The Dangers Of Reporting On China With Peter Langan

It has become increasingly difficult, and even dangerous to report on China. What does this mean for journalists covering sensitive topics like military defence, human rights, and politics?

Peter Langan is a journalist with extensive experience including almost 20 years with Bloomberg News in various roles such as: Asia Editor-at-Large and Tokyo Bureau Chief. He later worked as senior editor for the China Desk at South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, during the time of the 2019 democracy protests, the emergence of Covid 19, and the imposition of the National Security Law upon Hong Kong.

Peter Langan on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterlangan/

Yanking the Tiger’s Tail - Reporting in China via the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2wBd-MHZnw

SUPPORT ME - https://www.thetransformationofvalue.com/support

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
The conclusion we came out with,I mean, we had no, there's no
smoking gun, as it were, of yes,this is genocide.
No, we didn't arrive at that conclusion.
But we did find this informationthat showed there was a targeted
campaign against Uyghur women toforce birth control methods upon

(00:21):
them and other means to reduce the population of Uyghurs in
Shenzhen. Hello, I am Cody Allingham, and
this is the transformation of value, a place for asking
questions about freedom, money and creativity.
Today my guest is Peter Langan, A journalist with extensive
experience, including almost 20 years with Bloomberg News and

(00:42):
various roles such as Asia Editor at large and Tokyo Bureau
chief. He later worked as senior editor
for the China Disk at South China Morning Post in Hong Kong
during the time of the 2019 democracy protests, the
emergence of COVID and the imposition of the national
security law upon Hong Kong. Peter, welcome to the show.

(01:04):
Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Can you tell me a little bit about where you're from
originally, please? Sure.
I'm from the Uki was born in Liverpool in Northern England.
So I don't know if you know muchabout the city, but it's, it's
called in the UK, it's called the capital of Ireland because
of all the Irish immigrants, like during the various phases

(01:26):
of the Irish dysphoria, including from the famine.
So my roots go back to Ireland. My grandfather was Irish.
On my mother's side, they're allScottish.
So it, it kind of explained to me why growing up in the UKI
never felt very English, you know, which for whatever reason,

(01:49):
obviously that reason. But yeah, I grew up there.
I went away to see at an early age just to get out of this city
and see the world, get out of the country in an unexpected
way. It would contribute to the, the
sort of track I took later into journalism.
Because at sea, there's not muchyou can do in your downtime.

(02:11):
You know, you're, you're on board the vessel, you're out in
the middle of the ocean and you,well, as the stories go, you
either turn to drink or you read.
So I started to read an awful lot when I was at sea and I
stumbled upon Joseph Conrad and his writings, which really lit

(02:34):
me up. And I also stumbled on a book
called Last Exit to Brooklyn, which at the time was banned in
the UK, but I was in New York with Doc there and I found a
copy of it in a bookstore and took it back and read it.
And that also had a very profound effect on me.

(02:58):
I don't know if you know that book, but it's, it's very, very,
very dark. And at the time, and it was, as
I say, it was banned in the UK because it, it touched on, well,
it's based around a Brooklyn waterfront and violence, crime,
drugs, homosexuality, but it, itdove into it in ways that you

(03:22):
really hadn't heard before. So that book also had a very
profound effect on what could bedone through writing.
The author was Hubert Selby Junior and eventually a movie
was made out of it. So that had a very profound
effect on me and and turned my focus away from this kind of

(03:46):
romantic idea of travelling the world as a sailor and coming
back to the UKI went and studiedliterature.
This is great. I mean, what strikes me, you
mentioned last exit to Brooklyn,but also Joseph Conrad classic
Heart of Darkness, which speak to this almost Nietzschean

(04:07):
union, dark and light, the what lies within the human soul.
And I think staring out at the horizon on a on a British vessel
in the middle of nowhere would seem like you start to ask those
questions. Perhaps, yes.
I mean, it wasn't so much Heart of darkness that I read at the
time. It was, I think it was Almaya's
folly and the secret sharer. And because of, you know, Conrad

(04:32):
was at sea for so long, a mariner for many, many years.
And that became the a lot of thegrist for what he wrote later.
But yeah, as you point out, he he very much uses the sea as a
kind of a, a metaphor for yeah, what's out there.

(04:54):
And you know how we sort of navigate it.
Yeah, there was just particularly because I was at
sea and and he touched on so much of his in his work of, of
areas where he sailed Southeast Asia, in particular Africa and
other places. So, yeah, it had a, it did

(05:17):
something to me anyway. If I may ask, what sort of role
work were you doing on the vessel and what time period was
this? I worked in a galley, which is
sort of a chief cook and bottle washer, as they called it at the
time. It was in the 70s, very early
70s, yeah. And I, I mostly served on cruise
ships. So at that time the airline

(05:40):
industry wasn't anything like itwas now.
So a lot of people were still using cruise vessels to cross
the Atlantic from the UK to North America.
So this vessel used to go from it docked in Liverpool, it's
called the Empress of Canada, and then used to sail from
Liverpool to Montreal. And then in the winter it would

(06:03):
dock in New York and do like 2 week trips around the Caribbean.
So lots and lots of, lots of stops.
So that was also fascinating because we, you know, I remember
stopping in Haiti a few times. And that was, and again, that's
where I think Conrad sort of came to life because his

(06:25):
writings about ports and places and suddenly seeing it.
And Haiti at that time was stillruled by Papa Dock or I think it
was still Papa Dock or his son. But he had his own private army
called the the Taunton Makku, I think they were called.

(06:47):
And I never saw a place before with such bone breaking poverty
on the streets everywhere. Just it's kind of like it was
like images you see today of Sudan or somewhere, you know, it
just like just a hellhole. It doesn't seem like maybe it's
changed that much, though. It's still quite desperate.

(07:09):
Yeah, it's true. Yeah.
Yeah. But the thing about the the Tom
Tomaku is that you could always recognise them because in all
this drab poverty, they wore these kind of very almost
Hawaiian like shirts, flowery big shirts, and were swaggering
down the street, you know, with big guns on their their hip.

(07:30):
So that that experience really did, it was pivotal for me just
in and all that time spent reading and it, it just woke me
up to the, the absolute wonders of, of literature and, and where
it, where it can take you. And so from there, I ended up

(07:51):
studying literature and sort of ended up in Japan by a very
convoluted route. I mean, the other thing that was
very influential on me was I'm achild of the 60s, so to speak.
So it was the whole hippie era and how that was fundamentally

(08:11):
shifting society and how people thought and what you're expected
to do. And so I, with a friend from
college, went off hitchhiking throughout Europe and to North
Africa and around and about. And, you know, the next big

(08:31):
thing was the plan to go to to India, which is what you did at
the time. You know, that was the the
hippie trail again, Afghanistan,which is again, nothing like it.
It is today. But a lot of people used to go
there, but that never happened. I met a girl, Japanese girl.
We ended up ended up coming to Japan.

(08:52):
And that's how I convoluted. That's the, you know, short
version. But I ended up here.
Yeah. When did you first come to
Japan? I think it was 1984, yeah.
I'd done a detour through the the US before that and spent
some time there travelling then,yeah, came to Tokyo.

(09:14):
Unfortunately the relationship didn't work out, so we went our
separate ways, but I stayed and then I, I very much, I'm one of
those cases of stumbling into journalism.
I didn't have any, you know, clear mapped out goal that I
want to be a journalist. I, Nikkei, the Nikkei newspaper

(09:38):
group were, were looking for foreign sub editors at the time
because they had plans to make their, you know, it's the
biggest financial news organization in Japan, one of
the biggest in the world. And at the time they had plans.
I mean, this is also the bubble economy period in Japan.

(09:59):
You know, the whole country's sloshing with money and Nikkei
had the idea that it wanted to establish a, an English language
daily, financial daily for Asia rather than, you know, at that
time it was the Financial Times,the Asian Wall Street Journal
that were these sort of mastheadpublications in Asia.

(10:24):
So why these foreign news organisations, you know, setting
the agenda or the narrative about Asia?
So Nikkei wanted to do its own. So they hired all these
foreigners sub editors. But then the bubble imploded.
And along with it, when Nikkei'splans to, I mean, it had a, what

(10:47):
was called the Nikkei Weekly at the time, which was a, you know,
as it says, a weekly that was basically business and financial
and political stories about primarily about Japan, but also
Asia and, you know, come full circle.
Though they did eventually achieve their goal because they
bought the FT, you know, so theygot there eventually.

(11:10):
But that's how I sort of, as I say, stumbled into journalism
and learnt the basics and the ropes of constructing news
stories and you know, how to write them, approach them,
identifying holes in the coverage that you need to.
Well, can you tell me a bit about that?

(11:31):
Because you know, you've, you'vebeen in this world for, for a
while and you mentioned this challenge of overseas foreign
newspapers setting the agenda for Asia back then.
When you started off your career, how were you approaching
what, what, what were the ropes that you learned for what makes
good journalism? Well, this was very much a job,
like a sub editor job or a copy editor job, as it's known in, in

(11:55):
US journalism, where the copy isdelivered to you.
And the vast majority of that copy at the time was translated
from Nikkei's Japanese stories. So because as I say, Nikkei at
the time, I'm not sure now, but at the time they had four

(12:17):
financial dailies or business dailies, so a massive, massive
organization. And so the idea was to they
would translate editors, Japanese editors would choose
stories that would be translatedand then we would edit them.
So it was a good training in thesense that those stories were

(12:42):
written for a Japanese domestic audience and now the idea was to
take the story and deliver it toan international audience in
English. So like in any country, the
domestic audience, domestic reader, has a background of
understanding and knowledge and context of stories.

(13:03):
You don't have to keep explaining it.
But with these stories, we had to bring in context, you know,
explanatory background and otherthings to help that story have
the legs to meet the needs of aninternational audience.
So that sort of training to think in that way of, you know,

(13:27):
I might understand it because I'm living here and I, I got a
certain so, but what does the international reader.
So thinking of your reader, whatwas very important in that?
And I think that's a a key element of journalism.
You know, this needs to inform my reader.

(13:48):
It needs to give them the information they need,
particularly in business and such like about making decisions
or strategy, things like that. Do you think there's a
difference between some of theirmore pragmatic economic
commodities, business of the daystuff and in political
commentary? Oh yes, yeah, very much so.

(14:12):
You know, the political commentary comes with a, an
agenda from you, from the politics.
Well, from whoever's writing it right, You know, they, I mean,
to that point, I mean, in, in The Newsroom at the time, the,
IT was clear that Nikkei, you know, there's a national

(14:36):
self-interest in building this financial English language news
service. And it was to tell the story of
Japan. Remember, it's still Japan in
that period. You know, the whole story at the
time of Japan is back. You know, it's had this
phenomenal economic miracle of rebuilding itself from rubble

(15:00):
finding. And I think the the bubble
played a role in giving many Japanese people a sense of
identity again, you know, after the the war and what that did
psychologically was extremely difficult to come back from.
But the bubble played a role, inmy opinion, of giving back a

(15:24):
certain self-confidence because Japan was now, you know, the
world's second biggest economy. And at the time, like they're
doing with China today, they were predicting that Japan was
going to overtake the US. And so how did I put this?

(15:45):
I think as I say, it really helped Japan build again, a
self-confidence through what itseconomy did and the benefits it
gave to Japan's citizens. But into it, in my opinion, they
creeped a certain sort of arrogance, you know, which is

(16:06):
understandable when you think what the, I mean, it's, it's
difficult to understand what that the economy was like now.
But one anecdote I remember likethe sheer size of the Japan's
economy then I think it was in the Economist when the anecdote
was Nomura Securities, the investment bank at the time.

(16:32):
It's it's market value in Tokyo,it's stock value, it's valuation
on the Stock Exchange was biggerthan the entire Hong Kong Stock
Exchange. That's one company.
So you think of that now in a context of how Hong Kong rose,

(16:53):
China rose, it Japan was just, you know, it was just beyond
belief what it was doing. But to get to the point of
political commentary that it didmix together there of a certain
as I say, I would, I would term it a a pride, but I did an

(17:14):
arrogance started to creep in again of, you know, we are
Japan. Look what we have done.
And it's understandable. I think any country who would
respond the same way when, if, if you can, as I say, try and
get your head around just how big that the economy was then
and what Japan was doing, you know, and buying up all these

(17:37):
iconic properties in in the US and so on.
So there's a couple of things here.
So you mentioned on these cruiseships, the banned book Last Exit
to Brooklyn that you were reading.
So we've got this concept of censorship here.
The other piece you've got here is national arrogance at the
time from Japan, but now something we're seeing perhaps

(18:00):
coming from Communist China. And I think there's this
integration of that with journalism and storytelling as
well, is a really interesting place to talk about your
relationship with China. So, I mean, when, when did you
first visit China? Well, I, I don't remember the

(18:21):
date, but it was when the old airport was still on the island.
You'd fly in through those Caltech.
Caltech. Yeah.
Through the navigating the towerblocks.
So I don't remember the date. I I was in Japan, of course, at
the time. And I'd gone there just on a
visit. I'd never been before.

(18:42):
So I was struck by the vibrancy of the place.
That's Hong Kong. Hong Kong.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And but then I, I never went
back for many years because living in Tokyo, which was such
a like I say, humongous growing dynamic city, I didn't feel a

(19:04):
need on breaks or holidays to goto another big, you know,
heaving city. I know, like you mentioned
earlier, I, I was looking for the sea, you know, sea breaks
and holidays and such like. But then when I worked at
Bloomberg, I started visiting Hong Kong on reporting editing

(19:26):
trips. I had, you know, Bloomberg had
this like team system where you had a team of reporters across
the region covering a topic. So I had some reporters in China
and Hong Kong. So I'd go and visit reporting
trips for a week or 10 days, something like that.
And did the same in Beijing and Shanghai.

(19:48):
And also Dalian, because I was covering commodities at the time
and Dalian was the the emerging Commodity Exchange in China up
north, right. Yes, up north.
So this was would have been likewhat, the 90s or 2000?
Yeah, Yeah. So first time and then mainland
China would have been in the 90s.
Yeah, I think so, yes, it would have been.

(20:09):
That's interesting. So you've got this period of
time which I think a lot of Chinese people today are quite
nostalgic for, which is the. The opening up, the Din Jinping
era, I mean, what was your impression?
So I mean Hong Kong has 1 pace, but your impressions of the
mainland when you first went, what was that?
Well, again, it was very, very dynamic.

(20:29):
You know, literally everywhere you went, particularly in my
experience in Beijing, was just construction sites, You know,
everything was being pulled downand rebuilt.
There was quite a debate going on at the time about the old
neighborhoods and the that housing structure.
I can't remember. Hutongs.
Hutongs, yes, and wholesale destruction of those areas.

(20:52):
And, you know, Chinese reportersI was working with then, you
know, would explain to me how it's, you know, it's generating
a lot of controversy. But, you know, the Communist
Party was ruling the roost, so they just did what they did.
Yeah. Well, it's interesting though.

(21:13):
You mentioned you had these reporters.
You're working with your teams over there.
I mean, how did that change overthe years, though?
Because compared to today especially, it's I, I wasn't
with Bloomberg right through theperiod where we saw the rise of
Xi Jinping. I mean, I was for a part part of

(21:36):
it. So my reporting and editing
experience during that time was very much as you said that
things shall ping period and theopening up and the, you know,
the the astounding growth. And again, to try and illustrate
that it was a it was an anecdote.

(21:56):
I think it came from Goldman Sachs at the time where they
wrote this research report and titled it The Missing Barrels,
and they were referring to oil. And as I was covering
commodities, oil was a big part of the story, of course.

(22:16):
So it wasn't really being seen clearly just how big and fast
the growth of China's economy was, was happening.
And they were sucking in humongous amounts of oil and
causing these shortages elsewhere.
And again, China was, you know, it's not a, you don't have a

(22:38):
Free Press, you don't have that Freedom of Information and, and
such like. So the world's investment banks
and oil traders are going to figure out what's what's going
on, you know, and then Goldman Sachs finally figured it out and
called it the missing barrels. And it's like China was just
sucking up all the world's oil at the time.

(22:59):
And and so the growth was just phenomenal.
And that's very much what I saw.There was only one occasion on a
reporting trip when we'd arranged to meet a business
official and we went to his office and he suddenly
cancelled. He just, we, we wanted to

(23:19):
discuss something related to commodity.
I don't quite recall exactly, itmay have been oil and he was
involved in that. But then when we sat down with
him, he suddenly got very nervous and basically cancel the
interview so that he walked out on you.
He just said I'm not talking, thank you.

(23:39):
And that was it. So that was my only real taste
of, oh, something's happened here that's weird and he's not
telling and he wasn't, it seemedclear to me at the time it
wasn't just a commercial decision.
He, he felt worried, he felt scared so he wouldn't talk.

(24:00):
But then in the latter period when I as Xi Jinping rose and
eliminated all of his rivals andhis so-called anti corruption
campaigns, there were companies that we did cover who suddenly
the the CEO disappeared again. It was one of the big oil

(24:24):
companies is a Sinopec. I think it was Sinopec.
They had different names at thattime because but because this
was before pre listings, they were state owned monoliths.
And yeah, I think it was a sign of pic CEO.
One day he showed up at the office and the the secret police

(24:46):
walked in and just marched them out and that was it.
And it was like what you know, our shock and this was a company
we were closely covering. So began to see that emerging in
China. But my real sort of introduction
to what was going on there was when I went to work at the South

(25:09):
China Morning Post. And by then, of course, Xi
Jinping had solidified his power, removed so many of the
potential obstacles and rivals and had cracked down across the
country in so many ways. So it it changed the the, the

(25:32):
Deng Xiaoping sort of period sort of petered out as it were,
as, as he installed himself and as I say, solidified his power.
Yeah. Well, there was a press
conference you gave a couple of years ago here at the Foreign
Correspondents Club of Japan talking about at your time at

(25:52):
the South China Morning Post. And you mentioned a piece of
investigative reporting that youhad done while you were at the
South China Morning Post on Xinjiang and how that piece got
killed by the editors. And it sort of came out in this
press conference. It didn't seem to me as if that
was the original intention of the press conference, but it got

(26:12):
picked up that you had done thispiece that had got spiked by the
editors. Can you tell me a little bit
about the background today, actually, Sure.
So I was on the desk, the China desk in Hong Kong.
There were reporters in China, of course, throughout the
country and reporters in Hong Kong.

(26:33):
And the Xinjiang story broke that there was, I mean, well,
prior to that there had been theriots in Xinjiang, kind of
number of people were killed in those riots, Han Chinese.
So there was a crackdown. The Communist Party flew in a

(26:54):
new leader to lead that crackdown.
And he'd had his prior experience, if my memory serves
me, in Tibet. So he was accustomed to that
kind of a problem as they saw it.
So because the Uyghur people arepredominantly Muslim, the

(27:18):
problem was characterized in China as a Muslim or Islamist
terror problem. And it was then sort of
identified with what the US had faced in attacks on the World
Trade Centres. And then it's it's military

(27:39):
invasion that followed in the Middle East that it was framed
in that way that China was facing this this growing
Islamist threat. So the crackdown took place and
then it started to the news started to filter out.
I mean, I forget who broke it initially of the internment

(28:04):
camps that have been built and thousands and thousands of
Uyghurs had been arrested and put in the internment camps.
So once that broke, China went into, you know, PR mode that,
you know, they're not internmentcamps, they're just retraining
centres. We need to re educate these

(28:24):
people for their livelihoods andjobs and so on and so forth.
But the problem wouldn't go awaybecause the news media in the
West kept talking about it. And there was a particular, a
German analyst, he wrote a number of reports where he had a

(28:45):
small staff of, of Chinese speaking individuals.
And they started digging into all kinds of local websites and
information and what have you inChina, in Chinese, and started
pulling out this data and presented these reports that

(29:07):
there was there was a a clear directed campaign to suppress
the Uyghur people. And he then started to use the
word it was genocidal, what was taking place.
So one of the angles in that wasthat under the UN rules on

(29:29):
genocide, there is a section on targeting a particular ethnic
group or a group of some kind through inhibit or imposing
birth control policies. And by that way, the idea you

(29:50):
reduce the population by basically curtailing births and
you do it by sterilizing women on various other means.
So 1 of this chief editor of theSouth China Morning Post was
getting increasingly irritated by these stories on Xinjiang, by

(30:12):
the, as he said, the Western press and his view was the
Western press don't really understand China.
They just, you know, they just don't understand what's going
on. So I said to him, because the
Xinjiang story at the time was huge, was everywhere, pictures
of internment camps and so on. And some Uyghurs who had gotten

(30:36):
out Speaking of women, Speaking of rape, and, you know, people
just disappearing, family members never seeing each other
again, not knowing where they were.
So I said to him, well, we have the reporting resources to be

(31:00):
able to do this story ourselves.And the the German analyst has
cited so many of these websites and Chinese government
organisations with this information.
So why don't we go in and reportthe story ourself and then write

(31:21):
what we find, you know, based onyour, your criticism of, of
their reporting. So he kind, he agreed to it,
sort of he didn't stop me. So I had a small group of
reporters I was working with managing.

(31:41):
And so I explained the story idea to them.
And so off they went and starteddoing all the reporting and
digging into these websites and looking and, and particularly at
health ministry websites, both national and on all these
regional levels. So they spent about 3 months on

(32:03):
this. There's an enormous amount of
digging. And the conclusion we came out
with, I mean, we had no, there'sno smoking gun as it were, of
yes, this is genocide. No, we didn't arrive at that
conclusion, but we did find thisinformation that showed there

(32:23):
was a targeted campaign against Uyghur women to force birth
control methods upon them and other means to reduce the
population of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
So the story by this stage was eventually split up into three

(32:47):
pieces. It was going to be a series
because besides doing all that research into the data itself on
the Uighur people, birth controlpolicies, health policies,
things that had been said by Chinese officials.
We then took the next element ofthe story was to go to

(33:11):
international legal, legal scholars, specialists in
genocide and ask them, show themthe data.
And they also came out with, youknow, conflicting views about
it. Some saying, yes, this is
definitely a falls on the UN genocidal categories, whereas

(33:34):
another scholar said, no, I don't think so.
So again, very mixed or it oughtto be discussed though, right,
in the public's sphere. Yeah.
Well, the whole point is to bring it out and to show based
on the data and what people havesaid.
And then the third part of the series was to look at China's

(33:55):
kind of history with Xinjiang and, and going way back to
moving battalions of troops intothe region, bringing the
emigration of Han Chinese into the, the region, which of course
caused a lot of the tensions between, on the, on the ground

(34:17):
level between Uyghurs and Han Chinese.
So when I presented the story tothe editor, he, he was just
newsrooms, you call it the deathby 1000 cuts, you know, just
finding something that, oh, that's not quite right.
That part or this fact, we need to double check.

(34:38):
And so we started doing all thatand standing it up according to
his commentary. But then we had numerous
conference calls on it. And when he would raise
objections to various sections of the of the story or

(34:59):
questioning facts, the reportershad spent so much time digging
into this, they could answer them.
They had it all at their fingertips with every point.
And basically, I think it becameincreasingly embarrassing for
him for the to go on these callswith the reporters showing him
that. And he was trying to slow it
down. But yeah, yeah, it was like that

(35:22):
process of 1000, you know, cuts,you just and you had already
done these three pieces. It was all.
Yeah, it was all done and ready to go.
OK, so this got you thinking, because just coming back to this
genocide question, which as you say, there wasn't necessarily a
smoking gun, but you were putting this data out there and
it sounds like doing really important work, taking stuff

(35:43):
that was maybe in Chinese might be it was hard to find.
You were sort of bringing that together for the public to
consume to provide an outlook. But you did mention in this
press conference, you did the role of Iuds and these birth
control devices that are placed in the uterus of a woman.
And maybe can you tell me a little bit there's something

(36:04):
quite pernicious about this, this technology and, and sort of
the way maybe doctors are required to remove it.
Is that a correct understanding or not quite it was that in you
think of it in the context of China itself.
And it's, it's a one child policy, which was slowly lifted

(36:25):
and lifted and then finally removed.
So across China, the, it's it seemed from the data we could
find, IU D's inter inter nutrient devices were the prime
or one of the prime means for birth control.
So as China lifted its birth control restrictions and the one

(36:51):
child policy and so on, the sales of IU D's across China
fell off a Cliff. And that data was there from the
Health Ministry. And you could see that right
across China, sales of these devices, uses of these devices
collapsed I think is an appropriate word.

(37:15):
But there was one region where it didn't happen and that was
Xinjiang. So it seems that and and again,
finding a smoking gun, as it were, of a direct sort of order
to impose these birth control policies on Uyghur women.

(37:38):
It's clouded as to where that came from.
You know, it filters through it's a policy that is.
But the the data showed that while right across China that
the use of Iuds was it was slumping in Xinjiang, it was
actually growing. I see.
So it pointed in to, well, what,what does that mean?

(38:02):
Well, what what's also interesting here is this this
piece of investigative journalism could have perhaps
prompted the next person to comealong.
Or maybe there's some internal people with some whistleblowers.
Maybe there's more information if if it had been published
would have been forthcoming. I had to expand upon it.
And this is obviously what journalism does is it starts

(38:22):
pulling on the thread, right? But in the end, the piece death
by 1000 cuts, it never made it into the South China Morning
Post, right? And has anyone else tried to
pick this up that you know of anyone else gone and
investigated this? Well, various, like I mentioned
again, this German analyst, Zens, his name is Zens.

(38:46):
And, and Zens makes it very clear in, in his work and the
policy groups he works for, He'sa he's, he's an anti communist.
He's very clear about that. But he, you know, he, he does
his data research. So, so it was out there that
this information, we just did our particular piece of the

(39:08):
puzzle in trying to pull it together in, you know, this
format of looking at it from these three different angles in
the in the series. And but yeah, because the South
China Morning Post has intellectual copyright on that.
We were all working for them when, you know, it's never been

(39:30):
published. In fact, when I spoke about it
at the press conference, you mentioned I'd never I'd never
said anything publicly about it before.
But because I was asked to talk there with Michael about what
did we experience? First of all, Michael, of
course, was in the mainland. So this is Michael Smith.
Michael Smith, Australian journalist.

(39:51):
Yeah. And I was in Hong Kong when the
national security law was imposed.
We were talking generally about what we saw and what happened,
you know, personal sort of anecdotes.
But the when I was in the middleof it, then I just think, well,
I I should really tell say what happened to this story as an

(40:11):
example of how. A newspaper in Hong Kong would
not deal with this issue. I mean, to this day, the the the
managing executive managing editor argues that the story
wasn't ready. That's why he, you know, didn't
publish it. It didn't meet our standards.
I think was what he said to the media that followed up with them

(40:34):
as to why didn't you publish? But like I said, he we were
ready on we had you've got, you know, decades of experience.
Did you think it was ready? Oh, yeah, Yeah, it was
definitely ready. But it was uncomfortable.
And it was interesting because you had this press conference
again, this was you and yourselfand Michael Smith talking about
reporting from on China, from within Hong Kong, from within

(40:58):
China. And yet I understand that almost
immediately you received a letter from the South China
Morning Post about their comments.
Is that correct? Well, what happened is the, when
the press conference was done, obviously it went up on the FCC
JS website, the press club's website.
So there's a new, a little independent news organization in

(41:23):
Hong Kong called the Hong Kong Free Press, Very small, but
they're, they're doing their work.
And they, I think someone in Hong Kong told them about at
this press conference and what was said about this story.
So they called the South China Morning Post and asked them

(41:44):
about it. Did Hong Kong press talk to you
first or Yes, they did. They wanted to verify, you know,
what I'd said. And I explained to them again
the structure of the story, the work that was done and so on.
I showed them a copy of the story, but only under the

(42:07):
agreement that they could not share it with anyone else again
because of copyright issues. You basically got a gag order on
you on it. Seems like copyright, though, in
a case like this, there is fair use for showing it to somebody.
Maybe not. Just not for publishing it.
Right. I mean, copy seems to sit
further down the list of priorities.

(42:28):
Yeah, I I couldn't publicly publish it, of course.
Yeah. But for the purpose of a
journalism organization wishing to verify the things I'd said, I
showed it to them. But then Hong Kong Free Press
mentioned in their story that they had seen a copy of the

(42:48):
story and, and so on and verified certain aspects of it.
So then the South China Morning Post or their lawyers sent me a
letter warning that I would, youknow, would be sued or they, you
know, they're planning to sue me.
No. And then I, the letter they sent

(43:09):
me planning to sue me, I sent that to the Hong Kong, the Hong
Kong Free Press too. So then they published that.
And so that further irritated the South China Morning Post.
So they sent me another letter warning again that I face
prosecution for maybe extradition.
Yeah, well, I do have still friends in Hong Kong who said to

(43:33):
me, it's probably better not to come back to Hong Kong.
We love you, but please don't come back.
That's interesting. And I mean, just talking a
little bit about the South ChinaMorning Post.
So they are in this interesting space where they are owned by
Alibaba, which is a major Chinese corporation.
I mean, how would you describe their position?
Do they have access within Chinathat maybe other media wouldn't

(43:56):
be able to get? Yes, they do.
They, you know, they're, they'rea long standing publication and,
and you know, well respected and, and they have reporters
throughout China. When COVID broke, for example,
the South China Morning Post sent in, I think it was 4

(44:21):
reporters into Wuhan within a day or so of the news breaking.
I'm not sure if you remember howit happened, but there was a
group of doctors with a WeChat closed group and they were
saying about all these odd pneumonia cases they were
getting coming into the hospitals across Wuhan and they

(44:41):
were sharing it amongst themselves and sharing
information as doctors. But then that leaked from that
closed group and it then got onto WeChat and went viral, as
we say. But the story was SARS is back,
it's broken out again in Wuhan. And then the local authorities

(45:06):
were forced to put out a statement confirming that
there'd been unusual cases, sorry, a, a large number of
cases of what was termed unusualcases of pneumonia across the
city. And so the South China Morning
Post sent 3-4 reporters straightinto Wuhan, literally, I think

(45:33):
it was within 48 hours of that official announcement going out.
And they wandered all over the city.
They went to the market. They'd already shut it down.
The market where the story was, the virus that emerged from an
animal in the market. They went to hospitals.

(45:53):
They, you know, interviewed people.
So there was some good journalism taking place here.
Oh, absolutely. A journalist organization, for
whatever reasons, takes these kind of positions where the
pressure from the government or owners or whatever, you know,
the journalists on the ground, you're still dealing with, with
people. I mean, there's great
journalists at the South China Morning Post.

(46:13):
The people I worked with were wonderful.
I mean, they were fairly young, but really enthusiastic and, and
committed. They've all gone on.
I mean, the, the group I worked with on that particular story
all quit after it. It was, you know, it was not
published. But they've all gone on to, you

(46:35):
know, work at Bloomberg, Reuters, other places.
Well, it's quite telling, though, that they were
principled enough to resign whenfaced with this journalistic
integrity question of why didn'tthis get published?
Yeah. I mean, you lived as well,
right? Yeah.
Not long after. Yeah.
Yeah. I think it was if, if that story

(46:57):
and the refusal to publish it, it may have just been a tipping
point for some people because we'd already had in, you know,
the well, there's one particularincident where when Apple Daily
was shut down and Jimmy Lai was arrested and the owner and there

(47:21):
were images across Hong Kong on TV and what have you of armed
police marching into the Apple Daily newsroom, arresting
journalists, confiscating computers and so on.
And some of those journalists are still in detention today.
So the staff of the South China Morning Post demanded a

(47:44):
conference call with the leadership.
Just what what does this mean? And this is Apple Daily.
This is was one of the largest daily newspapers in Hong Kong,
quite openly critical of the Communist Party.
Oh, yeah. And a very wide readership,
right? Yeah.
Yeah. It was a very well known paper.

(48:06):
And again, yes, as you say, theywere.
Jimmy Lai is a staunch believer in a Free Press, freedom of
association, you know, democratic political systems and
so on. And he made it clear through his
his newspaper. Anyway, there was a conference
call to South China Morning Postafter this, because the obvious

(48:28):
question is, oh, are we next? You know, oh, I'm a foreign
journalist here. Have I written something that
through the national security law, they'll now find a way of
bringing me in for questioning. And, you know, what does all
that mean? So very, very concerned people

(48:50):
on that call, particularly therewas, there were journalists
there who were New Zealanders, Australians, etcetera, but of
Chinese ethnicity. And we know from the behaviour
of the Communist Party in China before that, if they decide to

(49:11):
go after you in China, even though you've got an Australian
passport, it doesn't matter, youknow, they'll see you as Chinese
and therefore they have the authority to do what they what
they like. So those other, the people of
that in that situation were obviously very concerned.
So, and some of these people have been writing about the

(49:33):
mainland. Well, and these are also very
valuable people because often they will be speaking Chinese or
Cantonese. They have maybe a little bit
more of a cultural insight. So the example that comes to
mind, which you mentioned in this press, Michael Smith,
sorry, mentioned in this press conference a few years ago was
the Australian Chinese journalist Cheng Lai, who she
was jailed for four years. She's only just gotten out this

(49:55):
year over some charges of espionage and she's managed to
get out. She's got back, she had two
little kids. So she's managed to get back to
Australia. But there's basically a text
message I think was the the cruxof it and not much substance for
it at all yet holed up in prisonfor four years because of that.
And effectively she, I mean, sheis an Australian.

(50:17):
Yeah, citizen. And they were able to do that.
Yeah. So I can understand the risk
there to being put in prison over something like that.
Yeah. Well, there's another similar
case, well similar in the journalist detained is a
journalist I worked with in HongKong called Hong Kong at the

(50:39):
South China Morning Post, calledMini Chan and Mini covered the
aerospace industry and defence issues and so on.
And as you can imagine, that's kind of an area that strays into
like National Defence, National Defence, military, whatever.

(51:00):
So after I'd left the South China Morning Post, Minnie went
to one of the main conferences in China on defence issues and
so on, which she'd covered before.
And when the when the event finished, Minnie never came

(51:22):
back. So this was actually this,
that's two years ago this month.She never came back.
So friends of hers on social media started asking has anyone
seen me and asking her family and such like.

(51:43):
And no one seemed to know. So it it then people put two and
two together and that she's beenarrested somewhere.
She's disappeared in China. The South China Morning Post
when it was asked about this because the media then got a
hold of it. One of your reporters has
disappeared in China. You sent her there to cover this

(52:03):
conference. What happened?
And they came out with a statement.
I mean, I haven't seen it myself.
But what I've read of it is thatit, it, it, it's a personal
family matter. And Minnie's family in Hong Kong
have asked that we respect theirprivacy.

(52:23):
You know, So clearly she's been brought, she's been detained for
some reason. There's a journalist I know who
thinks that what may have happened is because many had
sources in aerospace defence andwhat have you, Xi Jinping was
running a whole various bunch ofcrackdowns on the military.

(52:46):
And there's all kinds of leadingmilitary officials, right,
who've been removed for corruption or whatever is the,
you know, usually it's corruption.
So one view is that one of her sources may have been somebody
linked to one of these individuals.
And as they were brought down intheir own cabal, she may have

(53:07):
been identified as someone who'sbeen, you know, they've been
leaking information to her, something this is pure
speculation. No one knows.
But she disappeared two years ago and, you know, that's what
they do. Well, this is interesting
because I guess again, zooming out, looking at this question of

(53:30):
the media, the role of the media, and then obviously what's
happening with China, It seems like a lot of people are
certainly around me, you know, beginning to think, especially
as the United States seems to behaving its own issues.
Oh, well, you know, look at the way China's doing things.
They get things done, build a bridge, they can build a high
speed train that, you know, there's this kind of enamouring

(53:52):
of enamourment with China. And what's often not talked
about is, of course, these things that we've just
mentioned. You know, there's no, no freedom
of the press. You really have to self censor.
You have to be very careful. People can disappear.
And it's has an incredible chilling effect.
Absolutely. And I mean, I'm really

(54:15):
interested, Peter, and sort of at a high level, though, how do
we begin to interpret this? Because there is, as we saw
maybe with Japan in the 1980s, there is a huge amount of
arrogance around that the world can't make.
And so they see themselves in a sense as the factory of the
world. I mean, how would you relate
that maybe especially given yourexperience here in Japan in the
80s, that's sort of hubris. Yeah.

(54:38):
Well, if I could just go back tothe earlier question.
I don't think I've finished the thought on after Jimmy Lai was
Apple Daily was shut down and wehad the conference call in the
South Channel Morning Post. And so the staff were obviously
very concerned as I mentioned, particularly those of Chinese

(54:59):
origin, So the the executive editor.
Started the call. By saying I've never liked the
Apple Daily and the Apple Daily was just a, you know, ragtag
kind of publication. I mean, it's true the Apple

(55:21):
Daily used to do a lot of celebrity gossip, scandal stuff,
you know, sells newspapers. Lloyd.
Yeah. But he spent the first part of
the the call all about how the Apple Daily was a reprehensible
publication and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, which stunned me

(55:44):
when people are concerned about their, you know, their not in
their livelihood, but their personal freedom and their
family, their children and so on.
So he clearly wasn't ready to address those concerns or deal
with them. And then people asked a couple
of questions along the lines of,well, what would the.

(56:09):
South China Morning. Post do etcetera and it was it
basically waffled around it and it was very revealing conference
call. I eventually asked the editor in
chief, you, you, you know, the custom in China when the
officials, when the, the government or whoever is upset

(56:31):
with you for whatever reason, the foreign ministry in
particular will in in mainland China will call in somebody for
what is euphemistically called acup of tea.
Right? Where they're given in some
form. Like it's the, you know, the
steel hand in the velvet glove kind of talk about, however,

(56:54):
anyway that you're given some kind of guidance that the
government's not happy about this or whatever.
So I asked the editor in chief, have you been called in for a
cup of tea, you know, since the national security laws been
imposed? And she maintained, no, you
know, that no, that hasn't happened.

(57:16):
And in fact, she said many of because again, there was an
influx of Chinese officials because they were taking back
control. And and she said these officials
had often been wanting to talk because they wanted to
understand Hong Kong, as she putit.
And you're saying that these officials came into Hong Kong,
into South China wine press officers?

(57:37):
No, no, no, they in Hong Kong itself, as the national security
was imposed, there was a huge influx of Chinese officials
coming in because they had a, the central government, the
mainland government had a, a very big office anyway in Hong
Kong, you know, where they were guiding things.

(58:02):
So there was just more and more of these people came in and and
of course, this was also still during the time of the the
protests and, you know, COVID came later.
So it was just a very odd commentary to be making when in

(58:24):
a publication has been shut down, editors, journalists,
writers have been arrested. They're in detention.
No one knows what's going to happen to them.
And your first comment is I never liked the Apple Daily.
You know, it's just weird, very weird.
There was no sort of sense of solidarity with cold.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, it was very much just

(58:49):
cut the whole thing off, you know, effectively, I don't care
what's the tone of it. I mean, yeah, it was just, it
was just weird. So that was one of the factors
again, where I I spoke about forthe for myself and the reporters
I worked with. Maybe that story was a tipping

(59:11):
point, the refusal to publish iton Xinjiang.
But there was lots of other signs.
When people were leaving, journalists were just quietly
quitting. A lot of people left.
Hong Kong of. Course.
Yeah, so. Well, this reminds me of an
analogy that you've mentioned tome before around the Anaconda in
the chandelier, Yes, which is anidea from a book by American

(59:36):
scholar Perry Link. And if I may read a piece here,
the Communist Party's sensorial authority in recent times has
resembled not so much a man eating tiger or fire snorting
dragon as a giant Anaconda coiled in an overhead
chandelier. Normally the great snake doesn't
move. It doesn't have to.

(59:58):
It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions.
It's constant silent message is you yourself decide.
After which more often than not,everyone in its shadow makes his
or her large and small adjustments, all quite
naturally. And that is particularly true in
The Newsroom. Because I, I experienced it

(01:00:20):
myself that you, you start to the, the Anaconda works because
you start to self censor yourself.
You know, you, you begin to think, well, that story, you're
thinking of a story, something that's happened or you want to
follow up on something. You just know, well, that's not

(01:00:41):
going to fly. They won't, they won't touch
this one. So you then are sort of
thinking, well, is there a way that I can re angle this story
or repackage it in some way? But then you, yeah, you the
Anaconda's just hissing, you know, and you're just, you're
retracting. Yeah, don't.
Do that story. Well, it's interesting as well

(01:01:02):
because it's because you don't know, you don't know how far you
can push things. And you know, I've even thought
about myself, you know, some of the conversations I've had, some
of the people I've met, you know, at what point does do you
step over the line? And the fact is you don't know
where the line is or if anyone even cares.
And in a sense you then start tojust self censored depending on

(01:01:25):
how vulnerable you may be. And it's just, it's a really
messy Gray zone. Yes.
And you know, maybe when you're reporting on things a little bit
more practical, again, the business side, you know, what's
happening in the markets, there's there's maybe a degree
of freedom there. We still see some kind of more
business press operating in China.
But any kinds of questions of the political side, which often

(01:01:47):
does have a connection back to business sure becomes very
dangerous. And so you almost don't even
know what's going on anymore. And so you have this that is
almost like 2 Chinas the one that's actually out and that's
happening. And then the way it's been
reported about, which doesn't lead to any clarity for anybody,
I don't think. Yeah, yeah, that's the way it

(01:02:08):
works. Self censorship takes place.
That's that's what they achieve.They they just need to do 1
Apple Daily, very visual public armed police journalist, you in
the van, gone, you under arrest,gone.
And then that's it. It retreats to its chandelier as
the, I mean, again, it's the classic panopticon concept as

(01:02:32):
well. You don't know if you're being
watched or not. You know, the, the WeChat
messages, you never know really.Is it, has it gone through or
has it been picked up? And I'm in a in a database now.
I guess people by default are going to assume, yes, I'm being
watched. And so they're going to change
their actions accordingly, just as if they're under that

(01:02:53):
chandelier with the snake hanging over them.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's authoritarian
governments, not necessarily communist, function the same
way, right? I mean, I spent a number of
years in Singapore and, you know, which was basically run by
the Lee Kuan. Yew Family.
For, you know, since independence and I, when I first

(01:03:15):
got there, I, I took the, a bunch of reporters out for
drinks and we sat down at the, the table and there was about
1010 people there, local reporters and an editor.

(01:03:35):
And so I said, well, it was likea wine bar place.
And so ordered some drinks and aglass of wine.
We went round the table and it was sort of orange juice,
Coca-Cola, mineral water, Coca-Cola, orange juice.
You know which I thought, MMM, this kind of not what you'd
normally see with a bunch of journalists.

(01:03:55):
You know, people typically drinknothing wrong with it, but it
just struck me everyone's on soft drinks.
And then the atmosphere got verysort of stiff and awkward.
You know those when you're in a,a group setting and it's just
very, something's very awkward in the air.

(01:04:17):
No one is talking or someone tries to make conversation and
it just dies and his deafening silence comes back.
It was like that. And so I tried to sort of shake
things up. I said to everyone, oh, can you
tell me what's it like growing up in a, a semi fascist state?

(01:04:42):
I mean, I was just being, you know, annoying to try and get
someone to fuck. Yeah, say something like tell me
I don't know what I'm talking about, I'm stupid or whatever.
But it gets something going because I was at a table with a
bunch of journalists and it wentdown like a lead balloon and it
was just boom and like stunned silence.

(01:05:06):
And then just one by one had a sip or I'm sorry, I have to go
and everyone just left. And I, I thought, well, that was
a bit not not really a success that evening in team building.
So, so I asked a, a Singaporean journalist, a more experienced

(01:05:31):
journalist. I told her about what happened.
She was a very good journalist. This person again, it's not to
decry Singaporean journalist. I'm talking about what a system
can do in terms of how people relate and think and
communicate. And she told me right off.
She laughed when I I told her what I said.

(01:05:54):
She thought it was hilarious. But she said you're in a public
setting. And so Singaporeans in public
settings won't get vocal of criticism of the government
because she looked at me. They don't know who is
listening, who's at that table, who's at that table.

(01:06:16):
So they just decided the appropriate thing here was to
leave because we've got this nutcase who's just flown in and
he's, he's criticizing the government already, you know, so
making fun or whatever. And so that kind of also is an
example of how it functions. Well, totalitarian states, they,

(01:06:37):
they can't do humour. Yeah, fundamentally, yeah.
In my, again, my early days in Singapore, I, I made some Monty
Python reference to a couple of Singaporean journalists.
Oh, that's just like Monty Python, isn't it?
And they looked at me like blank.
No idea what Monty Python is because it's never been allowed

(01:06:58):
to be broadcast in Hong Kong, inSingapore.
So I was told. So there's all kinds of cultural
disconnects like that. You just because they're, you
know, the point of our humor. I mean, Monty Python sent up
everybody, right? They just took the piss out of
whoever they thought for the point of let's laugh at it and

(01:07:21):
see what's there. Yeah.
Well, well, I mean, those are the two sort of critical roles,
journalism and in comic. Yeah.
Yeah. But what I was just going to say
before again, Australian Chinesejournalist Cheng Lai, jailed for
four years over charges of espionage.
She she said that the communist part of China is insecure.
It needs to crush dissent. It needs to crush those voices

(01:07:44):
that start asking questions, even if it is quite a ridiculous
situation that it, you know, maybe someone just said
something, made a comment on social media and the police are
on their way. And then of course that's going
to have a chilling effect. And I mean, I'm not sure what
the situation is, but certainly I don't imagine there's comedy

(01:08:05):
taking place as critical of the Chinese state within China in
the way we see in somewhere likethe US or the UK.
It may be arguably increasingly less than the UK, but it's sort
of what happens when you can't have those conversations.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, it's interesting you mentioned that with comedy,
because that's what as as you point out there, it's also been

(01:08:26):
attacked now, particularly in the sort of, you know, the woke
phenomena that comedians, you know, challenging the status quo
or making fun of it and the woke, which in my opinion is,
is. Originates out.
Of Marxist Leninist thought, basically everyone's either an

(01:08:48):
oppressor or oppressed. You know, it's just they've,
they've switched the narrative from the economic model of the,
the, you know, the worker oppressed by the capitalist cult
class to every, everything is oppressor or oppressed.
You know, it's, it's a classic Marxist dialectic, right?

(01:09:09):
It's a mind virus. Yeah, you know, because there's
no place to resolve that. You can't either sort of or
without obviously killing everybody in the in the
concentration camps. But you know that there's no
equilibrium. There's no liberal framework
through which you can resolve that dispute.
Yeah. And yeah.
And you know, comedians just cutright through it, right?

(01:09:30):
They just. And that's why they got all
those people we saw cancel. I mean, and to the point,
though, the recent moment that Jimmy Kimmel is is on the other
side of that fence, right? If you got the left with left
wokeness associated with left and extreme left kind of

(01:09:50):
thinking, But it it can go the other way too.
So just, yeah, it just struck mewhen you said that just how
important comedy is, you know, to social society.
And because we need to, you know, poke fun at ourselves.
Well, it's it's it's civil society, right.

(01:10:11):
And this is again, what is underattack in Hong Kong, under
siege, not only these bookstoresand these associations and book
clubs and these kind of grandma and grandpa kind of
organisations actually deciding to dissolve, you know, these
book clubs and things. And then I imagine comedy,

(01:10:32):
things like this as well kind offit into these these organs of a
functioning civil society being able to have a laugh.
And I mean, I even think back tomy own country of New Zealand,
you know, regularly politicians are made fun of.
You know, it's, it's kind of an ongoing game.
That's what they're there for. You know, that's sort of whether

(01:10:53):
it's caricatures or or or or or commentary on TV, you know, it's
like that's part of the deal. And when you can't do that, you
have an inflation of the ego andthis kind of emergence of an
emperor like Xi Jinping, untouchable.
And if you do dispute him, you know, there goes your head,

(01:11:14):
yeah, even to, you know, the thecaricatures of him as Winnie the
Pooh, You know, it's just bannedeverywhere in China.
You can't do that. Yeah, a census will take it to
any images of Winnie the Pooh. So, So what I'm, I'm curious
about sheets of white blank paper, you know, and yeah, with
the, the Shanghai COVID protests, right?
Yeah. Or what?
I'm curious, Peter, just, I mean, trying to bring this

(01:11:36):
together though this, you know, and certainly your, your career,
you, you, you encountered these challenges, especially with this
Xinjiang piece. I mean, where to from here?
Because as you say, though, there's still journalists doing
good work in these organizations, yet in a lot of
cases, there's capture on the organization itself.
I mean, where do we go from herewith the media?

(01:11:58):
Well, I think where we're going is where.
We're going. In that even you know, the work
like what you you're doing and so many others in YouTube and
this diversified media. I mean the Internet came along
and broke the model, right? The monolithic model of these
news organisations. So I think that is where.

(01:12:22):
It's where it's going. Because now there's so many more
voices and opinions and you know, settings where instead of
you're struggling with, you know, a 5 second sound bite,
whatever, people sit down and really discuss things.

(01:12:43):
So some of the most interesting stuff I've, you know.
Read. Seen as in the recent years it
has been on YouTube like where topics are really taken to task
and pulled apart and looked at and you need to sit down and
listen to it other than this, you know, it's like TV news now

(01:13:08):
I, I, I just can't watch it. Well, there's, there's also a
kind of hive mind where quite talented people, you know,
because a couple of people working on this Xinjiang piece,
that's also possible. Just a couple of friends working
together on a piece as like freelance, not even freelance,
just hobbyists are able to like pinpoint things pretty quickly.
The Internet can do some pretty amazing stuff like that, You

(01:13:30):
know, you get some people with abit of free time on their hands
and they can track things down, you know, So it seems like
there's, there's some possibilities there with
independent media. Absolutely.
And that. But at the same time, I mean, we
are seeing maybe people's attention spans.
You know, we're talking at the beginning about tailoring your

(01:13:52):
writing for your audience and making it consumable for an
audience. Yet what does that mean when you
have an audience who can't even read, if we're honest, who can't
watch anything more than 5 seconds?
You know what? How do you make something that
talks to that person? You mean because of the the use
of just scrolling on screens now?
Yeah, I don't know, maybe it hasto be become more visual in a

(01:14:18):
way, maybe more funny, a bit of comedy perhaps.
Yeah, more, more comedy. Yeah.
I don't know. I there's so much that I think
every generation goes through this of.
I remember growing up and, you know, TV, I mean, I was old

(01:14:39):
enough to remember black and white TV's and then advertisings
and people sitting around watching TV and then horrified
social commentators saying, you know, this is the death of
conversation. You know, these TV things are
evil. Our brains are melting before
them. And you know which, to a certain

(01:15:01):
extent, yeah, there was a truth in that.
But still, it was a medium. And again, it's how you use it.
So and it just I don't know, thetrain just keeps rolling.
I don't know where it's going orwhat the answer is to to this or
if there is needs to be 1, but clearly there's well, OK.
Having said that, the thing thatdoes concern me is a lack of

(01:15:24):
understanding of history, I think.
And again, going back to story writing context and knowing
where you're your civilization as it was come from and you have
the doomsayers like as I mentioned there, the social
critics at the time saying TV would be the the death of

(01:15:49):
everything. Well, was.
It don't think so. There's good stuff.
It's serves a very valuable purpose when it's used in
constructive forms. I mean by the literary, art,
culture, fact based even, you know, informing us about our

(01:16:12):
history because the the lack of the sense of, of history of
where we've come from and what your, your, your civilisation
is, is built upon. We take so much for granted,
right? Freedom of speech.
You know which. It's just, yeah, it's like the

(01:16:34):
air. It's.
It's here. We, we grew up with it.
It's the way things are, right? Well, no, it isn't.
You know, it was murderous wars.Hundreds of you know, millions
and millions of people lost their lives in wars fighting to

(01:16:55):
establish. These.
Kinds of norms like the overthrow of aristocracies.
Just looking at Europe, you know, the 100 years war, the 30
years war and then First World War, Second World War.
Not. Not only.

(01:17:16):
In that history. Breaking the control of
aristocracies and kings and Queens and what have you, but
breaking the control of the the Catholic Church and the.
It's just unbelievable to think what people did to achieve that.

(01:17:39):
Yeah, well, there's a liberal project.
I mean, it's a an incredible development over thousands of
years to get to a point where wehave a mechanism of liberal
democracy through which disputescan be resolved, conversations
can be had, and there's like a self reflection possible as
well. And when you start talking about

(01:17:59):
censorship and you start talkingabout hate speech or free speech
and these ideas, you, you, you start regressing to the point
where you can get to a place where actually the punishment
outweighs the benefit. And so people shut up and you
lose all of those benefits. And you, you go down a couple of
notches back towards something like what we see with Communist
China, where you can lose it allfor saying the wrong thing.

(01:18:24):
And that's just not a very nice pathway for a civilization to
take long term, you know? Yeah.
And I mean, and it always comes back to get you.
You can't run away from it. Yeah.
So that sense of, of where we'vecome from, come from and what
we've achieved. It's like, you know, the the

(01:18:46):
writer Douglas Murray has he's written books on, you know, the
strange death of Europe. And I've listened to him a lot
in dialogues where he touches a lot on on this kind of thing of
the how Europe, for example, gotto where it is.
Yes, there are very serious black stains on that history,

(01:19:11):
but out of it has also come these forms of liberal
democracy. If you like the flowering of the
arts of different periods and and music and it you know, it's
it's astounding that side of things.
So I found his arguments and writing is very compelling to

(01:19:36):
look at that rather than just trying, you know, throwing the
baby out of the dishwater because of colonialism.
You know, it's he makes very, very persuasive arguments to on
that front. So I think, yeah, the lack of an
understanding of our the contextof our history and how we got to
where we are is something that, well, I mean, the way the way I

(01:20:01):
would wrap all of that up is. Nuance is important, and this is
something we've inherited in NewZealand from the English
tradition, the ability to take acouple of different angles and
look at things with nuance consideration and to not
necessarily go for the black andthe white because that's always
the totalitarian way as you're in or you're out, you're good or

(01:20:22):
you're bad, you're oppressed or your oppressor.
Yeah. My final question for you,
Peter, before we wrap up, what'snext for you, man?
What are you working on? What are you looking forward to?
Well, I keep telling myself to stop talking about this, but
I'm, I'm writing a book or trying to and it's, it's proving
very, very difficult. There's a well known journalist

(01:20:45):
who's a member here, Robert Whiting, who, who you know,
who's written a lot about Japan.And Bob told me a story of an
American author who compared doing fiction as opposed to, you
know, fact based non fiction writing.

(01:21:06):
And I think he said it was John Updike.
I'm not sure. But he he compared non fiction
to sort of sailing a boat and following a coastline where you
can see the lighthouse and the harbours and everything.
There. And you're kind of there's a
sense of security and then he said.

(01:21:26):
But writing fiction is kind of like going way, way, way
offshore, out of sight of land and everything else and the
weather, the monsters that lurk.And it's a totally.
Different. Animal.
So I'm struggling with that and I'm but I'm trying to write a

(01:21:48):
book of fiction that incorporates all kinds of stuff.
Well, you know, you know what's out there, though, because you
spend all that time on those cruise boats.
Yeah, I may have been partly informed by that.
I'm not sure. But.
I mean one of my also. One of my favourite races is

(01:22:09):
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the way he constructed whole
generations of families and and his sort of magic realism, which
completely captured me in reading his his works,

(01:22:29):
particularly the Love in the Time of Cholera was the one I've
I've reread many times. And so that's also I think
influenced my concepts of writing.
Yeah. So that's what I'm working on.
That sounds great. Perhaps a little bit of James
Joyce in there as well from the the Irish tradition.

(01:22:50):
No, I don't know. Yeah.
Well, anyways, Peter, I appreciate your time for sharing
your story. And yeah, thank you.
Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening.
I am Cody Allingham, and that was the transformation of value.
If you would like to support this show, please consider
making a donation either throughmy website or by directly

(01:23:12):
tipping to the show's Bitcoin wallet, or just pass this
episode on to a friend who you think may enjoy it.
And you can always e-mail me at [e-mail].