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Nov. 25, 2024 - Epoch Times

22:40

How Western Elites Were Duped by the CCP for Decades: Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang

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	The CCP is very smart at understanding the divides in American society and it knows how to target both sides.
	In this episode, I sit down with Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang, creators of the popular YouTube channel China Uncensored.
	Chinese people just are living in this propaganda.
	They live and breathe in this propaganda every day.
	They've been covering Chinese Communist Party propaganda efforts and narrative warfare for over a decade.
	There is a lot the U.S. can do To challenge the Chinese Communist Party.
	The idea that, like, we can't because we don't want to risk nuclear war or any other kind of war.
	They want us scared.
	There's a lot the U.S. can't do, especially with China facing pretty unprecedented economic troubles right now.
	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
	Chris Chappell, Shelley Zhang, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
	It's great to be here.
	Yeah, definitely.
	So let's talk a little bit about what China Uncensored is.
	As far as I can tell, you guys have been around for 12 years now.
	It's incredible how fast time flies.
	Tell me about what the idea behind this show is in the first place, just for the benefit of our audience.
	Sure.
	So I started it in 2012, which was a very different political landscape at the time.
	People were still thinking of China kind of fresh off the 2008 Beijing Olympics, that wonderful opening ceremony.
	Oh, it was so interesting.
	The goal of the show was to help Americans see the Chinese Communist Party for what it was.
	It puts a lot of effort into shaping how Americans think about the Chinese Communist Party.
	The overarching thing they want Americans to think is that China, the Chinese Communist Party, is not a threat.
	You know, they are very good at, you know, they looked at what happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they're very much like, we don't want to be in that position.
	How do we, you know, use our language, our messaging, even how they frame events in the world to Be to their benefit and then they can use that as part of their influence operations,
	you know, when they talk to American business people, American politicians, you know, even, you know, social media influencers, you know, they will take these messages from the CCP's narrative warfare and parrot them without even realizing that they're doing it.
	What was it that we saw today?
	There was a A Twitch streamer.
	Yes.
	It was a guy who is a big gamer and political commentator for, you know, the Gen Z audience.
	And he was talking about how, you know, China was right to take over Tibet because, you know, Tibet had slaves and China, you know, liberated them from this feudal serfdom.
	And this is a hundred percent.
	CCP propaganda.
	Yeah, this is CCP propaganda.
	Something else just jumps to mind.
	There was a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson who's criticizing America for the prospects of maybe shutting out TikTok.
	She's saying there needs to be openness of markets.
	This seems so How do you explain that?
	TikTok is a great example of the CCP's narrative warfare because it's been very effective.
	They portray it as the US government interfering in the free market or trying to censor free speech.
	Which is ridiculous because this is the Chinese Communist Party.
	They don't have a free market in China.
	They've banned all Western social media in China.
	TikTok is a weapon of the CCP designed to shape how Americans think, as well as steal a tremendous amount of personal data on individual Americans.
	And the ban, the idea of the ban is kind of ridiculous because it's just like the Chinese company that owns and controls TikTok just has to give up control.
	And then TikTok would be allowed, but the Chinese Communist Party does not want to give up control.
	Particularly because if they did, then Whatever American company bought it would have access to the inside of TikTok, to the algorithm, and actually get to see what really was going on behind the scenes.
	The CCP is very smart at understanding the divides in American society, and it knows how to target both sides.
	So, for example, We were talking to Lord Chris Patton the other day, the last British governor of Hong Kong.
	And he said one of the things the CCP would say about Hong Kong is like, oh, it's been occupied.
	It's the British colonial powers.
	And that really taps into this sort of left-leaning ideology.
	But he said the reality was the only people that were occupying that area were people fleeing China, fleeing communism from China.
	So, you know, they used that language to cover up the reality of things.
	And a more right-wing example, I have this theory China is...
	Doing this propaganda campaign that I'm calling, China is based.
	You see all of these conservative commentators, the CCP will put out a video of kids in China, young kids in kindergarten, playing with machine guns or fake rocket launchers, doing this military training.
	And these conservative US commentators will be like, oh yeah, China's based.
	They're not pushing woke ideology on kids.
	And you don't realize that militarization of children is insane.
	It gets them to react against this one other ideological extreme for this other.
	Or another great example is in video games now.
	China just put out a game called Black Myth Wukong that is one of the most popular games.
	And I criticized it because it's got ties to Tencent, which is basically A Chinese company with a lot of connections to the CCP. We don't want China controlling American video game industries.
	But the response was like, oh, I'm so sick of playing these Western woke games with woke ideology.
	I'll take this Chinese game.
	It's based.
	Because they said in the game that they weren't going...
	They don't want you to talk about feminism.
	Yeah they said you know they don't want you to talk about feminism and then it was like also anything about the Chinese government but because they said feminism first that it suddenly appealed to a political group in the U.S. who didn't were sick of feminism.
	Yeah which and then it kind of covers up the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is heavily involved in ESG funding that is pushing a lot of this I remember when Epoch Times was started back in the early 2000s,
	the distance between what People understood to be the reality of Communist China and the reality of Communist China that I was aware of being on the human rights side of things was so vast that it was almost like people would think you're a crazy person.
	You say, hey, do I have any topic I would talk about?
	It's wild.
	To be fair, it has shifted quite significantly, especially in recent years.
	Yeah, there was just this phenomenon.
	The Tiananmen Square massacre happened.
	That month, George Bush Sr. sent a secret delegation to Beijing to assure the Chinese Communist Party that it wouldn't hurt U.S.-China relations.
	The same month that the CCP massacred 10,000 students in Beijing.
	For years, we had experts, top politicians, telling us that if we do business with China, it will reform them.
	They'll become a democracy.
	It'll help the US government.
	Even as towns across America were being gutted because we shipped all of our manufacturing to China, we had experts saying, this is good.
	This is still good.
	Look at how much our GDP has gone up.
	Meanwhile, Americans are struggling to make ends meet.
	But we listen to these experts who have who knows what relation to China pushing this narrative that, yes, we have to engage.
	And I think in, you know, a few years ago, we talked to Alex Strosky, who wrote a book on influence operations.
	And he talked about how this type of narrative, the idea that China would reform democratically if there was economic reform, kind of came from The CCP, where they had this message going out through channels that weren't official channels,
	but it was as if, you know, if a U.S. official got to know Chinese, you know, business people who are connected with the CCP, or even Chinese officials, lower-level officials, or people who are maybe in academia, and they would say to them kind of as if on the down-low, right, that they were like, oh, well, you know, This is what we officially have to say.
	We officially have to say that we're the Communist Party and we won't change or reform, but actually, secretly, we want to do these things.
	If we had more economic relations with you, that can only be better for us.
	It was really insidious.
	These officials would be like, you really get China.
	You're very smart.
	Not like all the other people.
	You're a smart person.
	Don't push too hard.
	We're on the same side, but if you push too hard, then that means these far-left extremists in the party, they'll be activated, and then we can't deal with that.
	So just never push hard.
	Don't push publicly.
	And people felt special, right?
	Because they felt like they were getting the real inside view on what the CCP officials actually thought, not what they had to say publicly.
	But in actuality, this was part of their influence operations as part of their narrative warfare to try to make all these U.S. officials believe that that's what would happen if we just did more business with them.
	We were chumps.
	Chris, Shelley, just one quick sec.
	We're going to take a break and we'll be right back.
	And we're back with Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang, makers of China Uncensored.
	So some of the narratives I'm hearing, you know, Chinese nuclear proliferation has been going full tilt in a way that's been underestimated by Western intelligence.
	The military growth, the building of ships, all sorts of areas has been huge.
	Xi Jinping again recently openly talking about preparing the country for war, appearing in camo fatigues and everything else.
	It seems like a significant threat.
	Why risk?
	Why risk war?
	That is a powerful narrative they're pushing.
	I mean, first of all, Xi Jinping has been appearing in fatigues and saying to prepare for war since he came to power in 2013. That happens all the time.
	There is an unprecedented military buildup in China that should not be dismissed.
	I know some people are like, ah, it's all made in China.
	That's a dangerous way to take it.
	Or, you know, they have more ships than our Navy, but we have bigger ships.
	Better ships.
	Yeah, that's not a great way to approach it.
	But the Chinese Communist Party wants Americans scared.
	The idea of like, do you really want to defend Taiwan?
	Is it worth a nuke in Los Angeles?
	Yeah, there was actually a few years ago an opinion article in the Business Insider that basically said that.
	It was about, is Taiwan worth risking nuclear war?
	Everything in there was essentially exactly what the CCP would want to be out there because they want you to be too scared to make a move.
	And it's incredibly defeatist because there is a lot the U.S. can do to challenge the Chinese Communist Party.
	One great example would be to just expose the corruption of top CCP officials.
	This would be a powerful narrative warfare tactic the US could use, because the Chinese Communist Party, say, Say we just sanctioned China.
	The CCP would tap into the narratives like, oh, these imperialist Americans hurting us Chinese people, don't worry, the Chinese Communist Party will protect you.
	Shore up support for the Communist Party.
	But if the US is specifically targeting the corruption of top leaders, they can't really use that line.
	Because the Chinese people see, oh wait, you guys at the top are actually pretty rotten.
	So that's just one example of a tactic the U.S. could use.
	The U.S. can do so many things to fight China.
	And the idea that, like, we can't because we don't want to risk nuclear war or any other kind of connect war, they want us scared.
	But there is a lot the U.S. can do, especially with China facing pretty unprecedented economic troubles right now.
	The Trump administration was great with the tariffs.
	The Biden administration kept those tariffs and did the CHIPS Act.
	There's a lot of levers the U.S. still has to solve the problem, I think.
	We're Americans.
	We don't have to give up.
	We don't surrender.
	Recently, I've been thinking a lot about public diplomacy and the lack of most Western liberal democracies using that.
	It was a very powerful tool, notably incredibly valuable as part of the Reagan administration's efforts in seeing the end of the Soviet Union happen.
	What you talked about right now is a form of public diplomacy.
	Really, you're communicating to the Chinese people.
	I mean, I think when you look at what the CCP cares about with narrative warfare, you should look at the propaganda that they're putting out, but you should also look at what they're trying to censor.
	So, you know, there are social media channels, even on Twitter X, where people are posting all of these videos and things that are appearing on the Chinese incident being immediately censored.
	A lot of them are things like lots of small protests against banks for financial malfeasance, companies for not paying their employees on time, real estate companies for the loss of people's investments in their homes and things like that.
	And so you can see the cracks in The CCP's society and what they've tried to build and the things that they're worried about that they're censoring and the things that Chinese people care about.
	So there is a lot of messaging I think we can do about this is the reality of what's happening because a lot of Chinese people don't know that there are these protests.
	They don't know that things like that are happening.
	And if the CCP keeps people in the dark like that, then there is this feeling like, well, it's hopeless to go against the CCP, right?
	There's no point in speaking out or trying to, you know, improve things.
	But, you know, just exposing some of these things that are happening, telling the truth about the Lies that the CCP has in their narratives.
	Many Chinese people don't even know the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened.
	A lot of young people, yeah.
	But things like that, those are things.
	Also, essentially refuting the CCP's narratives about America, I think, in a lot of ways.
	Because if you watch the evening news, In China, the CCTV evening news, this third section of the news is always about international news, and it's essentially always about how chaotic and dangerous the rest of the world is, especially, you know, liberal democracies.
	They're full of chaos and violence and things like that.
	It's kind of comical, actually, like, you know, what they put in there to try to make the U.S. look bad.
	And we never try to, you know, Respond, debunk.
	Yeah, I don't even know if you have to respond to that white paper, but it's kind of like, where is the impetus in the US government to talk about why America is great?
	Yeah, I don't know why every politician and media organization in the US is like, they're harvesting organs of prisoners of conscience in China.
	That just sums it up.
	China uses rape as a form of torture.
	That's a message that needs to be out there.
	The flip side of what Shelley is saying is it's not just messaging to the Chinese people, but it's also messaging to the American people.
	So Americans know the reality of life under communism in China.
	And also, the same thing about the US has its problems, but the US and the Chinese Communist Party are not equivalent evils.
	That's something a lot of people believe.
	A lot of people believe the US is actually worse.
	US does not use rape as a form of torture.
	We are not harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience.
	And that's narrative warfare, to just say the truth.
	Saying the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
	Chris, maybe clarify this use of rape as a form of torture.
	I don't know if that's something that everyone watching would be aware of.
	This is the other aspect of The Chinese Communist Party's narrative warfare, they care about psychologically breaking people.
	And you see in Chinese detention centers, especially for prisoners of conscience, just the use of sexual humiliation to break down somebody psychologically.
	The Chinese human rights activist Gao Zhisheng, who God knows if he's even alive, he keeps disappearing into Whatever hole they put him in in China.
	He documented a lot of Falun Gong practitioners in China telling stories of incredible sexual abuse, electric cattle prods being shoved into their genitalia, women being stripped naked and thrown into a prison cell with a bunch of men to be gang raped.
	This is part of how they torture people, to break them down, to get them to be moldable and pliable.
	This is standard tactics for them.
	I think when it first became more apparent what was happening to the Uyghurs, there was people who testified in front of Congress even about women being raped in these vocational education camps, detention centers, things like that.
	Systematically.
	It wasn't just, you know...
	Some guard abusing his position.
	This was condoned and, you know, perpetrated across the system.
	Especially with the case of, I know, Falun Gong.
	They have, like, meetings and experts on how to break Falun Gong practitioners.
	So these are tactics they've developed and refined specifically to use.
	So again, this is not just some prison guard Using a browser, yeah.
	This is the practice.
	And so this is why I think this is very powerful narrative warfare.
	If everyone understands, China uses rape as torture.
	Then when someone like John Kerry comes up and says, well, you know, we need to work with China on climate change.
	It's like, China uses rape as a form of torture.
	We're going to work with them?
	Are they a trustworthy competitor or other nation?
	No.
	So it's very interesting.
	We've been talking primarily about narrative warfare of the Chinese regime against the U.S. and perhaps against the Western world, more broadly speaking.
	But you just started talking about internal narrative warfare or internal use of narratives.
	What would you say is the biggest thing or perhaps most important thing that you've learned newly over these last 12 years of running this show?
	One thing I have learned over the course of doing this show is there's this idea that we're at the end of history.
	That after the Cold War, the march of progress had concluded and everything's...
	We can do business with Putin and China.
	Everything's fine.
	Democracy has won.
	The reality is most of the world is under dictatorship.
	The light of freedom and democracy is very fragile, and it must be protected and fought for.
	Otherwise, darkness is always there, ready to swallow us up, and we can't give in to despair or attack our own values, allow the darkness to corrupt us and think that maybe our society is actually the evil of the world.
	We need to embrace what is good, because otherwise it won't last.
	Well, Shelley Zhang, Chris Chappell, such a pleasure to have had you on.
	It was great.
	Thank you all for joining Chris Chappell, Shelley Zhang, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

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