China Uncensored: Exposing the CCP’s Narrative Warfare and Global Influence—Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “The CCP is very smart at understanding the divides in American society, and it knows how to target both sides.”

In this episode, I sit down with Chris Chappell and Shelley Zhang, creators of the popular YouTube show “China Uncensored.”

They’ve been covering Chinese Communist Party propaganda efforts and narrative warfare for more than a decade.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Chris Chappell, Shelley Zhang, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Chris Chappell:
It’s great to be here.

Shelley Zhang:
Yes, definitely.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’ve been watching your program China Uncensored for years and I couldn’t help but notice that Scarborough Shoal and this whole region around the Philippines where the Chinese Communist Party has been operating is back in the news. I remember that you guys took a trip out there. Tell me about that.

Mr. Chappell:
Yes, this was in 2016. We hired a Filipino fishing boat, one that had actually been rammed or water cannoned.

Ms. Zhang:
It had been rammed by the Chinese Coast Guard, but we didn’t know that at the time. We didn’t know that until we got on the water.

Mr. Chappell (pre-recorded video):
We finally made it to the Scarborough Shoal. It used to be that Filipino, Malaysian, and Vietnamese fishermen would all come and fish in these waters. They would even eat together on the shoal. But in 2012, China asserted its claim and all that stopped.

Mr. Chappell
We went on this boat for three days on the open ocean to actually get to the Scarborough Shoal. When we got there, there was the Chinese Coast Guard off in the distance. This was at a period where there was a bit of a lull in the tensions, so we felt a little safer. Except our producer Matt has bright blonde hair. We had to put a hood on him so that he wouldn’t be spotted. We brought cigarettes and alcohol to bribe the Chinese Coast Guard in case we met them.

Ms. Zhang:
In retrospect, what were we thinking?

Mr. Chappell
It was a very stupid, dangerous idea. But the conclusion was that we actually got out onto the shoal, which is submerged, the shoal is submerged, so we were like chest high in water. Then I planted the China Uncensored flag on the Scarborough Shoal. The media constantly misses that Scarborough Shoal actually belongs to me.

Mr. Chappell (pre-recorded video):
You can only see part of the shoal, but as far as I’m concerned, this territorial dispute is over. Solid rock. Yes!

Mr. Jekielek:
The Shoal really has been taken over by China since that time.

Mr. Chappell:
It was taken over in 2012 after what’s called the Scarborough Shoal incident. And this is a major turning point in US-China relations. I think Chinese strategy changed tremendously because of this event. And what happened was the Scarborough Shoal is very close to the Philippines, very far from China, but China claims everything in the South China Sea. So their Coast Guard basically occupied the area.

The Philippines Coast Guard came and it looked like there was going to be some kind of confrontation. Under the Obama administration, Kurt Campbell decided to get in there and negotiate. And they got an agreement that both sides would withdraw. The Philippines withdrew, China did not, and the US did nothing in response. They let them have it and basically they have had control to this day.

Ms. Zhang:
They used it as a carrot and stick thing. So if the Filipino government was cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party at the time, then they would let the fishermen in. If the Chinese Communist Party was upset with the Philippine government, then they would block it again. So that’s kind of the situation that it’s been in right now. Like they haven’t started building an island there yet, but the current government of the Philippines is kind of challenging the CCP’s claims more.

Now, you see a lot more confrontation. More of the Filipinos are fighting back in different ways and trying to supply ships in these shoals, the Scarborough Shoal and Sabina Shoal. They are fighting back against the CCP’s narratives and saying that the CCP can’t claim these areas. These places are within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zones and we should be able to go there. That messaging has really rattled the CCP.

Mr. Chappell:
What the Scarborough Shoal incident did was it showed the CCP that if they push, the U.S. won’t push back. And from that incident, you saw that’s when they started ramping up the island building in the South China Sea, which, again, Xi Jinping and Obama met. They made agreements. Xi Jinping ignored it. They kept building the islands. They militarized the islands. That was really the moment where I think it completely changed Beijing’s calculus with how much they could get away with.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk a little bit about China Uncensored. As far as I can tell, you guys have been around for 12 years now. It’s incredible how fast time flies. Tell me about the idea behind this show for the benefit of our audience.

Mr. Chappell:
I started it in 2012, which was a very different political landscape at the time. People were still thinking of China kind of fresh off the 2008 Beijing Beijing Olympics, that wonderful opening ceremony. Oh, it was so interesting. It was so fantastic. People had a very skewed view of China and the CCP. Shelley, you tell the story about how people you knew thought it was a democracy, right?

Ms. Zhang:
Yes, I worked with people, well-educated Americans, who thought that China was a democracy, because they have a president. There was just a lot that wasn’t known. And I think people also hadn’t kind of really realized what they were doing geopolitically and how aggressive that they would become. For a long time, it felt like we were like Cassandra screaming into the void.

Mr. Chappell:
The goal of the show was to help Americans see the Chinese Communist Party for what it was. And the president thing is a great example of narrative warfare. In the English language media, they will call him President Xi Jinping. Specifically, people in America hearing the word President think that somebody voted for him.

Ms. Zhang:
It’s true that in Chinese, the term that they use for the leader of China is not the same word that they use for the president of democratically elected countries.

Mr. Jekielek:
They really do spend an inordinate amount of effort on this narrative warfare, carefully controlling the image of how the Chinese regime is perceived. This goes above and beyond the work of some of our most illustrious PR companies.

Mr. Chappell:
Yes, the Chinese Communist Party sees the United States as its biggest threat, its biggest enemy. And so it puts a lot of effort into shaping how Americans think about the Chinese Communist Party.

Ms. Zhang:
The overarching thing they want Americans to think is that China, the Chinese Communist Party, is not a threat. They are very good at, you know, they looked at what happened with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they’re very much like we don’t want to be in that position how do we you know use our language or messaging even how they frame events in the world to be to their benefit and then they can use that as part of their influence operations.

American business people and politicians, even social media influencers, will take these messages from the CCP’s narrative warfare and parrot them without even realizing what they are doing. Today we saw a Twitch streamer, a guy who is a big gamer and political commentator for the Gen Z audience, and he was talking about how China was right to take over Tibet, because Tibet had slaves and China liberated them from this feudal serfdom. This is 100 percent CCP propaganda.

Mr. Jekielek:
There was a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson who was criticizing America for the prospects of maybe shutting out TikTok. She’s saying there needs to be openness of markets. This seems so surreal. How do you explain that?

Mr. Chappell:
TikTok is a great example of the CCP’s narrative warfare because it’s been very effective. They portray it as, oh, you know, the US government interfering in the free market or trying to censor free speech, which is ridiculous because this is the Chinese Communist Party. They don’t have a free market in China. They’ve banned all Western social media in China. But this has been very effective at getting certain parts of the U.S. population to be like, oh yeah, I don’t like the U.S. government so much. Maybe they are censoring. Maybe the CCP has the right idea.

Ms. Zhang:
Yes, that’s a good example of how the CCP can hijack things that like free speech and use it to argue that’s why TikTok should be allowed to operate freely and stream Chinese propaganda into American phones. Because if you don’t allow that, that’s not free speech, but that’s not actually the case.

Mr. Chappell:
The issue is TikTok is a weapon of the CCP designed to shape how Americans think, as well as steal a tremendous amount of personal data on individual Americans. And the ban, the idea of the ban is kind of ridiculous because it’s just like the Chinese company that owns and controls TikTok just has to give up control. And then TikTok would be allowed.

But the Chinese Communist Party does not want to give up control, particularly because if they did, then whatever American company bought it would have access to the inside of TikTok, to the algorithm, and actually get to see what really was going on behind the scenes. The CCP is very smart at understanding the divides in American society, and it knows how to target both sides.

So for example, we were talking to Lord Chris Patten the other day, the last British governor of Hong Kong, and he said one of the things the CCP would say about Hong Kong is like, oh, it’s been occupied. It’s the British colonial powers. And that really taps into this sort of left-leaning ideology. But he said the reality was the only people that were occupying that area were people fleeing China, fleeing communism from China. They use that language to cover up the reality of things.

For a more Right-wing example, I have this theory that China is doing this propaganda campaign that I’m calling, China is based. You see like all of these conservative commentators will put out a CCP video of young kids in kindergarten playing with machine guns or fake rocket launchers doing this military training. These conservative U.S. commentators are like, oh, yeah, China’s based. They’re not pushing like woke ideology on kids.

But they don’t realize that militarization of children is insane. It just gets them to react against this one other ideological extreme for this other. Or another great example is in video games now. China just put out a game called Black Myth: Wukong that is one of the most popular games. I criticized it because it’s got ties to Tencent, which is basically a Chinese company with a lot of connections to the CCP. We don’t want China controlling American video game industries. But the response was I’m so sick of playing these Western woke games with woke ideology. I’ll take this Chinese game. It’s based.

Ms. Zhang:
Because they said in the game that they weren’t going to talk about feminism, and also anything about Chinese politics, COVID, and the Chinese government. But because they said feminism first, that suddenly appealed to a political group in the U.S. who were sick of feminism.

Mr. Chappell:
Then it covers up the fact that the Chinese Communist Party is heavily involved in ESG funding that is pushing a lot of this woke ideology in video games. China is controlling both sides of this and really it knows how to play Americans off of each other. So we’re fighting each other instead of realizing who our real enemy is, the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Jekielek:
I keep thinking of the term gray zone. In the South China Sea, there is no kinetic activity. Some of it’s getting very close to kinetic, but as long as it stays in the so-called gray zone, no one really wants to take a serious position. It seems like this term fits into everything you’ve just been describing. There’s always some level of plausible deniability that there’s a military objective and a specific strategic objective. Tell me what you think about that.

Mr. Chappell:
So this is one of the greatest failings in U.S. policy towards China. We have this idea that, okay, war is war, and then there’s everything else. And so we can do business with China, but the Chinese Communist Party, as a Marxist-Leninist regime, does not see things like that. They are not just a mirrored reflection of us. They see the U.S. as an ideological threat that has to be destroyed. And so they will use any means to achieve that.
It’s not just boots on the ground fighting.

For them, warfare is anything. It can be legal warfare, it can be economic warfare, political warfare, narrative warfare. So they have a goal in mind, which is to defeat the United States. But Americans and American politicians for decades, Republican and Democrats, have not seen it that way. They’re just like, this is another country we can do business with. We can be partners or maybe competitors, but we’re not enemies.

Ms. Zhang:
Chris, you make a good point about that binary, right? About war, not war. And I think that’s the thing with gray zone warfare is that these gray zone tactics are that they will, it doesn’t just stop in the light gray of the gray zone, right? Like they keep pushing and pushing as long as they deem themselves to be in this gray zone, right? Like they keep pushing and pushing. As long as they deem themselves to be in this gray zone, they’ll keep pushing and pushing towards that line to see where that line is.

And the more that there’s no response to that, or the more that they get away with it, then that just expands their ability to actually, you know, do these kinds of different things to, you know, blockade Taiwan, to, you know, challenge to the Philippines and the South China Sea, all of these things because there is a fear of overreaction on the Western side.

Essentially the CCP has trained us to react that way with their narrative warfare. If you ever look at anything that happens with Taiwan, US selling military equipment to Taiwan or supporting Taiwan in any way, the headlines in American media are always like, the US and Taiwan do such and such, comma, angering China. The headline is always about how you don’t want to anger China, like that is a threatening thing to do.

Mr. Chappell:
We don’t want to spark an accidental war with China.

Ms. Zhang:
Yes. The result of the messaging that the CCP has built up over the years is that we should be afraid of angering China. That’s why this is a problem. These things are not good to do because it might anger China.

Mr. Chappell:
They have the threat of actual war or kinetic war dangling over us. So we don’t realize that TikTok is a weapon. It’s not a social media platform. It is a weapon.

Mr. Jekielek:
Can you quantify for me, give me some sense of the scale or effort that the Chinese regime puts into this narrative warfare component of their, let’s call it, total war approach?

Mr. Chappell:
Let me just give a big picture idea to show the success of this, at least in the business community. COVID happened. The Chinese Communist Party spent the first initial month or two covering it up, specifically so they could buy up PPEs in America and stockpile them. They closed down domestic flights from Wuhan, and kept international flights from Wuhan going. They wanted to spread it all over the world. The COVID pandemic is entirely the Chinese Communist Party’s fault.

A few years after that, Xi Jinping went to San Francisco for APEC. The city completely cleaned itself up, got rid of all the homeless just for this communist dictator coming. You had American business leaders giving him a standing ovation. Just a few years earlier they had used the COVID pandemic against us. That shows just how successful they are at being able to get a certain class in American society on their side.

This begins at all levels of society, in politics and in business, on the political side. Eric Swalwell is a great example. A Chinese spy was essentially grooming him when he was very early on in his political campaign. You also see things like Eric Adams back when he was borough president of Brooklyn. China funds these trips for business leaders, congressional staffers, politicians, trying to make it seem like China is your friend and we can do business together.

Ms. Zhang:
A few years ago, it came out that China was spending something like $8 billion on overseas state-run media efforts. But I think that is just a drop in the bucket. When you talk about narrative warfare, it’s not just what comes out through the official state-run media and how they tried to use that to influence American media or media in different countries. It’s also these things that Chris is talking about. How do you quantify these business trips or these friendship trips to China from U.S. politicians where they get fed these narratives?

Mr. Chappell:
They have sister city agreements with towns, states, and colleges.

Ms. Zhang:
It’s pervasive through every aspect of the CCP’s outreach to the wider world. It’s hard to say how much they’re spending on this or that, because it’s part of everything they do.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re saying it’s embedded as part of every international activity, because it’s a key strategic directive from the very top.

Ms. Zhang:
Yes. People talk about the three warfares, that book that was written by, or those three Chinese PLA. But one of the things in there is essentially narrative warfare. They call it something different. But you can also call it public opinion warfare, information warfare, all these things. But it’s all about controlling not just the information, but the perception of the information.

Mr. Chappell:
It’s very postmodern. There is no universal truth. There are just different perspectives, and whoever has the most force can get their message across.

Mr. Jekielek:
I remember when Epoch Times was started back in the early 2000s, the distance between what people understood to be the reality of Communist China and the reality of Communist China that I was aware of being on the human rights side of things was so vast that it was almost like people would think you’re a crazy person. You say, hey, I have a new topic I would like to talk about. It’s wild. To be fair, it has shifted quite significantly, especially in recent years.

Mr. Chappell:
Yes, there was just this phenomenon. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened. That month, George Bush Senior sent a secret delegation to Beijing to assure the Chinese Communist Party that it wouldn’t hurt US-China relations. The same month that the CCP massacred 10,000 students in Beijing. For years, we had experts, top politicians telling us that if we do business with China, it will reform them. They’ll become a democracy. It’ll help the U.S. government.

Even as towns across America were being gutted because we shipped all of our manufacturing to China, we had experts saying, this is good. This is still good. Look at how much our GDP has gone up. Meanwhile, Americans are struggling to make ends meet. But we listen to these experts pushing this narrative that, yes, we have to engage.

Ms. Zhang:
A few years ago, we talked to Alex Joske, who wrote a book on influence operations, and he talked about how this type of narrative, the idea that China would reform democratically if there was economic reform, kind of came from the CCP, where they had this message going out through channels that weren’t official channels, but it was as if a U.S. official got to know Chinese business people who were connected with the CCP, or even Chinese officials, lower-level officials, or people who are maybe in academia.

They would say to them kind of as if on the down low, right, that they were like, oh, well, you know, this is what we officially have to say. We officially have to say that we’re the Communist Party and, you know, we won’t change or reform. But, you know, actually, secretly, you know, we want to do these things like, you know, if we had more economic relations with you, that can only be better for us.

Mr. Chappell:
It was really insidious. Like these officials would be like, you, you really get China. china you’re very smart not like all the other people you’re a smart person and you know don’t push too hard we’re on the same side but you we if you push too hard then that means these these far-Left extremists in the party they’ll be activated and then we we can’t deal with that. So just never push hard and don’t push publicly.

Ms. Zhang:
Because they felt like they were getting the real inside view on what, you know, the CCP officials actually thought, not what they had to say publicly. But in actuality, this was part of their influence operations as part of their narrative warfare to try to make, you know, all these U.S. officials believe that that’s what would happen if we just did more business with them.

Mr. Chappell:
We were chumps.

Mr. Jekielek:
Recently, two officials from the Solomon Islands, Daniel Suidani and Celsus Talifilu, were on the show in early 2023, in part thanks to your fundraising efforts to bring them to America to tell their story. Tell me about that. Where do things stand now?

Mr. Chappell:
To tie this into the whole influence of the CCP, we did that fundraising campaign to be able to bring them to Washington DC to warn U.S. politicians about it, also to raise their profile so they wouldn’t be immediately arrested when they went back.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain what happened.

Mr. Chappell:
The Solomon Islands are a very important strategic location in the Pacific. Major World War II battles were fought there. It’s a very important strategic location. For years, they had recognized Taiwan as opposed to the PRC as a legitimate government of China. And they changed that in recent years to recognize the PRC. And this was because the president, the prime minister at the time, May was getting a lot of money and a lot of close connections to the Chinese Communist Party.

The most populous province of the Solomon Islands, Malaita Province, was led by Daniel Suidani, a devout Christian. He saw what the Chinese Communist Party was doing to his home. The Chinese were coming in, this is their MO everywhere. They extract resources, do not provide much for locals. They might build a hospital, but extract the wealth of the entire nation. He pushed back against the switch, as they called it.

Ultimately, the prime minister and the Chinese Communist Party went hard against him. They denied him lifesaving medical treatment. He had to get flown to Taiwan, thanks to support in Taiwan, to get his medical issues treated. Then they got him kicked out of his premiership. And they were in the media trying to portray him as basically this troublemaker revolutionary who needed to be in jail. So it looked like he was going to wind up behind bars.

That’s when we began the campaign to get him to DC, this fundraising campaign. We raised, in a day, we were able to raise $27,000 for his travel expenses, legal fees, because he had to defend himself in the Solomon Islands. We were using GoFundMe. They did not want to release the money to us. And this was a real problem because they were here. We had to pay things out of pocket at this point. They just would not release the money until we told them that we were going to be testifying in front of Congress about what was going on and would have to mention that they were withholding funds. Then they released funds to us after that. And we never used GoFundMe again.

Unfortunately, now the latest is that Daniel Suidani and Celsus Talifilu have been arrested, and they’re out on bail. It seems like they held off on going after them, because there was that initial media attention and political attention on them. Now, a year or two later, they’re hoping that that attention has shifted, especially with everything going on in the U.S. right now. So they are once again in danger of being persecuted. This is a really important issue.

All the CCP has to do is pay off the right people in government around the world and countries around the world, and then they can take over. This is an example of just a few people fighting back. If the CCP is able to crush Dan Suidani, that sends a message to countries around the world, to people around the world who would stand up to the Chinese Communist Party. No one will come and save you. The U.S. won’t protect you. Why risk your life and your family just to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party? This really is ground zero. It was an important place in World War II. It’s now an important battlefield in Cold War II, a war with the Chinese Communists. What happens to Suidani is incredibly important.

Mr. Jekielek:
Chinese nuclear proliferation has been going full tilt in a way that’s been underestimated by Western intelligence. Their military growth has been huge. Xi Jinping recently openly talked about preparing the country for war, appearing in camo fatigues. It seems like a significant threat. Why risk war?

Mr. Chappell:
That is a powerful narrative they’re pushing. First of all, Xi Jinping has been appearing in fatigues and saying to prepare for war since he came to power in 2013. That happens all the time. There is an unprecedented military buildup in China and that should not be dismissed. I know some people say that it’s all made in China. That’s a dangerous way to take it.

Ms. Zhang:
Or they have more ships than our Navy, but we have bigger ships.

Mr. Chappell:
Better ships. That’s not a great way to approach it. But the Chinese Communist Party wants Americans scared. The idea of like, do you really want to defend Taiwan? Is it worth the nuke in Los Angeles?

Ms. Zhang:
A few years ago, there was actually an opinion article in the Business Insider that basically asked if Taiwan was worth risking nuclear war over? Everything in there was essentially exactly what the CCP would want to be out there, because they want you to be too scared to make a move.

Mr. Chappell:
And it’s incredibly defeatist because there is a lot the U.S. can do to challenge the Chinese Communist Party. One great example would be to just expose the corruption of top CCP officials. This would be a powerful narrative warfare tactic the U.S. could use because the Chinese Communist Party, say we just sanctioned China, the CCP would tap into the narratives like, oh, these imperialist Americans hurting us Chinese people. Don’t worry, the Chinese Communist Party will protect, shore up support for the Communist Party.

But if the U.S. is specifically targeting the corruption of top leaders, well, they can’t really use that line because the Chinese people see, oh, wait, you guys at the top are actually pretty rotten. So that’s just one example of a tactic the U.S. could use. The U.S. can do so many things to fight China. And the idea that, like, we can’t because we don’t want to risk nuclear war or any other kind of kinetic war, they want to scare.

There is a lot the U.S. can do, especially with China facing pretty unprecedented economic troubles right now. You know, the Trump administration was great with the tariffs. The Biden administration kept those tariffs and did the CHIPS Act. There’s a lot of levers the U.S. still has to solve the problem. We’re Americans and we don’t have to give up. We don’t have to surrender.

Mr. Jekielek:
Recently, there has been a lack of public diplomacy from most Western liberal democracies. It was a very powerful tool as part of the Reagan administration’s efforts in seeing the end of the Soviet Union happen. But what you talked about right now was just a form of public diplomacy, because you’re communicating to the Chinese people.

Ms. Zhang:
If you look at what the CCP cares about with its narrative warfare, you should look at the propaganda that they’re putting out, but you should also look at what they’re trying to censor. So there are social media channels, even on X, where people are posting all of these videos and things that are appearing on the Chinese internet being immediately censored. A lot of them and things like that.

And so you can see the cracks in the CCP’s society and what they’ve tried to build and the things that they’re worried about, because a lot of Chinese people don’t know that there are these protests. They don’t know that you know things like that are happening in China and If the CCP keeps people in the dark like that then there is this feeling like well, it’s hopeless to go against the CCP. There’s no point in speaking out or trying to expose some of the lies that the CCP has in their narratives.

Mr. Chappell:
They have Chinese people that don’t even know the Tiananmen Square Massacre happened to young people.

Ms. Zhang:
But things like that like those are things also essentially refuting the CCP’s narratives about America I think in a lot of ways because, because if you watch the evening news in China, the CCTV evening news, this third section of the news is always about international news, and it’s essentially always about how chaotic and dangerous the rest of the world is, especially liberal democracies. They’re full of chaos and violence and things like that.

And I’ve talked to people in China who are like, are you afraid of walking down the street in New York City because somebody might shoot you? And I was like, well, it’s definitely not like that here. And so these are the kind of things that people think in China. So like just being able to talk about, okay, you know, America has problems, but you know, the positive sides of America, you know, every year the CCP comes out with a human rights white paper about the U.S.

That’s just, it’s kind of comical, actually, like, you know, what they put in there to try to make the U.S. look bad. And we never try to, you know, respond. Yeah, I don’t even know if you have to respond to that white paper, but it’s kind of like, where is the impetus in the U.S. government to talk about why America is great?

Mr. Chappell:
I don’t know why every politician and media organization in the U.S. isn’t saying that they’re harvesting organs of prisoners of conscience in China. That just sums it up. China uses rape as a form of torture. That’s a message that needs to be out there. The flip side of what Shelley is saying is it’s not just messaging to the Chinese People but it’s also messaging to the American people, so that Americans know the reality of life under communism in China.

The U.S. has its problems, but the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party are not equivalent evils. That’s something a lot of people believe. A lot of people believe the U.S. is actually worse. The U.S. does not use rape as a form of torture. We are not harvesting the organs of prisoners of conscience. That’s narrative warfare, to just say the truth. Saying the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

Mr. Jekielek:
Chris, please clarify this use of rape as a form of torture. I don’t know if that’s something that everyone watching would be aware of.

Mr. Chappell:
This is the other aspect of the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative warfare. They care about psychologically breaking. And you see in Chinese detention centers, especially for prisoners of conscience, just the use of sexual humiliation breaks down somebody psychologically. The Chinese human rights activist Gao Zhisheng, who God only knows if he’s even alive. He keeps disappearing into whatever hole they put him in in China.

He documented a lot of Falun Gong practitioners in China telling stories
of incredible sexual abuse, electric cattle prods being shoved into their genitalia, women being stripped naked and thrown into a prison cell with a bunch of men to be gang raped. This is part of how they torture people, to break them down, to get them to be moldable and pliable. This is a standard tactic.

Ms. Zhang:
When it first became more apparent what was happening to the Uyghurs, there were people who testified in front of Congress even about women being systematically raped in these vocational education camps and detention centers. It wasn’t just some guard abusing his position. This was condoned and perpetrated across the system.

Mr. Chappell:
Especially in the case of Falun Gong, they have meetings with experts on how to break Falun Gong practitioners. These are tactics they’ve developed and refined specifically to use. So again, this is not just some prison guard doing this alone. This is a practice. This is why I think this is very powerful narrative warfare. If everyone understands, China uses rape as torture. Then when someone like John Kerry comes up and says, well, you know, we need to work with China on climate change. China uses rape as a form of torture. We’re going to work with them? Are they a trustworthy competitor or other nation?

Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve been talking primarily about narrative warfare of the Chinese regime against the U.S. and perhaps against the Western world, more broadly speaking. But you just started talking about narrative war, internal
narrative warfare, internal use of narratives. That’s also important, as you just pointed out, Shelley. Is there a greater focus on one or the other?

Mr. Chappell:
It seems like this is such a central piece of how the regime operates. Well, I know for many years, China spent more on their internal security, their police networks, than they were spending on the military. For the Chinese Communist Party, the greatest threat is the Chinese people. That’s why they spend the most amount of their time focused on propaganda internally and punishing any kind of dissident.

Ms. Zhang:
And just controlling information internally, right? Just closing the internet down. They’ve been focused on internet control for so many decades that it’s refined to the point where it becomes harder and harder for people to get around the firewall or find out what’s going on, and to access that kind of information.

Mr. Chappell:
Sadly, that was built up by Western companies going to China.

Ms. Zhang:
But I think narrative warfare inside China, it’s just, it’s kind of like, you know, the whole metaphor about being a fish in water and you don’t know what water is because you’re just swimming in the water all the time. Chinese people just are living in this propaganda. They live and breathe in this propaganda every day. Any Chinese town has propaganda posters everywhere. You don’t even notice them anymore.

In school, you go to Marxist-Leninist classes. But also in general, the kind of Chinese history you learn is infused with the CCP’s propaganda. Without the CCP, there would be no new China. It is this idea that the CCP is the same as the Chinese government, is the same as China, is the same as the Chinese people. So you learn to identify in a certain way your self-worth with the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, even people who don’t like the Communist Party, right, they can get pretty easily triggered if they feel like China is being criticized, which is really the Chinese Communist Party being criticized, the Chinese government. But, you know, they become sensitized to these things.

Probably a good example is what the CCP has been saying for years about Japanese people. Because of what happened in World War II when Japan invaded China, they did many horrible things in China. Everybody has tried to heal and move on and from that. But the CCP will never let the Chinese people forgive Japan, because they can use that for propaganda. When you’re a kid, you watch movies that are about the Japanese invading China during World War II.

There was this viral video that went around a few months ago where it was like a first grade classroom and one of the kids drew a picture and he wrote I love Japanese people on the picture. The teacher filmed a video of himself hitting the kid on his hand with a ruler for writing I love Japanese people. He said see what all the other kids wrote. Every other kid wrote
really patriotic stuff about loving China. He asked why did you write I love Japanese people? The kid couldn’t really give an answer, but he was only six-years-old.

Then the teacher punished him and he recorded himself on a video talking very patriotically about how he felt this was his duty as a teacher to punish this kid for saying he loved Japanese people. That is considered incorrect. He was saying that we need to educate the youth of today and make sure they understand why the Japanese are evil and they can’t go around saying, I love Japanese people. He posted this on the internet. And there are a lot of people who agreed with him in the comments.

There are definitely people who say you shouldn’t be hitting a child because of this. But there are other people who are very nationalistic, saying that’s correct. We must teach people that the Japanese are evil. That’s narrative warfare. About 10 years ago, there were anti-Japanese protests where people were burning Japanese cars and things like that.

Mr. Chappell:
Even more recently, there’s been cases of deranged individuals attacking Japanese students in China.

Ms. Zhang:
Yes. There was a case at a Japanese school where a woman and her child were attacked, and a Chinese woman actually died trying to save them. She was put up as a hero, because she tried to save this kid. But there was another case more recently where a Japanese person was stabbed. There’s actually been a lot of knife attacks in China recently, but that’s a different subject.

Mr. Jekielek:
Where are things today? On the one hand, the Chinese people have been completely brainwashed by the CCP to do the extreme things you’re just describing, not just around China, but also to Americans. Of course, there’s this huge, consistent anti-American propaganda, anti-West propaganda, colonialism, whatever. On the other hand, the Chinese people are fed up with the Chinese Communist Party. They’ve had enough of it. There’s bubbling up dissident movements everywhere. With the economy being in rough shape, I don’t think anyone disputes that, even the CCP at some level. What’s the reality? There are such disparate visions of what’s happening there internally.

Mr. Chappell:
The reality is it’s very hard to know what Chinese people in that system actually think and feel, because there are real consequences for saying so, especially to foreign journalists. We saw with the COVID protests, people in China were actually directly calling for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to step down. That was a pretty big shift. And what I saw within China and internationally, a lot of Chinese people felt like, oh, this is what I’ve been thinking the whole time. I didn’t know anybody else was thinking it, so I never said it out loud.

Mr. Jekielek:
And then there were the white paper protests.

Mr. Chappell:
But you know, after the fact, like a lot of those people were arrested and disappeared by the Chinese Communist Party. So it’s just, it’s very risky in that system to be able to speak your mind. So it’s hard to know for sure. And probably it’s, you know, there are probably people who are very, very brainwashed. And there are probably people who know exactly what’s going on.

Ms. Zhang:
It’s both true, because it’s not one block of people. You have 1.4 billion people. There’s a lot of people who have different opinions on different things. And they may also see through the CCP narratives in some things and be blind to it in other things, you know, because it’s complicated.
You know, being a human in the world today is complicated. So I don’t think we can say for sure that Chinese people feel like their lives are worse off than they were.

What you see is people trying to get out of China. People who are wealthy are trying to get their kids out at a very increased rate. You know, trying to move their money overseas in underground ways, trying to bring their kids, their families out of China, buying up real estate in the US and Australia and Canada, like all these places because they don’t feel safe in China. And it’s definitely been at a very increased rate recently. It says a lot that the people who have those resources are trying to leave. There have also been reports of people having their passports confiscated.

We first started to see some of these reports during COVID, where maybe certain low level government officials would get their passports confiscated. There was a report in the last few weeks that school teachers in one Chinese province were having their passports taken away, so they couldn’t leave, essentially, without applying for permission. When you see that kind of increased control, you can see that the Chinese Communist Party is worried.

Mr. Jekielek:
Chris, you mentioned a few different movements that are bubbling up. Could you clarify what those are?

Mr. Chappell:
Particularly for young people in China, the situation is very grim. Youth unemployment exploded to such high levels that the Chinese Communist Party stopped reporting it and then came out with a new metric that made it much lower, and then even that metric skyrocketed. So these movements are expressions of Chinese people feeling like there’s no hope in society. There was a movement called the Lay Flat, which is just where Chinese people would photograph themselves just laying flat.

Ms. Zhang:
There’s nothing to do. Just lying down on the couch or a table or just random places because it’s hopelessness.

Mr. Chappell:
Paralysis, really. There’s another movement called let it rot, which is just the idea that everything is falling apart. Just let it rot. People are calling it now the garbage time of history in China, which is a way of saying that things have reached a point of no return. They’ve crossed the event horizon. It’s just all a downward spiral. So very grim, hopeless things in a country that also has like 30 million more young men than women. It’s very unstable.

Mr. Jekielek:
Something interesting with the white paper protests, you have kind of some level of plausible deniability. How can you arrest me for holding a piece of paper? But everybody kind of knows there’s something going on. How can you criticize me for lying on the ground? They can’t, but everybody knows what’s going on. It’s also people becoming creative around expressing dissent as there is increasing repression. What would you guys say is the high point of your show over the last 12 years?

Mr. Chappell:
I would say just meeting fans and talking to people and seeing how much the show has meant to them and how much it’s opened their eyes. We’ve had people who have written to us saying I was a Marxist and you opened my eyes to exactly what communism is.

Ms. Zhang:
You would be surprised at the people we reach. I will always remember when we first went to Hong Kong in 2014. Back then, the show was a lot
smaller. We had 66,000 subscribers. Chris was basically almost a one-man band. He was editing, writing everything. I was working another full-time job so I was just doing it on the side. A friend of ours said you can go to Hong Kong, because there were the Umbrella Movement protests going on. They had occupied a huge part of the central business district. Could we go and actually see what it’s like?

We booked tickets and we booked an Airbnb next to one of the protest sites. The first night we were there, people started coming up to us in the street and saying that they watched China Uncensored. Again, we only had 66,000 subscribers. Today we have two million. But at the time, if we had 10,000 views on an episode, that was amazing to us. Then you go to a place where multiple people came up to us. Chris was recognized all the time, and that was really surprising to us.

And I’ll never forget people telling us that their professors in universities showed our videos that they really liked, that we were telling people about what was happening in Hong Kong. And it was just really moving. And I think we’ve had multiple fan meetups in Hong Kong over the years and we went back to 2016 and then in 2019 for those protests as well. I will never forget going there, talking to people, having that experience, and seeing what happened to Hong Kong.

Mr. Chappell:
Yes, inhaling tear gas in Hong Kong and seeing what happened there. That’s the low point.

Ms. Zhang:
For me it was spending three days on a tiny Filipino fishing boat in the middle of the South China Sea. Looking back, we were definitely a little reckless. There were extremely high tides because there was a supermoon. And so it was a boat that was essentially like an outrigger. So there was almost no, there was no shelter in the boat, except for where the captain was steering the ship and all the electronic stuff was and so we were sleeping like on the decks. Chris was sleeping on top of like these giant styrofoam coolers that they put the fish in and so the waves would come up over the side and splash us in the night and that felt very safe. At that point, I was just so exhausted that if I died, so what?

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you think you would be welcome in Hong Kong today?

Mr. Chappell:
I’m sure the Hong Kong police would welcome us with open arms and give us a free trip to mainland China and I could retire for the rest of my life. Most likely we would not be allowed to enter Hong Kong. We definitely do not feel safe going to Hong Kong. A lot of people don’t understand that the Hong Kong national security law essentially made Hong Kong just another Chinese city. That technically applies to anyone, anywhere in the world. So anyone in the world who criticizes the Chinese Communist Party or the Hong Kong government could run afoul of it. There’s a reason the State Department cautions against Americans going to any part of China these days.

Ms. Zhang:
The real danger also would be if we somehow managed to go to Hong Kong and enter, we would put anybody we talked to in danger because they could be accused of colluding with hostile foreign forces. There’s so many people we met and knew in Hong Kong that we cannot talk to. We had videos of our fan meetups in Hong Kong. They weren’t anything subversive, but we took them offline because we didn’t want to get anybody in trouble. Even if it had been a fan meetup way back in 2016, they could still get in trouble.

Mr. Jekielek:
What would you say is the most important thing that you’ve learned over these last 12 years of running this show?

Mr. Chappell:
One thing I have learned over the course of doing the show is that there’s this idea that we’re at the end of history. After the Cold War, the march of progress has concluded and we can do business with Putin and China and everything’s fine. The reality is that most of the world is under dictatorship. The light of freedom and democracy is very fragile and it must be protected and fought for. Otherwise, darkness is always there ready to swallow us up and we can’t give in to despair or attack our own values, allow the darkness to corrupt us and think maybe our society is actually the evil of the world. We need to embrace what is good because otherwise it won’t last.

Ms. Zhang:
That was really dark, but I feel like you saved it at the end.

Mr. Chappell:
Yes, the darkness is overwhelming, but there’s that glimmer of hope and we have to stand up.

Ms. Zhang:
I have a more positive thing that I’ve learned. I think that more people care than I realized, right? Because I talked about how for many years we felt like we were screaming into the void. Over the years, meeting fans of the show, we’ve met people in the strangest places. I met someone at an archaeological site in Israel who had watched the show.

You don’t really think about the fact that you do touch people in a certain way. So many people have said that they really learned about China from us. They really learned about the Chinese people and have such admiration for them. They are really upset at the Chinese Communist Party and want to do something.

My favorite comment that I’ve ever gotten on one of our episodes was a guy who wrote and said that his nine and twelve year old daughters like to watch our show with him. And he’d be like, you know, I would go, have you watched this episode of China Uncensored? And they’re like, oh yeah, we’ve already watched that one, you know, dad. And I just love the idea of this dad watching our show with his daughters and having them care about this part of the world that may seem far away.

But that’s something that I’ve really appreciated about doing this show over the last 12 years. One of the reasons we use humor in our show is because it really does make things seem not as terrible and dark. There’s some kind of lightheartedness and humor so that you can laugh at this authoritarian regime and it makes it easier and more appealing.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have talked a lot about the darkness in communist China right now. Where is the light there that you brush up against?

Mr. Chappell:
Over the course of the 12 years we’ve done the show, we’ve seen such a tremendous change in people’s attitudes towards not just the Chinese Communist Party, but communism in general. People are more aware of
the evils of it. We don’t really have people saying that China is a democracy.

Mr. Jekielek:
People are becoming aware. Is that just because of the change of approach of the Xi Jinping regime, or do you think there’s more to it?

Mr. Chappell:
It’s seeing what happened in Hong Kong. It’s seeing what happened during COVID. It’s things like Chinese secret police stations being put up in New York. It’s the Chinese spy balloon. People are seeing what happened. The Trump administration does deserve credit for making it okay from the top levels to kind of expose these things.

That made it okay for people across the political spectrum to start talking about China critically, instead of what we mentioned earlier, the idea that you should only say things quietly behind closed doors. It was good to publicly expose that. That’s why you saw broad consensus on China, even in a very politically divided time, China is something that people across the political spectrum can agree on.

Ms. Zhang:
A lot of these things were happening before Xi Jinping came to power. But at the time, you know, in the late 90s, the early 2000s, when the prevalent message was, you know, doing business in China is great. You can make so much money. A lot of these things were happening where American companies were having their intellectual property stolen, they were having lots of difficulties, but they were afraid to talk about it.

They were maybe ashamed to talk about it because nobody else was talking about it. It’s not that things only started under Xi Jinping, but that as things have deteriorated over the years and it’s become more visible and okay to say these things, then like now people understand what’s happened.

Mr. Chappell:
There is a great danger of people putting all the blame on Xi Jinping. And I think this is another part of narrative warfare that there are a lot of factions within the Chinese Communist Party that would love that that is the message that gets out there. So that someday if we get rid of Xi Jinping, we can go back to the way it was under Jiang Zemin, when intellectual property was still being stolen, when rape was still being used as a form of torture.

Mr. Jekielek:
When the whole organ harvesting industry was being scaled exponentially.

Mr. Chappell:
Exactly. The problem is the communist system. Xi Jinping is a product of it, but he’s not the core problem. And that’s something that I think has to be understood.

Ms. Zhang:
Because, again, that’s the survival of the Chinese Communist Party. What is the point of their narrative warfare? It’s to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party survives and comes out on top. So ultimately, the system could sacrifice Xi Jinping as long as the Communist Party still rules China.

Mr. Jekielek:
This has been an incredible conversation. Shelley Zhang, Chris Chappell, such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Chappell:
It was great.

Ms. Zhang:
Thank you.