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Welcome back on the exciting stage here at RC three. Our next talk will be held by Katherine Tai. She's currently doing her Ph.D. in Political Science at MIT and writing about Chinese internet politics. And that's also the topic of her talk, which is called Painting Tech Dystopia. How the West Tells It Saves Fairy Tales about Asia and Middle East Aerial. Have fun. Hey, everyone, thanks for, I guess, watching my talk. I called it creating tech dystopia. How the West tells itself fairy tales about Asia and believes they're real. So we want to talk about fairy tales today. Unfortunately, not kind of like ones that make you feel good about yourself, but the ones that maybe we shouldn't be telling, because some people's home a belief that they're not fairy tales. So basically, when you hear about technology in Asia, often there are increasingly this kind of like, Oh my god, there's this idea and this vision of a place that somehow, somehow lives in the future compared to places like Europe or North America. But the problem is that sometimes when these stories are being told, some of them simply aren't true, and that's what this talk is about. So I want to talk about the things we say about Asia and the things a lot of people in the West do do believe about Asia, but are basically simply factually untrue. I think one important disclaimer is what this talk will do and what it won't do. So I won't be doing the debunking here. I'm going to use two examples of things that people believe about Asia that are genuinely just completely B.S., but I'm not going to do the debunking. I think if there's anything we've learned in the last two years is that when someone believe something that's factually untrue, it's not really easy to convince them of the truth by just telling them the facts. There are a lot of other people who've done the debunking. So both my examples will have sourced slides that you can screenshot because this is a video and so you can screenshot the sources and lo
ok at them yourself. What I want to do instead is I want to use those examples and to kind of give you a sense of like the absolutely genuinely somewhat ludicrous things people believe despite not being true about technology in Asia. And I want to talk about why this is a problem and what this means for tech discourse and which consequences it has. So with that out of the way? Oh yeah. So I basically because I'm not doing the debunking, you basically have to take me at my word. So you have to believe me when I tell you this is something that it doesn't exist. I'm sorry. You have to trust me on that. So with that out of the way, I wanted to start with my first example, which hits very close to home these days and which is electronic contact tracing in Asia. So last year, in April 2020, the New York Times wrote twice in their leads that Asian countries have invested heavily in digital contact tracing, which uses technology to warn people when they have been exposed to the coronavirus. In a different article, they wrote. The French are cautiously considering digital tracking, which has proved effective in Asia at the time. How hard? Who works for the economist and writes about technology for them already called out these New York Times lead and basically was saying Asian countries are relying on manual tracing just like everyone else. The boss of the Singapore tracking app says it here. He also spoke to the Taiwanese CDC. Similarly, at the time I was in Germany and I heard everyone talking about these contact tracing apps that had been so successful in Asia. So this was late March, early April primarily. And I was like, This is interesting. I'm going to look into this, and I wanted to write an article about what these tracing technologies are and how they worked. The thing is, when I went and looked for these apps, they just didn't exist in the way people imagined them. The way what people imagined was essentially that people in Asia are being tracked 24-7 and then som
ehow magically get a notification that tells them if they've been in contact with someone who who had COVID at the time. The truth, as ever so often is much more complicated. Like I've said, I'm not going to be doing the debunking here, but you need to take my word for it that at least until very, very recently, I wasn't able to really find anywhere in Asia that had somehow use this magical electronic contact tracing at scale. So two examples for debunking this are a piece that I wrote in German Firstpost magazine and a piece in The New Yorker where the author describes in a lot of detail how the electronic contact tracing there really works. I think one important takeaway from this is that in Germany, in the last year or so, people have kind of just been repeating the statement, and it's now referred to as a fact. So this idea, this fairy tale that's kind of somehow seemingly come out of nowhere has become a fact that people widely believe, even though it is not true. I think another thing that's important about this is that they are small parcels of truth. So for instance, when you go to Taiwan, which I did last November, so a year ago during the pandemic, you have to do it to be quarantine. And during that two week quarantine period. The government tracks your location with your phone, but then somehow it's kind of like like in a game where, right, like somehow these like partial truths turn into something completely different, like in the public imagination and this whole like you get tracked for two weeks so you don't leave quarantine turns into people in Asia, are being tracked 24-7. This would be completely impossible. So it doesn't mean that there is no electronic means. It's just that for one, there was I wasn't really able to find much evidence that it's doing much. And to the stuff that's being imagined in places like Germany or in the reputable media like the New York Times isn't necessarily actually accurate to what's happening. And the second example i
s the China China's social credit system, which is a particular favorite. This whole narrative of the social credit system came out and I would say around 2015. And so there are some great examples of what people imagine when they talk about it. So this is on the left here. We have a quote from Politico, who are telling a reporting on a United Nations pledge about artificial intelligence. So China on Tuesday signed off on a United Nations pledge to stop artificial intelligence from wreaking havoc on societies, including by banning the use of AI for social scoring systems, a practice Beijing itself has popularized in recent years and currently uses to score Chinese citizens based on their perceived trustworthiness. In addition, we have this wonderful picture from Wired where they visualize, right, like everyone with the score of like the three digit score on top of their heads. Another nice example comes from a German newspaper. I translated this from 2018, where the author very vividly describes this really dystopian picture. Legions of cameras and drones screen citizens every step for the behavior they receive or lose points as part of the social credit system based on if they, for example, helped a neighbor or ran through a red light. It sounds terrifying, right? Problem is again, is not true. So with the social credit system, there's this idea that somehow citizens in China are scored on a lick some scale and get a score out of, I guess, nine hundred ninety nine, and that somehow rates their social trustworthiness. Again, the problem is this isn't true. Like if you have friends who live in China, you should ask them if they have a three digit scorer, and I am fairly sure that they will tell you no, they might be other things that are called social credit, but these are not the three digit scoring system. Again, this is something that simply, genuinely simply exists in the Western imagination about China. Again, it's simply not true. I think one thing that's happe
ning with social credit, the whole thing is extremely complex. But I think one thing that's really important about it is that you kind of have this thing that happens where you have this imaginary that's very scary and dystopian. And somehow, like the state is like omniscient. And with technology. But then the reality looks more like the picture that I have on the slide on the right where you see, like a woman who's kind of filling up paper because the South China Morning Post went to one of the cities that often gets referenced with the sole social credit system thing and found out that actually, a lot of this is like people filling out paper forms, and a lot of people in that city don't even know that the social like they have a social credit score, allegedly. And so that it really impacts their life much less than this, the Western imagination tells us. And again, like with the contact tracing, here's a source slide that is much longer than the first one. Again, please screenshot it and read these things. A lot of people who have done much more work on this than I have have written about and have debunked it. You can see of the titles the messy truth about social credit. It's just very complicated. China's Orwellian social credit score isn't real. The problem is that these people are again writing against this idea this fairy tale of a score that everyone's getting. And this idea simply isn't true. So why do we believe these things about Asia, right? Like why is it possible for me to like, talk to a random person in the US or in Germany? And they will assume that they will think that they know that people in China are being scored for their social trustworthiness, even though this isn't true, right? Like, it's like me telling you that there's pink cows in the skies in France because France is right next door. I will be recording this in Berlin, so it's quite close. Like, we know this isn't true, but somehow we believe like all this other stuff about Asia, for som
e reason, I think one really important part of the framing here is that we need to think about these stories as basically science fiction. This is basically science fiction. What's happening here, right? Like if we're writing these stories, what we're getting is science fiction because people are taking small facts, small bits of information, often taking them out of context, such as, for example, the existence of a document that describes. Something in a very abstract way that it called a social credit system. And then extrapolating from that, so even though we might have a document that's just very vague and it's not really telling you much. People take that, apply their imagination to it. And then somehow we end up with these fairy tales and often very dystopian fairy tales in these worlds. Asia doesn't just become kind of like a canvas for science fiction writing, but it becomes specifically a canvas for dystopian science fiction writing. And I think that's a particular problem. So I think the first important takeaway from this talk should be that Asia is not your canvas, right? Like, it's not just a place to project like techno fears about technology on. Instead, it's a real place where real people live and they're like, they obviously have real problems. But when we talk about it, we shouldn't be talking about Asia accurately. Also, side note Obviously, Asia is very large, but often it tends to get conflated into just kind of one place. So now I'm going to get into the meat of the talk because this was just set up. This is why I'm told this is where I'm just telling you all the stuff that people believe. That's not not true. So I think one important thing why you should be listening to me and why we should be thinking about this and having a conversation about this, because there are several reasons why this is bad. And I'm going to tell you five reasons why it's bad. The first reason it's racist in its techno Orientalist, right? So in English, German and prob
ably many other media technology in Asia exists in this techno Orientalist frame. It's these imaginary stuff like a place that so other and so different. But that's not really a real place like people in Asia, and these imaginations aren't really necessarily Maginnis real people. It becomes again like this imaginary place that is like genuinely just honestly just bad because it deprives these people off their humanity in Western imaginations on a practical level. It also has very practical consequences. One thing, for instance, that people in the West like to talk about is how great democracy is. The problem is that when people from China come to places like Germany or the U.S. and they read media that sees things that are obviously false about their home, but they know to be false because they've lived in these places. That also undermines trust in these institutions, and it makes it much, much harder to actually convince people that, well, democracy is great. I've personally like met people or known people from China who've come to, for example, Germany and then read German media and sometimes see things like this, right? Like these really blatant obvious wrong things about China. And then their conclusion from that is, Oh, well, that means, like Western media are just the same as Chinese media. There's someone in the background who has like an agenda or who knows what they're what they want to say. And so I can't trust them. And so I think that's a really big problem. If you are someone who believes that, well, somehow democracy should convince people through the power of its institutions and kind of just the power of its existence. Second reason why it's bad is that this means that if we imagine these really big problems that aren't necessarily real the way we imagine them, it means that limited political energy is essentially spent on these imaginary phenomena instead of the real problems. So one example for this is this is one of the reasons I use the politica
l slide earlier, because remember that those U.N. principles on A.I. had an explicit ban on social scoring in AI systems. So it's possible that this is another example where this is coming from. But like, I have a strong hunch that specifically something that was written into there because people have heard about this thing in China that doesn't exist in the way they imagine it. The problem is that, yes, there are things that are called social credit system, and there are obviously problems in China with like technology, right? But that doesn't. But the problem is that if you're banning things are putting energy into kind of having these principles banned things that just don't exist. You're not spending that energy on something else. And for example, spending that energy and figuring out like, for example, where there's issues with surveillance. So if we assume that political energies, a zero sum game and energy that spend on one thing cannot be spent, another thing this means that if we're trying to combat fantasies, then we're not using those that energy to address real problems, which I personally think is an issue for activism. The third reason why this is bad if we only imagine Asia as this fantastical, dystopian, terrifying place that's so different, then it's also impossible to learn from each other. I think both in the good and the bad, right? I think an example for how this is difficult with the good is with pandemic prevention. I did a lot of reporting on Taiwan's pandemic response personally, and while I wouldn't necessarily say that countries should simply copy the Taiwanese model wholesale because obviously every country is different. Why Explique, after being there for six months, I personally do believe that there are things to learn. The problem is if we constantly paint Asia team as like this whole place as a place, it is so different and exotic and dystopian that we cannot learn from it. It is impossible for us to actually go and take the bits tha
t went well and there from them. I think conversely, it also makes it harder to learn from things that go wrong. Obviously, Asian countries are real countries that have social issues, political issues, economic problems they have. Most of them have capitalism in some form or another. They have companies that are profit driven and will probably lie to their customers that will sell terrible and often insecure technology to people, including the government. I mean, so things will go wrong, and I think especially with a lot of technology is kind of becoming like big. So one example is like emotion recognition, which is an increasing second growing industry in China. But if these even the bad things that are happening, if we just again assume that Asia is this imaginary place that's really somehow not real, which you will see in a lot of these imaginary right, it's so dystopian, it's really just a fantasy. But but then we say, Well, it's so bad and so dystopian. It's so different from us that it makes it harder to look at places in Asia as a place that you can learn from. I think a good counter example for this is the Article 19 report on emotion recognition by Baidu Shimada and Shezi Dommett, which is about China's emotion recognition market and its implications for human rights. Because they really go into what's happening in China with emotion recognition, and they look at the mechanisms for why some things are going wrong. And one of the things one of the examples that they're using is that companies are selling these technologies and overpromising what emotion recognition can do. And then both private actors, but also government actors, essentially buy into those promises. This isn't like the perfect tech dystopia that you might be imagining, but the Chinese state can suddenly read people's emotions just by looking at their faces. But it is probably an important lesson when it comes to figuring out how we deal with new technologies, especially when companies are tr
ying to sell them to you and have clear profit incentives for overpromising what those technologies can do so again. For me, one of the big problems here, it's it's it's hard to learn from each other. If you if the other places turned into this imaginary other, that's not really a real place or imagined as a real place for other reasons. Fourth reason why it's bad is there's kind of this trope sometimes that essentially boils down to it might be bad, but it's not China, so it's OK. So this kind of, I think, is more narrowly about tech dystopia that we imagine about China. I think a very good example of this is some of the arguments that Facebook has been making in the past because over the past few years, I have an example here from TechCrunch with a quote Mark Zuckerberg in 2019, where he essentially said that you shouldn't be regulating American tech companies because if you clip the wings of the good guys, then the bad guys from China are winning, right? So this idea that there is like this incredibly bad dystopia and that maybe Facebook has its issues. But if you break them up and you control them and regulate them, then the evil Chinese are going to come. And that's just going to be so much worse when in reality, honestly, both the U.S. and China have, like Big Tech companies that probably all suck in their own ways, and it's unclear if they necessarily want us like good or worse, like worse or better than the other. Like the grand scheme of things. And I think importantly, this is essentially being weaponized, right? So Facebook, in this case is really trying to paper over its own problems and trying to fend off regulation because they're saying, Well, we're not perfect, but at least we're not China. And so this is, I think, really a really dangerous, dangerous thing as well. I think the other thing in addition to that is also that it makes it easier to downplay problems that happen with technology, for example, in the realm of surveillance and because it's gr
eat for companies for them to be always able to say, well, maybe this isn't great, but there's still China, which is so much worse. And you've heard about it because in the back of the of people's minds, there's always this dystopia that they haven't visited and haven't really seen, but they somehow have like this vague image of like how it's terrible that everyone's being surveilled and all your data is being vacuumed up. And so again, this is probably giving power to the wrong people and makes it harder to address problems that are happening. The fifth reason why it's bad and again, this is a point that's more about China than about Asia, which I think is often counterintuitive is that you might be doing the Chinese government's propaganda work for them. If you're kind of perpetuating some of these myths. I think especially the social credit system is a good example of this. But there's also other things when essentially the power of technology that the Chinese government has access to gets overexaggerated because. Often this writing comes from people who think that they're warning against really dangerous things that are happening in China. Often these people are people who think critically of the Chinese government. The problem is that they're making the Chinese government look much more powerful than they actually are, right? And so they're kind of creating this image of like a really powerful and threatening actor. And essentially, they're making the government look much more powerful than they are. And so if one of the aims of the government is to make people scared, then by telling these stories that when they are not real, like you're scaring people unnecessarily. So that's like, again, another reason for why these things should be factual. So what now? Honestly, I don't know. I think one of the reasons I wanted to do this talk is that I think it's important that we have a conversation about this. I think it's really important that we have a conversation ab
out the fact that somehow people belief, but somehow things have turned to facts that just are complete bullshit, like they're just made up things that read like that come from a science fiction novel and they are made up. But somehow they've turned to things that people just believe about Asia as fact. And when you tell them that they're wrong, they get mad at you and tell you that you're like a shill for the Chinese government. I'm not saying that there aren't bad things happening, right? I'm saying that we should not be believing the things that are not actually happening because we need to be talking about the real problem instead of the imaginary problems. But as I mentioned earlier, we've kind of learned in the last two years how hard it is to just launch, like these really set in stone narratives that have become fact in people's minds, even though they're not. And so I don't have an answer to that. So I can't like I don't have an answer for how we get rid of this and how we stop doing this. And I don't have an answer for how we have a better tech discourse that includes Asia as a real place and includes people in Asia as people who have problems and are just going about their lives in a regular way, like people in Europe or the United States or America more broadly. I think one thing that I do have is that I want to give you some suggestions for getting a sense of whether something you're reading might not be entirely accurate. This is this list is primarily based on a conversation that I had for a podcast with Shazia Ahmed. So thanks and most credits for this. To her, honestly, it's the podcast episode was referenced in an earlier slide. Since this is a video, I can just tell you to go back and look at that slide again. So that's great. So essentially, it's what we were talking about and that's in that podcast episode was how do you read the news about China? So how should you read the news if you yourself are not entirely sure what's going on? And how do y
ou get a sense of whether this is something that's accurate or whether it's one of these fairy tales just that's just being told. And so in this context, in particular, we were speaking about social credit system as a specific example, and her work on it is really great. So I very much recommend her writing. So the first thing is that a warning sign is usually when there are repeat anecdotes and you hear about exactly the same thing over and over and over. And the example that she used at the time, I think, was someone being banned from registering for a particular university because of social credit like and it was all very vague. It was not very clear. And you, if you looked at all the both the Chinese and the the foreign reporting, you could tell that the anecdote itself was always the same. It was always exactly the same thing in small details got changed. But if this was really a thing that was happening, then there should be more people who this is happening to, right? So if there's a phenomenon happening in China, which is a massive country with a lot of people there, these things should be happening to multiple people. So if there's kind of always the same thing that keeps being brought up the same, always the single same example, then something something is off, right? It's possible that like something genuinely happened to that person and something maybe went wrong or something bad happened. But it's really the same thing over and over again. It's probably not something that's happening all over the country. Secondly is her advice at the time was to look at sources and figure out whether most of the sources in a particular text are in English or whether that person. The article is actually referencing Chinese language sources because one thing that has happened with social credit and I think this is particularly insidious is that a lot of the reporting just referenced other English reporting that was already wrong. And so there was kind of like the circle
of credibility where people were able to kind of repeatedly reference other people, have written wrong things and use those as sources. And then it's like with the Asian contact tracing thing, right? Like it was the example that I used earlier was kind of just used in this New York Times lead. And so suddenly you have the New York Times. Times verifying somehow that it is indeed there's indeed this massive digital contact tracing thing going on in Asia without really going into specifics. So often, local sources and local language sources are especially important in China. One thing again is also that it's often important to be like, for example, if you're saying a policy is happening, then like there is that are going to be a document like no bureaucracy produces like as many documents as like the Chinese state bureaucracy. And so there will be original language documents that describe this policy. And so so those unless it's leaked. And so there ought to be something that you can describe. And thirdly, it's important that these sources are contextualized, right? So just because, for instance, you've read a translation of a Chinese government document or a Taiwanese government document or like, I don't know, a Japanese government document doesn't necessarily mean you really understand what's going on. Like, as a political scientist, I primarily studied Asia. So when I read a German law, I'm also like, Well, this is my mother tongue, but to really understand what's going on. So it's important that these things are contextualized right and put into that political context. Fourthly, and I think this this incredibly important is that it's really important for all of these tech ideas that there is ideally you want specific research or reporting on the ground, right? So you will ideally want probably one reporting where they've spoken to either researchers who have done work on the ground or to actually have done their own reporting on the ground. So there are some good
examples of this, for example, also with social credit, there's been some really good reporting in Germany as well on this, where people really went and looked at the specifics and really what was happening to people, right? So I'm not I don't I don't want to just media bash like these good things exist. It's just that they are much harder to remember. So specific reporting and research on the ground to really give you an idea of what specifically is happening and what this technology really looks like, right? Like how it's really working and its implementation. Another important caveat I think that's important to bear in mind is that people don't always understand a system just because they're subject to it. So just like if I would go out onto the streets now and maybe start asking someone on the streets in Berlin about like German, like German monetary policy and inflation, it is quite unlikely that person will. I mean, if I ask someone your university, maybe I'll catch an econ student. But generally it's quite unlikely that that person will understand what's going on. So it's also important that just because someone is in country doesn't necessarily mean the tender stand laws, regulations institutions, right? So I think this also goes for like, don't believe what random people tell you about like Asia, just because they live there like that doesn't necessarily qualify them to know what's happening. This goes for foreigners, but also for local people. Obviously, they will know what the experience is like a big spirit, like living with certain things. But governments in Asia and the entire world are often really bad at explaining things to their citizens. So you really can't blame citizens for not necessarily understanding what is going on. I think another important thing again, this is probably more China than Iraq point is to be wary of extrapolating from particular locations to the entire country. This sounds like a very simple and maybe stupidly simple statemen
t, but China is really big. Asia is really big. And so, for example, if you hear that this digital contact tracing in Seoul, you shouldn't assume that it's something that's happening in the entire continent of Asia. You also can't necessarily assume that it's something that's happening in the entire country of South Korea because in some places, for example, public health is like maybe like a state thing or municipalities and cities are doing a lot of the work. So again, it's really important to be wary of just assuming that because something is happening in a particular city, that it's something that's happening that entire country again. Also something especially important in China because the Chinese government often has kind of these experiments that are happening on the local level where they have like policy experiments and implement a policy in one particular city first or implement different versions of it in different cities. And so especially in those situations, just because something happens in one place doesn't necessarily mean that it's happening everywhere and also doesn't mean that just because one experiment is happening one place, that that's the one that's going to be implemented in the entire country, right? If the experiments go badly, they might just be ended and then nothing ever gets adopted on a country level. And I think last year, one thing that's very important is that it's important to distinguish between facts and speculation. And so maybe this is one thing that you might be able to catch on to if there's things that are very vague. It might be worth trying to figure out whether this is describing something that's actually happening or whether it's something that might be happening, right? Because often, obviously technologies that exist in the present might not be used for particular nefarious purposes. But there is a potential for them to be used that way, and I think it's very important to be distinguishing between the possibilities.
The way something could be abused and the facts in the present, were it actually like the way it maybe is already being abused or is not being abused? So yes, thank you. I'm sorry that was a bit of a rant, but I really genuinely think it's important that we think about this critically, that we have a conversation about it and especially when we're talking about authoritarian countries such as China, that it's important that we talk about the bad things that do exist and don't just somehow focus all of our attention and political energy on things that are not that don't exist because there are real problems, there are real problems everywhere in the world. And I think overall it's better to spend political energy on solving problems that exist instead of making them up out of thin air. So, yeah. Special thanks to Shazia Ahmed. Virginia KCON and how hard and a few others for a really productive conversations about this topic. This argument could have been more coherent, but I hope that maybe it makes you think a bit and that maybe we can start having a conversation about why people believe some of these favored. Yeah, hi. So spoilers, what you just saw was recording. So just a quick note, since a few days have passed, since that recording, one thing that I wanted to quickly add is that I talked a lot about how you can recognize writing about tech in Asia. That is probably not that great or it might be missing out on some of the facts. So I wanted to also briefly give some to counter examples that are kind of on opposite ends of the methodological spectrum. One is basically any of their bailiff's work that specifically has a report in the camps erm, China's high tech penal colony that was published a few weeks ago there in Belarus. An anthropologist, I'm just reading the book myself and about halfway through. But even with sensitive topics such as the changing of the camps, you managed to really get an incredible level of detail with regards to especially the experien
ce of people in the camps and how technology is used to kind of make that experience even worse. I mean, the other example is Margaret Roberts book Censored from 2018, which is a much more focused quantitative book that analyzes the way Chinese censorship works online. So these are, I think, two examples of different approaches to how you can do writing or research on technology, even in a very difficult context like China very well. And maybe reading those can give you a sense of the level of detail that we should be able to expect from writing. Even even in certain countries like China, even if things, although things have obviously gotten harder. Yeah, sorry. So I just wanted to quickly add that on before starting the Q&A. Yes, thank you very much for the entire talk and also for adding that right now. So if you have any questions for Catherine, you can ask them on Twitter at Macedone using the hashtag c3X Sign or on hearkened using the channel or C three dash sign. And now we have about 12 more minutes for some questions and the first one. The first fuel already came in. The first one is have you seen the documentary Coded Bias, where the social credit system in China is compared to mass surveillance and AI applications in the western world? If so, would you say that the content of the documentary is not factual? I haven't seen the documentary. I also hope that maybe we cannot make this entire Q&A about the social credit system, because, like I've said, a lot of people who really are working on it have been doing a lot of debunking in the last few years. And I also think that a lot of these are a lot of the people that are also doing research on the topic. And I am I think honestly, if you're interested in getting a sense of what really what is going on. Seek out those sources of people who have been on the ground and who have done fieldwork in China and who have spoken to people on the ground and can tell you in as much specific details as possible weapons imp
lementations look like. So I would strongly encourage kind of seeking out those sources and then hopefully that can help people get a sense of what really is going on. But genuinely, there's been so much material debate on these things that I don't think it's necessarily productive to have a conversation about, like, is this particular bit? Sure. Is this particular bit true? Because there are like there is there are things that are called social credit. There's many different things that have that label. And I think kind of going into like how complex and messy the whole thing is would take at least like a two hour lecture, probably from someone who has done way more research on this than I have. Okay, that maybe leads us to the second question that came in so far, which was that you presented us with five sources debunking the Chinese social credit system. Sorry, it's about the system again, and the person is asking that or stating that they checked all those sources and none of them were in the peer reviewed scientific venue. Can you speak to the credibility of the sources or do you maybe have something in general, maybe in a peer reviewed journal? I think they want to have it. I don't know. I mean, I think, for starters, I would suggest having a look at who the authors of those articles are so for example Shazeda Ahmed is I was doing research in China in 2019 on the implementation of social credit. I know as a matter of fact that there's at least I think I think I know of two dissertations that are being written right now and for which research has happened in pre-pandemic. But because of the way dissertations work and the way research works and the way academic publishing works, it's going to take a long time, a bit longer, I think, for those to be publicly available. I think secondly, one thing that's also worth noting is that one impression that I have is that people want research about like if people want research on a thing that doesn't really exist in the way they
imagine it, then it's quite difficult, right? I think one other thing where they might not be that much research, it's also. I was looking at social credit for one paper and considering like doing some work on it, a lot of it is quite banal and not. It was really hard to be able to tell whether it really had any impact. And the evidence just didn't seem to be there. And so I think it's also worth considering that it was a phenomenon and really that impactful, except for a tech discourse. Then there's also very little reason for empirically minded scholars doing research on the ground to be doing it right, so they might instead be focusing on other phenomena that really do impact the lives of Chinese people in those situations. Obviously, if people are aware of like, very good like empirical research that does look at things, some of the various things are called social credit are doing that are impacting people's lives and meaningful ways. I'm always open and happy to be corrected. I think it's just important to be making these statements based on specific information and like actual research from the ground, because anyone, anyone should know that the things that are written down in government documents in any country don't really get to tell you the whole story and only a very small part of the story. OK, thank you very much. As I see here on my machine, there are no more questions. I still have one. Are you going to post a slide somewhere after the talk or should people just screenshot everything? And if people weren't fast enough to screenshot while I was talking a little too fast, I will probably. I guess I can screenshot the source slides and put them up on my Twitter again, but I didn't have any other plans for putting up the slides. I think most of the other stuff was just to be fun being run the pictures to have something on the slide when I was talking. OK, great thing here, then I can just recommend everyone to follow Katherine on Twitter
at the Katherine Tai. Oh, and there's one more question, which is I'll have to read it live. I haven't read it before. Can you speak about the challenges of doing sociological research in countries like Mainland China? I mean, yeah, so the challenges are definitely there. And I think especially if you're I think this is especially the case or among scholars, and it has been in the recent past for scholars who do work in changing institutions, the wiggers. It's also the case that a lot of other topics have become quite sensitive, especially when it comes to, for instance, African minorities. I think a huge caveat to challenges of fieldwork in China is kind of the big obvious challenge is that nobody can really go to China right now to do fieldwork, and nobody has really been able to go for two years. So I think basically most knowledge that we have or what I'm kind of speaking on is knowledge that is outdated by two years simply because not much has been like people were like there were a lot of things that people just weren't able to do in the recent past. That being said, it is true that foreign scholars were often looked at skeptically. A lot of things were still possible when the pandemic hit, and especially on topics that are not necessarily considered politically sensitive. So are instance. Ethnic minorities are clearly a politically sensitive topic, so that's something that's probably quite difficult to be doing and research on the ground on scholars who work on Uyghurs have in the past openly spoken about how they stopped doing fieldwork or stopped doing interviews in country because they didn't like they thought it would be a danger to their subjects. On the other hand, topics that are not necessarily considered politically sensitive. This probably, I would say it's likely much easier. And I think for, for instance, social credit is not something that seems particularly sensitive. And it's the last time I was in China. It's not really. It's not really somet
hing that the government's trying to keep secret. It's not really something that the government just like, Oh, we need to hide this from the world where it's like this terrible thing that's happening in China. So I think, like it definitely varies based on topics. I think, however, that all of that is also another caveat for that is that the situation in China. From what I hear, it's gotten generally more difficult to be able to speak to people because people mistrust foreign scholars and journalists. So there are definitely there are challenges that is definitely true, especially with a kind of a progressive resurgence of you based research on the ground. So that's like a challenge for the entire field. Sure. I think in that sense, Margaret Roberts's work and a lot of the other quantitative work that's happening on China are good examples of other things that you can still be doing. And I think another example is that you can work with government documents, for instance. And one thing the point interesting about a lot of the work on Xinjiang, and this is also the thing that happened during my last book. So he that I mentioned earlier, he uses a lot of interviews. But in addition, he also repeatedly references government documents where a lot of the phenomena with regards to what's happening in Xinjiang were actually being documented by the Chinese government itself. So yes, it's definitely a challenge, and I'm not going to say it's easy. And we also things have probably gotten more difficult and I've definitely gotten we have definitely gotten more difficult, but it is. And so I think that's why it's important to recognize that there are things that you can still, there's things that you can still do, even if they're not maybe the preferred options. And I think in addition to that, like there's even more other things that you can, for example, look on social media, like if there's a phenomenon that affects a lot of people in China, people are going to be talking ab
out it on social media, at the song of the songs that are not sensitive enough to be heard. There will be an enormous amount of chatter, and I think a very good example of this is this whole idea of the Typekit is companion were being this fall. The Chinese government actually did try to introduce a contact tracing method that essentially uses people's cell location location to see whether they've kind of met or encountered someone who had it when they met them. But the system was so sensitive that people kept kind of getting red health codes and people thought was so ridiculous that all of Weibo was full of people making fun of it, and people even wrote songs and poems about it. And so that really is it like so it's through research on the ground genuinely is difficult and has gotten difficult. But there's also so many other ways of learning things about what's going on in China, and I think we really have to start recognizing that it is possible to find out about things. For example, what social credit? I mean, like, one easy thing you could do is ask a Chinese person and ask them if they have a social credit score and if they've recently gotten docked points for, for example, like running a red carpet. And if if they have a score, if they like it does anything, if it means anything, if they like, if it impacts the life in any way, I think that would be a very good and very easy way of verifying whether this really incredibly impactful surveillance system truly exists. OK, then I have one last question, which was that the person asking the question really liked the point about making the government more appear more powerful than it really is and is asking to what extent the government actually tries to spread this kind of myths, or maybe even as some kind of propaganda to see more powerful. Do you know anything about it? Is that a thing? I mean, from a political science point of view, we know that a lot of the things the government is doing are basically demonstra
tions of power. I think a good example of this is that there was research by a high hyphen, one that shows that, for instance, propaganda doesn't necessarily really change the ideas that people hold, but it's simply a way the government kind of makes itself appear more powerful and essentially so basically is able to show that people don't believe what the government says, but they become more fearful because the government being able to run these incredibly pervasive propaganda campaigns is a sign how powerful they are. So I think in that sense, we do know that governments, authoritarian governments in particular, are interested in looking more powerful than they probably are because even like there's different methods, certain governments staying power but looking extremely powerful and scary, it's almost certainly, almost certainly one of them. And so even if there's no specific propaganda campaign, we know that it's definitely a thing that authoritarian governments tend to try to do and tend to benefit from. OK. And I think there are a few more questions, maybe you have one shot, maybe an anecdote or something about a miss Smith's. So myths about Europe or the US that are. Well, Asia again, is a big place, but that our toehold in Asia, the question is phrased Oh, that's a good question. Oh, not off the top of my head. I think one interesting. Just maybe like an interesting general anecdote with regards to the different worlds that we live in. And sometimes, especially when it comes to China with a very specific media ecosystem, it's that while there might be a lot of people in Europe who believe that COVID originated in a Chinese lab, there is a not insignificant number of people in China who believe that COVID originated in American lab and was brought to China by American soldiers. So I think that's like maybe not the right answer to the question, but it might be a good example of how sometimes these ideas about the other place mirror an extremely obvious way.
Yeah. OK, thank you very much. I think that's all the time we have for now. Again, thank you very much for this very, very interesting talk. I hope a lot of people watch now or will watch the recordings later.
