Is China A Threat to Western World? | Jerry

Jerry, a British expat in China, sheds light on the realities of Chinese society, government, and misconceptions held in the West. He recounts his bike journey to Xinjiang to counter negative stereotypes, discussing China's infrastructure, poverty alleviation, and the blend of socialism and capitalism. Jerry touches on the cost of living, public satisfaction, the household registration system, and international policies, including the Belt and Road Initiative and data protection laws. His narrative challenges Western perceptions, advocating for a nuanced view of China's governance, social harmony, and international relations.

Siddhartha Socials:

• Youtube
• X
• Instagram
• TikTok
• More Socials

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:20 Podcast Begins
• 5:57 Government Trust and Vaccine Acceptance
• 13:29 Reality of China
• 19:47 Western Misconceptions
• 35:47 Cycling Across China
• 41:28 Autonomous Regions and Cultural Diversity
• 44:09 Poverty Alleviation
• 1:04:41 Cost of Living in China
• 1:15:49 Personal Experiences in China
• 1:34:27 China Non-Interference Policy
• 1:41:49 TikTok Controversy
• 2:09:22 Religious Freedom
• 2:17:24 Women's Rights
• 2:24:28 Treatment of Foreigners
• 2:30:58 Crime and Police
• 2:47:44 Chinese Governance
• 3:00:16 Dispelling Misconceptions

Transcript

0:00

Crime is virtually non existent here. Murder rate here is zero. I mean, 4 million people live here. As far as I'm aware, there has been no murder in Jongsan. I can't remember when, 10 years maybe? I genuinely envy you because right now here, the condition is so bad, you can't even take a walk at night without being afraid. Say China has no freedom of speech and that's not true. China has full freedom of speech. But they have some restrictions on their freedom of speech and this allowed to be aggressive. You're not allowed to threaten people. You're not allowed to incite people. So let's go out and start a riot. Let's go out and start a protest. You're not allowed to do that kind of thing. They had a foreign friend who was here a few years ago. He's left now and he got into several fights. While he was in China and he says it's because I was a white guy going to this bar or that club speaking. There was no hostility towards foreigners. I haven't seen it. No one has accused me of coming over here and stealing the beautiful girls who are now my wife or anything like that. I've never had any experience of that whatsoever. Most of our friends are Chinese and they come here and we drink together. We eat together. We go out together. No problem whatsoever. What China has done over the last 12 years. It's put a school and a clinic and 5G into every single village in China. They achieved this about 5 years ago. Every single village in China now has 5G. A sealed road going into it and coming out of it. Here's a really interesting thing I discovered. Those medical clinics have connections to the hospitals in town. And doctors in town using 5G can diagnose and treat patients in remote areas. Wow! That's incredible. Because Mao introduced a system what were called barefoot doctors. Barefoot doctors were basically, um, paramedics who were given a basic training and they looked after all the people in their region. So there'd be two or three of them in the county and they could, they would go from place to place. Really interesting story how, how this happened. And that increased the life expectancy of Chinese people, all the media, all the politicians, and certainly the presidential race is going to be all about who's going to be strongest against. The biggest threat they have China difference. Would it make to China if Trump wins or Biden wins in all honesty, who in China cares? Perfect. Hello. Uh, Hey guys, this is the Siddhartha podcast. And today we are live. With Jerry, uh, quick introduction about Jerry to those who do not know. Uh, Jerry is a British born person who lives in China. So today we'll be having a conversation with him because he has hands on experience about how China works, the Chinese culture, what kind of, you know, because there's a huge gap in what we are doing in the West and what's really happening in China. So thank you so much, Jerry. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for the invite. I'm very honored to be here. Continuing on our conversation. So, uh, in the law, it is written. That you cannot, uh, insult people. Like how strict is that? Like, of course, you should not make fun of people, but if I make fun of people, what really happens? I think making fun is one thing. Insulting is a different thing. And, um, it, it, certainly it's not strict. People say China has no freedom of speech, and that's not true. China has full freedom of speech. But they have some restrictions on their freedom of speech, in the same way that you in the U. S. would have freedoms, uh, some restrictions as well. You have, um, you're not allowed to be aggressive. You're not allowed to threaten people. You're not allowed to incite people. So let's go out and start a riot. Let's go out and start a protest. You're not allowed to do that kind of thing. Then you have the freedom of protest. So organizations and rallies. So if you're at work and you say, uh, this, this, whatever this is, this sucks, let's, let's protest about it. The workforce can come out on strike. All those things are quite legitimate, quite legal, and they happen every day in China. Literally, I believe the number is 500 protests a day in China. Now, the difference between China and the West is that it's constitutionally allowed. You have freedom of speech, you have freedom of assembly, you have freedom of, of protest. These are constitutionally allowed. Then you have a legal code which says what you can't do. And you can't incite, you can't harass, you can't insult, uh, you can't, um, uh, call for sedition, be treasonous or treacherous. The things that your FBI knock on the door at three o'clock in the morning about. China has the same things. That's really what they do, but in fact, they don't knock on your door at three o'clock in the morning. They just cancel you off your social media. So, they treat it differently. I'd much rather be cancelled on social media than have a, an armed force raid my house at three in the morning. Which, as far as I'm aware, I mean, I live in a city of four and a half million people. I've seen police with guns, there are some, but it's very, very rare to see them. There's plenty of police, but it's very rare to see them with guns. So, to answer your question, yeah, you have freedom of speech, but there are restrictions on that freedom, and they are very reasonable and fair restrictions. One other one is misinformation. That's another one in the list. So if I were to talk about vaccines, for example, because this is a very recent topic that, kind of divided most countries. China says you can't, you're not an expert on vaccines, so you cannot talk about vaccines. Now, if you are an expert on vaccines, you are asked to understand the research, understand the government policy on it, which comes from the research, and you follow the government guidelines. If you are going against the government guidelines, then there's a case of you will be in trouble. Now, people say that's stymies free debate. But I think it doesn't. What it does is it creates harmony. Um, It's about trust. So do you trust your government to give you a vaccine that is safe for you? Or do you think your government might give you something experimental? That's the difference between the two governments. People here trust their government. They believe the government wouldn't give them something that could harm them. And so they say, well, if the government says this is right, I'm not going to argue with it. I'll take the 90%. I think about 93 percent of people in China took the vaccine voluntarily. No one, no one was mandated to take it. Now, there were people who were told you should take the vaccine or you can't continue in the job you're doing bus drivers, school teachers, nurses, doctors, things like that. But no, no one was mandated to take it. They didn't lose their jobs if they didn't. They just got moved from their place in the public eye. So that was the difference. It's all about trust in your government. Yeah, I think it's kind of like, it's a bit different here because I think, I like when you say that there's trust in the government, I think in the West, like, so I personally am based in Toronto, Canada, still there is somewhat trust, but I think generally, on an average, the public does not trust the government, right? A lot of people think that corporations rule the government, or there's a deep state that is trying to rule and control them. So, you know, let's like officially get into it as well. Like, what do you think is the trust level of like an average Chinese person in their government? Here, it's an all time low. If the government says something, people just go in the opposite direction. They're like, there was a protest in Canada. It's called the truckers protest, where a huge percentage of people just Yeah, you remember? Okay, good. So news is reaching there to a huge population, you know, came out on the street. They said, we're not taking the vaccine. And there was a huge drama about it. Like how much does an average Chinese person trust the government? Well, you don't need to believe me. This is the important thing. What I find I live in China, I've been here nearly two decades now in 20 years. So I have an observational experience of China, but I also studied a master's degree while here and my dissertation required me to research people in China. So my observations are backed up by some of my academic research. So that's one aspect. The second is this. I look out on the streets of China and I see people who are generally speaking, happy. We've all got our issues. We've all got. Mortgages, health, kids, all the, all the things that affect our daily life. But the question is, are you happy living where you live? Is your life better this year than it was last year? And for the majority of people, the vast majority of people, that much is true. The trust in the government that I see anecdotally, because this is just me talking to my friends, my wife's friends, and you do tend to find yourself into, in your own echo chambers, because you get along with people that agree with you. This is normal. I see a very high degree of trust in China. Now, what I try and do when I'm writing my articles or, or making my videos, uh, I try and support my own observations. Now I will say this is my opinion if I haven't got academic support for it, but I will also say I have viewed people in China have a great deal of trust in their government. And the Edelman Trust Barometer, which is an American measurement of trust, agrees with me. They say that China's trust in government is over 90%. Now, when you ask people in China, do you like your government? Most of them will say they won't fix the, the, the broken door on the community center that they're useless bastards, that kind of thing. But 90 percent of them was, they trust the central government. They do trust the government to do the right thing. And that transcends down through media. Now, nearly all media in China is government owned. And if you pick up a newspaper in China. China Daily, People's Daily, Global Times, Guangming Ribao. Any local paper, we have a Zhongshan Ribao, which means, Zhongshan's the city I live in, Ribao means daily news. So we have this local newspaper. You pick it up and you read it. It'll be factual, it'll be truthful. It won't be sensational, it will be quite boring, but nothing in there will be a lie. If the Chinese government does not want you to know about something, they won't tell you a lie about it. You just decided it doesn't happen. So yeah, something that goes wrong in one place, but you think about it when something goes wrong. The last time there was a major protest in China, guess where it was. It was in Xinjiang. It was in December last year. Xinjiang is this area that's supposed to be oppressed and the people there are supposed to be persecuted. And yet we got hundreds of videos of this protest that happened in December last year when people were out there on the street. Because somebody, a few people died in a house fire or building fire. Actually, it's quite a serious event. Now, why did we know about that? Because the government doesn't suppress it. Why should the government suppress it? They don't need to suppress stuff that is genuine and true. There were people who had a gripe. Now, what does the government do? Because when I said it's constitutionally allowed that you can protest, it's also in the constitution that the local government must listen. And this is why we don't have many violent protests in China, because when you protest. The government has to come out and talk to you, and then they have to report back, and it ends up going back to the most senior levels of whatever the department is that has the, the problem, and something will happen, something will get done. It actually works, it works really well in China. Completely the opposite. To what you expect. And that's the amazing thing for me. I came to China with a completely different perception, the authoritarian state, dictatorial edicts coming from central government, police on every corner, uh, not allowed to do anything, no freedoms, no movement. I have no restrictions in my life whatsoever. Once you understand the restrictions you do have, I can't say bad words about Xi Jinping. And to be honest, why would I? Because the entire country has changed under his leadership in a very positive way. This country is a fantastic country in terms of its infrastructure. It has the best educational system. It has the best transportation system. It has the best communication system that you can imagine. Every single village has 5G. Every single village has a medical center and a clinic. You, you cannot travel across China and drop out, you don't. I mean, you may in some parts of the mountain areas where no one lives. I mean, I've ridden a bike all the way across China, and I've never, ever lost the signal on my phone. And that's just going across the desert. I've been across the Taklamakan Desert, I've been across the Gobi Desert, I've ridden 350 kilometers across the desert from one city to the next city, And had constant phone coverage, things like that. Why would you criticize a government that does that? Interesting. Like, I think one of the big perceptions I think in the West is that an average Chinese person is deeply frustrated with China and they like, you know, and they complain a lot and the government doesn't let them complain. And, um, like, so what do you think? So you're saying that after Xi Jinping has, uh, come on, you know, things have changed. Uh, what is the perception regarding Xi Jinping among like a Chinese person? Like, you know, here. There's a huge mistrust for politicians. Nobody cares if it's Trump, Biden, you know, Rishi Sunak or whatever. Like, how does an average person look at Xi Jinping? Is it through fear? They look at Xi Jinping like, oh, this is our dictator and you better not say anything. Or like, they admire him. Like, how is that? Anyone who can read Chinese can pick up Weibo. Uh, Weibo is like the, uh, Facebook of China is probably the nearest. It's not, but it, it's an equivalence, it's a social media platform. There's lots of complaints about the government. Nobody's afraid to complain. No, nobody has a fear. Nobody in China that I know of lives in fear, uh, unless they're criminal, I guess. I mean, I don't know many criminals. I, I don't think I do. There is, there is no fear of Xi Jinping. He's not a dictator. He is extremely popular. So is Mao. If you go into many houses, you'll find a picture of Mao there and you think why is Mao Zedong so popular? I thought he was a terrible leader who destroyed the country. Completely the opposite. When you, the difference is what you're reading here is Western media written either by people who have never been to China or by people who have come to China with an agenda. Now, a great example of that is your own Canadian broadcasting, uh, also BBC, British broadcasting. So CBC, BBC, and in Australia, the ABC. They are all completely biased and negative about China. Uh, so for example, when China opens Xinjiang to journalists, and it's open all the time, you can get on a plane and fly to Xinjiang tomorrow if you want to. Xinjiang's this area where there's supposed to be a persecution. They say there's a, there's 11 million Uyghurs and 1 million of them are in prison. In camps that about the logistics of putting 1 million people into camps and, and you know, where are the guards, where are the trucks, where are the trains, where are the camps? They don't have them. They, they don't exist. And then we got these idea that people would identify buildings and say, this is a, a camp. No it's not. It's a factory. It's a camp. Because look, it's got fences around it. Every factory's got fences around it. But look, it's got dormitories, there's cells. No, every factory has dormitories. This is a big country and people move to work, so they work in dormitories. Everything that we perceive in the west is misinterpreted quite often, quite deliberately. The, the BB, C in, in the UK has an Australian guy working in China who quite deliberately lies about China and, and then blocks every single person who tries to correct him. Literally, if you just say to him, Hey, Steven, that's wrong. And you must know this is wrong. Next thing, you're blocked. Every single person that I know in China has been blocked by Stephen McDonnell, the BBC's man here, because he's not telling the truth, and he knows he's not telling the truth. He couldn't possibly be making a mistake about this, because he lives in China. And many people quote him and say, you know, this guy who lives in China says this, but he has an agenda. Whatever that agenda is, whatever his reward for that agenda, I don't know. But there is an agenda there. So, no one is afraid of Xi Jinping, nobody's afraid of the government, the police are extremely friendly people here, there are a lot of them, but crime doesn't exist. And then they say, well, it doesn't exist because it's a surveillance state. So, what would you prefer, cameras watching you all the time, or the fear of getting robbed going to the bank, or going shopping, or raped coming home from a nightclub? What would you prefer? I prefer the surveillance. And again, that's about, do you trust your government? The trust is there. Now I can quote to you, San Diego University did a several year study, Harvard University did a 13 year study, the Edelman Trust Barometer does a study every year or two years it releases, and China tops the list. The Ipsos Global Happiness Index. China tops the list of global happiness. Well, how would you be globally happily happy? How would you have this, uh, registration of your happiness to be so high if you were living in a dictatorship that you needed rescue from, I wonder if the same thing applies in Iran or North Korea or Venezuela, because what I read about those countries and how evil their governments are is the same as what I read about China. And I know it's not. I know for a hundred percent certainty that China is not a dictatorship. It is a dictatorship of the proletariat, which means the people rule the country, not the government. And that actually works quite well through this system that just finished yesterday, the two sessions. That's the people telling the government what they want. It works. It's not a rubber stamp parliament at all. It's actually a very, very effective democracy system. People are not afraid here. So like, so I don't know if you're aware, like in us right now, we have what is called an American border crisis and there's like a huge percentage of people who are jumping through, there's a huge percent of Chinese there and a lot of them are jumping through and coming here and they're saying we are, you know, escaping oppression and it's horrible in China. Why do you think there's such a, let me give you some perspective here. The, uh, the border crisis has something like, um, 1. 2 million people a year coming across. Uh, that number is, is not my number, this is, this is the number that they will give you from border control, uh, statistics. 27, 000 of them last year were Chinese. Let's look at that in perspective. 1. 2 million and 27, 000 were Chinese. That's not a huge number. Okay. So let's put that into a perspective. What's happening is Fox news. And it's particularly Fox are trying to D to denigrate Biden. Now, the biggest thing that you can get right now is China fear. If you've got a fear of China, and then Chinese people are obliging you by escaping China and coming to America, you can then utilize that fear exaggerated beyond all proportion. I made a video about this one. A few, two years ago, 2022, I think it was. They, there was a thing in Fox news where they said 900 percent increase in Chinese people crossing the border. Okay. I read that story. Wow, this is serious and I thought well maybe there's something in this so I looked a little deeper and I went to different sources to look for the same story. This is, this is what I always do. And I found one that said the total number of people was 2, 700. That's, that's not a lot. Right. So then go back. To the year before and consider what that 900 percent increase to take it up to 2, 700, but 2, 700 in the scope of 1. 2 million, it doesn't even figure on the scale. That's what you're being misled about. The statistics they give you are not wrong. There was a 900 percent increase. This year they'll say there's been a 400 percent increase because it went from 2, 000 to 20, 000. 10 percent increase. I don't know what the number will be when it's finally finished. It could be 10%, it could be 400%. But the bottom line is, it's the tiniest, tiny percentage of what the real number is. And there's the problem. The problem is not Chinese people. Now, let's now go back to why are Chinese people leaving China? Okay, there's 1. 4 million people here. Now, 27, 000 have gone across the border. Let's look at that in its perspective. It's, I don't know how many zeros there are after the dot. It's 0. 0000001 or 2%. That's all it is. It's a tiny little number. Now, let's look at who would leave China When what I'm telling you is absolutely correct. And anybody coming to China will tell you this is true. The infrastructure is better. The health outcomes are better. The medical system is better. The education system is better. The wealth growth is incredible. Inflation is virtually zero, which of course, according to some is a problem. Um, rates are virtually zero. You can buy, if you, if you want to buy a house, you get like 3 percent interest and it's fixed. And most people buy houses for cash anyways, that again, that's another problem that doesn't really exist. So why would people when everything is getting Accumulatively better? Why would so many people want to leave China? What is China doing that would cause people to want to leave? And what has Xi Jinping been doing for the last 12 years? A clampdown on corruption. So who's leaving China? The people who are getting more and more wealth growth, better education outcomes, better health outcomes, better society. Those people, would they leave China or the people who have their potential corrupt money taken away from them? And if they're really seriously corrupt, they're going to prison. Who's going to leave China? That's one aspect. The other aspect is 2019, the United States went to Hong Kong and they paid a lot of Hong Kongers. This is now not conjecture. This is very, very proven fact. It's been proven in an independent court. Hong Kong judiciary is completely independent of the Chinese mainland judiciary, even though Hong Kong is part of China. Under the system that they have, the Joint Declaration, Hong Kong and China are two separately run judiciaries. So most of the judges inside of the Hong Kong are either British, Australian or New Zealand trained. Some of them are actually British, Australian or Kiwis. And some of them are Canadian as well. Now, what happened in 2019 was the National Endowment for Democracy and a few others came to China with an agenda. They've been preparing it for a long time. There were problems. Hong Kong has its problems. There's no question about that. But they capitalized on those problems. When they had protests. When they had protests, I think we're having a little trouble with connecting here when they had the protests. Yeah. NEDI cannot hear you. Protests. And so they capitalized on them and they utilized them in order to attempt a color revolution. Now we know this for a fact, now it's come out in the Jimmy Li case and Jimmy Li is not an individual. He was working for the American government, he was working with people in the American government and we're now having a situation where the whole of Hong Kong is realizing that this entire thing was caused by the Americans and the British, MI6 as well. What then happened is a lot of them went to the American government, American consulate there, to ask for asylum. Because, The American government had paid them to cause damage. The American government had paid them to protest and riot and hurt people. Now they're going to get arrested. And so they went to the American government and said, can we have asylum in America and the American government said, no. And there's actually documented cases of people being arrested outside the American government consulate. So this is why some of them have said, well, I've got to get to America, but I can't do it legally. So some of them will be from Hong Kong. Some of them will be criminals. I would suggest that, my opinion, USA is welcome to them. I think that's what most people in China think when they know this story, and they do know the story. Interesting. I wasn't aware that, you know, a lot of these protests are like paid protests, where, you know, foreign governments simply, you know, manipulate people in order to, uh, you know, Get something out of them. Why do you think like the western people like you are a western man? Who's you know, kind of settled in china? Why do you think like from an average person who's lived here? They're after you guys if you guys are simply minding your own business living your life. Why all these you know, western Five eyes uk brits canada australia like going crazy about you guys Excuse me. No problem. Going crazy. Um, I mean, no one's going crazy about me personally, uh, created in the Western media from time to time. Um, people in the West, there are, there are a couple of organizations that, um, dislike. People like me. One of them is the ASPI, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. And the reason is, I'm discrediting them. When they say something, I say, no, that's not true. Here's the reality. Of course, they don't want that on their Twitter feed. You know, it goes onto their Twitter feed. Someone's creating an element of doubt. So instead of allowing the debate about this, they cut me out. They, they just cut me out. Remove me. So they block me from following them. They block me from commenting on them. Uh, and, and the reason is I'm never rude to anyone. I've followed Chinese guidelines. I'm, I'm polite. I'm, I'm, I'll say, well, this is wrong because, and I'll give the support information for why I say something is wrong. Once I've done that, then there's an element of doubt introduced to their narrative. So, the, the, the example I gave before with the satellite imagery, that was, uh, ASPI. That was an Australian security, uh, Australian Strategic Policy Institute stating that these buildings that they'd seen from the satellite imagery are some form of concentration camp. Well, throughout China, factories have a security gate on the, on the front. Throughout China, factories have canteens. They have dormitories and they have fences. Every single factory that you will ever go to in China will have all of those factors. Now, I can prove that. I can just go onto any Google image and say, Look, here's a factory in Guangdong. And then they say, No, that's different. It's in Guangdong and they don't have the problems there. But in Xinjiang, exactly the same situation applies, except that the factory might have more security. Because Xinjiang had a terrorism problem. Xinjiang did have an extremism problem. Xinjiang does have an enhanced system of security. I've been through Xinjiang. I've cycled through Xinjiang. You know, I don't just go there on a holiday and have a look and say, oh, there's nothing happening. I cycled 5, 000 kilometers through the region. It's huge. It's bigger than France and Spain. It's huge. And I've cycled through it. And when you meet people, you know there is not what they say there is. So when you start telling people that, this is why they have a problem with me. I have a problem when people tell me, you can't have seen everything. Well, that's true. I didn't see everything. But you cannot go into a place and be welcomed by them when they're being oppressed. What happened to Jews in Germany, Germany, Germany. In Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, what happened to them if they didn't get rounded up and captured? What happened to them? They went into hiding. I've been invited into people's houses in Xinjiang. I've been invited into Uyghur homes. I've had breakfast. I've slept on the floor of a Uyghur restaurant. They don't allow you to do that if they're hiding something. So this is the difference. You know, I've actually been there, seen it, and someone looks at a satellite and says, no, you're wrong about this. And I said, no, I'm not wrong about this because I've been there. I've been to that exact site that you're saying is a camp. And I know it's a factory. I can, I can assure you you're wrong. Now, once they know this, they have two options, change their point of view. And if they are a think tank, working, To make a China threat so that their donors can sell more weapons to Australia, which is what's happening. That's, they're not going to listen to me. They're not going to change their view. They don't want to change their view. They don't want to be. Found out to be wrong, but they're certainly not going to change their view. And there's a couple of people that you should read into. If you want to know more about this, the there's one called the co West pro papers. It's a lady called Jack James, co West propaganda, countering Western propaganda, co West pro one word. And you can just go co co West pro online and you'll find her. She's written four papers. She was qualified, um, international lawyer. She has two master's degrees in international law, very, very highly qualified, and basically what she's done, she didn't go to this point with the view of saying they're wrong. She went to this point and said, have they proven it? And the answer is, no, they haven't. So if they haven't proven that there's a genocide going on in Xinjiang, then we shouldn't be claiming that there is. Nobody's produced a dead body yet. Nobody's produced a camp where people are dying. So then they say, well, nobody's dying, but it's a cultural genocide. And I said, well, hang on. The language is everywhere. The religion is everywhere. There are more than 20, 000 mosques in the region and you see them on every street corner as you're riding through towns and villages, there are mosques there. Um, You know, everything that they say is, is wrong. It's a lie. They've taken it from a tiny bit of misinformation and twisted that around. That's what, that's what media do. They'll take a tiny piece of information. So someone got arrested for reading the Quran. Someone got arrested for speaking Uighur. No, they got arrested for extremist views and spreading them and using the Quran as an excuse to do so, or using their language as an excuse to do so. And that's the fact that people don't get arrested for being a minority in China. They're minorities are very, very, um, advanced groups. They're in terms of society, they're way, way overrepresented in the national people's Congress, which is 3000 people. 2980 people. And these are people elected from local communities over 400 of them are minorities and minorities make up 7 percent of the people, but they make up 12 percent of the national people's Congress. So the minorities are overrepresented in that respect. So they're not culling the minorities. That's the opposite of what they're doing. The next thing is, when you think about this, There is a thing in China called the Autonomous Region, and it started With the Communist Party, it started in 19, I think, 1947. Communists controlled parts of Mongolia, and they made Inner Mongolia an autonomous region. When they took power in 1949, they made other areas autonomous regions. So, Inner Mongolia is one, Tibet is one. Uh, guanxi is one. Um, Xinjiang is another. And um, there's another one. There's five, five of them. These are autonomous regions, but inside of places like Guandong where I live, Guandong is predominantly Han. It's 99% Han I guess. Uh, Han Chinese is the majority here, but there are still autonomous counties in Guangdong. So if there are a group of people who make up the majority of that region. They're given autonomy to manage their own village, town, or county. Autonomous regions make up 64 percent of China. China's total land mass, autonomous regions, make up 64%. These are facts, these are indisputable facts, so if autonomous regions are making up this much ground, the, the leader, the, the, the party secretary of Xinjiang is a Uyghur. Hang on a second, aren't Uyghurs being prosecuted? Oh yeah, he must be a bought Uyghur, or he's a pet Uyghur, that kind of comment comes up. The man's a Uyghur, for Christ's sake, you know, he's, he's, he's, And I always say, well, look, I'm never going to argue with those people. I'm just going to say, you need to go for yourself. You're not going to believe what I say. Then there's no point in me talking to you. And I don't get into these long winded debates about whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong. I'll say what I have to say. If they say, if they come back and say, what about organ harvesting? Okay, now I'm talking to someone who's basically Falun Gong, which means that they are very anti China. The organ harvesting is one of their tropes, and so it goes on, you know. There are so many people who have closed minds to China because they believe the negativity. Because the negativity is everywhere. Now, why is an entirely different question. Why do people dislike China so much? That's a very interesting question. So let me ask you this. So you are based in Beijing right now, correct? I'm in Guangdong in the south, very near to Macau. Interesting. So how far away is Xinjiang from where you are right now? I have it tattooed on my arm. It's 5,000, uh, 4,931 kilometers. So like I wanna talk about, you know, like this is a very recurring issue. Uh, so you went there on a bicycle? Uh uh, uh, bicycle. So like, let's talk about this because I think, so you went there on a bicycle, uh, like all the way from your home, uh, to Xinjiang, just for the sake of kind of like finding out the truth of this area? No, not at all. In fact, I went with no political agenda whatsoever. I, I was not, I was not on, I'm not even on social media at the time I did that. I mean, I, I used the internet. WeChat, which is a chat function, but I didn't have Facebook. I didn't have, well, I did have Facebook, but I didn't use it. Um, there is a Facebook page called border to border, but, um, it's, it's not been updated many years. Um, I wrote from the border of Macau in the South to the border of Kazakhstan in the Northwest, and it took 57 days, uh, two of us, two foreigners, and the idea was just. China. He was a photojournalist. I wanted to lose a bit of weight, get fit, and that I was living in. Yeah, that was the real justification for it. Um, that was in 2014. The, the major problems in Xinjiang manifested themselves between 2008 and 2013. So by the time we got there, it had been Kind of security clamped down, if that's the right word. They, there was, there was an enhanced security in the region, but that didn't stop us from going through. We entered Xinjiang through a place called Xinxin Sha, which is a, basically it's a border crossing town. It's a little bit of the wild West. You know, you walk into a saloon there and everybody goes quiet and look, what the hell is this? But they get a lot of bikers, Chinese bikers, mostly cyclists. going through there. Um, motorbikers to a lot of people travel and motorbikes. We weren't, we weren't alone. We weren't unique. I think we were, I'm possibly unique in the fact that I, six years later, I flew to Xinjiang and then cycled home. So that's something I had this kind of unfinished trip in my head that I wanted to do. So I, I went up and cycled home, but my wife came with me. So it's, it was each time it was 57 days. It was a coincidence that it was 57 days, both times. The return home journey was slightly shorter. We didn't go all the way to the border. Uh, we went into Urumqi, which is the capital city. Wonderful place. Highly recommend anybody who wants to see an incredible culture go to Xinjiang. It's the most diverse. It has deserts. Grasslands, rivers, mountains. The only thing it doesn't have is a beach. That's it. It's a long way from the ocean. So it's a really, really beautiful place with extremes of weather. So you've got freezing cold and boiling hot. And we had them in the time we were there. We had the extremes of weather. I was snowed on and went through 45 degree desert. So it's really, uh, it's an interesting place. You can do all that in the space of a few days. You're going from the top of a mountain where it's snowing down to a desert where it's 45, a 45 C is, I don't know, it's over a hundred hot, very hot. That is a lot of work too, I guess. I think after that, you must have like, like really strong legs too, because. Like traveling so much and biking so much like you must have like good thighs and carbs and whatnot Well, we travel across three deserts the um, tengele the tacoma can and the gobi And we travel across three mountain ranges, too Um, the Nanlang, the Qinglang, and the Tianhe, uh, Tianzhen. So three different mountain ranges that we crossed and three different, uh, we crossed the three big rivers, the Pearl River, the Yangtze River, and the Yellow River. But the three mountain ranges certainly do build up your, your leg strength. Yeah, that's for sure. The hardest ones are down here in, in, um, in Guangdong. When you, when you hit, you, you, I leave where I live. and travel maybe 200, 250 kilometers north of here and you enter what's called the Nanling Mountains. And for a long time, the Nanling Mountains prevented people from coming from the north to the south and from the south to the north. That's why Guangdong has a specific culture and Guangxi too to a lesser extent. They have this specific culture which is different to China. the rest of China. Um, but that's because of this mountain range was a natural barrier. So their language is different. Their, uh, their customs and traditions are very different. And then you've got a group of people which are called the Haka who came from the north, avoiding wars and settled in the Nanling mountains and south of the mountains. And that's why there are villages and towns. In the middle of these really, really difficult, almost impassable mountains. There are roads across there now, but, you know, 150 years ago, they were not. And people went from the north of China to the south of China by ship. All the British, when they came to Hong Kong, Hong Kong was perfect. It allowed them access into Guangdong, Guangzhou, Canton. And then they would take the boat and go up to Shanghai or up to Beijing. From there. It's, it's quite tough when you finish it, you, I lost 20 kilos on the first trip. Oh, wow. That's crazy. Yeah, I'll put it back on though. I found it again. I think, yeah, uh, you're gonna have to be kind of regular if you want to make sure you're like a staying fit. Like nowadays with remote work and sitting at the house every day, like it's, it's very easy to get on those, those extra calories. Yeah, it is. Yeah. When it comes another trip to Mongolia at the moment is Mongolia in China, too There are two Mongolia's one is called in a Mongolia and one is Mongolia the country in a Mongolia is the region of China it says it's the autonomous region and Mongolia is the country that used to be part of the Soviet bloc And and what this is when the Soviet bloc and China Bordered each other and had a lot of problems. Uh, it was mostly through Mongolia. There's another area to the northeast where China and Russia join right up in Vladivostok. It's a, it's a Russian city that used to be Chinese. Which one are you going to? Inner Mongolia? Is that the one you're going to? We'll go through Inner Mongolia and we hope to. I mean, we're just Ulaanbaatar. Which is the capital of the country, Mongolia. Gotcha. Gotcha. I have a quick follow up question. So, you know, you were talking about, you know, there are these autonomous regions, and you were saying that in Xinjiang, there are these communities that are living on the hill, or they are in, like, some corner, uh, and there's a lot of natural beauty and things like that. How much does the Chinese government care about these people? Because see, if you're living in a metropolitan area, if you're living in capital and the bigger cities, you may have good infrastructure, schools, electricity, roads, but when you go to these other regions, that number one, that are culturally different. So you may have some tension. Uh, they are, uh, uh, they're autonomous. So maybe, uh, the Chinese government at the top may not have the direct control. Are these like in ruins? Like, because like, so I'm from India and there are many, uh, outer regions and nobody cares, cares about it. Like there's no electricity. The crime rate is high. There's no schooling. How is, are these areas when you go there? Is it like a civilization? Is it doing good? Can you speak to that? Yeah, it's a really good question. Thank you. That is a really good question. Um, the answer to your question, I will tell you what the Chinese government have done in the last 12 years since Xi Jinping came to power, but Xi Jinping gets the credit because it was done in his time, but Hu Jintao set all this up. Poverty alleviation started under, it actually started in 1949 under the communists. Once the communists took over, their goal was to make China into a moderately prosperous society. That was their goal. Now, they're working very hard towards that. But in order to do that, they had to enrich the east coast first. So places like Shanghai, Beijing, where I am in Guangdong, we, we really got the, um, the, the focus of attention for a long time, because you can't get rich without having somewhere that is your center of gathering the riches, if you as it were. So the trade all happens, the international trade happens. 20 percent of the country's trade happens right here in Guangdong. Um, it's the powerhouse of international trade. Um, something like 15 percent of all the world's manufactured goods are here in Guangdong. And they have this area called the Greater Bay Area, which has received an incredible amount of infrastructure. If you go online and look at a picture of Shenzhen or Zhuhai, even Guangzhou, infrastructure is fantastic. Having done that in the last 12 years, you know, the story about lifting 800 million people out of poverty, probably 750 million of them are rural residents who have been lifted out of poverty, but they have been lifted out of being poor. They've been lifted out of abject poverty, where they didn't have shoes, they, they didn't have enough food, or they didn't have enough money. Uh, so abject poverty no longer exists, but there are still a great many poor people here in China. There's no question about that, and they are mostly rural Chinese. So what China has done over the last 12 years, it's done three or four different things. One is it's put a school and a clinic and 5g into every single village in China. There is no village in China that doesn't have 5g and a school. Now the school will be a primary school, a kindergarten, primary school type thing. It may be that they don't have a high school and they have built a road for Into every village in China. There is no village in China now that does not have a road. They achieved this about five years ago. Every single village in China now has 5g. A sealed road going into it and coming out of it because it may not be the same direction. So it all, they all have a primary school and they all have a medical clinic, every single one of them. Now here's a really interesting thing I discovered. Those medical clinics have connections to the hospitals in town and doctors in town using 5g can diagnose and treat patients in remote areas. Wow, that's incredible. The life expectancy in China has gone shooting up. Interesting thing, if you take a look at the graph that shows the life expectancy in China, it's a constant stream upwards. COVID didn't affect it. It's been going upwards. It's been going upwards since the day Mao took over. Because Mao introduced a system what were called barefoot doctors. Now there's been a lot of criticisms about this, but barefoot doctors were basically, um, paramedics who were given a basic training and they looked after all the people in their region. So there'd be two or three of them in a county and they could, they would go from place to place. Really interesting story how, how this happened. And that increased the life expectancy of Chinese people. Then he increased their education, their literacy rate. Once you get people educated and literate, then they can learn what they need to learn in order to help themselves. So that has helped their wealth. It's helped their health. It's helped their development. And the last 12 years. It's probably culminated in the fact that there are now no people living under the poverty line inside of China, no one. There is no one in China needs to be homeless, but there are homeless people. Uh, there are people who choose when they move from, for example, uh, central Sichuan. They come from Sichuan, which is a central province, quite a poor place. And they come to work in Guangdong and they get a job and they choose rather than live in a dormitory where they're going to get charged very, very minimal subsidized living accommodation fee. Rather than spend that money, they save that money because they live under a bridge somewhere. So you do get to see them. And there are homeless people, but there are people who are Either making that choice to save money because they have a home, they're not homeless, they have a home, it's in another city, and they're sending money back. Or, they're perhaps some who've fallen through the cracks in the mental health system, which does happen. It's still a developing country. 70 years ago, when, when the Communist Party took power, they didn't have the whole country. It was, it was several years later before they actually controlled the whole of China. And then they had no money. They were, they were coming out of a devastating civil war. They were coming out of a second world war. They, they were literally the most impoverished country in the world. Now, 70 years later, no one is in poverty. And contrast that with North America, uh, particularly the two countries that make up most of North America, Canada and the United States. We're poverties on the increase. The richest countries in the world have an increasing poverty and This country which came from being the poorest to now one of the richest in the world has an increasing wealth And the goal is moderate prosperity. The, the path to that goal is something called rural Revitalization. So your question really targeted that. What is China doing? China has done all of these infrastructure things. There's high speed train lines going to somewhere near where those people are. Just last year, about this time last year, I was in Yunnan. We, uh, we caught a high speed train to the capital city. And we caught another high speed train, uh, to, uh, a place where 10 years ago, no tourist had ever been. You know, people would go through there on donkeys and carts. Now there's a high speed train going through there. And we got off there and then we got a car to take us to a place where there is now bed and breakfast, coffee shops, hotels, restaurants. And there's an ancient village which still exists, but it's now a tourist resort as opposed to being an ancient village. And every home has electricity, every home has water, every home has power. It's really a very, very different world. I saw China Rural China in 2005. And I'll tell you, I just cannot compare the difference. I've been to North Africa and I've been to rural China. I've never been to India, but North Africa, um, sub Saharan Africa is very, very, I mean, it's, it's devastated by poverty. Yeah. Rural China was that way as well. And now it's not. Now in cycling, we do cycle through the most impoverished of villages, but nobody. Can not afford to eat. Nobody's not wearing shoes anymore. Nobody is uneducated. So there are the pillars, you know, the education, the clothing, the food, the education, um, these are, these are pillars of what China has done for society. And it's completely different to what you expect because the Western bankers, everyone agrees that they've done this, but then they say, but at what cost, you know, is it sustainable? And the answer to China is who gives a. No one cares. Is it sustainable? Yes, because this is our path. This is what China is doing. So when you asked me earlier on, do they trust their government? You can see now why they trust their government because almost everybody in places where I live, like Guangdong, I would say at least 50 percent of the people who live in Guangdong, I don't know if this is a true number, but an opinion, about 50 percent of the people who live in Guangdong are not from Guangdong. They've come here to work. And where did they come from? They've come from an impoverished place for a better opportunity. Shenzhen is a great example. It now has 18 million people. 40 years ago, it had 30, 000. Yeah. How many people are born in Shenzhen? Not that many. And when people in China say I'm from Shenzhen, I say we born in Shenzhen. Yes. We are parents born in Shenzhen. No, no. Very few people were born in Shenzhen, but it has 18 million people living there. So why do they go there? They go there because their rural location is poor, but China has this thing called the hometown and every single one of them will refer to the place they came from as their home and the place they're living as where they're working or staying, it's not their home, they will retire back there. Now, if you've been working in Shenzhen for 20 years and you've been earning Shenzhen money and you go back to live in rural Sichuan. What are you going to live in? You're not going to live in a dilapidated old home with earthen floors. You're going to build your own house. Now, what happens when you build your own house? You need to buy the materials to build your house. Who gets the benefit of that? The local economy. You need to get workers to build your house. Who gets the benefit of that? the local economy. So you can see how now that the east coast is rich, the west and central of China is starting to develop. Now, there are other aspects of this rural revitalization and poverty alleviation that are even more important, uh, where they've sent factories from China, from China, from the east coast of China, To the, to the center and said, build a factory here. We'll give you five years of tax free. We'll give you the land to build it on. You build a factory here and you're going to employ 50, 000 people. This happens where a city like mine might have a factory with 50, 000 people working in there. They move it to Guizhou. Guizhou is an impoverished, uh, inland, landlocked province, and it's very small, and it's got lots of debts, and it's got lots of problems, but it's got high speed rails running through it, and it's got highways and freeways. It's got a lot of mountains. It's a beautiful place, but it's been impoverished because of its geographical location. So now they're moving all the data storage in China is in Guizhou. So people are building that you don't need employees, but you've got buildings, you've got infrastructure, you've got everything going in there. And that is how they build the economy. Now you can go into Guizhou as a tourist. It's really beautiful. And so what does a tourist do? A tourist unloads his pocket for money and gives it to a local community. That's how they're doing it. So, yeah, what your question was a brilliant question. Uh, and it really, it really encapsulates what the West think. China would do if they were China and what the World Bank says, you know, I read an article recently from the vice president of the World Bank Saying there's no doubt China's done a great thing here But is it sustainable the answer to China is yeah It doesn't matter that this particular train line loses money because overall the train line earns money They don't care about that line because it's not privatized The government is looking at a better picture. They're also looking at a picture where five years ago, that village had no income. Now that village is paying tax and that helps China. The line might be losing money, but the region is making money. The people in the region are suddenly selling products. They're selling services. They're accommodating hospitality. They're opening restaurants and they're making money and they're paying tax to the government and the government has put a train line in there and a freeway through there. And now it's paying for itself in that tax money rather than a corporation built a train line to there and now won't operate it because it loses money. They won't maintain it because it loses money. No, the whole region is making money. That's how socialism works. And it works very, very well here. It's working fantastically. So yeah, it was a fantastic question to hit me with. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And your answer is pretty good. And plus, I think, uh, the word socialism that even, you know, communism here, it's like, it's a very, uh, word that gets you a lot of criticism because here you believe, you know, we are a free world and, you know, capitalism is how you develop the society. And the very idea that the government is interested is considered like taboo, like there's something wrong in it. Yeah, China's an interesting political dichotomy. Um, I view China a little bit like I view myself. Effectively, I'm a capitalist. But I have socialist leanings. Um, I want to get rich. I'm not going to. I'm 65 years old now. My working life is over. Unless I win the lottery, I'm not likely to be a rich guy. I'm just living an ordinary life. I'm okay with that. The socialist side of me says, how can I help other people? Uh, and, and so we have this China is like this. It allows capitalism, but it doesn't allow unfettered capitalism. It allows capitalism to the point where they control it. It taxes the people who are capitalists, which the West, they don't do very effectively. It doesn't give rich people all these opportunities to avoid or evade tax. It says everybody pays tax. Everybody. And we have a sales tax. I think it's about 12%, but it's hidden. We don't see it. When we buy something, we're paying 12 percent tax. So, the retailer is paying tax. It's just part and parcel. It's been a cash economy for a long time. Now it's a digital economy. Everybody uses their phone to pay for things. So it's manageable. So money transactions are tracked, so you can't avoid or evade tax. That's the difference with China and the West. It's very easy to avoid or evade tax. And then they prosecute you. The Chinese government doesn't try and prosecute people. It tries to manage people. So if I'm on the road looking, you know, driving, I don't drive a car, but if I, if I were driving a car along the road. My GPS is telling me there is a seatbelt light ahead. Please check your seatbelt is on. There is a speed camera ahead. There is a, um, um, a behavior camera ahead. They're telling you this. And there's signs on the road saying cameras ahead. They don't want to catch you and find you. They want you to obey the law. They manage our behavior rather than profit from our misbehavior. And there's a big difference, you know, they're managing our behavior. So it is a very different society. Chinese government does care about the people and you know, why, what happened in 1911? When the Qing Dynasty government didn't care enough about the people, it got overturned. What happened in 48, when the KMT didn't care enough about the people, they got overturned. So the Chinese government know that if they don't Look after the people. The people will do what they did to the last lot. That's why it's important to them. That's not a fear. It's a fact that the Chinese government are the People's Party. This is the People's Republic of China. The army is the People's Liberation Army. The NPC is the National People's Council. It's all about the people. It really is. And it's completely different once you start viewing this from the inside as I am now, and I've been very, very lucky. Because I'm kind of outspoken about this in Chinese, in social media, not Chinese social media, but I'm, I don't need to tell the Chinese people that this situation exists, they know, but because I'm outspoken about it on my YouTube and my Twitter, I've been picked up by some media groups to say, would you like to come and have a look at this democratic process happening in the middle of Hunan, for example, and a couple of years ago, I went out with Xinhua, The major news agency in China to Hunan to look at where this dam was going to be built and how the people were going to be relocated with a view to making a video documentary about the process and how the process was managed. I learned a lot. And then I come back from that and someone says, Oh, the, this, the national people's Congress would like you to host a video that they're making about a couple of their delegates or deputies. So me, why me? I don't make videos. I do this. This is what I do. And I don't make videos. I said, no, we'll make the video. You just be the host. Okay. And so, you know, I got, I actually got paid for that. So I've received funding from the CPC, the dreaded CPC. I got paid a couple of thousand RMB a day and I was there for six days. That's 12, 000 RMB in U. S. dollars. That's probably less than 2, 000 is 1, 800 U. S. dollars for six days work. That's not a lot of money, but Hey, that was nice that they invited me. Now, other YouTubers get invited to go to holiday spots, tourist destinations. I don't, I get invited to look at democracy in progress and I love it. I love learning this and that's why. They've used me because I'm the person who sits up and says, hang on, what you're saying about this NPC or the CPPCC, that's not true. What is true is what I'm telling you now. It's a very much people oriented place. So when you talk about India and these villages that are deserted or left to rot, the complete opposite is happening here. Every single village, every village now has the clinic. Some of the villages were so difficult to put a road to that they relocated the entire village and gave them all new houses for free because that's incredible. There was some villages and you can find these, um, on YouTube just by looking village up a mountain, uh, people used to have to climb up this very long ladder. To get to the village. So what did they do? They built a new village down at the bottom and some older people said, I wanna move down the bottom. And they said, okay, you can stay in the old village. So , they, they've, they've helped them by putting electricity and power in there and they've got phone lines and they've, they've still, they, they, they didn't pull down and it's now a tourist destination. You can actually climb the ladder and go to this old village if you want to. And see how they used to live until the new village was constructed at the bottom. This is really good. I think I really like that. The government really cares about his people because Right now the way we have here even in canada people, uh, don't have enough money to you know, buy food people struggle In getting houses houses are unaffordable and be it like the liberals progressives or you take even the conservatives Nobody really care like majority of them are funded by rich bankers and rich, you know, these Make a corporations and all they care about is whether they get a tax refund in the next election or not and People are really like living a horrible life here They can work 40 hours a week 50 hours a week 60 hours a week and they still have like a 10, 000 credit card debt So so here comes the next question then Like how is the day to day, uh, you know expenses like uh, like here in canada We have very high rent food is very expensive traveling is extremely expensive insurance kills you How how like how much money do you need in china to live like a decent life where you're not rotting away in a corner? House is decent nice food. Like can you speak to that? Yeah, uh, I don't want to say too much. Otherwise, there'll be hordes of people honestly, it's completely the opposite to what you say. Now, I'm not going to say that there are people here who don't have financial difficulties. Of course, there are every country has them. Um, China is an interesting country. I do these little skits called Did you know, And China has 56 trillion in savings. So 56 trillion RMB in savings, in savings. It says, uh, I don't know how many trillion dollars that is, but it's a lot of money in savings banks. So China, just during, um, the COVID, last year of COVID, 2022, this is a verifiable fact. Chinese people saved, into their bank accounts, 2. 6 trillion U. S. dollars. The GDP of the United Kingdom is 2. 7 something trillion dollars. So effectively, China saved the GDP of the United Kingdom. Into its back. Wow. And this is why corporations like BlackRock would love to get over here and do some asset management. They, they actually have an office in Beijing, but they recently terminated their, um, the CEO of China. And the reason given was that, you know, things weren't moving as fast as, as they ought to have done. That's because China doesn't want Management by people like Blackrock it, I mean, they're quite insidious. They're horrible. One of the problems that you have in the West with, uh, you've got high inflation, you've got high interest rates. China has done everything it can to fix that. Now, let's talk about property for a moment. Everyone in the world thinks that there is a property crisis in China. They think that everyone in the English speaking world thinks there's a property crisis in China. People in China don't believe this at all. Uh, what has happened in China is that two companies have collapsed. There were two very large companies and they have made a dent. Let's, let's get that one right. So there's a negativity there. Why did they collapse? They didn't collapse because They were badly managed or badly run. They collapsed because they failed to follow the government guidelines in 2019 again a verifiable fact China said we are going to stabilize the property market We need to get the rules fixed so people stop buying property for speculation and only buy property for living. I actually own three apartments. My wife and I own three apartments. Rhett's Jerry. Well, no, they're very small. Honestly, they're very small. Now, when I tell you how much they cost, you go, well, no wonder you own three apartments. I paid 240, 000 RMB for one of them. That's about 30, 000. It's a two bedroom apartment. I paid two, 308, 000 for the second one. Now the first one, my wife owns outright. The second one, um, I own outright and I paid 40, 000 for that. So now we have four bedrooms. In two locations with a total value of 70, 000. The one that we just moved into, where I am sitting right now, is a three bedroom apartment, and we paid cash for that, but we borrowed 200, 000 in order to decorate it, and you can see it's quite nicely decorated. Uh, this, this is my studio. I mean, I closed the door, it's kind of soundproofed, and it's, it's a nice little studio for working in. Yeah. And so, uh, We paid 550, 000 RMB for this and 200, 000, 700, 000, that's 100, 000 U. S. dollars. So now we have three bedrooms here and, uh, one of them has been, uh, um, renovated. So it's only one bedroom, but it has a very large kitchen, diner now and not one bedroom down. And they're all three of them. The reason we haven't sold the other two, Is because the property market collapsed. So what did we do? We got into this property very cheaply because the property market collapsed. Now we don't owe any money. We don't have any debt. We borrowed 200, 000 to renovate this, but we've paid almost paid it off now. And it's only three months. I don't earn any income in China. I just have a British pension. And we've been able to do this now before I work before when I was working, I earned a very good income. I'm a foreigner. I'm quite well qualified. And I was able to get a pretty decent job earning about 10 times what a local would earn in one of my jobs. I am averaged probably not 10 probably about five times six times maybe what a local would earn. And I saved a lot of money and we bought an apartment for cash. Also, my mother passed away and left me some money. So what am I going to do with this money? I can squander it or I can invest it in some property. Now, the reason I'm telling you all this is not to big note or anything like that. The total value of all my properties altogether are less than 150, 000 US dollars. I don't know what a Canadian dollar is worth, but I have three apartments in Zhongshan, which is a city, uh, 80 kilometers from Hong Kong, an hour and a half on a ferry from Hong Kong, and 45 kilometers from Macau, uh, 80 kilometers from Guangzhou, right in the middle of the Greater Bay Area. It's a fairly important place. So I have these three apartments that are worth 150, 000 U. S. dollars. We're going to wait until the market improves and sell the other two. We can afford to do that. Why can we afford to do that? Because there's no such thing as rates or property tax here. When you buy a house, you pay a stamp duty. Once you own that house, you pay nothing else. Now, you say, well, what about your utilities? My utilities for each of these houses are on a usage charge. There is no standing charge. So, currently, I, I, we have a tenant in one of them, and he's a friend. He's, uh, borrowing it for a month while he's visiting. And so, he's, he's living there, and he's, he's going to pay the electricity bill. When he moves out, the electricity bill will go down to zero. That's it. Because we don't have a fridge, there'll be no light usage, um, it has a fridge when we live there, but we moved the fridge out. Now it has nothing drawing electricity. So when the electricity is not drawn, there is zero fee, but they don't cut you off. Three months later, they'll send a message saying, do you still want to keep this? Yeah, we do want to keep it. Cause if you cut us off, we have to pay for reconnection. We don't want, we, every three months we get a message from them saying, do you want to keep this? Yes, we do. Because we, we get people to stay there in one of them. The other one we've only just moved out of, and we moved out of that to this one because we wanted a ground floor apartment. Uh, as, as we killed my wife thinks long term. As we get older, I didn't want to live upstairs on the third floor with no elevator, so we've moved here before that need arises. So that's why we moved into this. Now we've got this situation where we pay no rent, no rates, No property taxes, no fees, uh, if we had an apartment that was inside of a complex with elevators and swimming pools, we'd have a maintenance fee. We don't have that. Both of our apartments are older style apartments, and they don't have elevators, they don't have security guards, they don't have, uh, swimming pools to maintain, they're just apartments in town. And so we have absolutely no fee, so why should we sell it at a loss? It wouldn't be a loss, the property crash took the value, the one I paid 240, 000 for is, wasn't, went up to about 600, 000. And it's crashed back to about 400, 000. So if I sell it tomorrow, it's not at a loss. I've still lived there rent free for seven years, and there's no capital gains tax because it was my home. That's it. I, and I pay no tax. The pensioners, if you're over 60 in China, you don't pay tax. So, when people retire from work, their pension is the same as their salary, and they don't have to pay tax, and they don't have to pay Social Security anymore, so they actually get an increase. What happens to a pensioner in Canada, I guess, is the same as the UK. They usually live on two thirds or thereabouts of what they used to earn, And they pay tax on it. You can't in China. You don't pay tax on your pensions. So, that's why, that, that, when we say, how much does it cost to live here? I can live very comfortably on less than a thousand dollars a month. And I own three apart, we own three apartments. between us, my wife and I. So we don't have the rates to pay. We don't have the standing charges. That 1, 000 a month covers all my electricity fee, my telephone, uh, wifi. We don't have a television, so we don't have to buy the television box or anything like that. All of everything, all of our utilities, everything. Is paid for in about 1, 000 RMB a month, everything 1, 000 RMB is about 150 U. S. Dollars. Then we eat out sometimes we go out for a beer or go out for a meal at a restaurant. We're spending about 7 RMB, less than 10, 000 RMB, less than 1, 500 dollars a month for two of us. To live travel, we travel as well, quite a lot. Um, and you've asked about the, the cost of, uh, travel. It's very, very cheap. The high speed rail. Um, I went up to Beijing, it depends on the timing as well, but I went up to Beijing for 450 r and b. Um, 500 r and b would be about $70. Beijing is two and a half thousand, less than two and a half, over 2000 kilometers away. Uh, 1500 miles and it takes nine hours on the high speed train. You're there. You get up in the morning. The high speed train station is a 15 minute taxi ride from here. Get on the train. Nine hours later, you're in your hotel in Beijing. That's how it is in China now. Oh, I am, I think, you know, it's good that you're not talking about it because if you told people here, genuinely people will run to China because Here you live in a shoebox and that costs you like million dollars and like large part of your income goes away. And I feel ashamed of saying this, but we have old people here who are pushing carts in Walmart. Like really old people who are like, who shouldn't be working, but they struggle so much. They're pushing carts in Walmart, and like, they have to work at that age as well. So, like, it You wouldn't see that here. What you do see here Now, don't get me wrong. I live in a, in what's a second tier city. A first tier city, the cost would be three or four times what I say. If you're in Shenzhen, Shanghai, or Beijing Wow. It will be 10 times what it is here. So you wouldn't, you wouldn't pay this kind of money in, in one of those cities, but you would in most of China. Uh, so it is very, very relative to where you live. So you have to be aware of that. So someone coming to live in Beijing. would have expenses that would triple or quadruple mine. Someone coming to live in Shenzhen would have expenses that would be five or six times mine, at least. So, coming to live in Chengdu, probably the same as mine, but not in the city center. Outside of the city center, you'd get that. If you're going to Changsha and Hunan, yeah, they'd be similar to here. So, it's very relative to where you live. Very relative. Um, what you do see sometimes, a lot of people say this, Oh, I saw old people sweeping the streets. You do see that, but if you talk to them and ask them why they do it, they say, well, it gets me out of the house and I get an income. I'm not saving my pension. They're not doing it because they have to do it. They do it because this is, we have a, we have a friendly cleaner in our neighborhood here. And he loves us because we've recently moved and he collects all the cardboard and the recyclable stuff from us. Every time we buy something, it comes in a cardboard box, and every day he comes to see us and say hello to see if he's got any cardboard. He's collecting that cardboard, not because he needs to, it's a habit that he's always had. He has a home, he has a good income, he has a good pension. I mean, I haven't asked him what they are, but he's certainly very happy with this. Now, an interesting thing, a Canadian friend of mine, Uh, James Hsu who came over here just to do what he called a fact finding mission on China did talk to those people. He went to the park and he saw an old lady sweeping. And he speaks Cantonese fluently, so he talked to her in Cantonese. And she said, yeah, I've got a family, and you know, I stay in Zhongshan because my grandkids are here, but my hometown is several thousand kilometers away. And she said, no, I just, I sweep the park because I earn 1, 500 a month doing it, and I don't touch my pension. And he said, well, how much is your rent? She said, 400 RMB. I don't know what she lives in for 400 RMB a month. It's probably not very nice. It's probably a one room thing, but she seems pretty happy and he said, well, why don't you go home and retire? She'll retire. What would I do? I enjoy this. I meet people and talking to you. This is what she does. It's a choice. It's not a necessity. So there are people and, and I've had this said to me a few times where people say, okay, You know, I saw old people, they're working there because they have to. Well actually, have you asked them? Go and ask them. And if you can't ask them, then you will never know. So if you go and ask them, you have to speak their language. And for many of them in Guangdong, older people, their Mandarin is not so good. They'll, they'll speak Cantonese to you. There's two different, very different languages. Um, and people will argue that they're not very different. I can tell you they are. Uh, so you, you talk to them in whatever language that they can speak to you in, and they will generally speaking, tell you every single person I've ever spoken to in China will basically generally tell you they're happy. Now, there are people who are unhappy. Um, James, same guy came over from Canada, talked to a driver. Yeah. Extensively. And the driver felt ripped off because he joined the army. When he joined the army, he lost his household registration in the village where he lived and when the village started selling property land to the property developers, everyone in the village got money from that deal, but he didn't because he's, he joined the army and he was no longer a registered resident of that village. He lived there, but he wasn't a registered resident of the village. And, and, you know, he has his gripes about that. And I understand that, but his wife got paid. So his wife got the money that because his wife was registered in the village. My father in law has exactly the same thing, same situation. When you join the army, they take your hookah household registration and. You become an army registered person, and then when you leave the army and go back to your hometown, they say, well, you're not registered here anymore. So, he's living in the hometown, and his wife gets all the benefits of living there, and he gets none of them, having served his country. So there's issues there, and the Hukou system needs to be addressed. There's a few things, this household registration system needs to be addressed. Generally speaking, the people who have complaints are generally happy with their life. They're unhappy with one aspect of it, and it is an aspect that should be changed, particularly if it's something like that. I mean, he lost hundreds of thousands of r and b. You know, he could have bought his own house if he got the government promised the people, the well the government delivered to the people of his village. But he wasn't counted as one of the people. So you can see why that would, that would cause a bit of concern and somebody would dislike their government. So there are people here, there are criticisms to make of China. I generally don't make them because there are so many other people who were doing that very well already. Yeah. I don't need, I don't need to join that cacophony. Yeah. And I think, you know, this can happen. No system is perfect. It's like a big machine with hundreds of moving parts. And there are always going to be people who will miss out on some opportunities. That doesn't mean like the system at large is bad. Like it's, if it's serving like 85, 95 percent of people, that means the system is working. There's always going to be some people who there. They are out of luck. The timing isn't right. They were somewhere else. Their documentation didn't work out. And it happens in like every country in us, Canada. So it's not like very, uh, like big criticism. Oh no. You know, now the entire country needs to be redone. It's a problem, but it's not a systemic problem. And that does exist. There's no question. There are people who fall through the cracks and China's a very bureaucratic country that they're trying to change, but still a lot of bureaucracy and it's easy to fall through the cracks. Yeah, we have a lot of bureaucracy in India, too, where there's a lot of red tape, there's a lot of paperwork, and one document here and there, and you pretty much lose out on the benefits you're supposed to get. In Canada, we have less bureaucracy, uh, so you don't have to struggle with that, but If like, even, but all the government centers here are also super slow. So if you're even to get to go for a driving license, you'll be stuck in a line and everyone's like super rude. So I think that's kind of like a problem with government in any part of the world. So I don't like, it's not like a major red flag. The, the, um, the Harvard, the Harvard, uh, research in China was in 2019. It was a 13 year research. They found that, um, satisfaction rates with local government was much lower than central government. Which I think is normal because they're the things that we deal with every day. You know, they fix that door, fix that road, fix that whatever it is locally. Um, so local government. But what they found was 95 percent satisfaction rate with central government. Now that, that was divided into three parts. I mean, I'm not going to say everyone's 95%. Uh, there was Very satisfied. Somewhat satisfied and satisfied added together was 95%. So obviously there's a thing here where they're getting it right. But there's 1. 4 billion people. There are 56 ethnicities in China. There are All kinds of different cultural changes when you move from one place to another place. So of course there are going to be some people. And the other thing is I'm not sure in the methodology, it didn't explain where they tested. Now had they gone out to Xinjiang and gone out to Tibet, maybe they would have a different view. I would much rather they went to Tibet and Xinjiang and ask, because I think if Harvard university ever go to one of those areas and ask local people, what do you think of your government? They're going to get a very different picture to the one that media, which is influenced by the intelligence community, are giving us. The, the 70 years of this Tibet narrative is just about done to death. I mean, Tibetan, the, the people in Tibet have an entirely different life to what they had 50, 60 years ago. They have a much higher literacy rate. They have a much higher life expectancy. They have a much higher wealth. I mean, they were basically 90 percent serfs, slaves. Indentures to a piece of land that was owned by the ruling classes, which were the religion. So China said, we're not going to allow that. You know, we will give you autonomy. But you're not having that. That's not autonomy. That's slavery. And, and the, the People's Republic of China is based on removing serfdom. Because that's how they got to power. They don't want people in these situations. So I would guess, if somebody goes out to, to Tibet, or Xinjiang, And carries out a survey on, on popularity. It would be higher than 50%, whether it would be as high as 90%. I don't know. I I'd love to have someone do that, but I know for a fact it would be higher than the West perceives it to be for sure. Because I've been to, I haven't been to Tibet. I've been to Xinjiang. I know this for a fact, people in Xinjiang are very happy with the security. It's much better than it was. Everybody knows someone who was hurt. I think another issue is that we, like, I grew up in India, so I spent 25 years there, and, uh, so in India, we have this guy, it's called Dalai Lama, I don't know if you know him, and, so he is, like, super popular, and, you know, like, the, the challenging part is, the narrative is so hard, like, for the first 20, 24 years when I was in India, you don't hear you Any good stuff about China at all. Like China is like 100 percent represented evil. And you have Dalai Lama who's like this cool looking guy with a nice attire. So everybody, and he's like laughing and he's friendly. So he's like, Oh, China hates Dalai Lama. I'm like, how can you hate this guy? This guy is incredible. I think he's negotiating now to come back to China and he'll be welcomed back to China. I don't think there'll be an issue with him coming back if he wants to. The problem is, will the CIA allow him to come back? Because he's in India because the CIA pay for him to be there. He is a tool. And this, this is not my opinion. Again, this is a documented fact that the Dalai Lama's brother wrote the book. I didn't write this book. So go, go find out the Dalai Lama believes that Tibet is an integral part of China. He always has, it is Chinese. Now that's completely different to the narrative that we see, but if you go online, just go into Google and search. Dalai Lama says Tibet is part of China. You'll find that it's true. Now, of course, the headlines will tell you all of the reasons why he was forced to say, but he says it's a part of China. The Dalai Lama and his team, which they welcomed. The communist party in 1950, not in 1951. So they, when, when China took over, when the PRC took over the entire part of China, there was still outposts and pockets, which were not part of the people's Republic of China, parts of Guangdong hadn't been, um, taken back from the KMT yet there was, there was a few months in some cases and a couple of years in other cases, and Tibet was one, but the Dalai Lama welcomed the people's Republic of China. That that's a fact. Then what the Chinese government wanted to do was change the system and he said, no, I'm not having that. And then the Americans came and the Americans gave him money and they said, you'd be better off out. They're going to kill you if they, if you stay here, you'd be better off out. So he fled. Now, as far as I'm aware, China has never killed an opposition leader. And, and, you know, you can correct me if I'm wrong on this. There'll be people who say, but what about, well, nobody's been executed by China, except if they've done something very wrong and gone through the legal system, America has tried to kill Castro. How many times America? Even India are killing their opposition. This is a proven fact from a few months ago, India tried to kill a Sikh separatist, a Baha, what to call them the, I can't remember the, from the Punjab, they have a Khalid, Khalid, Khalid, Khalistan, Khalistan. Yeah. So they tried, they, they murdered one and tried to kill another one. So what can you give me an example? Can anyone give me an example of when China has done that? They've got a, Opposition all over the world. There's no evidence that China has ever tried to, or actually killed one of their opposition. So for me, it's really strange when I see this, you know, the, the Americans are accusing China of all kinds of different things, but it's really what they would do if they had the chance, if they were China, that's what they would do. So it's a lot of projection on China. China's not an aggressive, it's not a threat. It's not. All it is, is a country that wants to do better for itself and its people. And in doing so, it's already bringing up the underdeveloped world. So what we call the Global South or the Third World, they're all dealing with China now. And they're all doing better. Go have a look at the media in Zimbabwe. Go have a look at the media in Zambia. Go have a look at the media in Namibia. And you'll see that China is their savior. They've been exploited for hundreds of years. China isn't exploiting them. China is working with them, building infrastructure for them, putting hospitals in, putting schools in, putting train lines and ports. And it's doing all this because it benefits China. But it leaves the infrastructure there. Infrastructure stays in that country. What have the, the colon, colonialists, what have, UK, I'm British, I lived 28 years of my life in Britain thinking it was a great country, and then started to realize, as I got older, that we've just exploited, including India, trillions and trillions of pounds came out of India. To the benefit of Britain, what's Britain got? How did it become so rich when it's a tiny little island off the coast of Europe? It became so rich because it had all of the resources of countries like India, Australia, it colonized those places and said, you know, we're going to benefit ourselves and enrich ourselves. And in your country, one or two people got rich. Maybe a few hundred people got rich, but in terms of the percentage of the country, it's tiny. Whereas in China, everyone is getting better. Not so many are getting rich, but the rich are not getting that much richer, and the poor are coming up behind them. So you can see this is happening like this. You've got many rich people. Hundreds and hundreds of millionaires. Um, I think nearly a thousand, 800 and something billionaires, billionaires in China. So it's okay to get rich. You've got to be part of society. And if you are, um, a great, a great example is the guy who runs, um, Tencent, Pony Ma, he's put billions back into the community. He's the reason why they have 5G everywhere, because he's helped to fund it. They have schools everywhere because of Jack Ma. These people help to fund, help the government to destroy poverty. That's why they're loved in China. Billionaires are loved in China, generally speaking, because they help the communities. They put it back. The guy from Tencent. Has it a day I think it's called nine nine September the ninth where they raise Literally billions and billions of us dollars and, and put it back into the communities. That's what they do. So we're very different place here to what, what we've been told. I think also the part where they're doing good for these, like, you know, poorer countries, like I've also heard, Like China helps Africa, it builds bridges and roads. I think that's a good thing to do because, uh, there are many countries who cannot do it themselves. And sadly, you know, I've seen like a, I didn't know a large part of Africa speaks French. And the reason they speak French is because they were French colonies. And even today, French, uh, like, I think, exploit them because their currency, apparently, in those African countries is controlled by the French, still. And they're still, like, you know, in this sort of economic form of colonialism where they cannot free themselves because the French control the wealth that is getting generated. And I think the way China is differing Itself is that it's going into these countries. Now, of course, it may have its own reason. Probably they want some minerals or whatever, but at least they're Like they're not going to do it for free, but they're at least getting back. They're doing something for these communities So maybe and there's another thing I think it's what is called the belt and road initiative. They're doing something. I don't know Whether it's being implemented or not. They're trying to build new trade routes through, you know You Asia to expand trade and to help the poorer countries. So I think it's interesting that you don't know much about the B. R. I. It's one belt. One road is its real name. E. Dye. Loo one belt. One road is the name Chinese use for it. And it's been called the belt and road initiative by Western media. There are now, do you know how many countries there are in the world? Like 150, 180? It's over 190. It's less than 200. But there's a couple of territories in the Vatican and things like that, which, uh, take it up to nearly 200. 150 countries have signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative. 150 countries. So when you think about that, and you start to say, well, hang on, why are 150 countries signing onto this? There must be some benefit for them too. Nobody's forced to sign onto it. Now, here's an amazing thing. Not one of those countries has been told you need to be a communist country. Or you need to change your form of democracy to our form of democracy. Not one. This is an American system. This is how the Americans do it. They change you from what you once were and say, we're going to bring democracy to you at the point of a gun. Now that's not democracy if you are forced into it, that's not democracy. Every country has its own standards. Every country has its own desires, its own goals, its own methods, its own cultures, its own traditions. And what China does is we are not gonna interfere with that. We China doesn't say to Saudi Arabia, you can't cut off, um, adulterers. He heads and thieves hands. It's to, to Saudi Arabia and America says, you can't do this. America says to Afghanistan, you must educate your women, but they haven't got any money to do that. So they've come back to their traditional systems of educating the men first. They're doing what China did. China enriched the East Coast first because that's how to get rich. And then they'll spread it out. The Taliban are doing that. They're being criticized. You're not educating women. You're not, you're not respecting their LGBT rights or whatever it is. The Taliban and the Afghans don't care about that. They care about selling whatever it is. They're growing and China is buying it from them. China is now talking about putting Afghanistan into the. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor. So it becomes a partner in this very, very lucrative trade route. The BRI is like that. It takes the old, it started off with the idea of the old Silk Road, and it was going across to the Euro Asia, uh, Eurasian, uh, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, those, the stands. And, and that was where it was first announced, in 2013, I think it was, by Xi Jinping, in one of those Eurasian meetings. And then it's expanded now. There's a Maritime Silk Road and the BRI is the agreement that you enter with China that will, China will help you to develop the infrastructure so that China can bring out the resources. Of course it's mutually beneficial and of course China don't do it for free, but at the same time, and this is another provable fact, China is building hospitals, it's building schools, it's building ports, and it's doing that for free. In lots of places, especially in Africa, and why is it doing it? Because China has always, from 1949, China has always helped Africa. China helped socialist countries in Africa when it couldn't afford to help itself. And that's another true fact. China has always done this. Now it's doing it more. The people of Africa Are being told that you're being sucked into a debt trap by the people who have sucked them into debt traps for the last 400 years. The people who stole their strongest and took them across to the other side of the world in chains. The people, you see, you talk about France. France has masses of gold underneath its central bank. But it doesn't have any gold reserves in France. Where did that gold come from? It came from Africa. And Africa isn't rich. Africa is rich in resources, but poor. France is poor in resources, but rich. So is the UK. How did that happen? That's what China's changing. Yeah, I think, I think, I like this cooperative approach, I think, because you need to have, you know, an approach where you see other people as your kitten kin, at least as part of the human race, where you're not trying to, you know, like, you help them, but you don't exploit the shit out of them, that there's nothing left out of it. And plus, you know, if there's poverty, there's higher crime rate. People kill each other, terrorist groups take over. Another asset of China is it doesn't interfere this international terrorist groups. You see U. S. with Taliban, ISIS, Al Qaeda providing them weapons, creating Osama bin Laden because they didn't like Russians. I think China doesn't do any of that. So I personally see it as a plus, actually. Yeah, China, China has a non interference policy. It won't interfere. Now, people are critical of it because it's not interfering in Ukraine. It's not interfering in Gaza. China is not telling the Yemenis, please stop firing at ships coming through this area, and they're getting criticized for that. China has made no changes. It is a completely non interfering country, and then they say, Well, they interfere in U. S. Elections. What difference would it make to China if Trump wins or Biden wins? In all honesty, who in China cares? Not one person cares that as far as we're concerned here in China, one one is a buffoon, and the other is He appears to be, um, well, he appears to have a problem. So let's, let's put it that way. I'm, I'm, I'm trying to be polite here, but he's too old for the job. Yeah. One, one is a buffoon who seems to have a good cognitive dissonance. He seems to be, Oh, not cognitive dissonance, cognitive ability. He seems to have the right cognitive ability, but does he have the right personality to lead the free world? And the other one. It seems like he's a bit of a puppet on a string. I don't know what the reason is, but there's no benefit to China to, to interfere in that election. None whatsoever. Why would China care what happens in America right now? Everyone in America is anti China. Not everyone. That's not true, but all the media, all the politicians, and certainly the presidential race is going to be all about who's going to be strongest against the biggest threat they have. China, China, the country that has one overseas base that America asked them to put on, um, United Nations asked them to put into Djibouti, China that has never invaded or bombed in your lifetime any other country, the China that has a military defense capability that all the experts say is the wrong thing to do. To to attack anyone. They've got the wrong ships for attacking. They can't invade Taiwan if they ever wanted to, because they have the wrong ships. They have the, they've got no landing craft for massive beach landings. They don't have enough planes to take parachutes over there. I mean, China's got a very, very strong defensive military. But it's not got an attacking or aggressive military and there's no evidence. So all we get, um, the debt trap, the aggressive, the threats from China, none of them are true. When you look at them, none of them are true. And there may be people who watch this and go, what a liar, and I would challenge you, find me something that the Chinese government has said that is a threat. And I don't mean what the Western media interpret as the threat. I mean from the Chinese government and I read Chinese government sources all the time. They never threatened anybody They've never interfered with anybody. They have no plan to, they have no need to, because they're just growing nicely on their own and helping others grow with them. That's what China does. I think, uh, I agree with that. I think, I think there's a recent drama going on. I don't know if you know this app, maybe you're too old for it. It's called TikTok. Have you heard of it? Yeah, I use TikTok. Okay. Yes. I think they are, uh, they just passed a bill and they're going to ban it in the United States, uh, because the thing is like a Chinese spyware. So, like, I think the Chinese doesn't care as much about the U. S., but the U. S. has been losing it for the last, like, 10 years. So they're going to ban TikTok and, like, they're, they're, like, hitting hard on them. Plus, you know, uh, uh, Sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say the TikTok ban is not going to happen. Um, two, two reasons why it's not going to, it'll get passed, the bill will get passed. Um, China does not control TikTok. ByteDance is an individual company. And uh, Jiang Yiming founded it and he separated it. The American TikTok is different to the Chinese Douyin. Douyin is the company he founded. TikTok is the American version or Western version of it. The English language version of Douyin. Douyin is exactly the same in China. It's a great algorithm. Now, there are 170 million users. In the United States. Now, many of those will be youngsters under the age of 18, but these are the people who Biden and Trump will need to appeal to, to get their votes. So it's not going to, there's going to be no ban before the election. After the election, they can do what they want. Um, my suggestion, if, if Douyin and ByteDance want to listen to what I have to say, the best thing they can do is to actually shut down TikTok for two days. And see how people react and then reopen it and say, we shut it down as an experiment to show you this is what's going to happen after this bill is passed. I'm not sure if the bill has been passed into law as yet, but it's been presented or it's been proposed. Uh, if it's been passed, I haven't seen it. I missed it. Uh, so. I haven't been paying much attention. I've been quite busy the last couple of days. So if it's been passed, I didn't, I didn't see that. But when it, when it gets passed, there will be a period of time. Now, ByteDance will be told you need to sell to an American corporation. So there are only basically three corporations that would be interested in buying it, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta. They've Facebook, Google, and Bill Gates is Microsoft. So those three companies will be in a bidding war to get it. Now, China won't interfere in this because it's not China's business. This is a business decision that Douyin needs to make and Douyin will make whatever decision it needs to make. But what did, why does Google not operate in China? Why does Facebook not operate in China? The answer is not because they've been banned by China. The answer is they choose not to operate within China because China has very strong data protection laws. It also has very strong laws that say, if something happens and we need to investigate, then you need to give us the information. And this is what TikTok is most afraid of. TikTok is an American subsidiary of Douyin. TikTok has all, it's the only organization that has done this. It has all of its data stored in Texas now. They call it the Texas Project. So the data is in America. Managed by an American company and subject to American law, the Communist Party of China, the dreaded CCP, they keep calling it the CPC cannot access that information. Full stop. It can't be done. It is technically and legally impossible for China to access tiktoks information. That's a fact. So what will probably happen when this bill is passed, TikTok will go to the Supreme Court. And say, this is an unfair bill. And the Supreme court will look at this and say, yeah, we agree with you. Now that will take two, three years for that to come to fruition. I don't think tick tock will ever be banned. And if it is banned, I don't think it will ever be banned. It will be pulled out rather than sold to an American corporation, which is coercion of the, this, this is a predatory trade practice, selling a product like this, forcing the product to sell itself to an American corporation so that America can control it. Uh, 170 million users in America. Are going to be like that cut off from their supply of whatever it is that they're interested in and tick tock is a very, very addictive product, so they're not going to be happy with their government. And I think if China really wanted to do something, China would say to do in pull out of the market right now and do in if they were listening to what the CPC said would pull out. But that's not happening, so I don't think it'll be banned, I don't think it will be sold. I think it will either go to the Supreme Court and be overturned, or it will go to, uh, it'll be pulled out. The way that Google and Facebook pulled out of China, because the law in China is a law that they didn't want to comply with. They're never banned. BBC is banned in China, but the Google and Facebook are not. I think the reason is pretty simple. Of course they want American corporations to do business, but they don't want, you know, this like use Chinese data and use it as a sort of spy tool against their own people. So I think their requirements Pretty decent. And you, you can't trust these companies as well. You can say that, yeah, they are corporations, but the CIA, FBI met, uh, all these organizations have very strict, like they're, you know, like Elon Musk, right? He gets into a lot of trouble with these, uh, CIAs and FBIs specifically because he exposed them that these people control what you see on Google. They control what you see on Twitter and they remove whatever they want to. So, uh, and he got, gets into a lot of trouble for that. And probably the Chinese government understands that, that if we let them in, they're probably going to manipulate information. And if we don't have control over data, the Chinese government hasn't said you can't operate in China. They, they, they'd be quite happy to open YouTube in China, but there are certain aspects that what, If, if YouTube comes to China, for example, YouTube, let's just take one YouTube. YouTube has no pornography on it. Which is a good thing. At least if it does, I don't know where it is. I think YouTube kind of cuts all pornography out. Twitter has loads of pornography on it. And a lot of Chinese people go to Twitter for their pornography. Because pornography is hard to find in China. It's true. There is a lot of Chinese pornography. But unless you know what you're doing, it's hard to find. It's illegal. And Twitter, being outside of China, has loads of it. And if you take a look on Twitter, And look for pornography. There's a lot of Japanese and a lot of Chinese. I don't know why the Japanese, because they don't have a restriction on it. But there's a lot of Japanese and a lot of Chinese pornography on Twitter. Now, so Twitter will have a different issue. One of the things is hate speech, misinformation, and um, uh, inciting. Sedition, those are the three big no nos hate speech, misinformation, and sedition. China will say we need to control things like this. We can't have, let's say for example, Tiananmen square, Chinese media will never talk about Tiananmen square, which is I'm going to talk about it now, which proves I'm not Chinese media. So Chinese media will never talk about it because the official story Which I believe is the real story is that 249 people died that day. Many of them were police. Many of them were the people's armed police. Many of them were soldiers and some were students. 249 people died that day or that night, and it wasn't in Tiananmen square. So, so the government of China have. Told the public, this is the story. Now, every single time a western media comes in, it's a different story, it's misinformation. So, what for, for YouTube as a specific example, and Tiananmen Square as a subset of an example, the Chinese government will say, you have to block access to that information inside of China. And the only way to access that information on YouTube, like I do, is use a VPN. There's another thing. VPNs are not illegal to use. The Chinese government does not make them illegal. People say to the, all the time, so I link them, Here's the Chinese criminal code in English. Please find the act and section. And they say, No, it doesn't matter that they have an act and section, because they're an authoritarian state. China's a country with a rule of law. They don't, they don't prosecute you for breaking no law. They prosecute you if you break a law and they'd only prosecute you if you break a serious law, or if you are consistent in breaking laws. So people who park in the wrong place often get a warning the first time, then they'll get a ticket the next time. This is very common in China. They, I said before. They manage our behavior. They don't profit from our misbehavior. That's the Chinese government. So China will then say to YouTube, you can't have anything about Tiananmen square, but Available freely in China. YouTube will have to remove that from the search engine in the same way that Microsoft have already done. Microsoft operates Bing inside of China. You go onto Bing, you can search anything you want to search and you can get access to loads of stuff through Bing. Which is legitimately operable inside of China because they comply with the Chinese government's requirements. It's as simple as that. If you want to open a business, if I want to open a business in Canada, what do I need to do? I need to register my business. I need to comply with the laws. I need to get this, this, and this, whatever it is that I need to do. Once they've ticked off all the boxes, I can open a business. China's no different. You can open any business you want in China, including an online social media platform. If you comply with the laws that they have. And one of them is we don't have misinformation. We don't have hate speech. We don't have sedition. We don't have insults. We don't have aggression. We have a harmonious society that doesn't want this division. That's what China does. So YouTube can operate in China. Well, I could say tomorrow, but they can make the decision tomorrow to operate in China, but it would take a few weeks to sort out how they are going to operate. And all they need to do is register their business card. And store the data in China. So what I watch on YouTube, if I'm watching a movie or I'm watching an interview with you, that's not a big deal. But if Tiananmen Square gets mentioned, it's not available in this, in this area. Sorry, that video is not available in your market or whatever it is that they say. That's what you'd get. So I want to watch something else about China. Okay. I can, I can watch China's beautiful scenery and China's travelogues and China's food, but I can't watch misinformation about China. They would say the mention of Tiananmen square. It's going to be misinformation because 99 percent of what you read about Tiananmen Square is misinformation. So they'd say, we don't want Tiananmen Square erased. That's why the Chinese media says we're not talking about Tiananmen Square because as soon as we do, you're going to accuse us of liars and it only just inflames the issue, which really is, if you think about this, one event 40 years or 35 years ago, And never been repeated. Now, you think about what America has done and how many people, America, America shoots more people in a few days than got killed in Tiananmen Square 35 years ago. America shoots a thousand people, police shoots a thousand people every year, at least. So, you know, every three months, there's a Tiananmen Square in America. Think about it like that and yet that's not that China could really raise this as a propaganda win I think yeah, it's it's strange a Facebook could operate Facebook were operating actually YouTube was operating in 2004 when I first came here all the way through to 2009 and Facebook was used by Tibetan and Xinjiang Separatists in Washington to create race riots inside of Xinjiang and Tibet in 2009. Again, a proven fact, already proven. But of course, it depends on whether you believe the proof because China knows this happened. So China went to Facebook and said, We've got terrorism going on inside of China. We've got people murdered. We want the data that relates to the communications between these people. And Facebook said, no, we're not giving that to you. They said, you must. You're operating inside of China. That's the Chinese law. We have a legal right to get it from you. Facebook closed everything down in China and moved out. That's why Facebook doesn't operate in China. They refuse to hand over the details of murderers on their system. That's why they're not liked in China. Chinese people don't like Facebook at all. Murderers are allowed to get away with murder. People who incited, encouraged, and supported murder were allowed to get away with that. It shouldn't happen, but it does. It's infuriating, honestly, like only recently Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook guy, he was in the Senate in front of a committee in, uh, U. S. as well, where a lot of parents complained that their kids died because of Facebook and sexual harassment and online harassment. And so it is a big thing. And I personally also feel, especially in U. S. where you have this teenage generation who's into iPhones and Snapchats, they get manipulated really quick. They are very instinctive, they see something, they act, and people die. So I think, I personally feel, I guess, the teenage generation in China, they are not as cosmopolitan or stupid, or the Chinese government doesn't want them to be exposed to garbage, it eventually will just cause them more problems. So I guess they are just trying to control it, not because, like, they're fascist, just because they don't want people in their own country to suffer, and they want to maintain, you know, the peace that they have. China. The word harmony is not used very much in English. It's used a lot in Chinese. Harmony is used when we talk about music. When we're speaking English, we use the word harmony to relate to music. China uses the word harmony to relate to society. People in society live harmoniously with and among each other. And we have, uh, in China, there are 56, uh, 55 ethnic minorities, 56 ethnicities. Han Chinese is 97, uh, 93%. 7 percent belong to the rest. 11 million of the Uyghurs, I think about 10 million are, um, uh, Tibetans. Now, the West have used these weapons against China for a long, long time. Now, thinking about this, when Tibet was taken over, if that's the right word, by the People's Liberation Army and the Dalai Lama left, Do you know what the population of Tibetans was? No idea. 4 million. It's now 11 million. Same thing in Xinjiang. So the population has grown through this supposed genocide, through this supposed oppression and persecution. Each of these populations have grown. They're living much, their life expectancy has gone from 30 years to 70 years plus. Their health and education outcomes are so much better than they used to be. A Tibetan, a Tibetan kid. Get schooling for free for his or her entire life all the way through to PhD if you're a Tibetan. Now, if you are a Tibetan and you live in an area that is recognized as being part of the poverty alleviation and you're a poor Tibetan, not only do you get education for free, Your parents get paid to let you do it because you would normally be asked to stay and work on the farm or in the rural area. So the government pays Tibetans to help their children get educated. That's not a bad thing. And they pay the kids. To stay at school. Now in Canada, quite recently, uh, I wrote an article for a Canadian, um, uh, news outlet, um, the Canada files, uh, for Jonah. I wrote this article for him and it was about this thing. You, your Canadian government used the words, um, colonial schools. I think it was, they're using shock treatment to say that China is bad. And the person who said this. Was actually located in Washington. Why would you have a home in Washington writing about stuff, uh, in on the, on CBC, it was, it was Canadian broadcast. Uh, why would you have this person from Washington telling us what's going on in Tibet? Most of the people in Washington who live there and are Tibetans have never been to Tibet. They've got stories of Tibet from their parents or grandparents. But they've never actually been and seen the region for themselves. All they've got are stories. Now, I live in China today. I can assure you, if you visited China ten years ago, the China that I live in now is a very different place. Now imagine, if your grandfather left your home village in India, and you grew up in Canada, what would you know about your village other than what your grandfather told you? Would you know that your village had a school, it had a 5G, it has Wi Fi in every home? Would you know this? You wouldn't. You'd just believe what your grandfather told you, and you would continue with that narrative. That's what's happening. They're continuing a narrative and they're paying people to continue a narrative that is simply no longer true. I think that is, uh, we do not have 5G working properly in Toronto and Chinese villages have 5G working at them. So that is impressive. And I think that I personally feel also that When it comes to Tibet, I think the only part of Tibet that they talk about is the oppression part. Maybe there have been some problems, but they don't talk about like, I had no idea that you get free education directly from China if you were living in Tibet. And that is something that I think this is the first time I've heard from China gets nine years of free education. Um, people in the city get 10 years of free education. Uh, university fees. Um, my wife went to university as an adult, uh, 10 years ago. Um, more than, she finished 10 years ago, so 14 years ago, she started, um, because she didn't have the opportunity when she was young. She was, she grew up in poverty. Literal poverty. She was born into a shed that had no power, no water, a well out the front. Her parents now live in a three story, five bedroom, four bathroom home. And they don't have, they're retired. They built this home in their retirement. So, when I met my wife, they had a home. They had a proper house, a two story house when she was born. They did not. And so when she was 18, 17, 18, graduating high school, there was no opportunity for her to go to university. She went off to work and that's what she did. So when we met and we had quite a successful little business going, uh, we closed the business down. I went to work for a, uh, an international corporation and, uh, she went to university for four years. Her fee for university. 10, 000 RMB per semester, two semesters a year. We had to pay a total of 30, 000 RMB for each year of her university. 30, 000 RMB is about 4, 000 US dollars. But, what did that include? All of her books, all of her tuition, all of her research materials. It included her accommodation. For the entire school year and her food. It costs us 30, 000 R and B for her to go to university for a full year. Including accommodation, food, and everything else. She paid nothing else except transportation to Guangzhou, where she was, she was living basically four years of uh, Monday to Friday at school, come home Friday evening, leave Sunday afternoon. Holidays, she was at home of course. So for four years she did this and it cost her a total cost us a total of a hundred and twenty thousand R and B That's less than twenty thousand US dollars for a four year degree course. That's not bad considering it included all of her accommodation and her food and Some people were doing part time work She shared a dormitory with someone, had a part time job and they earned enough to cover all of those expenses while they were working. So, part time job, you don't have student debt here, things like that. So, up until year 9, or 9th year of education in the rural areas, 10 years of education in the city, and then when you do move on, And 60 percent of students now graduate into tertiary education. So 40 percent don't. They go into the retail and the factory jobs. Um, uh, or working with their families and parents. But generally speaking, 60 percent now are going to university. Vocational training college, some sort of trade skill, you may be the electricians or mechanics or CNC operators, those kinds of vocational training school skills that they have, and that's something China's been doing for years since I came to Zhongshan, the city I live in. They've built two vocational training colleges and two new universities in 20 years in my city, which is a small city, they've built for vocation for tertiary education, uh, institutions, and one of the colleges is huge. I mean, huge. It's got 20, 000 kids in there. It's massive. It's a pharmaceutical college, and it's it's massive. I used to work in a school across the road, and I watched them build this. What the hell is this? As they're building it, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. You could see from my, my classroom was on the fifth floor and I could see this construction site. It was huge. And so, yeah, it was, it was interesting to watch that develop and vocational training schools are popping up all over China. That's what they put into Xinjiang. In order to educate farmers to become traders, hairdressers, CNC operators, woodworkers, electricians, mechanics, they all got training skills to lift them out of the poverty trap that they were in. And what happens when you lift people out of poverty? You lift them out of extremism. That's what they did. They didn't bomb anyone or kill anyone. They just educated them, trained them, and gave them opportunities. And got criticized for it. Yeah, that's, I think the problem is, if you do not support religion, I think there's a huge percentage of population in every country that believes in a bunch of nonsense, voodoo, some sort of, you know, backward intellectual process, and apparently it's their human right to believe in the garbage. So if the government is like, hey, I think we need to stop this stupidity. Put you towards progress, take you away from this religious darkness that you're stuck stuck in. It's considered brainwashing like Religious extremism is definitely taboo here. Religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed So why are organizations like Falun Gong banned and they say why are they knocking down mosques? They're knocking down old mosques so they can build new mosques That's what happens. You never see the follow up story when they knock down a mosque. And of course there's going to be some people who say that's the mosque I've been going to. I'm 70 years old. I've been going there since I was five. And you know, I don't want you to knock it down. It's going to get knocked down because it's dangerous. It's that old. You know, if you've been going there for 65 years, then it's time. You know, it's that, that's what happens. And people don't want that change. They knocked down a whole range of part of And, you know, this cultural elimination, they're killing, they're genociding the culture. Well, no, they were knocking down adobe huts and building apartments. You know, you might like the adobe huts as a tourist destination, But you don't have to live there. You don't have to walk 200 meters with a cart to get your water. And you don't have to cook with a wood fire. You don't live like that, so why should, why should the people who live in Kashgar live like that? They've lived for thousands of years like that. This is what progress does. It creates this problem that, you know, one half of the world says human rights abuses, the other half says human rights abuse if you leave them there. What happens if you leave people living in these unsanitary conditions, they die young. What happens if you move them into nice built apartment blocks, they live longer. And that's exactly what's happened in China. The life expectancy has gone in, in the 70 years of communism, life expectancy in those regions has gone from the 30s to the 70s. That's what's happened. So it's not really, it's not really a cultural decimation, nor is it a human rights abuse to give someone a better quality of life. However, you have to accept there are societal implications. People who've lived in this all their lives don't like that change. And yes, there's going to be people complain about it. But the people who are now living in high rise, three bedroom, centrally heated, air conditioned, uh, got power, got water, can have a hot shower every single day. They're living longer, and they're getting better educated, and they have better job prospects. And there is still an area of Kashgar that looks like the old town. They've kept it. It's a tourist attraction. They're very, very keen to keep that. They really want to keep Kashgar. The culture alive in China, but at the same time, if you keep the cultural life, you've got to improve the sanitation and the living conditions. So, yeah, it's not really human rights abuses. It's human rights abuses if you leave them there. But yeah, there's going to be complaints. There are always, when you make changes, there are always societal issues. Of course, it's inevitable. Let me ask you a quick question regarding that. What religion, so, uh, I like talking about religion, philosophy a lot. Uh, what is the official religion of China? Official religion is they have none, but it's constitutionally guaranteed that you have the right to do so. of freedom of religion. Um, I know, I know loads of Christians. Uh, I know several Muslims. Um, I don't know any Hindus, uh, or Sikhs in China. Hong Kong has, but, um, I don't know in China. I actually, I was, I had an Indian friend here yesterday. Uh, and he's from, uh, southern China and he, he, he's, uh, mostly Buddhist, mostly Buddhist. Oh, wow. But yeah, uh, and, um, you know, my wife is Buddhist as well. So I, I guess Buddhism, Taoism, uh, are the main things that you see. There are Buddhist temples everywhere you go. So, uh, yeah. Clearly, religion is not banned. Buddhism is very strong. Daoism or Taoism is very strong here. Um, the official religion of the Communist Party is atheism. Oh, wow. There is, there is no law that says, and this is another misunderstanding, you cannot be a member of the Communist Party and have religion. Uh, not true at all. Not true at all. You can be a member of the Communist Party and a Christian. What you can't do is allow your decisions to be influenced by religion. Your decisions need to be influenced by what's beneficial to the people. That's how the Communist Party works. It serves the people. Uh, now, of course, there are individuals who don't serve the people very well. But the party's mandate is to serve the people, and that's what Xi Jinping is all about. That's why people don't like him outside of China, because he's so popular and doing such a good job inside of China. And if you, if, let's go back to the religion. Um, religious freedom is guaranteed. Where I live now, my apartment here, has three churches within a kilometer. Uh, one of them is Catholic, one of them is another Christian, and the other one, I have no idea what religion it is, because a lot of the Koreans go there, there's a lot of Koreans live here, and it's like a Korean church, so it's one of those kind of Americanized religions. Yeah, Mormonism or something like this. But it's, it's a church, and it's an Americanized church, but all the Koreans go there, but there's a Catholic church, and there is a Christian church. It's an Anglican church here and the services I've been, I'm not a religious person, but my father is and I took him and I sat through a Cantonese mass in the Catholic church. I'm just, for me, it just like this, but everybody in there seems to enjoy it. And a few weeks, actually, it's a couple of months ago now before Christmas, this friend of mine, James Hugh, who is religious came over here, he arrived on a Sunday and I took him straight to church. That's what he wanted to do. And he went to church and he came out chatting to a group of people, one of whom joined us for breakfast for yum chow, which is the Chinese breakfast. And she was actually from Hong Kong visiting. And I said, have you been here before? Oh, I go to this church all the time. I've got an apartment nearby. And so Hong Kong people are coming here and using our churches. So yeah, that's, that's in here. I traveled through. On my bike, I traveled through Ningxia, which was for me, the most incredible place. And you've probably never heard of Ningxia. It's, it's a, there you go. It's, that's the other one when I was trying to think of the five autonomous regions. It's Ningxia, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous region and Hui are Muslims. They are Chinese Muslims. Now the Uyghurs are Muslims. Many Mongolians are Muslims or, um, Uh, Buddhists, the, uh, the, but Ningxia is a Hui region. As you cycle through these tiny little villages, the most imposing building in every village. Is the mosque and I'm they are beautiful. They're colorful. They're bright. Sometimes they're dual purpose. I've got a great photograph of a mosque with a hardware store on the ground floor. I thought that's what a great use of space. And you know, I asked about it. And this is the hardware store was there first. They built the mosque on top of it. Well, okay, right. The hardware store was turned into a mosque, but the hardware store still operates. And, you know, people would look at that and go. Oh, Chinese government are operating a hardware store from a mosque. No, it's the other way around. It's a practical solution in Jong San, where I live, there is no mosque, but there is a restaurant literally, believe it or not called the Muslim restaurant. That's its name, the Muslim restaurant. And I haven't been there, but I'm told by Muslim friends that if you want to go there, they have services on the roof. They have a kind of a. mini mosque on the roof. And it's a temporary, not temporary, but it's a makeshift mosque. And it's the only place in Jongsan where a Muslim can go to, uh, to pray, to worship. So that's the only place I know of that they can. And it's, it's the Muslim restaurant and it's a great restaurant and they sell beer and they sell wine. Oh, wow. Really? Yeah, and again, people say, Oh, they're forced to do that by the government. No, they're not. They're forced to do that by the, the, the Rita. People like me like to have a beer with my dinners. I'll go to a Muslim restaurant and I'll ask, do you have beer? And they say, no, we're Muslim. Okay, no problem. Then I'll go to another place. Do you have beer? Yes, we do. In the fridge, go and help yourself to the beer. It's, it's really a choice and it's based on their, their retail desires. Many of the, uh, small hand pulled noodles are very, very famous throughout China. Uh, Lanzhou is a city in Gansu. And from there is this hand pulled noodle. You can watch them make, they stretch the dough and they bang it on the table, they spin it around, stretch it, bang it, spin it around. And then the next thing that, you've got a bowl of spaghetti. That's, that's how good this stuff is. It's very, very fresh. And they're nearly all from Gansu. Gansu is another place where there's a massive Muslim population. Mosques everywhere. So I cycled through Ningxia, Gansu, and Xinjiang, and there are thousands of mosques. What is the, what is the, like, status of Muslim population in China, like, you know, like Islam is, is a complex topic to talk about, like, you know, even sadly, you know, things like Sharia law, things like, uh, you know, women, women, right. It tends to be a slightly, you know, rougher, you know, topic. On certain edges, and it gets a lot of criticism. Well, the version of Islam that you see in China, do you think it's progressive? Like, do people get treated fairly? Do women get treated fairly? Or do you feel that they also kind of struggle with that sort of, uh, a little bit of a backward mentality? Okay, another great question. Yeah, you're hitting me with some good ones here. In China, they have laws to protect individuals. It doesn't matter who the individual is. So they don't make special laws to protect, uh, trans people. There are trans people. There are gay people. There are bi, lesbians, all of those things. They do not make special laws to protect them. And the reason they don't make special laws to protect them is because they are protected by the laws that protect everyone. So if I harass a gay person or a trans person because I'm not and I think they're terrible people, then I will be prosecuted under the law for doing that. They don't need a special law. Same thing applies with women. Uh, there is in China a standard of equality. It's very, very strict, very strong. Women are very, very well looked after under the Chinese law. Uh, chairman Mao is famous for saying women hold up half the sky and he, there was no equality before communism. Now what's happened in China is you have to understand it's a very traditional and conservative country. They have traditional values. One of those values is the value of home and homemaking. So women will leave the workplace to have children. Now here's a really interesting thing. If you are a female and you get pregnant, you can work up to 15 days before the baby is born. The due date, if the due date is, you know, two weeks time, you can stop work. Now, you may, your baby may not be born for three weeks or four weeks, but if you're overdue, but you get from the, you get a date that the baby is due 15 days before that date, you stop work and 158 days later, you can go back to work. In exactly the same position and salary that you were in before. That's the first thing. The women throughout China get that. If you have twins, you get an extra 15 days. If you have triplets, you get an extra 30 days. Each baby adds 15 days to this. Now, for paternity, men get 15 days in some places, 10 days in others. And it's kind of localized, but it does exist. Everybody is entitled to this. If you're a woman and you're pregnant, you cannot be fired. No matter what you've done, you can't be fired. That's the law. It protects you. You can't be fired. Because people would have And it does happen. I know this happens in Australia. Uh, where someone gets fired. Because they're pregnant and it's going to cost us a lot of money. So we're going to replace this person and they'll find something to fire you for. In China, you can't be fired. It doesn't matter. You, you could shoot the CEO. Now you might have to go to prison, but you can't be fired from your job. So this is, there's a law protects a pregnant woman. Simple as that. Um, In religion, the religion is respected as well. Now, inside of Islam, there are rules about what women can and can't do. So, for example, in the mosque, there is a men's prayer area and a women and children's prayer area. That applies. That's still so the degree of equality is that if your society or your community has this tradition, it's respected. So they're not going to write a law that says. In the religion of Islam, women and men must worship together. They will leave the religion of Islam to look after the religion of Islam's traditions. But, if it's extremism, they will clamp down on it. Um, they, so, women are educated in exactly the same way, they have the same opportunities. But if their family stopped them from being educated, Then we got another issue. This is not China's human rights abuse. The family can be prosecuted for preventing the daughter or the wife from achieving their goals. So, because that person is protected by the same law that protects me and protects you if you're in China, even as a tourist, you are protected under Chinese law. So, there are some issues there where some conservative or traditional Islamic families are Buddhist families, Christian families, you know, if someone is Amish or something like that, they don't want to get their daughter educated and they come to China, that daughter says, I want to be educated. They could sue their parents in China. So yeah, you can sue your parents in China. Your parents can sue you as a child as well, if you don't look after them in your old age. Oh, wow. Really? That's cool. It's a filial society and about, I think it was about 2015, they introduced a law that says. Not only do you have a physical, a filial responsibility, you now have a legal responsibility to protect your parents as they grow older. You must stay in touch with them, you must support them with whatever financial needs they have. It's, it's a law now. Um, so it used to be just a kind of social thing where people did it anyway, mostly. But there was obviously some people who chose not to, so the government wrote a law. And the law was passed by the National People's Congress after months and months of debate, and it finally came to fruition. So, your question is a really good one. My experience is not really wide inside of the, uh, Islam community, but Ladies and Islamic girls will get exactly the same protection as me, a Christian, foreigner, pensioner living in China as my wife, a local, um, she's not, she's not as old as I am. She's, she's completely, she keeps telling me she's not young anymore, but, um, she's not quite my age. She's not retirement age yet. And the retirement age for women is 55 in China. It's 60 for men. So she's a few years away from retiring. Um, but she doesn't have a job that she looks after me, I guess that's her job. Uh, so there's equality, they're completely protected by law, but there are also conservative and traditional things that will say, you know, divorce is very low and you do get some abuses inside of the home, but it's against the law, it does happen, but the, you know, the, the wife may not divorce the husband who beats her. And that kind of thing gets China a bit of a bad name, but if the Chinese government know about it, they will react to it because everyone is protected. Everyone has the same protections, but you have to understand, right now, the Politburo, there's 24 people in the Politburo and they're all men. And it's the first time it's happened, I think, ever, that the Politburo is entirely men. That's got nothing at all to do with, um, inequality. It's just that these are the best guys for the job. You know, I saw that NASA were hoping to put a, a black woman into space. Yeah, okay, it's great that they're thinking like that, but why not put the best person for the job? And why isn't the best person a black woman? That's the issue. If, if everybody got an equal share of the educational pie, people in America wouldn't have this inequality, this racism. You don't have that in China. Every single person has the same share, the same protections, the same ability, the same goals, same ambition. You can do whatever you want to do in China. If you're a Muslim, if you're a Buddhist, if you're a Han, if you're a Uyghur, if you're a Kazakh, it really is, it's up to you what you want to do. Let me talk a quick question about racism. I know, like, Han is the racial majority, if they're like 93%. You are a white Caucasian man. How have you felt? How hard is assimilation as a white foreigner who speaks English? Like, do you think that China welcomes people of different races because you're not Han Chinese, you don't look like them, you don't speak like them? How has been your assimilation process? Um, all I can talk about my family, my family is a, is a Guangdong Cantonese family. They are Han Chinese and, um, very welcoming. Strangely, my, my wife has two sisters and both of her sisters are married to foreigners. So, yeah, um, that, so three, three of the daughters are married. So my, my wife's family is basically three foreign sons in law, quite unique, I think. Um, we are very unusual. I would say, well, my Indian friend who was here yesterday has a Chinese girlfriend. I don't know if they plan to get married, but they have quite a long term relationship. So it, you know, it's up to, it'd be up to their family. Now he's Indian, so he has a darker skin than me. Um, in China, there is always this thing about dark skin because it's a bit of a stigma with the dark skin means that you're a poor farmer because you're out in the sun all day. The light skin means that you are a richer person. This, this still exists now in the West. When I was growing up, if you had a dark skin, if I went on holiday to Southern Spain for two weeks and came home with a tan, everyone would say, wow, you're looking great. Now, if I do the same thing in China, everyone would say, Oh, what's wrong? You look terrible. It's culturally different. Um, so there is an issue with people from Africa or African Americans. Uh, there, there is an issue. Um, it does exist. It is benign. But it exists, there is no hostility. I've never ever encountered hostility for being a foreigner in China. I had a foreign friend who was here a few years ago. He's left now. And he got into several fights while he was in China. And he says, it's because I was a white guy going to this bar or that club. It wasn't, it was because he was a drunken obnoxious white guy in this bar or this club, if I'd gone to the same bar in the same club, I would not have experienced these problems unless I joined him in his drunken obnoxious behavior. That was his problem. He was a, And he would get very abusive to people. And then he would say, you know, you're only, you're only kicking my head in because I'm a white guy. And he would have a fight with a taxi driver. He had a fight with bars. There was a regular thing. And his problem was he was white, but it wasn't the problem. The problem was he was nasty when he was drunk. Lovely guy when he's sober. Nasty guy when he's drunk. I had, I had a fight with him once. God, I mean, I don't fight anybody, but I had to take him down. Literally. I used to be a police officer, so I know some self defense tricks and he was kicking someone in a bar. I kind of intervened and stopped him and. Took him down. He ended up in hospital with a nasty gash on the back of his head. But that's another story. Um, generally speaking, there is no hostility towards foreigners. I haven't seen it. No one has accused me of coming over here and stealing the beautiful girls who are now my wife or anything like that. I've never had any experience of that whatsoever. Most of our friends are Chinese and they come here and we drink together. We eat together. We go out together. No problem whatsoever. I've traveled. Uh, extensively quite often on my own, I'll or with another foreigner, not with my wife and I'll go into a small town and you get these looks that I think the best way to describe is they look hostile. But they're not, they're curious. A foreigner walks past them and you give them a smile and say, Ni hao. Oh, yeah. I can speak a little Chinese. Yeah. That's, that's how it goes. And the next thing you know, they're buying your lunch or your dinner or whatever it is. It's completely the opposite. There was one case during COVID where somebody in McDonald's put a sticker on the, on the window of McDonald's saying no black people allowed. And that caused an international stir. It caused a stir in China because it's such an unusual thing. And what happened was the local government got in touch with the African community. The area where this happened, uh, is very close to an area I know fairly well, Xiaobei, where there's a lot of Africans. So a lot of black people there. And the, this sign was put out by a Chinese person in an American corporation. And it was, it was a mistake. It shouldn't have happened. Now, what then happened was. The only reason was there was parts of that area where there were a lot of Africans living illegally. Now what China had to do was to find the illegal Africans because the illegal Africans weren't caught in the testing and vaccination and the COVID system because they were living illegally. So the Chinese government had to try and find where they were. And what they did was they used the African community and they used the consuls of the African countries to try and help them and they got it all together. And anybody who was there illegally was given a temporary visa to stay until COVID was over and then they were going to be released. Repatriated. They had to leave. Now, I guess some of them are probably still there living on that no visa. I knew I knew a Filipino guy who lived eight years in China with no visa came on a tourist visa. And stayed for eight years. Now, as long as you don't leave the country, then you'll never going to get caught. No one cares. But when he went to leave the country, of course he got caught and he had to pay the fine. He went into a detention for a few days while he sorted out what the fine was. And, and then he was, uh, he put on a plane and sent back to the Philippines and his passport was stamped, not allowed back into China for 10 years. Oh, damn. Yeah. He can't come back for 10 years. So that's what Chinese do. They, they do deport people. Uh, but they only deport people if, there was a guy in Jong san, I think he was Russian, he might have been Ukrainian, actually, he was from that part of the world, a few years ago, got caught on camera stealing stuff from the delivery, have deliveries to, if you live in a big gardens, there's usually a security gate, and outside the security gate, there are a load of lockers. But sometimes they, they get a little lazy, the delivery guys will call up and say, I've just dropped it outside the locker. So he would go there and pick stuff up and walk away. And it wasn't his stuff. He was dealing stuff and he got caught and he got a warning. That's it. And for another year or two, he, he remained in China. He's left now, but yeah, that, that was, that was what China does. But if you do drugs, that's a no, no, you're out of the country. Uh, you will be prosecuted if you're dealing with drugs, but if you're taking, uh, and they, they, they used to, they don't anymore, but they used to go into bars and just. All the entrances of the bar and then test everybody in it. And if you've got drugs in your system, then you go into detention for 15 days. And if you're a foreigner at the end of 15 days, you're deported. They don't tolerate drugs at all. Very, very anti drug here. Um, there's not much that will get you into serious trouble in China. You have to really try hard to get into trouble with the police here. Really, it's, I've never had a run in with them. I've met many policemen, but I've never had a run in with them at all. It's the police who, like, you know, so in US we have this movement which is called Defund the Police, and there's a huge, where cops, you know, like, Shoot people like, you know, if nobody's watching, they'll like, you know, boom, and they'll get away with it. And sometimes it happens with racial minorities. Sometimes in white people get killed because the cops are rogue and corrupt. Do you have policing problems in China? Did you ever run into like a corrupt cop? And you said, wow, like I am being mistreated by this cop or this cops are rogue, they're shooting us now. Hasn't been a police shooting in China in years, years. The last one I know of. And I might be wrong here and someone can say, Oh, no, there was one in, there was one in 2022. I didn't know about it, but the last one I know of was in 2018. And, um, it was somebody who was shot driving a car into a crowded area. Uh, and obviously deliberately trying to kill someone or some people. I'm not sure what the story was. But the, there are armed police, not many of them, but there are armed police around. And one of them was there and shot this guy. Uh, he had already killed some people. And then he was killed by the police. I think there was another one a year before that, which was a similar thing with a forklift, a guy on a forklift doing the same thing, you know, chasing people and he wasn't getting off the forklift and he was going to take out the cops. So they shot him too. Uh, we're talking about five, six, seven years ago when these things happened and there was one case, I think it was 2012 where a drunken police Pulled his gun out in a restaurant and shot someone. They didn't die, fortunately. And he was sentenced to, he was sentenced to death suspended for years. Yeah. Well, because he's in a position of trust with that firearm and he abused that trust. So, they have this thing in China called the, uh, the suspended death sentence, where they put you on trial, they sentence you to death, and then you behave yourself for two years, and at the end of two years, it's commuted to life in prison, and for a lifer, you do a minimum of nine years. So then they've served 11 years and are released from prison. After 11 years, that's what happens in China. Uh, so a lot of people who get sentenced to death don't actually get executed. They, I mean, people do. They executed a couple, a few days ago, uh, and it made international headlines. How bad is China? This was a very, very handsome young man with a very gorgeous young girlfriend. And he was married and had two children. And because they had two children, his wife wouldn't divorce him, and his girlfriend wouldn't marry him because she didn't want the two children. So, the pair of them threw the children out of the window of their apartment. Holy crap. Yeah. That's a true story, and they were executed. Both of them, on the same day, just two or three weeks ago. And it made international headlines, but yeah, I mean, most people in China say, well, they deserve that. That's, that's, I'm not a big fan of the death penalty. I hate the death penalty to be honest. I'm, I'm a little, not a little, I'm very anti the death penalty, but I live in China and they have it and I see that they do use it and they use it where serious drug issues. There's an American in on one of those commuted life sentences in prison in the next city here, Jiangmen. Not very far away from here. He's been in prison for, um, about five years now. And he was, he was, he was doing what the DEA are asking China to stop doing. And he was dealing drugs into back into America and he and his gang got caught. He was sentenced to death, suspended for two years, and he's now serving his time. He's. He'll probably be, he'll probably be going home in about five years time, but he won't be kept in China. Well, I do also agree with you on the death penalty part. I think I do. I think probably because of the Western culture where we have like, I don't know, call it compassion or whatever. Killing is just, does not sit right. Like put them in jail forever or something. What the family did was. Like horrible, like throwing children out of the window, like throw your own two children out of the window to satisfy your carnal lust. Effectively. That's what this was. Um, yeah, yeah, it's, it's pretty evil. Uh, but again, I, I, I think, um, you, do you want to rehabilitate someone who did that? I don't know. I don't know that that is true. It's not a debate that I really like to get into. I'm not for the death penalty, but I can see why it's done sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah for sure. I think yeah, it's hard to say that somebody who would do such an evil act maybe after going jail uh, would they be forgiven or not, so Will they change or not? Yeah Yeah, and by the time they came out, they wouldn't be handsome beautiful couple anymore You know Well, maybe they still would be 11 years if that if that's what they serve then But then no these two are gone now. They're both executed on the same day Well, well, they, they kind of pushed the boundary here, so maybe we'll skip that, what should have been done, but whatever they did was pretty horrible as well, so I think, but I think a little bit of strictness with the law is something that I prefer to, because where I live in Toronto, like, Not again, not death penalty or chopping people's head off, but I'm saying, like, we have a huge crime rate here. Your car gets stolen, uh, you go to a shopping center, people steal iPhones, uh, you cannot shop in a market where people sometimes even end up out with guns. So I think having a strong, uh, policing system where, like, I don't think these kind of things happen in China where people are just shooting, looting, beating the shit out of each other, right? It's almost impossible to find a gun in China. I mean, there, there are illegal guns, but it's very, very difficult to find one. I mean, I wouldn't know where to start looking. I've never seen a gun apart from where a police officer has been carrying one in his holster. I've never seen a gun in China. There's nowhere I know that you can go and get them. There's no one who says, Oh, if you want something, you just talk to this guy. I've never heard of that. Um, there are drugs in China, but there are very, very deep underground. Um, there are people who use drugs in China, but I don't know where they get them from. Um, there, there's no street crime at all in China. Um, I don't know anyone who has been robbed or burgled in the last 10 years. I don't know anyone. I know hundreds of people. Um, I don't know anyone who's been raped. In China, it just basically doesn't exist. Um, when it comes to car theft, I've got a great story. I used to teach the owner of a, um, a shopping center, and it was a very, very upmarket shopping center. It, uh, back in the day, a lot of shopping centers didn't have car parks because they didn't need them. People didn't have cars. That's changed a lot. Now, uh, again, part of the wealth of China, the increasing wealth, almost everyone I know has got a car or two. And when I came to China, Almost no one I knew had a car. So it's changed a lot, but this guy had a car park under his, um, shopping center, four layers and hundreds of cars. And I was talking to him once and I worked in the security industry in Australia. I was a police officer in the UK, so I'm very familiar with crime rates. And, uh, I said to him, you know, how many cars one day we're just chatting about his business and how many cars get stolen on average in a year from your shopping center. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And he said, why would you ask that question? I said, well, I used to do security for, I wasn't a security officer, I was a manager of a security division. And one of our clients was, in Australia, people would know this Paramatta, the shopping center in Paramatta, and it has the highest rate of car thefts. In Australia and they were losing three a day at that time when I was working there and we were trying to overcome this through electronic security and they were losing them even through barriers. It was just, it was very difficult. So we had, we were trying to, uh, there was no facial recognition in those days, but we were putting in cameras with movement detection, all kinds of things. Uh, and, and so. I was explaining this to him and he said, Well, the shopping center's been open for five years now. We haven't had a car stolen. And I, not one in five years, then it occurred to me that at that time, we're talking about 2010, 2011, maybe crims in China couldn't drive cars. They didn't know how to, because they had grown up with cars. So that was one aspect of it. But the other aspect of it was motorbikes weren't getting stolen either. He said, we had one attempt of stealing a motorbike. And the security guard saw, because he has security guards wandering around as you do in, in shopping centers. He said the security guard just happened to see that a girl left that bike and then a boy was taking it away. So he said, excuse me, is that your bike? To the guy. And he dropped it and ran. That was it. That was the only attempted theft of a motorbike, not even a, not even a bicycle. Bicycles used to get stolen very easy because anyone can steal a bike. But now I've left my bike outside of shops and stuff. I don't bother locking it anymore. It doesn't get stolen. It's never been stolen. I had one bike stolen. I guess it was about 2012, uh, where, and it was my fault. I had a problem and I had a puncture and I didn't have a spare, I didn't have a spare tube. So I just parked it up at the side of the road, locked it to a lamppost. Went to work, finished my work eight or nine hours later, came back to the lamppost and it's gone. So there you go. I lost a bike, but it was in a, there's no such thing as a dodgy area. It was in a wide open area at the side of the road. Someone came along and said, Oh, that's it. It's nice. That, that bolt cutters on the back of a truck and gone. But that was 10, probably 12 or 13 years ago, maybe 15 years ago. And I haven't, I haven't had a crime issue since. Crime is virtually non existent here. Murder rate here is zero. I mean, it's literally zero. Um, as far as I'm aware, in Jongsan, four million people live here. There's only one city in North America In Canada and the U. S., there's only one city bigger than Jongsan, and that's New York. Four and a half million people live in this city. Mexico City is bigger, so that's why I stopped for the North America thing, because Mexico's got bigger cities. In Canada and the United States, only one city is bigger. Los Angeles is close, it's around about the same, but only one city is bigger than where I live. And as far as I'm aware, there has been no murder in Jongsan. I can't remember when, 10 years maybe, maybe more. There was one, I remember there was one. And it got reported quite widely in local media. And it was big, uh, A boyfriend killed his girlfriend, um, and it was right opposite the apartment where we lived, but I didn't know any of these people. It was literally across the road, 30, 40 meters away from my home, uh, and that's the only murder that I'm aware of in the time I've lived here. There's been a few suicides, but not many. I genuinely envy you because right now here, the condition is so bad, you can't even take a walk at night without being afraid. And, um, like the country you're from, in London, it's so bad that I've seen people, they take a walk at night and they're killed by gangsters and mobs. And the crime, they don't even care about it, like if somebody gets stabbed on the street, you get stabbed on the street and you deal with it, like, There's no like justice system, people get raped, murdered, and like, there's no effort to address that. So I think in many ways, I think Chinese society seems like a superior society, may communist. Maybe there's a little bit of government authoritarianism here and there, but I still feel the way these people are running it. It's, it's, I think, overall better offering a better quality of life. Sure. Um, with, with crime, crime is usually associated with poverty. Yeah. If there's no poverty, then there's no need for crime. Uh, but there's also one issue and you mentioned the authoritative, it's surveillance, uh, China is a widely surveilled country that every city has got cameras everywhere. Uh, you can't, you can't go down the street without being seen by a camera. Now, again, we'll go back to what we talked about. It was trust. Do you trust your government? And Chinese people do. So the government has this data on us. It has where we are, what we're doing. We use our WeChat money. The app that we use has our wallet in it. So we're using money through our phone. The phones are all registered to us. So we have to have a phone. If I want to buy a SIM card for my phone, I need to register with my passport. My wife needs to register with her ID. So everyone has an ID card. Everyone has some identification that links their phone and their car. And now your face as well. So if you do something wrong, you might get a message. Uh, it's never happened to me, but it might, my wife's cousin had it just a few days ago where he parked outside of our house. It's a school zone. It was a few minutes before the parking relaxed and he got a message saying, you know, you're parking in an illegal place. If you don't move, you're going to get a ticket. There's no one there. It's all done by surveillance. So this is them managing the behavior. So he moved. He went drove around the block when he came back. It was one minute before the school zone expired. And so 7 p. m. 6 59 p. m. He was parked there. And he got another message which said you're parked in an illegal zone. Please move. So there's still nobody there to do this. But he didn't get a ticket. He, what he did was he took two minutes or one minute to reverse across the road and park in another parking spot, by which time it was 7 p. m., nothing happened. So he got no ticket, no infringement. And that's surveillance. So what they're doing is managing our behavior. They're not profiting from our behavior, they're managing us to, to comply with the law. Now, some people say, oh, that's authoritarian. Yeah, okay. If that's authoritarian, bring it on for me. I'm quite happy with getting warnings when I've done something wrong rather than getting fines when I've done something wrong. Now, if I had done that in Melbourne or in Sydney or in Brisbane, I guarantee I would have got two tickets. Guarantee. It would have cost me hundreds of dollars. So let me give you Let me give you a little pushback. Uh, let, let, I don't know if you'll like it. Do you guys like, let, let's say you're getting surveilled and I can see all these benefits. Do you guys like, do not fear that the government, government may get corrupt and there's internal corruption among the government. May, you know, they may crack down on you guys. Don't you feel afraid that they may use all the surveillance to exploit you? Well, first of all, I would say, what can they do that would harm me? That's one question. I don't know what having information about where I'm going, what I'm doing. I'm not breaking any laws, so I see no issue with it, but yeah, I get your issue. Xi Jinping is a very widely respected and much loved leader in China. Now, yeah, there's going to be people who don't like him. But let's say 90 percent is probably higher, but 90 percent are very happy. Now, what happens when Xi Jinping goes? When Xi Jinping finally says, I've had enough of this and I'm retiring. I want to go and spend some time with Mrs. With my wife, Ms. Peng. And she's got a lovely wife. She's a beautiful singer, a very famous She was famous in her own right before she met him. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. She's an opera singer, a military person, a very, very famous person. And at one stage, she was interviewed, and she, and she, uh, the interviewer asked, this is a really famous interview, this is a long, long time ago, and the interviewer asked her, you know, how do you feel being married to someone who's unknown? Because she's so famous, and she said, oh, my husband will be known. Oh, she knew, she knew. Um, So there's that he's, he's one day he's going to retire. Now here's the thing with the system in China, uh, a corrupt person cannot, cannot rise to the top at the moment. What happens is you get to the top on merit. You, you get into your next position by being selected. And elected, you must be nominated before you can be elected for promotion within the government. Now there are two aspects to this. There's the government and there's the party. Now, if you're not a member of the party, you're never going to reach the highest elevation of position because the communist party runs China. But if you're not a member of the party, you can be. Nominated to the highest part of the National People's Council, NPC. So they are the people who oversee the government and there are 3, 000, 2, 980 of them, 60 percent are not party members. And of the other 40 percent who are, some of them are members of the communist party. Some are members of the other eight parties that exist. Now there are, there's no adversarial politics, but there are factions within politics here. There are left and there are right. And funny thing, my wife asked me yesterday in your politics in the West, do you have left and right? And I looked at her as if she's mad, because she knows, she knows our politics, she knows the system. And I said, what do you think Conservatives and Labour are in the UK, the Liberal and Labour are in Australia? Oh, she said, are they left, because we have left and right in our politics. She thought having one party with a left and a right, Would be different if you had two parties. They would both be left or both be right, I guess. It's a conversation that we started last night and have to finish today. She didn't realize that there were factions. She knew there were factions in Australia, in China, but didn't realize there were factions in, in our governments, in Oh, it's much worse. in Kosovo and Canberra and London. So there was a really interesting discussion we started yesterday. So yeah, there are factions. Now people can come with different views and there are people who are anti reform and people who are pro reform. There are people who are pro massive. There are people who would love to have an American style capitalism inside of the government in China. And there are people who would love to have back to the Mao era of restrictions and control. Both sides of politics exist, but they have one thing in common. They have all signed and sworn. To honor the people, respect the country and the people. They swear allegiance to the people of China, not to the, well, they also, if you're a member of the parties, where allegiance to the party, but that's to serve the people of China. So this is what they're doing. Now, of course, there are individuals within that and people say, Oh, Jerry, you're crazy. You think. That they're not going to be individuals who are corrupt. Of course, there are, there are going to be individuals who are corrupt and there are going to be individuals who disagree with everything Xi Jinping says, but then the majority agree with everything he says, because he's doing a good job. China is going in the right direction. Now it's hard to, to criticize that, but if you happen to be somebody who wants to criticize that you can get into power, but you cannot get into power. By being corrupt, you get into power by being efficient. You get into power by being loyal to the country and loyal to your party. You get into power by doing the right thing and you must be educated. You can't get into government, uh, high levels of government. Without at least a bachelor's degree. Once you have that, you then go to Cadre Training School, as the English call it. But there is a communist party school where you learn governance and you learn how to manage this, and then you manage a small town. You might get promoted to manage a city. You might get promoted to be the governor of a province. You might get promoted to be the onto the, the Central Poly Bureau. And then you might get promoted to the standing committee, which is the final eight people of which one of them will become the next president, but you can't do that. Through donations from lobbying and public elections, you do that through efficiency. You do that through proving you are good at your job. Every single year, every government person produces their own work report. This is what I achieved last year. This is what I'm going to achieve next year. And it goes all the way up to the highest level of government. And Xi Jinping will give his work report in, uh, I think it's October, the next two sessions. Li Jiang, Chiang, the, the new premier of China, gave his work report just a week ago, last Monday. So, this is how it happens. You get work reports to show this is what we said we were going to do, this is what we did, this is what we're going to do. Next year, this is what we said we're going to do, this is what we did. That's how you get elected. It's because they are elected. Every single member of the Chinese government is elected by their peers and their subordinates, but they're selected by their superiors until you get to the top. Xi Jinping has no superior, so he was selected by the Politburo. There are 24 people who say he's the guy that we want to nominate. Now, if three people got nominated, Then the National People's Council will vote for which one they want. But only one got nominated. That's why you have him as our president. China's president. What role do citizens play? Do you guys get to elect like a mayor or something? Like at least at the local level? Do you guys get to vote or there's no voting? Oh, absolutely they get, not we, I'm not one of them, but, uh, yeah, my wife has the opportunity to vote every, I think it's four years, it might be five years, I'm not sure, um, she doesn't bother, she's not interested, 90 percent of people you talk to don't care, but my wife's sister and parents vote, the three of the, one sister lives in Australia, so she doesn't vote, in fact, she voted by proxy last year, she did, she voted for, uh, the local mayor. And, uh, apparently he had some stiff competition. So, and he's, he's a friend of the family. And so my wife, sister. My wife has a hukou from a different place, so she can't vote in that election, so it wouldn't have made any difference. But my wife's mother, father, sister, and the sister based in Australia all voted for the person that they wanted to represent them for the next period of time. Now, he is nominated by the people. You can self nominate too, if you want to. So those local people, and it's written into the constitution that they have the power. To nominate, vote, and remove those people. So the NPC works at local level, county level, provincial level, and national level. And they have the power to put people in position and then remove them. And that goes all the way up to Xi Jinping. He can be removed by his 24, um, colleagues on the Politburo, the political bureau of the, of the party. Now there's a standing committee, which is nine people. If there are, including Xi Jinping, eight others and Xi Jinping, they can vote to remove him too. So, yeah, he can be removed. He's not president for life. He's president for the time that he's, uh, efficient and successful. This is pretty cool. I did not know you could vote and I like how you need to have like a local experience before you can reach the top. I think a lot of people in our countries outside of China, because you're not told you can vote, but you only vote for the people that represent you. Now, at the local level in my wife's hometown, they voted for this guy. He then goes along to the next level and they have to vote for the next person and the next person. So you vote for the people who represent you, not the people who represent the people who represent you. You're only voting for the next level up. It's actually quite a good system because the people here. At this level, know the person they're voting for. They know he's done a good job. They, they, they voted for him. They're happy with him. They can vote to remove him every time. So those people know, so they trust them to make the decision to vote. Now they may come back and say, you know, I've been asked to vote for this guy or this guy, they may come back and seek ideas from their, their electorate on, on who to vote for, but. As far as I know, that doesn't, that hasn't happened that I'm aware of, but it could happen. There's no reason why not. They have regular meetings, they have consultations, they have what we would call surgeries, where they go to their community at certain times, and everything they do is recorded. Everything that people say, I've got this criticism, complaint, suggestion, is put onto an app, which is then talked about behind the scenes. There's a lot going on that people don't realize. Yeah, no, this is, uh, uh, I had no idea. I thought it's more like, you know, whatever the Chinese government does, it does. People can fuck off and I think, uh, uh, knowing that people have some say and also I think it's a testament, the fact that people really don't care because they're already getting what they need. I think that's a positive sign. Like if your wife who was born here and she's like, you know what, yeah, I don't even vote and life is just fine. That means the government is doing what it's supposed to do. It's, it's, it's actually inside of the constitution. It's written that China is a proletariat, a dictatorship of the proletariat. And what does that actually mean? That's it's a, it's from Marxism, a dictatorship of the proletariat means the people tell the government how they want to be governed and it actually works. A dictatorship of the proletariat. Now it could be in the West. They tell us it's dictatorial. Xi Jinping is an isolated leader that nobody likes that. That's what they would like you to believe. I mean, when you ask if you San Diego university, Harvard university, the Edelman trust barometer, these have all asked Chinese people. What do you think? And Chinese people have all said the opposite of what Western media thinks. So, who's got it right? Come to China and ask the Chinese people. Yeah, I think no, I think this has been a quite a wonderful conversation Uh, and I think this would be a good place to end as well because i've had you for the last three hours and I think It has a time passed by I really enjoyed it And I think the best part is I was a slightly uncomfortable in the beginning. I was like, oh my god I hope it's not some propaganda and I have a hard time digesting it. But the way you talked about it You I think makes me more knowledgeable, more enlightened and, you know, uh, look, look at it as not like some evil regime who wants to destroy everyone, but it just genuinely cares about its people and it wants the best of it. And. Yeah, yeah, I would say, I mean, advice to your viewers, um, take everything you read in Western media with a very large grain of salt. You can usually turn it upside down. Every story that you have read starts with a grain of truth. You know, when you see the problems in China, here's the grain of truth. Here's the reality. The grain of truth has been misinterpreted, misunderstood, and you are being misinformed about China because of that. So they'll, they will do that every time. And if they want to really see how this happens, I've got two social media platforms, or two, uh, two YouTube channels. Uh, the, the Jerry's Take on China, which is just Jerry's Take on China. And the other one is called the 3Ms. Social. 3Ms. social. Now, those two sites are the three M's, which is three misinformations, the misinterpretation, mistranslation leading to misinformation. And that's only just recently started. And I'm doing that with another guy that another two guys actually that I know quite well here in China. And we have 65 years of experience between the three of us. of living in China and observing China through very different situations. We, he, one lives in Dongguan, I live in Zhongshan, the other one lives in Hainan Island. We have very different backgrounds, different working experience, different life experience, but we all have shared the same views. So that's the best thing I can say test your sources look for your sources if anybody says to you that China is bad Let's look at what they're actually saying then go and check what by all means Interact with me on my channel. Anybody has a question I'm very willing to answer it very willing to answer it and I respond to every comment that I get I read every comment. I don't respond to all of them, but I read every comment that I get and I respond to probably 70 80 percent of them. Sometimes it's just thanks. I actually put a like or something like that on every comment, but I will respond to anybody who asks me a reasonable question. Are you a paid CCP shill? Yeah, that's one question, but it's not reasonable. The answer is no, I'm not paid by the CPC. But even if I am, prove me wrong. If you can't prove me wrong, you're not discrediting me. If you can, you are. So please, by all means, find out what you, what I've said in my video or on my article that you're criticizing and tell me what it is that's wrong. Not what you don't like. Please don't use media headlines to tell me I'm wrong. Give me some academic source. Don't tell me I'm wrong when I say Chinese government, Chinese people trust their government. Tell Harvard University that they're wrong. They spent 13 years researching it. Now, how are you going to disprove that? That's what I would say to people. So, yeah, check this out. And by all means, have a look at what I say. You don't have to follow me. You don't have to subscribe. I'm not monetized. It doesn't matter to me that I get more followers. I would like more people to get this message. That's all. For sure. And I think, you know, all the people who are listening to our podcast now, because we're ending across Apple, Spotify, and YouTube, uh, Jerry's channel is on YouTube, it's called Jerry's shake on China, and I will also leave his socials in our description. So if you want to learn about China, especially from a perspective of a man who's living there and from a perspective. Which is unbiased. Please go ahead, subscribe to him on YouTube, follow him on Twitter, and you'll get to learn a lot more about how China works. Yo dawg, thanks for watching the video. Now, if you liked it, smash that like button, hit the subscribe button as well. And don't forget to click the bell icon. The next time I come in, you get a notification.