Below is a complete transcript of the Sinica Podcast with Jeremy Daum.
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access. Access to not only our great newsletter, the Daily Dispatch, but to all of the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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On Tuesday, June 20, a federal jury convicted three individuals of interstate stalking of Chinese nationals in connection with China’s Operation Fox Hunt and found two defendants guilty of acting or conspiring to act on behalf of the P.R.C. without prior notification of the attorney general. You might recall that in February, Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican congressman, who chairs the House Select Committee on U.S. Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, staged a rally in front of a building, which he said was part of a Chinese program of transnational repression.
Then in April, the DOJ announced that two individuals had been arrested for operating just such a police station, and for destroying evidence and obstructing justice in the case. Any casual news consumer, I think, could be forgiven for seeing all of this as part of the same basic story, a Chinese party-state whose security services have gone extraterritorial. The specter of Chinese transnational repression has loomed up in the American consciousness quite a bit recently, fueled by reports, one in particular that have circulated throughout the first half of this year about Chinese police stations supposedly being operated in the U.S. and dozens of other countries.
This idea that these police stations are part of China’s long-arm repressive apparatus has even made it into Germany’s recently announced China Strategy, which includes, according to Reuters, that “Germany is taking countermeasures on a national and European level against transnational repression, especially on the issue of Chinese overseas police stations.” But are these all part of the same thing, these alleged police stations, on the one hand, and the harassment, and even the kidnapping of Chinese nationals overseas, whether political or religious dissidents or fusion of criminals or what-have-you on the other? What are, in fact, these Chinese police stations?
Joining me to help sort this out and to give a clearer picture of the real scope of transnational repression and the role, if any, of the overseas police stations is Jeremy Daum. Jeremy was on the show not too long ago with the amazing Kendra Schaefer to talk about the draft regulations on generative AI. Now that those rules are no longer just drafts, we have them, and maybe if we have time, I will ask him a bit about that again. But listeners will know Jeremy, if not from his appearances on Sinica to talk about social credits and other things, then certainly from his invaluable China Law Translate website, which is just what it sounds like, translations of Chinese law, replete with very authoritative and insightful commentary.
Jeremy is a senior research scholar in law and a senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Law Center, and he’s an indefatigable debunker of nonsense about China. With some trepidation, he’s taken on this whole conflation of police stations and transnational repression issue, but not, as you shall say, because he downplays the very real issues around intimidation and harassment of overseas Chinese, but just because there is a lot that’s simply wrong in it.
Jeremy Daum, welcome back to Sinica. Great to see you.
Jeremy Daum: Thanks, Kaiser. Good to see you, too. I’m glad you mentioned my trepidation because, as you know, we’ve talked back and forth a bit. I have been reluctant to take on this topic, in no small part due to two main reasons. One is that the public sentiment environment out there is just so bad right now. It used to be that if you said something sort of positive about China, then people would start yelling at you about being an 五毛 wǔmáo or a panda hugger or something. Now, if you deny something bad that was said about China, anything short of a full adversarial stance towards China seems to bring out the worst in people.
And my motto, I always love your motto of reporting on China without fear or favor, my version of it is when a reporter once asked me, “Are you pro or anti-China?” And I just had to answer, “No.” I don’t think we have to be, but we are really seeing that polarization where you’re asked to take a camp and it’s been that way for a while. The other reason why I’ve been a little nervous about talking about this topic is my expertise is Chinese domestic law, and this is a little outside of it. I’m not an investigative reporter. I haven’t traveled to any of these sites that were listed, but I have worked with police in China, I have talked to reporters who visited some of these centers, and I began to see this big disconnect between what was being reported about these overseas Chinese secret police stations and what even the documents being cited to support those statements were saying.
I am capable of reading those documents and understanding them. That’s what I spend my time doing. So, I did write about this, and I think it’s become enough of an issue that it is worth talking about.
Kaiser: Yeah. You’ve made some public forays into the conversation already, so you’ve made your bed; now I’m going to make you lie in it.
Jeremy: Fair enough. Fair enough.
Kaiser: For example, when those charges were brought against the two individuals in April over their failure to register as foreign agents under FARA and for obstruction of justice charges, because they did delete and destroy documents. You noted though publicly, this is on Twitter, a pretty stark contrast between, on the one hand, the public-facing press release that the DOJ put out or the FBI put out and the actual charges. Can you lay out what that disparity is and explain why you were concerned by that disparity between the charging document and the actual statements?
Jeremy: Yeah, you’re right. I took note of the disparity. I think I do so because it’s a good example of the sort of disconnect in what we’re seeing where there’s a real distinction between a legal case that’s proceeding, which is totally appropriate and should be proceeding, and a more mainstream media public opinion battle that’s happening alongside it. It really felt like you could see it in the DOJ’s press release versus in the actual criminal complaints. In the press release that they had accompanying, you see lines, they’re quoting people, officials in the U.S. government, they’re saying things like the secret physical presence that was established in New York City, secret illegal police station on U.S. soil.
They’re really emphasizing that there’s a bigger threat somehow in this office having been a secret police station as they like to say. Whereas if you look at the charges, no one’s actually charged so much with running a secret police station so much is that the secret police station is one example of the defendants acting as agents for the government of China under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And you see that a lot of the other activities that they did on behalf of the Chinese government, in fact, the more controversial activity of organizing counter protests following Gong protests in the U.S. happened before the station. It may be that the people who are involved with this station are also the people who are involved, and we can talk about whether it matters, then that there’s a misrepresentation.
But the stations themselves are so far from what’s being discussed in mainstream media of a functioning law enforcement station, actual policing by China in foreign jurisdiction.
Kaiser: What were they doing, in fact? What is the function of these so-called police stations?
Jeremy: Well, again, I haven’t been to them. What I can say is, one, what the Chinese media talks about them, and two, what appears in things like indictments and in investigations by foreign governments. That should give us a pretty clear idea of what they’re actually doing. First, let me just say they’re often described as secret illegal police stations. They’re not secret. They were advertised. The single report that brought everyone’s attention to this from Safeguard Defenders relied on sources that were all essentially press releases by local governments in China’s public security authorities letting people know these existed. They were often labeled with signs out front. And as the criminal complaint from the New York case shows, people were given awards and had opening ceremonies.
So they’re not secret. Are they illegal? Well, there’s not a crime of having a foreign police station because it’s too weird a situation maybe. But being an unregistered foreign agent, absolutely, is something that they can be charged with. Whether that’s the police station or the individuals is a separate question. Are they police stations? No, I don’t think it’s fair to say that by anyone’s common understanding of what a police station is, that this is what they are. The reason I say that is that, in part, they seem largely to be doing what the Chinese government has said they were doing.
Kaiser: Which is?
Jeremy: Which is helping Chinese citizens abroad file certain paperwork, including for driver’s license. People might not know who are familiar with China, but the China Public Security offices do more than law enforcement or policing in the traditional sense. They also have a lot of administrative and filing sorts of duties. And this seems to be that, but more importantly, they were way stations, if anything. They had teleconferencing equipment with all the work that was even of that administrative nature seems to have been being done back in China. So, even in the cases where they were seen to be most involved in something like law enforcement, it was that somebody went to one of them to talk on a video conference to police back in China.
Kaiser: I see. I see. That doesn’t sound so terribly nefarious. You mentioned this now, a report by Safeguard Defenders. Let’s talk a little bit about that. International attention to the issue of these Chinese police stations abroad, I think it’s fair to say, came directly from that report, which was issued in December. Now, Safeguard Defenders is really the successor organization to China Action, which was a human rights-focused NGO, an unofficial or unregistered NGO, founded in 2009, I believe, by a Swedish guy by the name of Peter Dahlin, who I think many of our listeners will be familiar with. He was friends with many of my friends. He was expelled and forced to do one of those really unseemly, kind of wearing the orange jumpsuit televised confessions.
I think a lot of listeners will remember that. The report, and I don’t know whether Peter Dahlin himself had a hand in writing it, was called “1-1-0 Overseas” or “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild,” and it alleged that overseas police stations played all apart in efforts to repatriate, by various means, Chinese nationals who were wanted by China’s law enforcement agencies. Let’s not dwell on this too much, but can you talk a little bit about what was wrong with that initial report? Because you were somebody who wrote to them, you got in touch with them, you wrote about this, and what they subsequently corrected and didn’t.
Jeremy: I mean, bluntly, it’s a sloppy report. This is C+ work. I didn’t want to draw too much attention to that because I do think they’re raising important issues. A lot of the report, contrary to I’m sure many of the media outlets that have covered it, is not actually devoted, in great detail, to these overseas police stations. They’re one small part of it, most of which is about various tactics of persuading people to return to China, overseas fugitives and the like. That has confused a number of media outlets, some even saying that the police stations were directly involved in that, when the connection is actually much, much more tenuous. I don’t want to harbor, like you said, on the quality of the Safeguard Defender’s report. I’ve written about that in the past.
They clearly didn’t understand everything they were reading, and were using Google Translate to read some of their sources. I don’t think it was Peter himself who authored it, but some of the staff of their NGO. To me, what’s the most shocking about it is that really, a single source drove this entire international news story. You’ll see that almost everyone reports back to them without having sort of verified what that is that is written in this report. The media companies feel comfortable doing this because they’re not reporting on the truth of it. They’re just saying, “This is what Safeguard Defenders said.” And that is true, Safeguard Defenders said this, but given the inflammatory nature of the story and how tense things are in international relations, one would ask for a little bit more.
Then we get the problem that I sort of alluded to a second ago, which is Safeguard Defenders, which is an organization with a mission to be critical of China, which is fine, of course, they take the worst plausible interpretation of these documents that they’re reading. They leave themselves a fudge room presented in a way that they could say, “Well, technically what I said is true because I put this maybe in here,” and they try and spin it. Then the media reads the Safeguard Defender’s report and does the same sort of tactic, but from the report of they try to present those findings in the worst way that they can. And it gets more and more exaggerated as it goes on.
Kaiser: Yeah, not surprisingly. I’ve seen that happen before with other things. But you know, there is something there, right? I mean, there is something that they’re talking about. In fact, in the Safeguard Defender’s report, they write about how the Chinese media itself had boasted of 230,000 people who had returned to China. But my understanding of that was that these people were mostly these kind of tele-fraudster types who’ve been plaguing places like Sihanoukville and places like around Southeast Asia, or in the Middle East, like in Dubai, where they’re sending me apparently all these texts that just say random things to try to bait me into a conversation. I’m sure you get these too.
Jeremy: Of course.
Kaiser: It’s terribly annoying.
Jeremy: Yeah. Like you say, there is some there, there, and that’s part of my reluctance to talk about this. I mean, international intimidation and harassment of dissidents and normal street criminals that are overseas is real. I never want to downplay that story. That part is real. And the numbers you cite, the 230,000, that number is somewhat inflated because it refers to all efforts at repatriation of what they call persuasion to return in the reports, which, by and large, is done by sort of blanket announcements rather than individualized contact. So, they’ll put out a thing that if you come in now and turn yourself in, you’ll get a more lenient sentence. If you come in later and we have to catch you, then you’re going to get a heavier sentence.
And people who turn themselves in during that count into those numbers, as do many people who are overseas fraudsters, like you were mentioning, who came back during COVID because they would have rather been in China than wherever they were for the pandemic. So, that number includes a lot, and it certainly isn’t directly tied to these police stations.
Kaiser: Another one of the things that happens when the story gets into the media is, as you’ve pointed out, there’s this tendency to see things that are done actually at a relatively local law level of law enforcement to interpret those somehow as national policy. In your piece that you wrote in China Law Translate from December, if I recall correctly, you made the analogy to some school district in Texas banning LGBTQ books, and then somebody reporting on it saying the U.S. bans LGBTQ books. I’ve seen this happen in China all the time. The example I always used was yeah, like some; a school district bans the teaching of evolution, and it’s somehow reported as the U.S. bans teaching of evolution. But yeah, this happens a lot in China. Maybe you could spell out what, if anything, in these policies actually is national or is being carried on by central authorities.
Jeremy: It was one of the things that first struck me as odd about the story. Like I said, there’s no question that China has done some overseas harassment in the name of law enforcement, including having people physically travel to other countries to leave messages, meet with people, etc. But the idea that they would establish a physical presence, a physical office for the purpose of doing that, when it would clearly be so controversial to the American public and the American government, as well as many of the European countries and African South America, all over the world that they’ve done this, and that they would proceed by doing this incredibly controversial thing by having municipal city government, public security offices do it.
That just doesn’t make sense. It’s too big a move. Local-level governments in China, contrary to what some people might think, do have a lot of discretion in the way they implement the commands that come from on high, and they’re sort of used as laboratories for experimenting with new policies and new procedures, and then their experiences get summarized and the good ones get carried forward into central government rules. In my guess this is something that the central government is none too happy about. In fact, one of the people that’s named in the criminal complaint for the New York case, I don’t know why, but they have been removed from their position, one of the people who was credited with creating the program in Fuzhou.
Kaiser: Interesting. I want to keep at this. Have you seen any evidence at all to link these actual physical presences with transnational repression in some way or another with repatriation of criminals or anything like that? Is there any evidence to suggest?
Jeremy: It’s pretty minimal, but I wouldn’t say no. There are some cases where the people, once they’ve set up these stations, have then been asked to locate somebody who’s in that country. So they’ve been a contact point. Or even to set up a video conferencing call. One guy bragged that he’d been asked to try and persuade someone to return. They’re not law enforcement actions really, but they might be harassment actions. The question is, I’ve said that I think they play, at worst, a minimal role in this international harassment, intimidation, etc. The reason I say that is I don’t think closing all of the stations down would stop the harassment or intimidation.
Kaiser: We’re barking up the wrong tree essentially, is what you’re saying.
Jeremy: I think it’s fair to say that these are something of a distraction. I’ve said that they’re not a key part of the overseas harassment and intimidation because I think that closing all of these wouldn’t stop it. Essentially, any functions that they’re playing a role in that could be replaced just by a citizen with a cell phone. Once security, public security or state security in China has a contact or an asset of any kind somewhere, then it might start to use that for other purposes. So, they might be a danger in that sense, but saying that these are physical presences set up for the purpose of intimidation and surveillance doesn’t seem to be the case. Even in the criminal complaint, you see that it says what was present when the FBI raided the site seemed to be consistent with helping people apply for driver’s licenses. The site seemed to be open for one hour a week on Thursdays. It doesn’t seem like these were really that big a deal.
Kaiser: If they’re this innocuous, I mean, should we just allow them to operate? Is that what you’re arguing?
Jeremy: I don’t think there’s a real threat from driver’s license services, but like I said, people should investigate, and if there’s a question of violations of a law like the Foreign Agents Registration Act, then they should prosecute. That’s up to each country to use their domestic laws to do. My fear is that by creating this threat out of a physical Chinese policing presence on the ground, that we’re whipping up a frenzy. The original Safeguard Defender’s report published the addresses of these places. And Gallagher, you mentioned earlier, held a rally outside of people after they’d been charged with a crime, certainly before they’ve been convicted of a crime, a rally outside of their offices pointing to it, saying, “The building behind me houses a secret police station.”
This is more than a dog whistle in my mind. This is whipping people into a frenzy of hatred that might be direct. I’ve had fear that we would see a Pizzagate sort of scenario where somebody who’s seen these addresses or seen a rally like this would show up with a gun to fight off the Chinese invaders.
Kaiser: Just for those of you who don’t know that reference, that’s comet ping pong, a guy from the great state of North Carolina, where I reside, drove up to Virginia to comet ping pong with, I suppose it was an AR-15, and wouldn’t believe before he was shown the basement, that didn’t exist, where the Satanic pedophiles were keeping the children. I think he fired a couple of shots in there. And yeah, so that’s what you’re worried about.
Jeremy: Yeah. And from what you read in these statements about China’s Ministry of Public Security has set up a physical presence in our city, it seems like that would not be an inappropriate response. In fact, one might be surprised that the FBI charged only two people involved in the one in New York, then released them on bail. We have the frenzy; again, that is outstripping the actual threat. While I don’t want to say the threat is zero, because these people have been involved in other activities outside of the police station, it’s the same people. So, you should maybe be keeping an eye on them. But I think using rule of law, not public opinion, having cases like this one, or other cases that have recently been filed, like the recent Fox Hunt case you mentioned, and I think there was one in Boston as well about overseas intimidation and harassment.
There’s been one in California. Using our law and our courts and due process to investigate these situations rather than creating this public opinion narrative that’s running alongside and outrunning the criminal process that is whipping people up into a frenzy.
Kaiser: Hear, hear. But I mean, it’s pretty easy for me to imagine how somebody might respond to these concerns about tarring Chinese in America or tarring American Chinese with this fifth columnist brush, which is what we’re talking about here. They might say, and I think many honestly believe this, that what they’re doing is really intended, precisely to protect Chinese in America from the long arm of the Party State. That this is all in the interest of Chinese in America who are being harassed or whose families are being threatened or where there’s implied threats, that sort of thing. So, when you find fault in the overseas police station narrative, you’re effectively enabling transnational repression, aren’t you, Jeremy Daum? How would you respond to that?
Jeremy: This is the dilemma that we have, that everyone thinks they’re the hero of this story. And you’ve seen it in my reluctance to say anything because it’s been so intertangled with the idea of this harassment, which, of course, I don’t support that it’s inextricable. But at the same time, I do worry about both sides of that argument. I’ve seen major news outlets in the U.S. saying that Chinese-Americans aren’t sufficiently assimilated and need to assimilate more, both parts of which I think are wrong. You also have China not helping the matter by arguing that the sons and daughters of China spread around the world should look upon China with pride and creating the idea that there is a political connection between ethnically Chinese people and China. It’s a complicated matter and it’s hard to deal with. But I don’t think we want to get to a position where we’re starting to view, and perhaps we’ve already passed this position, where everyone of Chinese or even East Asian descent is suddenly looked upon as a potential spy of the Communist Party.
Kaiser: A lot of people know your work in taking on the mythology around the social credit system. You, I think, did quite a bit to explode this idea that there was this single number assigned to all Chinese citizens, and that their political misbehavior or their behavior on social media was going to give them this ranking. You did a lot to counter that. I think that it changed the media narrative, or that it contributed mightily to the changing of the media. I don’t see it used as often by responsible media. Do you find you’re getting traction on this story with the media as well? Because I know you’ve engaged with quite a few media outlets on this.
Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, I’ve spoken to people about this. I think you’re overly optimistic about the social credit story. My concern with both of these stories is that you see not just people getting it wrong, but super confident in their wrong narrative. People are 100% certain that there is a score in China, to the point where when I explain what social credit is, rather than people saying, “Oh, well, it looks like I’m thinking of a slightly different thing,” they say, “No, you’re wrong.” That you’ve been bought out, you’ve been incorporated. I think it’s the same with this overseas police stations thing. People are going to hear me and they’re going to say, “Well, there’s no distinction there. You’re saying international harassment’s real. Well, but the stations are.”
But even if it’s some of the same people that overlap, it’s different. Not everyone in these stations that are often based in real estate agencies, restaurants, community centers, and business associations are involved in this stuff. And you’re labeling them all as spies. What troubles me most about this, as with social credit, is that certainty; that 100% certainty in a wrong narrative, and the inability or unwillingness maybe of media and government to go dig up the primary sources, to go take a look at what’s being cited as the basis for this. I mean, calling these secret police stations when your knowledge of them is based on a press release, how can that not cause more cognitive dissonance?
Kaiser: Exactly. I’ve got another one for you if you want to take it on next, I mean, this business about United Front Work departments influences over Vancouver local elections. You got to check this out. I don’t know if you saw the time story, but it was shot so full of holes. It was unbelievable.
Jeremy: I haven’t followed it closely. I’ve seen bits of it. I will say this about both overseas policing and United Front Work generally because it is involved in helping make some of the connections, the United Front Work departments. It’s one of these things that yes, there’s some there, there, as you said. There’s some meat there, and this is maybe something that people should look at. But people who are wanting to be critical of it tend to ascribe these supernatural powers to the Chinese police and United Front Work groups. The idea that there could be a police station set up, or it’s the same thing you see with people who are paranoid about U.S. government, saying about this CIA that there’s this-
Kaiser: Or the NED.
Jeremy: Exactly. This inhuman ability to carry out operations that just on a surface level doesn’t really make sense. Not to say there’s no involvement and no problem at all, but you can see it rising into a conspiracy theory. It is a very othering kind of thing to start ascribing this, not quite human, almost mystical, magical power to these agencies.
Kaiser: The Safeguard Defender’s report actually talked about 110 police stations abroad. I mentioned Germany, I’ve seen the Netherlands investigating, different countries in Africa, actually, supposedly alarmed at this and investigating. Are you aware of other governments who have brought cases against these so-called police stations or have otherwise put pressure on them to shut down their operation?
Jeremy: Yeah. A lot of them have shut down once investigations started. I should say also that while the Safeguard Defenders does now list over a hundred of these stations, the 110 is the police emergency number that they’re referencing, which is actually what they’re called.
Kaiser: Right. No, I got that.
Jeremy: Yeah, just because you said 110, I wanted to make sure. But they have said it’s over a hundred of these out there. But yeah, the UK did its investigation and revealed that they found no illegal activity. They don’t have a foreign agency law, which I hear they just passed and might be coming in their new National Security Act. And a lot of countries don’t have that so that offense wouldn’t be there, which is what the U.S. has charged these defendants with. To my knowledge, the U.S. is the only one that’s actually had a criminal case initiated.
Kaiser: So, Jeremy, I’m not trying to provide cover for you or anything here, but I think it is important that we do talk about the actual problem when it comes to the way Chinese law enforcement, local or otherwise, has tried to compel the return of alleged criminals. You touch on the issue of unjust course of tactics being taken against the property or even families of overseas criminal suspects in some of your writings. Maybe let’s break out some of those tactics in more detail and the extent to which they might actually violate not just U.S. law, but even China’s own domestic laws, which is something that you are an expert on.
Jeremy: It’s certainly a topic worth looking at, and I’m glad that there is some attention even with this hyped-up narrative of police stations. Intimidation, I break it into two types in my head. I mean, one is by law enforcement using intimidation, threatening family that’s back in China, threatening assets that are back in China in order to get people to return, or even just letting it be known that you’re still being watched while you’re overseas is intimidation enough. They could well violate local jurisdictions, stalking laws, harassment laws, intimidation laws, and those should be pursued. I break it into two parts. I would say one is law enforcement, the other is, I think, sometimes there are just super patriotic Chinese citizens who are overseas who think they’re defending their homeland without being directly employed or acting as agents for the far government.
We’ve seen that with some student groups, I think there was one in Berkeley, somewhere in California, that a student was harassing another student who had attended the Taiwan Independence rally, and they were charged, and they should be charged.
Kaiser: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, for sure.
Jeremy: But I think that’s exactly right. What we see is that this gets focused attention on, because it has this connection to China, whereas a strictly domestic case might not. There is a difference between state action, of course, and non-state action. But my thought is that if domestic law decides to really take an action in stopping cyber violence — online bullying and threats and things like this — really takes a stance against stalking and intimidation, that would be great. Not trying to phrase it as Chinese diaspora becoming agents.
Kaiser: All right. Jeremy, since we do have a little bit of time, I wanted to get some comments on the main differences between, this is very much switching gears here, but on the main differences between the draft regulations on Generative AI. Generative AI, just to remind everyone, are a kind of large language models like ChatGPT. It’s things like Midjourney or DALL-E, these AI-powered image generators, music generation, anything like that. So, between the draft regulations that you and Kendra talked about just a few weeks ago on the show and the surprisingly quickly rolled-out final regulations, what has changed and what stood out, or surprised you?
Jeremy: I think they’re a lot less strict than the draft had been.
Kaiser: You anticipated that, though.
Jeremy: I think credit mainly goes to Matt Sheehan for seeing that it was going to go in that direction, but they weren’t workable. So, we knew that they were going to have to give. Unfortunately, sometimes unworkable law does get put into effect, but I’m glad that they backed down on some of the points. What’s interesting to me is that they did so sort of explicitly in the name of allowing the development of this new industry. Some things that they backed down on were requiring that service providers be able to guarantee the truth of generated content or of training data. Not only is that unworkable, but it doesn’t make sense. I pointed out, you put up an abstract piece of art, and try and tell me, is that true or not? It’s true and it’s a representation of the art, but what does it mean for a painting to be true?
Kaiser: Right.
Jeremy: They’ve gone down on that. They’ve added a few positive things like discrimination, which was already a concern, preventing discrimination in the use of AI. They’ve added health-based discrimination, assumedly a nod to persons with disabilities. Generally speaking, that is the biggest change. Oh, I’m sorry. I’ve left out one of the biggest ones, which is that they shifted it to really focus only on public-facing Generative AI services. Before, it also included those being used in research and development or that might just be used by a business internally for some other purpose. So, it’s really focusing more on that misinformation and spread of AI content that might cause problems. That’s much narrower in the range.
Within that category, those providing such public-facing services, their obligations are largely the same in terms of what they have to watch out for in user conduct, but with a little bit reduction of the strictness with which they have to moderate.
Kaiser: The changes were made largely with the intention of preventing regs from hamstringing the development of this very, very important technology. Were they successful doing that? Do you think that Chinese developers are still going to face significant impediments in developing Generative AI that their western, U.S. or European counterparts wouldn’t face?
Jeremy: That’s such a good question, and we’re going to have to watch it a bit. I think the research and development being lifted from a lot of the regulations is going to allow companies to be making products behind the scenes quite easily without running afoul of these rules. Training smarter and smarter AIs they can use for things generative and non-generative things, like the logistics ones that are used to make sure delivery drivers get the quickest routes to the largest number of people will continue to develop. The development future for me, at this point, is so unclear. I’m alarmed by the rapid development of AI. I play with the tools, and I see them as so game-hanging that I can barely get my head around.
Kaiser: Yeah. It’s just insane. I spend an awful lot of time playing around with that stuff now.
Jeremy: And you have to assume that what we’re using is already a generation behind. The growth of these is going to be exponential, and I’m not sure we’re ready to deal with it.
Kaiser: That’s right. Jeremy Daum — Daum, the Debunker — thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It has been a real pleasure as always.
Jeremy: For me as well. Thanks, Kaiser.
Kaiser: Let’s move on to recommendations. I’m definitely curious to see what you’ve got for us. But firstly, a very quick reminder that the Sinica Podcast is part of The China Project. If you like the work that we’re doing with Sinica or with any of the other shows in the network, or with The China project more generally, then the very best thing you can do to help us out is to subscribe to Access from The China Project. You get access to this show on Mondays, East Coast Time, and of course, to our daily Dispatch newsletter. You can avoid the paywall on the great stories we run on the website. So, pitch in, help us out, and become a member. All right, onto recommendations. Jeremy, what do you have for us?
Jeremy: I’m going to go with a TV show this time.
Kaiser: Ooh.
Jeremy: The strangely named new effort from Boots Riley which is called I’m a Virgo.
Kaiser: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen it.
Jeremy: Have you seen it?
Kaiser: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jeremy: It’s not consistent straight through the whole way, especially the first few episodes, you’re really seeing something new.
Kaiser: Oh man, yeah.
Jeremy: It’s a strange, weird show with a message to deliver. In fact, a character whose superpower is making messages delivered. So, it’s a lot of fun, and I would recommend that.
Kaiser: I think we can spoil a little bit and say kind of what it’s about. Because right away, within 20 minutes of the first episode, you know what it’s about. It takes place in Oakland in an African American family, and it involves the story of a 19-year-old boy. Is he 19?
Jeremy: A giant. Yeah.
Kaiser: Yeah. But he’s 13 feet tall.
Jeremy: He is 13 feet tall, and him standing tall does not go over well with the community necessarily.
Kaiser: But what’s great is that they have him fallen with this really cool group of these radical activists.
Jeremy: I called it “Do the right thing if Maid is a Marvel superhero movie.”
Kaiser: That’s right. Yeah, it’s Spike Jones meets the Marvel Universe.
Jeremy: It’s Spike Lee.
Kaiser: Spike Lee.
Jeremy: Spike Lee meets the Marvel Universe. Yeah.
Kaiser: Not Spike Jones.
Jeremy: I mean, Boots Riley is no stranger to delving into issues of race in this country. His movie, what’s it called? Sorry to Disturb You is really good too. Sorry to Bother You maybe. But really good stuff. I strongly recommend it. It’s a lot of fun if nothing else.
Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think they quite stuck the ending, but it’s good. It’s good.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Kaiser: All right. So, my recommendation. I’ve got both my kids home for the summer. My daughter’s actually home from college. My son’s not headed off yet. But I’m always just struggling to find creative ways to feed them that just don’t involve too much work. So, there’s a new go-to for me that just takes very, very little prep, and it tastes great. I buy like a big old salmon filet or tuna steaks, something like that. It’s ideally, obviously sashimi grade stuff, but people don’t always go that way out. But anyway, I set aside the nice thick parts for sashimi if it’s salmon, and then take the rest and then just slice it up into little cubes, centimeter cubes. Then I make a sauce with a couple of tablespoons of mayonnaise and about a tablespoon of sriracha, maybe a little more, a little mirin, a little ponzu.
Mirin is good enough. You don’t need the ponzu. Some sugar, like a couple teaspoons of sugar, and sesame oil is really important, and then the juice of a lemon, like one full lemon. This is for like a full, almost full salmon steak. Then mix it all up really well. And it’s spicy tuna or spicy salmon. What we do is rather than just serve it in bowls or do rolls or anything like that, we decide to do it DIY. The cheapest way to do that is I just get those seaweed snacks that you can get from Costco, these like Korean or Japanese seaweed snacks that are kind of nice toasted, dried, sealed, packed Japanese seaweed, and then throw some furikake seasoning on that, or toasted sesame seeds, some chopped green onions, and have some wasabi there.
Everyone can decide and make their own little mini hand rolls. It takes no effort, and a really, really quick cleanup. That’s my feeding the family idea for the summer.
Jeremy: It sounds very good. With my daughter, we’re at the phase where if we can get her to eat things, we’re happy.
Kaiser: How old is she now?
Jeremy: She is eight now.
Kaiser: Oh, wow. Yeah. It’s weird how finicky eating is a thing with kids. I had a friend whose kid would only eat food that was white in color.
Jeremy: Yeah. I’ve known kids like that. I have known kids like that. Yeah. My daughter used to be a good eater, then something clicked and it just stopped. Suddenly, now there’s objections to everything.
Kaiser: Yeah, my son doesn’t eat cilantro, which is just really weird. But I guess people have a genetic-
Jeremy: Well, cilantro, there’s that gene, yeah, that some people taste it very differently.
Kaiser: He claims to have it. 23andMe supports him.
Jeremy: You’ve given your data away to that company, huh?
Kaiser: Goddammit.
Jeremy: Yeah.
Kaiser: All right. Let’s hope that they don’t use it to transnationally repress me.
Jeremy: Well, they’ll just sell it to the local police. It’s all good.
Kaiser: Thanks, man.
Jeremy: Take care. Take care.
Kaiser: Yeah. Good to see you Jeremy. Thank you so much.
Jeremy: All right. Thanks for having me, Kaiser. Bye.
Kaiser: The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all of the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.
