John Moolenaar Calls For Policies To 'Effectively Combat The CCP's Censorship'

3 months ago

During a hearing of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) questioned witnesses about censorship in China and its global impact.

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00:00Mr. Xiao, what do you think would happen if the Great Firewall ceased to exist and information

00:10flowed freely in China?

00:12Mr. Xiao. The People's Republic of China will no longer exist, given enough time. Let

00:23me put it this way. Why do they really, really want to block the Great Firewall? Because

00:31just like the Berlin Wall, without that wall, the other half of the city of Berlin will

00:37walk across to freedom. And for the Chinese people, if the Great Firewall is not there

00:44to stop the people from accessing information, they will seek freedom online in their hearts

00:49and minds. Dr. Cooper and also Mr. Quachman described particularly the sort of alternative

01:02or the parallel cyber reality in China. But that so-called cyber reality doesn't really

01:08hold water if the Great Firewall is really down.

01:11Let me also say this. This is fundamentally about the legitimacy of the Chinese government.

01:22If they cannot answer the question who elected them, who they represent, and who participates

01:31in the daily decisions, if those questions are being openly asked and a debate can be

01:37freely sort of led people to express, then fundamentally the Chinese Communist Party's

01:44legitimacy is undermined. So in this way, Xi Jinping is correct to say that the information

01:52security is his regime security. And that regime is critically holded by the Great Firewall.

02:02Dr. Cooper, why do you think the CCP is investing so much in this Great Firewall? And why is

02:10controlling information at home and abroad so important to their strategy?

02:14Well, I think Mr. Hsiao put it really well. At the end of the day, the Party's legitimacy

02:20doesn't rest on the support necessarily from the people for the policies that it's pursuing,

02:25especially when those policies don't appear to be working. You look at what's happened

02:29to the Chinese economy the last few years. You look at the increase in political repression.

02:35And it's hard to say that the Communist Party is delivering for its people. But it's very

02:40clear that the Party has become more reliant on information controls. And so I think at

02:44home increasingly we're probably going to see the Party rely more and more on information

02:49control rather than actually being able to deliver for the Chinese people. And that downward

02:55cycle is probably going to get worse. I would just say abroad, I do think this idea that

03:00China needs to make the world safe for autocracy, as some people have said, makes sense. And

03:05ultimately there's no way for China to do that without trying to pacify the criticism

03:11that it sees from the outside world. And so I would expect that we would see China try

03:15and proliferate the tools and techniques that it has. It's already doing this. But I think

03:20we're maybe at the first phase of a strategy that will go well beyond that ultimately.

03:25And then, Dr. or Mr. Kretchen, what should be done to enhance the flow of information

03:34across the Great Firewall? You mentioned there's no one policy. But what would it take to effectively

03:41combat the CCP's surveillance and censorship? Yeah, I think from the United States perspective

03:47it's going to take a lot more focused coordination across a lot more of the, you know, agencies

03:55and different actors that we have on our side. The way that China has designed its information

04:02control system is to try to ensure that most Chinese citizens never even hit the Great

04:08Firewall, that they're mostly trapped inside of this domestic ecosystem of WeChat and other

04:13kind of giant platforms. And since that's the case, we're going to have to be able to

04:17more nimbly reach in to find folks with the kind of solutions we can offer in terms of

04:23circumvention tools, to be able to provide uncensored, truthful content to folks where

04:29they are on the Internet they've been socialized into, and lead them back out into, you know,

04:36the global Internet, which at this point they've kind of lost the muscle memory of.

04:42And Dr. Cooper, do you have a thought on that?

04:45Well, as Nat just said, you know, I have the honor to be the chairman of the board of the

04:51Open Technology Fund. And I think the kind of work that OTF has been doing has been incredibly

04:56important in this area. But I do think the scale at some point does matter, right? The

05:02Chinese government is putting billions and billions of dollars into this year after year.

05:07I think increasingly this has to be a central pillar of our own strategy, too. Even if we're

05:12not going to spend that kind of money, I do think that we have to be talking about significant

05:17investments over time, or else the closure that we're seeing in China will get worse,

05:22and it won't stay in China. It will expand to other authoritarian states. So that's why

05:27I said I think this is time for a moonshot. We need a major societal decision that this

05:34is something that we have to deal with over the next decade or two.

John Moolenaar Calls For Policies To 'Effectively Combat The CCP's Censorship'

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