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00:10Hello, Tell Us in English presents a new episode of China Now, a Wave Media's production that showcases the culture,
00:16technology and politics of the Asian giant.
00:18In this first segment, China Currents take a deep dive into the week's top stories, such as Chinese cities running
00:26out of thieves, Japanese government AI being American and Brussels asking to Beijing to sell fewer cars. Let's see.
00:42Hello, and welcome to China Currents. This week, Chinese cities are running out of thieves. Japan's government AI is American
00:50and tainted by Japan's distortion of history, while in Brussels, officials ask Beijing to sell fewer cars. Let's get into
00:58it.
00:58This September, Chinese social media was buzzing with a question that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,
01:04which is, where did all the pickpockets go?
01:07The question quickly made the hot search list as people share their own experiences of how different everyday life has
01:13become in terms of worrying about your things getting stolen, compared to even just a few years ago.
01:18The numbers back it up. Official data shows that theft, robbery and fraud cases fell nearly 40% year on
01:25year in the first half of 2026.
01:26But to understand why a species disappears, you first have to understand the ecosystem that once allowed it to thrive.
01:33In the 1990s and early 2000s, pickpocketing was actually quite rampant in China.
01:38As reforms in opening up unleashed massive population movement, railway stations, long-distance bus terminals and open-air markets became
01:45some of the busiest and most chaotic places for money to change hands.
01:49So pickpocketing was not only rampant, but became organized in some places that it had developed its own networks.
01:57It ran on a business model that was largely dependent on three things. Cash was everywhere, secondhand markets were everywhere,
02:04and millions of people were constantly on the move.
02:07Together, they created the perfect ecosystem for pickpockets to make a living.
02:11But over the past two decades, that ecosystem has been dismantled piece by piece.
02:16Mobile payments nearly cut off one of the main arteries of the business.
02:20By 2024, mobile payments had become the norm in China, with penetration above 80% and even higher among younger
02:26people.
02:27And then there's smartphones, which, when stolen, can be a real headache for the thief.
02:31Passwords, fingerprints, facial recognition and account-linked remote locks can make a stolen device almost impossible to use and very
02:39easy to track.
02:40Steal an iPhone, and you may never even be able to turn it on, making it so that the only
02:44option would be to sell it for parts.
02:46Except, a phone that originally cost around 8,000 yuan might fetch only a few hundred yen from a recycler.
02:53So for a few hundred yen, who is going to risk getting caught?
02:56But cash is only part of the story.
02:59Over the past two decades, China has also poured enormous resources into public security and surveillance in its cities.
03:04A study covering more than 300 Chinese cities found that cities with denser networks of security cameras saw much larger
03:12declines in crime in public spaces such as stations, markets and streets.
03:16The cameras do more than help police identify and track suspects after a crime.
03:20They also serve as a deterrent, making people think twice before committing a crime.
03:25Then, of course, there's the question, what if stealing itself has simply become less necessary?
03:30If we look beyond policing and into China's labor market, over the same period, the last two decades,
03:36China's economic growth has created a huge number of jobs that were accessible to people without high levels of education
03:42or specialized skills.
03:43The full range of service jobs like delivery, ride hailing, logistics, retail and warehouse work are all industries that don't
03:51just make everyday life more convenient,
03:53but they also provide jobs for millions of people.
03:56And in many of those industries, the barrier to entry is low.
03:59So if you're willing to work, there's a way to make money.
04:02So you might make 200 or 300 yuan delivering food for a day, which is hard work, but it's clean
04:07money and relatively predictable.
04:09That compared to stealing for a day, which might not even get you 50 yuan.
04:14And on top of that, you have to worry about getting caught.
04:17So there you have it.
04:19The economics of petty crime has changed, and it's likely the main reason why street crime has declined in China.
04:25That change being rooted not in one policy or one piece of technology, but in all the little changes China
04:30has seen in its economy, cities,
04:32and the way money is earned by millions of ordinary people.
04:35And so when people are asking, where did all the street thieves go?
04:39It wasn't so much about the fate of pickpockets, but a collective realization about how much Chinese society itself has
04:46changed over the past few decades.
04:48Next, we have AI issues from Japan and its training on Japan's propensity for editing history.
04:54In Tokyo in May, Japan's digital minister answered questions in parliament with a speech drafted by AI.
05:01Japanese newspapers reported it as the first time a cabinet minister had done so in a full chamber.
05:06The tool he used is called Gennai, and it's run by the Digital Agency for Civil Servants across the government.
05:12It doesn't use a Japanese model.
05:14Instead, it connects to Claude, a product of the US company Anthropic, along with Amazon's Nova.
05:21The Japanese parliament set aside 4.4 billion yen for the system, which is just about 30 million dollars,
05:27and with it, agency plans to service roughly 180,000 civil servants.
05:32But there's an issue with the way that the AI is trained.
05:34It's trained on a giant government archive of records going through around 18 million pages of cabinet decisions,
05:41parliamentary records, and the official gazette.
05:43However, the gazette's coverage starts in May 1947.
05:49Which means the war, the surrender, and the Tokyo war crime trials are not included in what the system reads.
05:55It also learns the whitewash wording that Japan's institutions prefer.
06:00For example, Japan's National Archives filed the fighting outside Beijing in 1937 as a Sino-Japanese military clash.
06:08The Nanjing Massacre is filed as the fall of Nanjing, while records on Unit 731 are not digitized at all.
06:17Gennai's curation of history may already be reflected in some instances.
06:21In March, Japan's Asia Historical Records Center rebuilt its search system,
06:25allowing search engines and AI models to better access its archives.
06:29In that same month, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum decided to drop the words Nanjing Massacre from its displays
06:35and use Nanjing Incident instead.
06:38A related AI issue that recently surfaced is that according to an investigation by the Japanese newspaper Asae Shimbun,
06:45it came out that right-wing groups were paying freelancers on a crowd-working site to mass-produce AI videos
06:51denying the Nanjing Massacre.
06:53The rate was 5,000 yen, or 30 US dollars, for a 30-second video.
06:58Anti-China posts also earned 1,000 yen per 1,000 views, well above what ordinary videos paid.
07:05Japan's digital agency describes Gennai as a tool that only drafts,
07:10and that there is a real person official responsible for checking the facts before anything is published.
07:15The digital minister, challenged in parliament about formulaic answers,
07:19set the tool free to staff to spend more time on the substance.
07:22But what's becoming undeniable is that those Gennai drafts will be published as official government documents,
07:28which will then train the next generation of models that will learn from this information world.
07:33Now we move on to Europe.
07:34In 2024, the European Union imposed tariffs of up to 45% on Chinese electric cars.
07:41That ruling, however, did nothing to stop Chinese exports.
07:44In response to the tariffs, which only targeted battery electric vehicles,
07:49Chinese car makers shipped it towards hybrids, combining a petrol engine with a battery,
07:54knowing that those cars faced a much lower tariff at just 10%.
07:58So ironically, despite the intention of the 2024 tariffs,
08:01monthly shipments of Chinese vehicles to Europe jumped from below 4,000 units to about 50,000 units.
08:08Now Brussels is moving to address that loophole.
08:11Last month, the EU requested that Beijing limit Chinese hybrid exports.
08:16According to the Financial Times, Brussels wants Chinese hybrids to account for under 15% of the European market.
08:22At the moment, Chinese hybrids account for more than a third.
08:27An EU official told the paper that if China doesn't limit its exports voluntarily,
08:32Europe will impose restrictions itself.
08:34The official described the approach as managed trade, aimed at preventing further deindustrialization,
08:41which is not a new idea.
08:43In 1986, Europe reached a similar arrangement with Japan, limiting Japanese car exports until 1999,
08:51to which Japanese automakers responded by building factories inside Europe.
08:55China's foreign ministry has rejected the idea of voluntary export restrictions,
09:00saying Beijing will continue to watch what the EU does next.
09:03And the pressure behind Brussels' request is clear in the trade figures.
09:07China's trade surplus with the EU reached more than €360 billion last year, up 15%.
09:14European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called the imbalance a tipping point,
09:19saying Europe is facing a second China shock.
09:22Germany is also pushing for tougher measures on Chinese hybrids,
09:25with its finance minister making the case this month at Volkswagen's headquarters.
09:30EU and Chinese trade officials are due to meet in Beijing in October.
09:34But for now, the proposal is still on the table, and the next move will come in Beijing.
09:39And those are our stories for this week.
09:40Thanks for watching China Currents. We'll see you next time.
10:14We have a short break now, but don't go away because we'll be right back.
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12:38Welcome back to China Now.
12:40In the second segment, roughly Chinese has China as a manufacturing and exporting powerhouse
12:45as the China International Import Expo helps overseas brands to connect directly with the Chinese market.
12:51While Top Peaks has the new Western Atlantic Sea corridor that has taken more than 100 years.
12:58Top Peaks also take a deep dive into Once Upon a Time in the Middle East,
13:02a film that shows the reality that people from the Middle East endure.
13:06So, let's have a look.
13:19Oh, bro. These posts drive me crazy, man.
13:27I mean, like, it doesn't even make sense because you go to the grocery store here, they have everything.
13:30They have everything you have ever imagined and then some.
13:33And it's not just Chinese food, which, you know, they would call here, they would just call it food, of
13:38course.
13:38But they have food from all over the world.
13:40As a matter of fact, I'm willing to make this a challenge.
13:43I'm willing to go to the grocery store right now, buy however much food there is,
13:49any imported items we can find, maybe whip up a little bit of lunch.
13:53Anyway, let's go to the grocery store and check this out. Come on.
14:01You might know China as a manufacturing exporting powerhouse.
14:04However, the battlefield behind me, AKA the local supermarket, might add a little bit of nuance,
14:11a little bit of context to that perspective.
14:13Let's go check it out.
14:19Oh, these are from North America.
14:22These are some apples from New Zealand.
14:27Ooh, let's get some, let's get some oranges.
14:31How about some oranges? These are from, these are from Australia.
14:35Golden kiwis.
14:36Golden, a kilogram of golden kiwis from New Zealand.
14:40This is very exciting.
14:42Over here, I saw we have Brazilian beef.
14:47Huh?
14:48Ribeye steak from Brazil.
14:55How much is it?
14:56It's half a kilo of salmon.
14:57500 grams of salmon for, I don't know, $17, $18.
15:01That's not bad at all.
15:04Ooh, we of course.
15:06Ooh, wait, is this, this is a brownie crisp.
15:11But I see there's Thai on here and Arabic.
15:16Gluten free, good taste.
15:17Oh, and I see I've been meaning to pick up actually some olive oil, which isn't something you would expect
15:23to find in China.
15:25But here we have olive oil.
15:28Oh, it's gotta be French actually.
15:31It's olive oil.
15:32Huh?
15:33Sounds fancy.
15:36Okay, I have date night coming up with my girlfriend in a couple days and I want to get a
15:40nice bottle of wine.
15:41And while China generally has a very nice selection of wine, I specifically am looking for a bottle of wine
15:49from, I'm gonna get one from Australia, specifically South Australia.
15:54I might, I might not only get the $389, which is quite fancy, but I think, I think I'm also
16:00gonna get the $407.
16:03This one, a real Cabernet Sauvignon.
16:06Huh?
16:06Pretty fancy.
16:08South Australia.
16:09What's going on down there?
16:10I have no idea.
16:11Probably kangaroos if I had to guess.
16:12Cool country though.
16:13I like Australia.
16:21We got honestly some pretty nice like fancy imported goods.
16:25I'm kind of shocked how cheap that was.
16:27Go check it out.
16:52All right, I think it's time to eat.
16:54Bon appetit, my friends.
16:56You know, while our producer was cooking, it made me think, why does China have access to all this incredible
17:01food?
17:01You know, beef from Brazil, salmon from Norway.
17:04What's going on?
17:05Why are they able to access all of these international products?
17:07And I found out through a little bit of research, November 5th through the 10th, there's an Import Expo that's
17:13hosted here in Shanghai.
17:15It happens every year and companies from all around the world come to this beautiful city to showcase their products
17:21that are grown abroad and sold here domestically.
17:23The CIIE specifically helps overseas brands and connects directly with the Chinese market.
17:28Many of the things I just bought, their brands are CIIE exhibitors.
17:32China's globalization efforts benefit both Chinese consumers and give overseas manufacturers more opportunities to access Chinese consumers.
17:42The CIIE is not only a national level economic and trade event, its pulse has long been in sync with
17:47the daily lives of each and every one of us.
17:50From consumer choices and personal growth to health protection and urban transformation, the CIIE is weaving itself into everyone's life
17:58in concrete and heartwarming ways.
18:00And listen, thank you so much for granting us the opportunity to raise a glass of wine here on this
18:05beautiful Tuesday in Shanghai, China.
18:08And explore the diversity of the supermarkets that we have here.
18:12So thank you so much, or as we say here, xie xie, ganbei.
18:16You may have seen this video. It looks like a construction site on the moon, or like the construction of
18:22a planetary engine in the wandering earth.
18:25On one of the buildings at the site hangs a striking Chinese national flag.
18:30In fact, this is the madder hub of the Pinglu Canal in Guangxi, China.
18:34The canal starts at the Pingtang river mouth in the Shijin reservoir area of Hangzhou city, Nanning, and ends at
18:41the Qingzhou outlet to the sea.
18:43In simple terms, it directly links Guangxi's Shi river system with the Beibu Gulf.
18:49It is a backbone project of the new Western Landsea corridor and a century project that the people of Guangxi
18:55have awaited for more than a hundred years.
18:57Let's look at the numbers first. The Pinglu Canal is about Nantan 34.2 kilometers long, with a total investment
19:05of about RMB 72.7 billion.
19:08The entire line is built to class Ironland waterway standards and can accommodate five OO ton vessels, making it the
19:16highest-grade navigable canal in China.
19:20Three cascade hubs madder Kishi and Qingyan have been built along the route.
19:25From start to finish, the water level drops 65 meters, equivalent to the height of more than 20 stories.
19:32The canal uses three water elevators to break up this drop in stages.
19:37The madder hub is the world's largest inland water-saving shiplock, with a maximum water level difference of 29.6
19:44meters between upstream and downstream.
19:47One lock chamber is equivalent in area to 1.5 standard football pitches.
19:51A total of 104 bridges have also been built along the canal.
19:55Construction began on 28 August 2022, and the canal officially opened to navigation on 16 September 2026, completed in just
20:05four years.
20:06To understand why the Pinglu Canal was completed so quickly, and to understand how the people of Guangxi feel about
20:12this canal, you need to look at a map.
20:14Guangxi has more than 1600 kilometers of coastline, with the Beibu Gulf right on its doorstep.
20:21But for a long time, Guangxi's main inland river shipping ran eastward like a river in spring.
20:27The Xi River system flowed east, and goods had to pass through Guangdong and go out to sea via the
20:34Pearl River estuary.
20:35Its own Beibu Gulf ports, by contrast, were left hungry.
20:39A Guangxi netizen put it this way, it is like having a big courtyard at home, but the main gate
20:44opens into your neighbor's house.
20:46The Pinglu Canal changes all that.
20:49After it opens, goods from the southwestern region can reach the sea via the Pinglu Canal,
20:53shortening the inland voyage by more than 560 kilometers compared with going through Guangzhou port,
21:00reducing overall logistics costs by 18 to 30 percent, and saving society more than RMB 5 billion in transport costs
21:09each year.
21:09But for ordinary people in Guangxi, the canal means far more than cheaper freight.
21:14In the comments sections of short video platforms, one poignant line about the Pinglu Canal circulates.
21:19If it weren't for this canal, I might have gone to Guangdong to work in a few years.
21:24In other places, this might be just a sigh.
21:27In Guangxi, it strikes a nerve for too many families.
21:30What the canal brings is not just lower logistics costs, but the chance for young people in Guangxi to find
21:36work close to home.
21:38If the previous section answered, why Guangxi needs this canal?
21:42The next question is, where will this canal take Guangxi?
21:46In the past, Guangxi long occupied an awkward position in the regional economic landscape coastal,
21:53but not truly connected to the sea.
21:56Goods could not get out, and industry could not get in.
21:59After the Pinglu Canal opens, this pattern is being completely rewritten.
22:03From the end of the corridor to the frontier of opening up, Guangxi's role has undergone a fundamental chain.
22:10At the canal's starting point in Hangzhou City, Nanning, Lujing Industrial Park has already attracted companies such as BYD, Sunday
22:18Paper,
22:18and the French chemical company, SNF, forming four major portside industrial clusters,
22:24high-end papermaking, new energy materials, green chemicals, and smart shipbuilding.
22:29Thomas, project director of SNF Group's Nanning project, said the Pinglu Canal was a key factor in their decision to
22:36invest and build a plant in Nanning.
22:38At Chinzhou, the canal's outlet to the sea, 60 green petrochemical enterprises have gathered, with annual output value exceeding RMB
22:47100 billion.
22:48In Gai Gang high-tech zone, more than one OO electric vehicle assembly and supporting enterprises, including EI Ma, Lu
22:56Yuan, and Teoji, have clustered.
22:58One company executive said that after the canal opened, a dual-channel CXS pattern via the Xi River and the
23:05Pinglu Canal took shape,
23:07allowing companies to flexibly switch transport plans according to order needs and greatly enhancing supply chain resilience.
23:14More broadly, to the south, the Pinglu Canal connects with the ASEAN market, which has been China's largest trading partner
23:20for six consecutive years.
23:22To the north, it links with the China-Europe Railway Express and the Belt and Road.
23:27The southwestern inland region now has a golden sea route directly to the ocean.
23:32More than one OO years ago, Sunday Yat-sen envisioned in the international development of China using Chinzhou as an
23:38outlet to the sea to shorten the distance from the southwestern region to the sea.
23:43A century later, their blueprint has finally become reality.
23:47And outside Guangxi, the Pinglu Canal has drawn a rare combination of enthusiasm and caution in Chinese public opinion.
23:54A Xinhua commentary called the Pinglu Canal, a grand practice of China's governance, saying it breaks the development dilemma of
24:01geography and location,
24:02unblocks the arteries of economic circulation, and becomes an open link connecting China with the outside world.
24:09Niyoping, Vice Dean of the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University, commented that its national strategy,
24:15level historical positioning, world-class engineering scale, and technical difficulty.
24:20And cross-century comprehensive economic and social value make it a milestone project in the history of water transport construction
24:28in New China.
24:30Public discussion has been equally heated.
24:32Not only people in Guangxi are paying attention, netizens in Guizhou have also left comments such as
24:38the nearest outlet to the sea and a canal that changes destinies.
24:42At the same time, rational and cautious voices also exist in public discussion.
24:47Some scholars warn that in the early period after opening, attention should be paid to the risk of cargo organization,
24:55collection and distribution facilities, and operational services not being synchronized.
25:00Research on the long-term impact of the river straightening project on the hydrodynamic conditions and ecosystems of the original
25:07river channels also continues to attract attention.
25:11This state of expectation coexisting with questioning itself shows that the Pinglu Canal is not viewed as a simple infrastructure
25:19achievement,
25:19but as a major project whose long-term value is being seriously discussed.
25:25A canal changes the destiny of a region.
25:27The Pinglu Canal is turning Guangxi from China's borderland into a frontier facing ASEAN,
25:33and the discussion around it, expectation, questioning, caution and confidence, is itself a microcosm of Chinese public discussion in this
25:43era.
25:45Think of the last time you saw the Middle East in a Western blockbuster.
25:48There's probably a yellow filter.
25:51Some ululating call to prayer ambience laid over a shot of a crowded market.
25:55Men with beards shouting in a language the film doesn't bother to subtitle because what they're saying doesn't matter.
26:00They're not characters, they're weather.
26:02They're the hostile environment the protagonist has to survive.
26:06Now imagine a film where those same streets are filmed in natural light.
26:10Where the language is spoken earnestly by actual Arab actors and subtitled because the words matter.
26:17Where the explosions don't exist to make you marvel at firepower but make you feel in your stomach when an
26:22explosion actually is.
26:24The panic, the crush of the crowd, the ringing silence afterwards.
26:29That film came out in China this August.
26:32The Chinese title is Welcome to Long Restaurant, but its international title is the one that tells you what it's
26:38really doing.
26:39Once Upon a Time in the Middle East.
26:42So quick context, because this film is a genuine phenomenon and most Western audiences haven't heard of it yet.
26:49Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is directed by Wen Muyei, the filmmaker behind Dying to Survive, one
26:56of the most acclaimed Chinese films of the last decade.
26:59It stars Shen Teng, who is basically China's most beloved comedy actor in a deliberately against-type dramatic role this
27:06time.
27:06He plays Xu Fu, a chef from Northeastern China who goes to the Middle East, to the fictional city of
27:13Bahata in an unnamed country, to cook at a Chinese restaurant and pay off family debts back home.
27:19The story is set against the 2003 Iraq War, and it's actually based on a real story.
27:25A Chinese cook named Chen Xianjong, who ran a restaurant in Baghdad and sheltered local civilians and children when the
27:32invasion began.
27:33The restaurant prospers.
27:35Then the war arrives.
27:37And the restaurant becomes a refuge, especially for orphans, including a boy named Saif, played by a 16-year-old
27:43Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, whom Xu Fu takes on as an apprentice.
27:48One more detail that matters.
27:50The film was shot partly in Egypt, with a mixed Chinese and Egyptian cast performing in Chinese, Arabic, and English.
27:57Within two weeks of release, it had crossed 1.2 billion yuan at the Chinese box office with over 30
28:03million tickets sold,
28:04and its Doban rating, the Chinese equivalent of IMDb, actually climbed from 8.4 to 8.6, which almost never
28:11happens.
28:12This movie was a smash hit that millions of people went to see.
28:17Many of them reportedly walking in expecting a classic Shintang comedy and walking out in tears.
28:23So, what is it about this film?
28:25The first striking thing about this movie was actually in something that it didn't do.
28:29The absence of the orientalizing gaze.
28:32Now, let me be precise here.
28:34For decades, Middle Eastern filmmakers have been portraying their own region with all its complexities and human stories for decades.
28:40Iranian cinema, Nadine Labaki's Capernaum, Henny Abu Asad's Paradise Now.
28:47All that's not the novelty.
28:49The novelty, what made this, to my knowledge, the first film of its kind,
28:53is that this is a major commercial blockbuster from an outside power that portrays the Middle East without the exoticism.
28:59No yellow filter.
29:00No orientalist mood lighting.
29:02No shots of locals framed as props or backdrop or menace.
29:06This fictional city of Bahata is filmed as a place where very real people live.
29:13They run businesses, hold weddings, argue about whether the food is too salty.
29:19And to grasp how abnormal that really is, consider this record.
29:24The scholar Jack Shaheen documented over 900 Hollywood films that stereotype Arab and Muslims.
29:31A drum beat, running for a century, of sheikhs, terrorists, and belly dancers.
29:38Against that output, this blockbuster treats Bahata as a hometown where the people speak in their own language with interiority.
29:46This film is clearly interested in portraying their souls.
29:50And this really shouldn't be remarkable.
29:52But it is remarkable, at least for anyone of us watching from the West because of what we're used to.
29:58The standard Western grammar of the Middle East was basically codified after 9-11.
30:03The region as a level in a video game.
30:06Call of Duty literally turned Middle Eastern cities into shooting galleries and landscapes of permanent war.
30:12Hollywood gave us a version of the same thing.
30:15American Sniper, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Thirteen Hours.
30:20Films where, even at their most self-critical, the Middle East exists as the stage on which Americans have their
30:26moral crisis.
30:27The one who is human enough to doubt, to suffer, to grow, is always the one with the light eyes
30:33and the pale skin that burns a little too quickly under the Middle Eastern sun.
30:36Everyone else is either a threat, a victim to be saved, or set dressing.
30:42And here's the thing.
30:44Even the good versions of this don't escape the structure.
30:48Even the films that question the war, that say it's more complicated than you think, do so by demanding empathy
30:54for the perpetrators.
30:55And so, we, the audience, are asked to fill the trauma of the soldier who kicked down the door.
31:01The people behind the door are still a part of the furniture.
31:05Which raises the central question of this video.
31:08Who gets to be human, and who gets to be the protagonist of their own story?
31:13The second thing is how this film depicts violence.
31:17Hollywood war films, even anti-war ones, have a dirty secret.
31:22The explosions are gorgeous.
31:24Slow motion fireballs, operatic sound design, the camera lingering on the machinery of war, what I can only call a
31:32kind of perverted sense and awe of power.
31:37Apocalypse Now admitted it 50 years ago.
31:39The spectacle of violence is seductive.
31:41And American cinema has never really kicked the habit.
31:43Once Upon a Time in the Middle East, on the other hand, refuses that entirely.
31:48The violence here is depicted with pure dread.
31:51Explosions are not beautiful.
31:53They are what they were designed to be.
31:55Death and destruction.
31:57The film is ruthless about inducing panic.
32:00The chaos of a crowd when a bomb goes off.
32:02The disorientation.
32:04And then, this is the part that most war films like to skip.
32:07The dread and anxiety that comes after.
32:10The hunkering in the bunker.
32:11The not knowing.
32:12All of it from a normal civilian's point of view.
32:15Because that is the film's entire perspective.
32:19People for whom war is not a mission, but a catastrophe that happens to them in the middle of dinner.
32:26There's a Christmas sequence midway through that critics in China keep singling out.
32:30A warm kitchen, festive music, food being prepared until a bomb drops onto the celebration.
32:36Chinese reviewers compared the rhythm to cooking itself.
32:40Slow simmer, sudden high heat, and then the desperate final toss of the wok to keep everything from burning.
32:47It's a film whose action grammar comes from a kitchen, not a gunfight.
32:51That alone tells you where its sympathies live.
32:55Now, here's where the film gets genuinely radical.
32:58It extends humanity to everyone.
33:01And I mean everyone.
33:03Without flattening anyone into a moral black or white.
33:07There's Zaid, the long restaurant's owner, a mid-level official.
33:11His family is killed in an attack, and the grief turns him into the very thing the film condemns.
33:18A man who chooses terror.
33:19The film shows you the radicalization.
33:21It doesn't excuse it.
33:23But it does make you watch a human being be unmade by war.
33:27Which is arguably far more disturbing than a villain who was never human to begin with.
33:32Then there's the American soldier, Tony.
33:35A Chinese-American GI, part of the invading force.
33:37Who drinks at the restaurant and breaks down crying about home, about his mother.
33:41The film lets you love him.
33:43And then it lets him die in the very cycle of violence his presence is part of.
33:48Invader and victim, all in the same body.
33:51There's the extremist headmaster being tortured by American forces.
33:55With chili water, a condiment turned into an instrument of interrogation.
33:59And Xu Fu quietly sabotages it, who makes a fake broth with the color of chili water instead.
34:05That mercy is proven to be undeserved as we later learn about the genuinely extreme methods of the headmaster.
34:12But he gets that mercy anyway.
34:15One Chinese critic put it beautifully.
34:17Chili is for cooking, not for hurting people.
34:19And how you use a chili determines what kind of person you are.
34:22In the film, that same chili gets weaponized a second time by local kids, using it to take revenge on
34:28American soldiers.
34:29War turns anything into an instrument of torture, or a weapon of vengeance.
34:35Xu Fu keeps trying to turn it back into food.
34:37And then there's the torture himself, the cruel American who administered that chili water.
34:42The film affords empathy to even this guy.
34:45At first, he is truly despicable.
34:48But later, when he's killed like a dog by a child soldier in training, then the film's response is in
34:54triumph.
34:54It's pity.
34:56Hollywood, on the other hand, by and large, tends to hold onto the black and white positioning of morality.
35:01And when it does try to complicate things, the complexity is a privilege reserved for its own.
35:06After decades, arguably centuries if you want to go back to the British settlers, of dehumanizing the other,
35:12perhaps the machinery has simply forgotten how to see humanity except in shallow, formatted ways.
35:17Even though well-meaning attempts end up using people as props, as spectacles to behold, as passive damsels to be
35:25saved by someone else's hero.
35:27And here's the film's most pointed detail.
35:31It does this twice.
35:33Twice, American characters refer to the local children as terrorists.
35:37They're born terrorists, one says.
35:39And twice, the Chinese protagonists push back firmly and angrily.
35:44They are children.
35:46The film knows exactly what discords it's entering.
35:49It is self-aware about the context in which it will be watched.
35:52And it is directly and deliberately talking back to a century of that framing.
35:56Which brings me to the idea I most want to put on the table.
36:00Protagonism.
36:00In development theory, particularly in the socialist tradition, there's a concept that development isn't something done to or for people.
36:08The people must be the protagonists of their own development.
36:11Subjects, not objects.
36:13The opposite of development as charity, development as intervention, or development as regime change.
36:20What struck me about this film is that it applies protagonism narratively.
36:25Safe, the orphaned boy, is not a symbol.
36:28He's not there to be rescued so a foreigner can complete his character arc.
36:32The film's central question is mainly on what he will choose.
36:36And the whole world of the film is fighting over his answer.
36:40To the Americans, he's a born terrorist.
36:43To the extremists, a recruit, a future martyr, a body to strap a bomb to.
36:47To Shu Fu, a kid who should learn to cook.
36:50And here's what makes that question devastating rather than abstract.
36:54Safe is not standing at this crossroads alone.
36:56His friend Jamal, a boy the same age, stands at the exact same fork.
37:01Except his decision is already made.
37:03Jamal has chosen violence.
37:05He is eager to fight, to become strong, so he will never be the victim again.
37:11And the film has the honesty to make that choice legible.
37:15It's a very human response.
37:17Safe himself is tempted by it at points.
37:19And the uncomfortable thing is the audiences too.
37:23After you've experienced even a slice of the devastation and helplessness this film puts you through,
37:29you can feel the pull in yourself.
37:31The urge for fairness, for payback, for the universe to finally balance its books.
37:36And the film doesn't condemn that urge, it understands it.
37:40Which is why what happens to Jamal lands so hard.
37:43He joins up to avoid being cannon fodder and becomes exactly that.
37:48There are tears in his eyes as he looks back.
37:51And the film cuts between these children happily shouldering their school bags to go to the battlefield.
37:56And an egg slowly burning in a pan.
37:59School bags should hold books, not bombs.
38:02And that's what finally breaks the spell for safe.
38:05Not a lecture, but seeing with his own eyes where that road leads.
38:10And what Xu Fu offers instead is almost embarrassingly modest.
38:15The path of breaking the cycle, of fulfilling what he frames as the wish of every human being on earth.
38:21Eat well, raise your children, live a peaceful life.
38:25In Chinese, this phrase is hao hao chi fan.
38:29Eat well, have proper meals.
38:31And it's become the film's calling card.
38:34The line audiences repeat when they leave the theater.
38:38An Iraqi journalist who lived through the actual war saw the film and said,
38:42For people who've lived through the war, sitting down to eat one peaceful meal is in and of itself a
38:48luxury.
38:48The grandest ideal in the film is a meal.
38:51That's the point.
39:05So it's primarily cheap labor and raw materials.
39:08Low value added products with very low profit margins.
39:11Whereas the countries of the core monopolize high value added, you know, this says consumer goods.
39:17I didn't make this graphic.
39:18I wouldn't use the term consumer goods, but high value added products where there is very little competition.
39:25So I think this is better to help us understand imperialism today.
39:28And you have to think about the global economy as an industrial pyramid.
39:34This is the global division of labor, right?
39:37And, you know, when you read Adam Smith, the first page of the wealth of nations written in 1776, 250th
39:43anniversary.
39:44The first page extols the division of labor.
39:49And he talks about a pin factory and how the division of labor leads to a massive increase in productivity.
39:53And you can make all these products with the division of labor that you couldn't make in a feudal economy.
39:57But what we've seen, especially in the era of globalization, is a global division of labor that is very strict.
40:05And here, what's interesting is this is not like an objective analysis.
40:10This is just what I made just based on like my personal analysis.
40:14But I think this is a kind of rough schematic to help us understand.
40:18And I think China can be put in every part of this pyramid.
40:21So if you think about the lowest value added industries with the lowest profit margins because they have the most
40:27competition.
40:28This is things like textiles.
40:30Like everyone in the world can make t-shirts.
40:33Like every country can make t-shirts.
40:35You don't need a lot of capital expenditure.
40:37You don't need to train workers that long.
40:39Everyone can make t- like shoes.
40:42So China still has some of those industries, but a lot of them have been moving.
40:46If you want to go up a little bit, this could be like roughly things like household appliances, toasters, refrigerators.
40:52Go up here, this would be like cars.
40:54So for instance, Japan and South Korea have very good car industries.
40:59Toyota, Kia, they export a lot of cars.
41:02They produce them abroad.
41:03And then you go up even further to like high tech.
41:06This would be things like maybe computers, TVs, even semiconductors.
41:13And here, this is like the most advanced chips and like artificial intelligence.
41:17Like the most cutting edge technologies.
41:20Again, this is- it's not objective.
41:21It's just kind of to understand the global division of labor.
41:25And what's funny is- what's funny about the Trump administration is it kind of makes my work easy.
41:29Because Trump and his officials are often known for saying the quiet part loud, if you will.
41:35They have no subtlety.
41:36Whereas Democrats will talk about human rights and all that stuff.
41:39Trump- I mean, he's proud of the fact that he's an imperialist.
41:42And this is an excerpt from a speech that was given by J.D. Vance.
41:46Who is J.D. Vance?
41:47He's the vice president.
41:48He's also the political servant of Peter Thiel, the billionaire from Silicon Valley, a major venture capitalist.
41:57The only job that he ever had was he worked in Peter Thiel's venture capital fund.
42:02And then Peter Thiel spent millions of dollars to fund his Senate campaign.
42:08And he became senator from Ohio for one term.
42:10And then Trump chose him to become vice president.
42:13I mean, the only job he's ever had is working for this venture capitalist from Silicon Valley.
42:17So, J.D. Vance gave the speech last year at the so-called American Dynamism Summit
42:23that was organized by a major venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z.
42:31And I was shocked that he said this openly.
42:34He admitted that the U.S. goal was always to keep China trapped down here.
42:39That's why the U.S. is angry at China.
42:41That's why relations were so good in the early 2000s.
42:44And that's why the U.S. started the trade war.
42:46This is what J.D. Vance said.
42:48The idea of globalization was that rich countries move further up the value chain while the poor countries make the
42:54simpler things.
42:54This is the value chain, if you think about it.
42:56You would open an iPhone and it would say designed in Cupertino, California.
43:01The implication is it would be manufactured in Shenzhen.
43:04So, again, the U.S. would maintain intellectual property monopolies, which is the most profitable thing.
43:10You look at an iPhone, the vast majority of the profits go to Apple, which is the intellectual property holder.
43:17Only 5% of the profits go to China, even though China produces more than 90% of the world's
43:23iPhones.
43:24So, the profit is not in manufacturing.
43:26It's in designing and then controlling the intellectual property monopoly.
43:31And then he said, we got it wrong.
43:33The geographies that do the manufacturing, over time, they get good at designing.
43:37I actually disagree with that.
43:38It's not inevitable.
43:39You have to have a developmental state, which China has had.
43:42But you have many other countries that have always been at the bottom.
43:45Like, India has not made much progress.
43:48It's actually, India now has this idea of we're going to leapfrog and move above manufacturing and go straight to
43:53high value added services, which is a pipe dream.
43:56But anyway, he complained that what happened is that we assumed the other nations would always trail us in the
44:03value chain.
44:05But as they got better at the low end, they also started catching up.
44:08I mean, this, it's just an admission.
44:11Like, again, I'm done.
44:12Like, I don't need to make any other points today.
44:14Like, J.D. Vance just admitted my point, which is that the reason that relations between China and the U
44:20.S. were so good in the 2000s,
44:21is the U.S. allowed China to join the World Trade Organization in 2001 because the impression was that China
44:26would permanently be here.
44:28The impression was that I often say the three T's.
44:32The impression was that China would always make cheap toys, textiles, and toasters for U.S. consumers.
44:37And then U.S. capitalists would invest in apps in like 20 different varieties of apps that destroy the local
44:44taxi industry, Uber, Lyft, whatever, and all these different whatever.
44:49They would focus on the digital economy, and now AI, and all of the capital intensive, labor intensive, low profit
44:57margin industries would be done by China.
45:00But China didn't want it.
45:01Just people in China wanted to have a better life.
45:03They wanted to move up.
45:04They wanted to make higher wages, and they wanted to have good jobs.
45:07They wanted, you know, you call them air conditioning jobs.
45:10You don't want to just work in a factory breaking your back making T-shirts.
45:12So this helps us understand the global division of labor, and Mexico out of Latin America and Brazil have pretty,
45:21comparatively, have pretty advanced manufacturing capabilities.
45:24A lot of this is because the U.S. with NAFTA actually offshored a lot of its domestic manufacturing, especially
45:30in the car industry to Mexico.
45:31China is the world's manufacturing superpower.
45:34India is very slowly developing, but I don't think it'll ever reach the level of China with the political system
45:42it has.
45:42Of course, Russia, Indonesia is making a lot of progress.
45:45This is the semi-periphery.
45:46By the way, those countries in the semi-periphery also just so happen to be the main countries in BRICS.
45:52I'll talk about that in a second.
45:53I think it's very important to understand that this is related to multipolarity.
45:56It's really the rise of the semi-periphery countries.
45:58These countries in the global south that are relatively developing and saying,
46:01we don't want to just be at the bottom of the global pyramid.
46:04We also want to have advanced industries and technology.
46:08But I forgot I included this.
46:10To be fair, again, it's not just the Republicans.
46:11Sometimes the Democrats say this stuff.
46:13This is Gina Raimondo.
46:16People in China might know her because she became a meme.
46:19You can buy on Taobao, you can buy these Huawei phone protectors with her face, this famous quote.
46:27You can't really read it.
46:28She says that the US, quote, wants to slow down China's rates of innovation, end quote.
46:34The full quote is, if we really want to slow down China's rate of innovation, we need to work with
46:38Europe.
46:38But the point is, she's saying we want to slow down China's rate of innovation.
46:42The US does not want China to develop these industries.
46:45Again, this is my whole point.
46:47The US wanted China to be stuck at the bottom of the pyramid.
46:50And this is why when the Mate 60 Pro came out, I remember I had a friend here in China
46:55who bought a Mate 60 Pro and on Taobao bought the phone protector that has her face.
47:01And in Chinese, it says, we want to slow down China's rate of innovation.
47:04But obviously, it didn't work.
47:06This is Peter Thiel.
47:08I forgot I had this in here.
47:09Peter Thiel, who, he's the boss, the real boss of J.D. Vance.
47:15The only job he ever had was working for Peter Thiel.
47:17And Peter Thiel wrote this article in the Wall Street Journal in 2014.
47:22Competition is for losers.
47:24If you want to create value, build a monopoly.
47:28This is one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.
47:31He was a big early angel investor in Facebook and many other big technology companies.
47:37These comments were also recently made by the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt.
47:41This is a friend of mine, Arnaud Bertrand.
47:43He said, what I don't like about China's AI is that it's all open source, which means it's largely uncontrolled
47:49and not controlled in any way by us, which is a bit redundant.
47:52But I mean, this is the former head of Google saying, yeah, we don't like China's technology because we don't
47:57control it.
47:58It's open source.
47:59This is a Wall Street Journal article.
48:01Washington and Silicon Valley are jolted.
48:03They're so furious.
48:04They're angry that China took away their monopoly.
48:07Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT.
48:12Sam Altman has been lobbying the US saying, we have to ban these Chinese models because they're controlled by the
48:18Chinese government, is what he says.
48:20And which is absurd.
48:22If you know how open source works, that's nonsense.
48:24You can go and download the actual program itself and the programming language, the code, and you can run it
48:32domestically and locally on your own computer.
48:34You don't need China.
48:35But the real reason is that DeepSeq and Alibaba and these other Chinese companies that are releasing their models open
48:42source are challenging the monopoly that the US companies wanted.
48:47They wanted to be here because, again, if you think this is just like this basic Adam Smith, like the
48:53whole point of capitalism is when you have a lot of competition, it reduces the profit margin.
48:58So in order to maximize your profit, and Professor Liu mentioned that there was all this financialization.
49:04Well, why did those capitalists invest in, like, 20 varieties of a phone app instead of actually manufacturing?
49:09Because if you're manufacturing cars, you have to compete with all these countries.
49:12You have to compete with Japan and South Korea and now China.
49:15If you're just making, like, Facebook, if you're just making semiconductors and AI, you have no competitors.
49:22So the US didn't want any competitors because that's the way you maximize your profit is by maintaining a monopoly.
49:27If you're making a textile plant, good luck making any money.
49:30You're going to make very little money.
49:32This is why Washington and Silicon Valley are so mad.
49:35And this is why the trade war against China has gotten worse and worse as China has developed.
49:42This is actually a good time to transition to when Professor Liu was speaking, he mentioned a few things that
49:49I just wanted to reaffirm.
49:50I agree with his analysis.
49:52This is a chart that he mentioned, but this is just a representation of it.
49:57This is China's manufacturing output as a percentage of the world.
50:01It's over 35%.
50:03I mean, look at that.
50:03It's incredible.
50:04Here you have the US.
50:06Here you have Japan.
50:07Here you have Germany.
50:09And then the next nine largest combined, which is the point he made.
50:13This is the next nine largest combined, and this is China.
50:16China recently overtook them.
50:18China has become the manufacturing powerhouse.
50:21This is another illustration.
50:24So this is simply looking at different economies.
50:27So you have gross production.
50:29You also value added, which is a bit different, but it's kind of nerdy economic stuff.
50:33But the point is that you'll have gross production, manufacturing output.
50:36China's 35%.
50:36The US, 12.
50:38Japan, 6.
50:39Et cetera, et cetera.
50:40Rest of world, 31%.
50:42And while I'm on this subject, I also want to show this, because we talked about overcapacity.
50:52And I agree with Professor Lu's point that when China was just making a bunch of cheap consumer goods that
50:58US consumers benefited from,
51:00because wages in the US were stagnant for decades.
51:04One of the reasons that workers in the US didn't, and Europe also, but especially the US,
51:07one of the reasons workers didn't feel poorer is because they had so many cheap consumer goods.
51:12So deflation was exported by China in things like TVs and computers, which had become way cheaper.
51:18Think about how expensive a TV was like 20 years ago, or a computer.
51:22They'd become way more affordable.
51:24I mean, the iPhone's still very expensive because there's a monopoly, but if you think about many Androids,
51:29they become so cheap.
51:30You can get an Android for like $100, where the cheapest used to be several hundred dollars.
51:35And China's exported that deflation.
51:37When China was doing that at the lower value added industries, the West didn't complain about overcapacity.
51:44But now that China is eating their lunch, the West starts complaining about overcapacity.
51:48But this is nonsense.
51:51Objectively, looking at the data, this is from a think tanker in Washington.
51:54He's not like some pro-China guy.
51:56He works at a major think tank in the US.
51:58He pointed out that China's exports to the US make up 2% of China's industrial revenue.
52:05And I have the chart here because it's really hard to see.
52:09This is here.
52:11So I'll zoom in a little bit.
52:12So this is the red here.
52:15This is domestic revenue.
52:16The green is other export, and the blue is US export revenue.
52:21So this is China.
52:22These are Chinese industries.
52:24The red is domestic consumption.
52:26So yes, the biggest industry for exports in China is definitely consumer electronics, obviously.
52:32Although the majority of consumer electronics produced in China are still bought domestically.
52:36These are things like TVs, computers, phones.
52:39But they do export a lot to other countries and to the US still.
52:43And this is why when Trump started this new phase of the trade war, he actually put an exemption for
52:48Chinese electronics goods, which is very funny because he said he was going to bring back those jobs.
52:52He knew he wouldn't do that.
52:54This is electro equipment, very similar.
52:55But look at all of the other industries in China.
52:59The red is the domestic consumption.
53:01Excuse me, domestic consumption.
53:03So where is the overcapacity?
53:05There's a little bit you could say here, but it's absurd.
53:08The vast majority of products in China are consumed domestically.
53:13Now, there is involution, which is not the same thing as overcapacity.
53:18In China, Chinese they say neizuan, in the sense that there is so much competition.
53:22Ironically, US monopoly capitalism has no competition.
53:27A bunch of big monopolies that are charging exorbitant rates.
53:31There was a recent report in the Financial Times about how US supermarket companies were conspiring to raise the prices
53:38of eggs.
53:38Not because there was a shortage, but because they could.
53:42And so there's very little competition.
53:44China, with the socialist market economy, it does have a vibrant market sector.
53:49It has insane competition, and the profit rates of these companies are extremely low.
53:55Some of them are like losing money, literally.
53:59So this is the point about imperialism.
54:01I think this is so crucial to understand that, especially in the era of globalization,
54:06the key goal of imperialism is to keep global south countries trapped down here.
54:11It's to tell them it's in your comparative advantage.
54:13It's the whole potato chip versus computer chip thing that Professor Liu mentioned.
54:17I'm glad he mentioned that, because that was the dogma spread by mainstream economists and the IMF and the World
54:22Bank for decades.
54:24The US can make the computer chips, and the global south countries can make the potato chips, and then they'll
54:30trade.
54:30It's in their comparative advantage.
54:32So it's a way of keeping these countries trapped at the bottom of the value chain.
54:36So I mentioned BRICS.
54:38One of the ways that I think about BRICS is there are people who criticize BRICS, and they love to
54:42point out that there are all these conflicts.
54:44So like Iran is now a member of BRICS, but then you also have like the UAE is a member
54:48of BRICS, and they're literally at war with each other.
54:50I mean, so yeah, but even if you know about the history of like the Bandung conference in 1955, the
54:56Shah's Iran participated.
54:58I mean like Saudi Arabia participated.
55:00In all of these global south led organizations, you always have political internal contradictions.
55:04The point is, is that what brings them together is a desire to change the global division of labor.
55:12These countries want to move up the value chain.
55:15They don't want to just make toasters for American consumers.
55:18They want to actually have their own domestic industries.
55:23So when we think about multipolarity, I think it's important, you know, this is like a very hot topic.
55:28I don't know if I included this in here. No, I didn't.
55:30Multipolarity has become like so mainstream.
55:32If you said this a few years ago, people would be like, you're a Russian propagandist.
55:36But now it's become so mainstream that last year, the Munich Security Conference, which is like a NATO conference.
55:42The report last year was titled multipolarization.
55:45So it's become totally mainstream.
55:47But the point that I often like to emphasize is there's so many debates which I find annoying.
55:51And they're like, are we in a multipolar world? Is it multipolarity?
55:54It's like, it's not like one day you're in it and the next day you're not.
55:58You have to think about it as a spectrum, like you have extremes and it goes in different ways.
56:02So this is a graphic that I just made.
56:03So like the most extreme example would be like the 1990s when like the US is the only major power
56:09superpower militarily, economically, technologically in terms of soft power.
56:14Everyone was watching Hollywood all like that era is long gone.
56:17And like, where are we in this spectrum?
56:20I don't know. Maybe like over here.
56:21Maybe we could we could get further, but we're still like in the middle.
56:24I don't know. But the point is, is that power is becoming much more decentralized globally, not just economically, but
56:31politically, militarily.
56:33Even in terms of pop culture.
56:43And this was another episode of China Now, a show that opens a window to the present and future of
56:48the Asian giant.
56:49Hope you enjoyed. See you next time.