45,920 a contradiction here. This particular example,  that I think was on the publicity, we put on the   229 00:25:45,920 --> 00:25:51,680 publicity, is a finance journalist who had written  things about where the market was going and then   230 00:25:52,320 --> 00:25:59,840 was a decide, it was decided by someone, somewhere  that he caused a crash that happened. So he was   231 00:25:59,840 --> 00:26:04,560 told you better go on tv and confess; it  is your fault. And this is him doing that.   232 00:26:06,160 --> 00:26:11,680 Another very striking and more directly political  example is that of this village leader in   233 00:26:11,680 --> 00:26:17,840 Guangdong province, where they had - quite  famous now - elections, and he was elected   234 00:26:17,840 --> 00:26:24,080 at the village's representative partly as  an outcome of a struggle over land grabs,   235 00:26:24,080 --> 00:26:29,840 which is one of the biggest social issues in  rural China right now, where developers seize land.   236 00:26:29,840 --> 00:26:33,280 villages protest because they don't want  it seized, or they want something out of it   237 00:26:34,000 --> 00:26:42,160 and as part of this, he was suddenly disappeared  and then showed up on tv saying I'm corrupt,   238 00:26:42,160 --> 00:26:50,880 I accepted bribes, I'm a bad person. They staged  a special protest in the streets rejecting this   239 00:26:53,120 --> 00:27:01,520 smearing of their own elected local leader, but of  course as in terms of the dissemination, there is   240 00:27:01,520 --> 00:27:09,120 no comparison between what these villages can get  out in terms of a message and what the massive uh   241 00:27:09,920 --> 00:27:17,280 media machinery of the state can get out,  so this is the image that you, most people   242 00:27:17,280 --> 00:27:25,760 will have seen of the corrupt village leader who  tried to chew over more than he could swallow.   243 00:27:26,400 --> 00:27:34,160 And there are many other examples. To me, there's  no question that this has become a set pattern   244 00:27:34,160 --> 00:27:39,360 that's been picked up from the past. It was  not done in recent years, but from about 2013,   245 00:27:40,160 --> 00:27:47,280 this mode of grabbing people, working on them,  intimidating them, persuading them to present   246 00:27:47,280 --> 00:27:52,960 a confession, and then disseminating that on  the media has proliferated, so it's become a   247 00:27:52,960 --> 00:28:01,840 set choice, and these are just examples that show  you that there's a mix of entertainers, um actors,   248 00:28:02,640 --> 00:28:10,720 bloggers, uh journalists, we already mentioned  um and others who are all caught up in this and   249 00:28:10,720 --> 00:28:18,320 on whom this is deployed. There's a difference  here and we know that torture is very widely used   250 00:28:18,320 --> 00:28:23,600 around China, this is acknowledged by judicial  authorities in China also, they, as I will get to,   251 00:28:23,600 --> 00:28:30,640 they have issued uh reminders, declarations that  we must stop the torture that is being done by   252 00:28:30,640 --> 00:28:38,960 police around China. It, of course, happens mostly  to unimportant people, small people; the truck   253 00:28:38,960 --> 00:28:44,720 driver or whoever who refuses to confess, he can  be beaten. The difference is, of course, that he   254 00:28:44,720 --> 00:28:50,800 is not about to be presented on tv. He doesn't  have propaganda value. If he had, he might not   255 00:28:50,800 --> 00:28:57,040 be beaten, so that there would be visible scars.  Instead, he would be tortured or intimidated in   256 00:28:57,040 --> 00:29:05,520 such a way that he was made to accept his duty as  it were to confess and, and not beaten physically. 257 00:29:08,080 --> 00:29:11,840 Here's another example of police-provided footage   258 00:29:13,680 --> 00:29:19,520 which is, has this strange feature of blurring  the face, which seems to be a decision by the   259 00:29:19,520 --> 00:29:27,840 editors to suggest something like respecting the  privacy of the individual being, being put on   260 00:29:27,840 --> 00:29:35,920 the spot like this even as she is put on the spot  like this. So this is a curious thing to observe.   261 00:29:37,760 --> 00:29:44,160 There's many other kinds of people who've been  put through this, including a lot of lawyers,   262 00:29:45,360 --> 00:29:51,280 and during 2015 hundreds of lawyers representing  ordinary people of the kind you saw with a truck   263 00:29:51,280 --> 00:29:58,640 driver being tortured, or like the villagers uh  being the victims of land grabbing, and so on,   264 00:29:59,360 --> 00:30:04,080 these lawyers themselves have been rounded  up and held com- in communicado and forced to   265 00:30:04,080 --> 00:30:09,840 confess wrongdoing. Uh some of them were  being forced to confess to having colluded   266 00:30:09,840 --> 00:30:15,440 with foreigners. Another Swede here, he's one  of the foreigners that such lawyers have been   267 00:30:15,440 --> 00:30:20,720 accused of colluding with because he's a legal  aid activist, human rights activist who lived   268 00:30:20,720 --> 00:30:28,320 in Beijing for a number of years. He suddenly  disappeared and was made to do the same show.   269 00:30:28,320 --> 00:30:31,360 He's not the only foreigner that has been put  through this. There's been some commercial,   270 00:30:32,080 --> 00:30:35,680 some businessmen who've also  been put through it, but he was,   271 00:30:35,680 --> 00:30:40,800 and he additionally confessed to hurting  the feelings of the Chinese people.   272 00:30:41,760 --> 00:30:48,880 He waited six months, I was very eager to get his  testimony, but it never came. I waited six months,   273 00:30:48,880 --> 00:30:53,920 and then finally he gave an interview to a  newspaper, I think it was again New York Times,   274 00:30:54,560 --> 00:31:01,440 where he revealed how people were being  tortured and screaming in the room next door.   275 00:31:02,960 --> 00:31:08,880 He was not himself tortured, but he was  frightened. He was also being intimidated by uh the   276 00:31:08,880 --> 00:31:13,920 authorities telling him that things will happen to  your Chinese girlfriend and your Chinese friends   277 00:31:13,920 --> 00:31:19,360 if you do not read this statement on tv,  which you should, and you will do it,   278 00:31:19,360 --> 00:31:27,520 and so he had to rehearse this, and and do this.  Uh in Hong Kong, there's been something of an   279 00:31:27,520 --> 00:31:36,400 obsession with observing these choreographies,  choreographies of these confessions, and to spot   280 00:31:36,400 --> 00:31:42,720 mistakes that these editors have committed. For  example, uh in the case of my friend Gui Minhai,   281 00:31:43,680 --> 00:31:50,240 they noted, and I don't think that I would have  noted this, that midway through the interview,   282 00:31:50,240 --> 00:31:55,280 which is presented as if it's one sitting,  he is not wearing the same clothes anymore,   283 00:31:55,280 --> 00:32:00,320 which of course means that they have been editing  this, and forgetting to let him wear the same   284 00:32:00,320 --> 00:32:06,320 clothes, that it would look like he was there  throughout the same, throughout one sitting.   285 00:32:07,280 --> 00:32:12,400 It's very interesting to think about what this  is about. Is it the incompetence? Yes. Maybe   286 00:32:12,960 --> 00:32:17,440 is it arrogance? Maybe these editors are saying to  themselves, ah what the heck, it doesn't matter,   287 00:32:18,400 --> 00:32:24,240 it works anyway. So it's perhaps both, and  I have a slide here where I want to suggest   288 00:32:24,880 --> 00:32:31,600 the skeleton outline of how these people, based  on these witnesses that we have, testimonies that   289 00:32:31,600 --> 00:32:38,000 we have, how these authorities, the people who are  doing this, do it. First you disappear the victim,   290 00:32:39,280 --> 00:32:44,560 you can also do it now from other countries,  such as Thailand, Hong Kong, then you keep   291 00:32:44,560 --> 00:32:51,200 things silent. That means there's no communication  to relatives, friends, and so on. So everybody is   292 00:32:53,200 --> 00:32:59,840 anxious and afraid and scared, both the people  held and the people who are connected to them.   293 00:33:00,640 --> 00:33:06,240 So I think that's very intentional. Then, at  the same time, you interrogate and you clean   294 00:33:06,240 --> 00:33:11,520 torture the victim, this is a specific  term that comes from Darius Rejali,   295 00:33:12,080 --> 00:33:19,120 the prime scholar of modern- the history of  modern torture, who uses this term to describe,   296 00:33:19,680 --> 00:33:25,520 like I was suggesting, torture that doesn't  leave obvious scars, and that could be what   297 00:33:25,520 --> 00:33:31,520 could happen, is that you could be isolated  for lengthy times, you could be informed   298 00:33:32,240 --> 00:33:36,640 things that are not true, there could be threats  made and then there could be these various kinds   299 00:33:36,640 --> 00:33:44,960 of non-traceable violence, like too hot, too  cold, no sleep, no food, prolonged standing,   300 00:33:46,080 --> 00:33:51,920 and so on and so forth. You can also then move  on, as in this case, with the booksellers to   301 00:33:51,920 --> 00:33:57,200 detaining associates and then have them speak  against each other after they are frightened,   302 00:33:58,000 --> 00:34:03,360 but importantly you assemble a case and there's  a Chinese phrase for this mo, xu you,   303 00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:10,160 you've got to find one. So if it- there  isn't anything, you have to find it anyway,   304 00:34:10,160 --> 00:34:16,160 and then you script that, and you choreograph  it, you practice it in detention until you have   305 00:34:16,800 --> 00:34:23,360 a presentation that you're willing to put on tv.  You film that. You've, yes you film it first,   306 00:34:23,360 --> 00:34:28,480 and you edit it so it becomes uh perfect,  then you disseminate this self-incrimination 307 00:34:29,360 --> 00:34:35,440 via select mass media, and there's a science  on its own uh as to which channels are used,   308 00:34:36,560 --> 00:34:40,320 you repeat that, you can disappear  more people, and then, optional,   309 00:34:41,280 --> 00:34:48,640 you can then let these people go, or let them  sit there, or you can have a trial and tell the   310 00:34:48,640 --> 00:34:55,440 authorities, judiciary departments, that now we  need a trial. What is also new in these recent   311 00:34:55,440 --> 00:35:00,560 years is that you can force Chinese-origin  people who have foreign citizenship,   312 00:35:00,560 --> 00:35:05,760 or who sometimes have dual citizenship, as in  the case of Liu Bo, by the way, to renounce that   313 00:35:06,960 --> 00:35:10,800 that, and force them to stay. That- that's  something that's new, as of last year.   314 00:35:12,240 --> 00:35:18,880 You can also apply the same to foreigners, and  especially to less powerful countries such as   315 00:35:18,880 --> 00:35:25,440 Sweden, or people like that. If we move beyond  this kind of staged confession, I think we see   316 00:35:25,440 --> 00:35:31,280 the same kind of choreography in the way people  who are apprehended abroad and brought home either   317 00:35:31,280 --> 00:35:36,400 for corruption trials also like here, the people  um Taiwanese who were taken from Kenya to China.   318 00:35:36,960 --> 00:35:42,640 I think that uh it must be uh quite intentional,  this use of the hoods. I don't know why phone   319 00:35:42,640 --> 00:35:48,720 scam detainees would need to be black hooded as  if they were Al-Qaeda terrorists, but because   320 00:35:48,720 --> 00:35:55,840 the Americans do this, it works to do this, and  also, not only as a justification, because the   321 00:35:55,840 --> 00:36:01,200 Americans do it, so we can, but also to suggest  that we have complete control over these people,   322 00:36:01,760 --> 00:36:08,640 there's no way for them to go. A similar example  is the time in July last year when Thailand   323 00:36:10,320 --> 00:36:16,640 asked, um uh was asked by China to to give  up, by, about a hundred Uyghur people who   324 00:36:16,640 --> 00:36:20,880 had gotten to Thailand to ask for asylum  status and to be shipped away from there,   325 00:36:21,680 --> 00:36:28,480 but who were sent back to China, and uh this was  put on Chinese television, apparently causing   326 00:36:28,480 --> 00:36:34,480 a protest from Thai authorities, who- who, the  military junta authorities, who were saying that,   327 00:36:34,480 --> 00:36:42,240 this was not part of the deal, we gave you the  prisoners but don't make this kind of show of them   328 00:36:42,240 --> 00:36:48,800 because that reflects badly on Thailand, is what  one kind of news says. And when we look at these   329 00:36:51,200 --> 00:36:58,000 presentations on tv, we can begin to see influence,  other kinds of influences. I mentioned the   330 00:36:58,000 --> 00:37:04,720 American black hoods. I think that's an imported  technique that has been picked up. This one,   331 00:37:06,240 --> 00:37:10,480 we can- we can see how uh they've picked  up something else, which is these bars,   332 00:37:10,480 --> 00:37:16,160 which is also not a traditional Chinese way of  doing things. This one I think is picked up from   333 00:37:16,160 --> 00:37:21,120 elsewhere from Russia, because in Russia,  this has been used for quite a long time.   334 00:37:21,680 --> 00:37:27,840 When you have suspects in court, you put them  in a cage with this kind of see-through bars to   335 00:37:28,560 --> 00:37:35,440 highlight the fact that these people are subjected  to accusations. They're not only suspects, but   336 00:37:35,440 --> 00:37:40,480 likely criminals. So it's very much a stage  show. This is just happens to be one of the   337 00:37:40,480 --> 00:37:44,960 business tycoons, but this has happened to  a lot of people there, and my theory is that   338 00:37:44,960 --> 00:37:53,040 when the editors, the choreographers of these  confessions in China, uh work, they gather ideas   339 00:37:53,040 --> 00:38:00,320 from elsewhere, such as from the U.S., such as  from from Russia. There is a longer a history of   340 00:38:00,880 --> 00:38:05,280 drawing on the Russian examples that goes back  to the Soviet Union. I want to move now into   341 00:38:05,840 --> 00:38:13,120 uh historical uh origins of these  practices as they play out in in China now.   342 00:38:14,720 --> 00:38:20,800 Right now we have, uh not just um people like  booksellers and journalists and people who are not   343 00:38:20,800 --> 00:38:26,720 Communist Party officials, but ordinary citizens  in China. So far I've spoken most about them.   344 00:38:26,720 --> 00:38:31,840 But we also have, as part of the anti-corruption  campaign in China, many officials who are put   345 00:38:31,840 --> 00:38:38,080 through the same motions, and I would  say that the way they are presented,   346 00:38:39,520 --> 00:38:45,440 the way they are made to seem contrite and  confess various kinds of crimes has very strong   347 00:38:45,440 --> 00:38:51,280 parallels to the way these other people are um  treated, so there's a there's a family of this   348 00:38:51,280 --> 00:38:56,800 phenomena, but this are, these are communists,  these are members of the ruling parties,   349 00:38:56,800 --> 00:39:03,040 this is members of the elite, this is the elite  treating themselves, their own people to this. And   350 00:39:03,600 --> 00:39:10,880 so this is different in that regard. I think  that um one very interesting example was   351 00:39:11,440 --> 00:39:18,240 one of the highest ranking communist officers in  China ever since 1949 to be accused like this,   352 00:39:18,880 --> 00:39:23,920 uh or at least in recent decades, was Zhou  Yongkang, and it's very interesting to see   353 00:39:23,920 --> 00:39:28,480 how he was kept in house arrest for 10 months.  Of course he wasn't given any hair coloring,   354 00:39:29,040 --> 00:39:35,680 so he lost the shining black hair that Chinese  leading officials always seem to have, even though   355 00:39:35,680 --> 00:39:43,120 they are 70 years old, and he reverted back to  his white hair, then he was put on trial, and I   356 00:39:43,120 --> 00:39:49,040 have a theory, this is speculation, but my theory  is that this is intentional, and a part of the   357 00:39:50,160 --> 00:39:59,680 choreography, to make the people put on  the spot look defensive and worn out and   358 00:40:02,480 --> 00:40:06,480 not able to defend themselves,  but instead confessing. Of course,   359 00:40:06,480 --> 00:40:12,880 in the case of these most high ranking  officials, they uh would hold their confessions   360 00:40:12,880 --> 00:40:18,320 short, but submitting to this procedure is, of  course, already to play, to be playing along,   361 00:40:18,960 --> 00:40:22,960 and for this I think we have to go to  the original Soviet communist model of   362 00:40:23,520 --> 00:40:30,400 Lenin's and Stalin's show trials to see the  origins of this. This- this was also exactly   363 00:40:32,640 --> 00:40:41,440 sham show trials involving former members of the  same Communist elite that was ruling the country   364 00:40:41,440 --> 00:40:45,680 of the revolution. Many people think that  Stalin started this, but actually it was   365 00:40:45,680 --> 00:40:51,840 Lenin. I've been studying a bit, uh setting up  a bit on this. It was the founder of the KGB   366 00:40:52,560 --> 00:40:58,320 and Lenin, the two of them together, who  decided in 1922 that we're going to make   367 00:40:58,320 --> 00:41:04,640 this upcoming trial of our enemies into a  show trial. We are instructing the judges   368 00:41:04,640 --> 00:41:11,440 to not look at their books, instead accept  a pre-ordained verdict that they will make,   369 00:41:12,560 --> 00:41:20,400 and we will ask the media to work together,  and propagate this as an educative exercise.   370 00:41:20,400 --> 00:41:25,280 This is the essence of the show trial, and it's  exactly what you have in the Chinese examples,   371 00:41:25,280 --> 00:41:28,560 and which we haven't seen for a while  but now has been picked up again.   372 00:41:29,920 --> 00:41:36,320 This is one of Lenin's closest associates, a very  interesting affair, uh he was executed by Stalin   373 00:41:37,200 --> 00:41:42,880 and as- as- because he was a competitor for-  for power. What is interesting about it is that   374 00:41:43,840 --> 00:41:50,080 many people in the past have thought that he was  just such a firebrand communist that he decided,   375 00:41:50,080 --> 00:41:57,840 I have to confess publicly, otherwise I will shame  my party, I will bring uh um my Communist Party   376 00:41:57,840 --> 00:42:03,280 would look bad, and therefore he put up with it.  But there's been recent historical research by   377 00:42:03,280 --> 00:42:08,480 witnesses who were part of these proceedings who  have instead told the true story, which is that   378 00:42:08,480 --> 00:42:14,720 he was told that he had to confess and that his  entire family would be executed, including his   379 00:42:14,720 --> 00:42:21,920 children, and he desperately tried to negotiate  for the life of his children and for himself,   380 00:42:22,560 --> 00:42:28,880 but to no use because they were all killed  by Stalin. But this was why, at one moment,   381 00:42:29,600 --> 00:42:36,880 he made this uh confession that stunned the world.  He confessed to plotting to murder Stalin and to   382 00:42:36,880 --> 00:42:41,680 to uh secretly plot with his enemies, and  so, which is all complete nonsense of course.   383 00:42:42,480 --> 00:42:48,720 And the Chinese Communists picked up this uh very  early on. This is from 1952, supposedly the first   384 00:42:48,720 --> 00:42:54,640 show trial of corrupt officials, communist elite  members, and uh you can see that it's already   385 00:42:54,640 --> 00:43:00,640 taking on the Chinese characteristics  that we saw a lot during the Mao era,   386 00:43:01,440 --> 00:43:07,280 this kind of labeling of the victims, putting  their uh the accusation against them alongside   387 00:43:07,280 --> 00:43:13,760 with their name on their bodies, and so on.  This was um developed further in the Cultural   388 00:43:13,760 --> 00:43:19,360 Revolution, uh when it sometimes turned into  on-the-spot lynching there were people who were   389 00:43:19,360 --> 00:43:25,520 killed on-the-spot when this was happening. This  is during Mao's cultural revolution, and it is of   390 00:43:25,520 --> 00:43:32,160 course because of those excesses that, since the  1980s, after the death of Mao Zedong, many people   391 00:43:32,160 --> 00:43:36,720 in China have felt that we need the rule of law,  we need a judiciary system, we need courts, we   392 00:43:36,720 --> 00:43:42,640 need this due process, we need all these things.  And as such a system has been partly built up.   393 00:43:43,600 --> 00:43:48,800 There's a large infrastructure with courts at  different levels and so on. This is the Supreme   394 00:43:48,800 --> 00:43:56,560 Court of China, and what is very interesting to  me is that, in recent years, the Supreme Court,   395 00:43:56,560 --> 00:44:03,600 as well as other uh levels, have explicitly  condemned states confessions and explicitly   396 00:44:03,600 --> 00:44:10,240 condemned torture, which they acknowledge  that it exists, but they come out against it,   397 00:44:10,240 --> 00:44:16,480 it is illegal, the laws that have been implemented  since 1980 say it's illegal, you cannot do this,   398 00:44:17,280 --> 00:44:24,320 but it is being done, so they being invested in  this process of building up a judiciary system,   399 00:44:24,880 --> 00:44:30,320 they try to put their word in for stopping  it. Just a snapshot from the Supreme Court's   400 00:44:31,600 --> 00:44:34,880 web page. These are the kinds of  people who are thinking these thoughts,   401 00:44:35,680 --> 00:44:39,840 that China needs a rule of law, this is why  we're here, this is what we are trying to do,   402 00:44:40,880 --> 00:44:47,040 we are not stooges. And recently there  was a very interesting pronouncement by a   403 00:44:47,600 --> 00:44:52,960 top judge of a provincial court, who was asked by  the Wall Street Journal: what do you think about   404 00:44:52,960 --> 00:44:57,600 these tv confessions. Well he said, outside of  a court no one has the right to decide whether   405 00:44:57,600 --> 00:45:04,160 someone is guilty of a crime. The police aren't  qualified, prosecutors aren't qualified, media are   406 00:45:04,160 --> 00:45:09,040 less qualified to determine guilt, as a direct  reference to CCTV, the China state television,   407 00:45:09,040 --> 00:45:14,000 putting people on show and confessing to crimes  that they haven't even been accused of yet.   408 00:45:14,640 --> 00:45:19,600 So this is a powerful statement, and it shows you  what I think is a very powerful sentiment, not   409 00:45:19,600 --> 00:45:23,760 just among the judiciary, but probably among many  people in China, that this is the wrong way to go.   410 00:45:25,120 --> 00:45:29,440 Another example is the vice chair  of the China Lawyers Association,   411 00:45:30,960 --> 00:45:36,240 uh not being interviewed by Westerners but saying  in a Beijing newspaper. This article was still up   412 00:45:36,240 --> 00:45:42,320 as of yesterday, so this can be said, somehow.  Forcing people to confess on tv means saddling   413 00:45:42,320 --> 00:45:47,760 them with a presumption of guilt, was illegal.  All evidence needs to be presented in court,   414 00:45:47,760 --> 00:45:51,040 all arguments needs to be made in court,  and the final judgment should be based   415 00:45:51,040 --> 00:45:56,400 on a court's investigation, not somebody  else's investigation. That's very powerful.   416 00:45:57,360 --> 00:46:03,920 So uh we see that there's this split, there this  contending trends, and we don't know where they   417 00:46:03,920 --> 00:46:11,040 will go. Let's ask step even further back and ask  where do these torture practices come from. And   418 00:46:11,760 --> 00:46:16,400 in my research, what I found, is surprising  to me, is that I don't think they build a lot   419 00:46:16,400 --> 00:46:21,280 on precedence from China's own traditions of  torture, which have been prevalent, of course.   420 00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:27,200 You know that yeah there's a whole literature  about deaths by a thousand cuts, 凌迟 (lingchi),   421 00:46:27,200 --> 00:46:33,600 and so on and so forth. And there was of course  a lot of punitive display of those sentenced   422 00:46:34,160 --> 00:46:43,200 in imperial China, like this. But uh not spectacle  staged as if voluntary, they didn't do that. And   423 00:46:43,200 --> 00:46:47,440 in that sense they are more like the Nazis  than the Soviets, I mean traditional China,   424 00:46:48,000 --> 00:46:52,240 because the Nazis also, it's very interesting  to think about, they never put these shows on,   425 00:46:53,520 --> 00:46:57,040 and I have a theory about why the  difference, but we can get to that.   426 00:46:58,240 --> 00:47:05,920 What I'm saying is that uh the source uh for  the clean torture, no touch torture, that we see   427 00:47:06,480 --> 00:47:10,240 involved in the production of these forced  confessions, doesn't necessarily come from   428 00:47:10,240 --> 00:47:16,080 traditional China. But, as you know, the judicial  system may have been in some respects with torture   429 00:47:16,080 --> 00:47:21,520 and everything in traditional China. If  you read Darius Rejali, you'll find out,   430 00:47:21,520 --> 00:47:25,120 this is probably the best book today about  the history of modern torture methods,   431 00:47:26,240 --> 00:47:31,120 you'll learn that at clean torture, this  set of practices that don't leave scars,   432 00:47:32,160 --> 00:47:39,200 are a modern invention by Western European  police forces spurred on by the urge to have   433 00:47:39,200 --> 00:47:46,720 uh clean statistics, to satisfy bureaucratic  requirements. We want a high conviction rate,   434 00:47:46,720 --> 00:47:53,520 we want to be on a efficient police force, and  that would mean more public support for police,   435 00:47:54,560 --> 00:48:00,480 as fit in a democracy, and that  would mean better relations with the   436 00:48:01,600 --> 00:48:06,240 politicians who speak for law and order,  if the police is sufficient. There's,   437 00:48:06,960 --> 00:48:11,680 we had a talk recently in anthropology by Lawrence  Rothfield on the black box of police torture the   438 00:48:11,680 --> 00:48:17,600 history in Chicago of Chicago police officers  in cahoots with politicians implementing torture   439 00:48:17,600 --> 00:48:26,000 they'd learned in the war in Vietnam on people  in Chicago and covering it up, and it was uh   440 00:48:26,640 --> 00:48:32,400 this is something that is also discussed by Darius  Rejali in his book. This is where it came from.   441 00:48:33,680 --> 00:48:40,640 So it came from Western democracies, even  though of course in reality these practices   442 00:48:40,640 --> 00:48:46,080 are subverting the very fundamentals of democracy,  equality before the law, how can you have that,   443 00:48:46,640 --> 00:48:54,320 presumed innocence, those are key elements.  And there's a tension within our democracies uh   444 00:48:54,320 --> 00:49:00,320 because of this, and it's because these practices  are useful, clean torture practices are useful,   445 00:49:00,320 --> 00:49:06,560 that they were picked up. I wrote uh Darius  Rejali, we had a long conversation on email,   446 00:49:07,200 --> 00:49:12,160 and it is not something that he has studied,  but he is venturing that there might have   447 00:49:12,160 --> 00:49:17,920 been Soviet Communist prisoners in Europe  who learned about and saw the practices of   448 00:49:17,920 --> 00:49:22,640 European police forces, and then, after  they gained power in the Soviet Union,   449 00:49:22,640 --> 00:49:28,480 they perfected this. In the contemporary U.S.,  the most striking example may be right here in New   450 00:49:28,480 --> 00:49:35,360 York is the Central Park Five. These are five men  intimidated and confessing to a 1989 crime. They   451 00:49:35,360 --> 00:49:40,800 were then exonerated completely by a due process  that said they didn't do it. Somebody else did it,   452 00:49:40,800 --> 00:49:45,920 there's proof somebody else did it, uh there's a  screenshot, and this is what they look like today,   453 00:49:45,920 --> 00:49:52,720 and it's before the current president-elect,  uh began arguing that no they're guilty. This   454 00:49:52,720 --> 00:49:56,800 worries me a lot. That's authoritarianism.  That's setting aside, that's what I meant by   455 00:49:57,360 --> 00:50:04,240 rejecting and setting aside democracy's key  elements, which worries me a lot. This is   456 00:50:04,240 --> 00:50:11,200 a part and parcel of the same issue whether we  are in China or in the U.S. If we think ahead,   457 00:50:11,200 --> 00:50:18,240 this is a side track perhaps, a futuristic  uh recent research are- is showing that   458 00:50:19,600 --> 00:50:26,720 the kind of hard work that the police were  doing on the Central Park Five, convincing them   459 00:50:26,720 --> 00:50:33,840 by intimidation over lengthy periods of time that  they were guilty, that they did it, changing their   460 00:50:33,840 --> 00:50:38,400 own mental pictures of themselves, and their  memory of their actions inside of their head,   461 00:50:38,400 --> 00:50:42,480 this is extremely traumatic for them, all of  that work may no longer be necessary in the   462 00:50:42,480 --> 00:50:47,200 future because their new techniques develop for  how to alter the memories of the living things.   463 00:50:47,200 --> 00:50:52,720 They're doing it for rats very successfully,  and you can see this movie to learn about the   464 00:50:52,720 --> 00:50:57,680 Harvard researchers who are saying this is a  the bright future of taking away our phobias,   465 00:50:58,720 --> 00:51:03,440 so that we don't remember the scary incidents that  cause us to be afraid of spiders or things like   466 00:51:03,440 --> 00:51:08,560 that. And of course what authoritarian regimes  will do with this is to alter your memory so   467 00:51:08,560 --> 00:51:13,680 that you now remember that you either did it or  didn't depending on what they want you to say, and   468 00:51:13,680 --> 00:51:19,440 so that you can then repeat it. Which is a scary  prospect, but perhaps worthy of a talk on its own.   469 00:51:20,320 --> 00:51:27,440 Again, I do want to make the point that this basic  issue of modern police forces seeking bureaucratic   470 00:51:27,440 --> 00:51:36,800 uh um success, efficiency is is shared between  China and other countries. In China it's worse,   471 00:51:36,800 --> 00:51:41,520 of course, you have a hundred percent, who will  believe that? But they are aware that this uh   472 00:51:41,520 --> 00:51:47,280 problem exists, uh perhaps because of this, people  in judiciary know that no, those people are not   473 00:51:47,280 --> 00:51:52,400 those 100 people are not guilty, some of those  will be innocent people who have been tortured   474 00:51:52,400 --> 00:51:57,440 and forced to confess by the police as in this  picture. Now this is a little off, of course,   475 00:51:57,440 --> 00:52:01,920 because not everyone is beaten with a stick like  that. But you get the picture. The policeman is   476 00:52:01,920 --> 00:52:09,280 looking to his bureaucratic superiors who are  asking him for statistics. Can you show us a   477 00:52:09,280 --> 00:52:14,880 high conviction rate? That's what he's doing,  so that's why he's telling the victim: confess   478 00:52:16,080 --> 00:52:23,200 or else. So China shares in a global modern  predicament of justice, but we should still ask:   479 00:52:23,200 --> 00:52:29,600 what is uh historically specific to Communist  China and the Soviet case? So I already told you,   480 00:52:29,600 --> 00:52:34,480 this was imported from the Soviet Union, it was  perfected for the special purpose of coercing   481 00:52:34,480 --> 00:52:39,520 political prisoners, assigned parts in propaganda  spectacles showcasing the power of the regime,   482 00:52:39,520 --> 00:52:44,560 and disseminated via mass media and now social  media, so as to warn and frighten the wider public   483 00:52:44,560 --> 00:52:49,920 which is rules by reference to an, uh this is  specific to I think the Soviet and the Chinese   484 00:52:49,920 --> 00:52:55,040 communism, to an official teleology that claims  ownership of the truth, how history should unfold   485 00:52:55,920 --> 00:52:59,840 with the self-appointed Communist party in  charge, which which is different from other   486 00:53:00,480 --> 00:53:03,440 kinds of authoritarian regimes,  such as the fascist ones,   487 00:53:04,080 --> 00:53:10,560 or other varieties. And I won't get into, but I  think it's very interesting to think about how   488 00:53:10,560 --> 00:53:19,920 this also helps explain the theocratic character  of um China, and uh what was the Soviet Union   489 00:53:19,920 --> 00:53:26,000 in the sense that the Communist Party is the same  as the Vatican. It is the the holder of the truth   490 00:53:26,560 --> 00:53:34,480 about history and humankind and the ultimate  authority over the executive branch,   491 00:53:35,680 --> 00:53:40,160 but before I end, I want to ask also another kind  of question that I think should be asked, and   492 00:53:40,160 --> 00:53:46,000 which is very interesting. Is there also at the  same time some kind of shared Confucian character   493 00:53:46,000 --> 00:53:52,960 to this Chinese Authoritarianism? Perhaps shared  with other parts of East Asia which are much   494 00:53:52,960 --> 00:53:57,920 more democratic politically, Japan, Korea, but  they also have these crazy conviction rates. 495 00:54:00,160 --> 00:54:02,480 This is an example, just three slides about that,   496 00:54:03,760 --> 00:54:10,880 in Korea, there was a pop band that including  a Taiwanese girl singer, and they were all   497 00:54:10,880 --> 00:54:17,440 in uh bunk beds waving their flag, you know some  of you saw this video maybe, and then because she   498 00:54:17,440 --> 00:54:22,800 waved a Taiwanese flag, see she's  waving Korean and Taiwanese flags,   499 00:54:24,080 --> 00:54:32,000 she was contacted by her, by the business owners  of the, this show saying that this could mean bad   500 00:54:32,000 --> 00:54:38,080 business in China, because you're not allowed to  show the flag of Taiwan, so she came on air to   501 00:54:38,640 --> 00:54:45,520 affirm uh that she was um uh proud to be Chinese  et cetera, et cetera, and what is interesting here   502 00:54:45,520 --> 00:54:51,600 was that uh a huge number of people in on social  media in Taiwan, they saw the direct parallel to   503 00:54:51,600 --> 00:54:58,880 ISIS videos where they filmed a guy digging his  own grave just before his head is cut off. They   504 00:54:58,880 --> 00:55:03,840 thought that this treatment of this young lady  and her fearful demeanor as she was presenting this   505 00:55:04,800 --> 00:55:10,080 was suggestive of this, and of course there  is a parallel, this is about power inequality.   506 00:55:11,360 --> 00:55:15,680 If you go to Japan, you can see public  apologies that seem very similar in form   507 00:55:16,240 --> 00:55:22,800 to the Chinese Communist version that you see  today, but it's sometimes they seem um overdone.   508 00:55:23,360 --> 00:55:27,120 Uh this guy is a member of Parliament  who cried so much that it became a   509 00:55:28,080 --> 00:55:32,080 national joke, and went all around  the internet as something to mock,   510 00:55:32,080 --> 00:55:37,680 and ridicule, which of course cannot happen  in China. There is also a difference that he   511 00:55:37,680 --> 00:55:43,440 would not be imprisoned, he's not being told to  do this, he's just out to try a trick, to save   512 00:55:43,440 --> 00:55:48,720 his political future, his seat in parliament, and  things like that. But it is very interesting to   513 00:55:48,720 --> 00:55:56,880 compare and to think about how there is a certain  underlying shared notion of respect for authority,   514 00:55:56,880 --> 00:56:01,840 this kind of thing that's played up in  the Asian values discourses that we find.   515 00:56:03,840 --> 00:56:11,840 And I think so also because you can see in Japan,  as in China, something that's slightly different   516 00:56:11,840 --> 00:56:18,800 but also has a kind of family resemblance of what  happens in China. The confession of something bad,   517 00:56:18,800 --> 00:56:24,560 a self-mutilation here, cutting off her beautiful  hair, a member of a girl's band who's had a   518 00:56:24,560 --> 00:56:27,600 boyfriend even though she's not supposed to have  a boyfriend, they have their own rules and the   519 00:56:27,600 --> 00:56:34,320 public expects them to hold them, but I think  it is of a family in that it means submission   520 00:56:34,320 --> 00:56:41,760 to authority, it means submission of yourself  to a collective, uh instead of arguing um,   521 00:56:41,760 --> 00:56:47,360 go away I have the right to see my boyfriend.  I wanted to end by going to Franz Kafka.   522 00:56:48,880 --> 00:56:52,240 His most famous book that is  relevant for us is "The Trial."   523 00:56:53,200 --> 00:57:01,440 This is Orson Welles' film version of it. It  was possibly, posthumously published. It's a   524 00:57:01,440 --> 00:57:05,760 story that's very relevant to us. Here it's  the story of a man named only by the initial   525 00:57:05,760 --> 00:57:10,560 K who is abruptly made to realize that he's  being presumed guilty for some crime, and he's   526 00:57:10,560 --> 00:57:16,080 expected to conform to the opaque procedures of  a court process, which ends after about a year,   527 00:57:17,120 --> 00:57:21,920 of his futile demands to find out what the  concrete charges are which he is never told,   528 00:57:22,640 --> 00:57:28,400 and it ends with his execution, with two men  killing him by sticking a knife in its heart,   529 00:57:29,280 --> 00:57:32,880 an execution to which he submits almost  voluntarily, even if he seems still to be   530 00:57:32,880 --> 00:57:38,000 hesitating and hoping that there might be some  kind of last recourse. Many commentaries have   531 00:57:38,000 --> 00:57:43,840 uh described Kafka as the author that talks  about anguish of the lonely individual of   532 00:57:43,840 --> 00:57:50,320 modern society, but I think that's not enough.  Kafka himself at one point insisted I am Chinese,   533 00:57:51,840 --> 00:57:54,960 and this is an argument that cannot  really be reconciled with describing   534 00:57:54,960 --> 00:58:00,160 him only as the author of Western, describing,  analyzing Western modernity. There's something   535 00:58:00,160 --> 00:58:05,280 deeper and I should like to argue, and here  I'm reading along with Hannah Arendt in her   536 00:58:05,280 --> 00:58:12,240 1944 reinterpretation of Kafka, that his  writings are about systematic inequality,   537 00:58:13,520 --> 00:58:17,840 the antithesis of democracy in terms in the  terms that I used earlier, in terms of the   538 00:58:17,840 --> 00:58:23,840 equality before the law. I think that Kafka's  writing serves to expose the ideology that   539 00:58:23,840 --> 00:58:31,280 naturalizes unequal authority. uh The ideology  which supports such a system and he exposes   540 00:58:31,280 --> 00:58:38,560 how that ideology colonizes the minds of all of,  almost every member of the society they're in, so   541 00:58:38,560 --> 00:58:45,360 that this state of affairs of inequality becomes  invisible to them with consequences for everyone.   542 00:58:46,400 --> 00:58:52,240 There is a story by Kafka called "The Building  of the Chinese Great Wall" which shows a   543 00:58:52,240 --> 00:58:58,800 China characterized precisely by such a system of  inequality: there are the lowly wall builders that   544 00:58:58,800 --> 00:59:02,720 are never given any explanation of why the wall  is being built, why they have to build it the way   545 00:59:02,720 --> 00:59:10,240 they do. They are expected to just assume that the  emperor knows and that and the emperor's arbitrary   546 00:59:10,240 --> 00:59:14,320 power is warranted on this assumption that  he knows and they don't. They have no say.   547 00:59:15,440 --> 00:59:21,040 So as in the society of the trial, everyone in  this fictional China accept this state of affairs   548 00:59:21,040 --> 00:59:25,440 as a given, a natural state of affairs which  cannot even be addressed because it can't be seen.   549 00:59:25,440 --> 00:59:32,960 But of course by writing it, Kafka is exposing it  for what it is. And Hannah Arendt writes on the   550 00:59:32,960 --> 00:59:38,640 trial: "No man can expect justice from judicial  procedures where interpretation of the law is   551 00:59:38,640 --> 00:59:42,800 coupled with the administering of lawlessness.  That is lawlessness in the sense of the   552 00:59:42,800 --> 00:59:47,840 arbitrary framing and intimidation of a man made  a suspect for the purpose of serving as a suspect.   553 00:59:48,560 --> 00:59:53,920 The bureaucrats who conduct this process argues  Arendt our functioners of, faithful believers in,   554 00:59:53,920 --> 00:59:59,520 and imagine necessity," which, she argues, was an  ideological formulation prevalent in Kafka's own   555 00:59:59,520 --> 01:00:05,360 time, the idea that we are subjected to a grand,  necessary, and automatic process to which we must   556 01:00:05,920 --> 01:00:12,400 submit. We can't do anything about it. And to  which most people unquestioningly do submit   557 01:00:12,400 --> 01:00:17,920 themselves. I think China today is an example  of this, and we may become an example of this.   558 01:00:17,920 --> 01:00:24,480 I would argue that Kafka's tales serve to expose  the rules behind this, and that his genius lies in   559 01:00:24,480 --> 01:00:29,120 his simplistic seeming depiction  frighteningly accurate of how we all,   560 01:00:29,120 --> 01:00:34,160 if left alone like K in the story of the trial,  in the face of this system, would succumb to the   561 01:00:34,160 --> 01:00:41,200 dictates of the tortures, even before the torture  starts. As with K in the trial. Kafka was very   562 01:00:41,200 --> 01:00:47,120 keen on considering torture and the threat of  torture as the means of enforcing conformity.   563 01:00:48,080 --> 01:00:54,880 Faced with the threat of such intimidation, we  all might easily become confused and, like K,   564 01:00:54,880 --> 01:00:59,760 in the face of massive conformity all around  us, we would choose quote, unquote to conform   565 01:00:59,760 --> 01:01:04,160 as well by accepting the assigned guilt  like all those victims of no touch torture,   566 01:01:05,760 --> 01:01:13,600 clean torture, and stage confessions that I have  spoken about today, which I think could all be us,   567 01:01:13,600 --> 01:01:17,920 and indeed I think we could be next,  so that's why I believe we must take   568 01:01:17,920 --> 01:01:26,160 uh Kafka's prophecies uh very seriously. That's  why this is not the end. Our future depends   569 01:01:26,160 --> 01:01:36,960 on our continued vigilance, and as scholars,  research, analysis, critique, but thanks for now.