their distinctive kitty. it will never be entirely black until after the 1940 s. it would become predominantly so of course to all by the 30's, '40's, 50's this was the center of the black business district as well. and joe louis and duke ellington a lot of local color. you're black professional class. nowadays it is a struggling community with the housing project on one side, on apartment complex on the other side. we are serving with the community to try to rebuild it. >> for informational on this and other cities visited by c-span

local content vehicles visit c-span.org / local content. from the 19th annual yield from fred dekker discusses his book, bowling to beijing, have barack obama is hastening america's decline in assuring in chinese domination. fortnate >> very fortunes of the here.ag the heritage foundation played s very important role when i was a student in peru and information trying to fight the culture war and the war in campus. the heritage commission was one of those t is kv information you need to come back. asko, it's a great pleasure to be asked to be here by one of

the heroes of the conservative movement. growing and updated not really have that many people to -- is, went to school in the 80's '80su really didn't have that many people to look up to who had the courage to combat really the, just this cultural tsunami that was washing over traditional america. and it's a great pleasure to be asked to be here. so "bowing to beijing," the book came out last year. i spent four years in china. before i went there, i had a kind of a typical, i'd say, conservative view of our relationship with beijing. and that was this idea that the u.s. relationship with china predicated on this big gamble. and the gamble is if we increase our relationship with china,

trade with them more, they'll eventually become more like us. and that if we make them richer, automatically they'll become freer. and as people in china become, get more economic rights over time, they'll demand for political rights. that's a gamble on our side. one of the three cease of my -- theses of my book is that's not necessarily occurring. for one thing, there's this myth that there's this new china now where the middle class is growing fantastically, um, and things are getting better, and that's more or less not true. the middle class, they're small or than our middle class, and that's a country of 1.3 billion people. but even more significantly, the middle class there isn't as dynamic as ours because the government picks and chooses winners and losers. so it's not based on individual

initiative, um, or, you know, you work hard, pull yourself up by the boot straps, you can do anything you want. the communist party there, um, after the massacre ofty yang man square, the communist party scratched their head. wow, we have a lot of discontent in the country, and what most people don't know when the tanks rolled in tiananmen square, they also had uprisings in hundreds of cities elsewhere. so the government moved in to suppress uprisings across the whole country. so the communist party looked in the mirror and said we have to do something to counter this. so what they decided to do is loosen up a little, continue some economic liberalization. but the idea was specifically to increase the number of rich business people and the middle class, motto make a free -- not to make a free society, but to

co-opt the educated class which had led the revolution before. and that's what they have right now. so the businessmen and the business leaders and the white collar or class all owe where they are to the communist party and are mostly members of the communist party. so you're not going to have any friction between, say, the entrepreneurs and the business owners and the party because they're, essentially, one and the same. and if anybody bucks the system, they can just be plucked out and replaced with somebody else. i guess the underlying crisis that i address in the book is, um, and on the back of it there's this great photo. people think i'm too fixated on it, but it's the president of the united states bowing to hu jintao, the president of china. and, you know, a picture can speak a thousand words or more. you know, he's the head of state

of the land of the free, and here he is in an act of subservience to the head of the communist state. so i think you have to think what that means and then look at the policies that he's implementing and wants to implement and what that means for our relationship with china and america's relationship in the world. and i think you can look at several things, but one is just the amount of debt that he, that president obama is stacking up. you know, we're at the point where our debt is about 15 trillion and growing. i didn't check this morning, but, um, which is, you know, roughly the size of of an entire year of economic growth. so everything bought, produced, consumed, all the service of the united states which is by far the biggest economy in the world, our debt gobbles that up. a whole year's economy of the biggest economy in the world. so you have to think all these

programs that obama, all these stimulus programs, i mean, where does that money come from? we're broke, we don't have it, so we have to borrow the money. and one of the biggest lenders that's happy to give us money is beijing. and people don't think about that, but eventually there are policy consequences to being indebted. can you really to continue to be the freest, most powerful country in the world if you're the biggest debtor nation in the history of the world? i think the answer is, no. and then you have to look at who you owe that money to. and in china's case, um, i think you have to put a value proposition on who these guys are. um, and this goes back to our original gamble. if we engage them -- i mean, the alternative is another question, but, you know, if we continue to engage them and make them richer and they're not becoming freer, well, let's take apart exactly how bad these people are to see how this policy is working.

and i'll just go through a few examples. um, one is -- and this is, i think, when i was promoting this book, i did tons and tons of radio, and one of the things that people hadn't heard of before is how, um, china uses the judicial system, um, to feed the black market for organs for transplants in the whole world. there's a huge demand because medical care has advanced so much. there's this huge demand worldwide for organ for transplant. and the largest provider, actually, is china. and where they get these organs is the whole world combined two years ago executed about 700 prisoners worldwide. i think iran led with roughly 300, almost half. and this isn't, this isn't

anything in capital punishment, it's just to put the numbers in perspective. china they estimate, amnesty international estimates that china executes annually between 5,000-7,000. so the whole world is 700, china is upwords of 10,000. and this can be crimes as little as a farmer being executed for chopping down trees without a permit. they've executed somebody before for evading tolls on toll roads. so, you know, you don't have to be an axe murderer in china to be put to death. and there's no appeal in china. so if you go to court for one of these crimes and you're sentenced to death, they just take you out in the backyard, kneel you down and put a bullet in the back of your head. there's no appeal, you don't get to say bye to mom, it's all over.

so, but where this gets, i think, particularly scary is, um, there is a -- [inaudible] in new york a few years ago where they had representatives of the beijing government meeting with some americans and some doctors who were posing as consumers of organ for transplant. and they had these representatives of china had a price list. and it was how much different organs can cost if you want to buy 'em. and they said we will shoot to order. so they were saying we -- you just tell us what you want, and we'll get it for you. and investigations that have come out since then, it's been shown that prosecutors in china and judges have a list of what is in particular demand at that time. so if someone comes before a court, the prosecutor and the judge knows what the economic

incentive is to convict this person and sentence them to death. so, um, i think that's just sort of one egregious example of the place we're dealing with, and this is happening right now. um, another is this idea, you know, how benevolent is our engagement, and are we just kidding ourselves? i think the 2008 beijing olympics are a great example. i was living in hong kong working for "the wall street journal" at the time, and we ran this great op-ed, great op-ed but on a terrible subject, and it was every time the international olympic committee would visit beijing, the communist party would go crazy making the place look like disney world. they did things like would put paper leaves on trees in winter to make it look, you know, happy and not sad and depressing which beijing is in winter. they'd spray paint the grass green when the grass was dead.

so they'd do these funny things. but then they'd do a lot of horrible things too. for example, they would go round up all the physically and mentally handicapped adults and children and throw them in jail because they didn't want anyone to see any sign of weakness in the chinese people. and in some of these cases, there's this one case where this 8 or 9-year-old boy didn't come home from school, he was mentally retarded. and his parents were, obviously, concerned and freaking out. and three or four years -- three or four days later the police -- and this is when the olympic committee was visiting, and they did one of these round-ups. three or four days later the boy was dropped -- dumped off on the parents' front porch, and he had just been beaten to death by police. he was a young, vulnerable person who, i guess the police were just having tear kicks and just beat up this poor little boy and dumped him on the

parents' house, on their doorstep. "the wall street journal" published the story about this before beijing was approved for the olympics that year. for 2008. so this was known, the olympic committee knew about it, and beijing won the olympics anyway. i think if you're looking for an anecdote about how serious our engagement is in and if we're really trying to improve society over there, you know, everyone likes to think the olympic games are about, you know, building relationships and making the world better, and i think this is a great example of how -- and they didn't lose any sponsors either, by the way, right? coca-cola still spent millions and millions of dollars sponsoring those olympic games even with that kind of information in hand. and i guess the last anecdote at least on the human rights issues that everyone knows about the one child policy in china where women are only allowed to have one baby in their entire life, and if they get pregnant a

second time, they're forced to have an abortion and then usually forced against their will to be sterilized by the state as well. what a lot of people don't know about the one child policy is that it's not only that you can only have one child, it's that you have to have it on the government's schedule. so, um, the calendar they'll have, you know, all these villages and cit cities, went wn can have a permit to have a baby. if a woman gets pregnant not on the government calendar, all right, you don't have a child, you get your one child but that's in five years, they'll still force her to get an abortion even though she hasn't had a baby yet. it kind of brings home how the policy's even worse than a lot of people know. i think the other thing and i

don't know if i'm bumping up -- i think i'm bumping up against my time, so i'll just touch on a couple things quickly. on the trade issue is one thing is they cut every corner you can cut there. they have no -- you know, they break every law, rule, regulation in the book, and that includes health regulations. so a lot of the products that come here and, sure, it's a big flood. so you have millions of products and maybe only thousands of them are bad, but the thousands of products that are bad can have real consequences. what most people don't know people think of toys and electronics and things like that, but china's now shipping four billion pounds of food a year to the united states which if you look at all the corners they cut on code violations, um, you know, the food and drug administration at our ports rejects more products from china than anywhere else. thomas jefferson hospital in

philadelphia did a study of cook ware that's sent here from china, and 10% of it had lead in it. and that's going to all the stores you know of which i won't mention, but all the stores across the country are selling that stuff. 10% has lead content that wouldn't get approved here. the last thing i'll do, i'll say is there's kind of this myth that american power can't be superseded or, you know, i think it falls back to, i think, which is a beautiful belief in our manifest destiny. but people tend to think that we're always going to be on top, and i think that makes us lazy where we don't have to do what it takes to stay on top. we're cutting our defense spending all the time. the current budget agreement was based on cuts, and if the cuts didn't happen, they'd automatically come out of defense. china increases their military budget double digits every year

as we're cutting and investing highly in new ways, new-age weapons. and right now they have the largest military in the world. people think we do. we have roughly 1.4 million troops in uniform, and they have 2.3. so, um, if you look, i guess to wrap it up, we're receding, our unemployment's higher, debt's terrible, china's had double-digit, 10% growth for almost 20 years. we're not going to stay on top if we continue to recede and they continue to climb. and we have to change, you know, this is an important election year, and we need to start making some changes otherwise, um, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. thank you. >> thank you, brett. [applause] questions? yes, in front. you can stand, just -- speak loudly. >> thank you so much for being

here this morning with us. i'm really interested when you were talking about how much debt china's buying from us now and bowing to beijing, aware of the future that china's projected to have and our alliances with them based on the economic standpoint. what is america's alternative to allying with beijing? >> right. that's the great question. i mean, and i think that's, when you get down to it, i think that's the, you know, "bowing to beijing" is mostly the red dragon's demagoguery book. it can have another part saying china might just blow up and collapse. i mean, you don't know what's going to happen. but i think the takeaway from it is that any of this isn't inevitable, it's just that our own policy positions are putting us in a vulnerable position. we're spending more than we have, so i think the answer is we need to tighten our belt, look in the mirror and get our act together, you know?

and, you know, i think the lesson is, the financial lesson is, you know, we need to be responsible as a country again. and if we're not spending more than we have, then we don't have to borrow it from bad guys like the chinese communists. >> yes. >> my question was similar. but i would maybe have you expound on it. >> sure. >> other than the debt, because you talked a lot about human rights issues and such, what are other policy issues that you'd like to see changed, other policy directions in our policies towards china? >> well, you know, i think a lot of it is we just have to change our policies at home, and then it won't matter. i think the only reason china's a danger is because, um, you know, we don't have our act together. if we're smart, the only thing we're just going to look at china in the rearview mirror. but, you know, i think it's always risky to, i mean, i don't know how many strings attached

you want to put on policies in general. um, but, i mean, i think, you know, defense policy, we bring chinese admirals and generals over here and basically show them everything. we take them to very sensitive areas. when we have new planes or submarine, we'll show their most senior leadership, you know, sensitive information that's, you know, and weaponry that's being developed. and this is supposed to be a, you know, officer exchange. you know, they take us over there and show our generals, like, their cafeteria and stuff like that, and we show them our new stealth fighters. i mean, i think in general america needs to be serious again, and i don't think we are. if you look at our debt and our defense policies, i think, um, it's just a -- i think we're getting a wake-up call, and we have an election. we need to address everything, basically, across the board. >> i'd like to ask you a question.

um, i think your book's very important and very readable. how do you explain that our political candidates are simply not talking about china? i don't think they've read your book. i don't think they address it as an issue, and it is an important issue. >> yeah, that's a great question. i think the answer is kind of like the answer anytime anyone asks why something is or is not addressed in washington, it's all about money. so political candidates need a lot of money to run for office. a lot of that money comes from the businesses that have interests in china. so if you, if you speak out too much against china, you get a lot of pressure right away. so -- i don't think all of it is necessarily nefarious in that until i lived in china, i kind of believed that our only option was to engage them as well.

and i think it's easy to think that. but i think it's just because in the west as people, as the economy is developed people got more, more rights and more freedom, it doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the world works that way. and the government in china has -- their gamble is we won't say anything to them, and by the time we realize this is a mistake that, you know, they'll be on top. but i think the real thing is just, the typical money in politics is part of it, and i think, um, i think we have the best is system in the world. so i think it's just people need to speak out more. it's amazing if you look at how many americans think china's a threat. it's something like 60%.

so politicians who aren't talking about china, i guess, you know, they're not representing their constituents. >> well, if money is the answer to my question, money in politics, i guess that explains why the only one who really speaking out about china is donald trump. he doesn't need their money. >> yeah. he's -- [laughter] the donald's great on this issue. he actually sent me a note saying he loved the book. you know, a lot of times when people have the freedom to say what they want, they say the right things. and mr. trump definitely is saying a lot of it on china, and i think he's bringing up a lot of very important issues on other questions as far as mr. trump is talking about the need to sort of reestablish our manufacturing base. and it's one of the things when we, when you get everything from somewhere like china is that

there is a little bit of myth on some of the free trade talk in that you make decisions as a country, and if you just look at the auto try, for -- auto indus, for example, and it's easy to bash detroit for losing money and making stupid decisions. but a lot of u.s. laws actually discriminate against american manufacturers to the benefit of foreigners, foreign companies. for example, the big three is all unionized and has to use all uaw workers, and all the owners' contracts and negotiations -- onerous contracts and negotiations that go with that. ford, for example, if they would try to break a uaw contract, you'd have nationwide strikes, it would cripple the company. companies cannot by law, they don't have the nuclear option like the unions do. so ford can't say we're going to

fire everybody and hire scabs. i mean, they'd be out of business in a second. foreign companies don't have those restrictions. for example, mercedes, mercedes and bmw have factories in the south, korean and japanese companies have factories in the south, and thai not unionized. they don't have uaw labor. i mean, we have foreign companies that come to the united states sub factors, which i think is great, they're employing americans, but they have a better situation than american companies do on american soil. and i think there's something fundamentally messed up about that when foreign companies can produce the same product in america cheaper than american companies do. and those are policy decisions. so it's not just ha that american labor is more expensive and china's cheaper and that's why we have to buy all the junk from china. we've made policy decisions that have set that up

you have this big disparity where i think the live birth for girls to boys is something like 6 to 1 in china, so you have millions and millions and millions more boys than girls, so -- i mean, one, if a man wants to get married, there's nobody to get married to. so i think you have a lot of social consequences to that. friends in southeast asia when i visit the thailand and philippines, i say, you know, they're going to invade you just for your women. but that's going to run into a lot of problems. when you have millions and millions of more of one sex than the other, something's going to give at some point, you know? but i don't think they will just because they have this view that population is a problem and not a resource. and when you have that view, you're looking at how you can

get rid of people, not how you can, you know, give them more opportunity. >> my question relates to this rhetoric you're using about china being a threat. seems like a modern stream of international relations theory defines that threats are more created when we speak about people as threats. i'm just wondering if the more we talk about china being a threat, won't they see us as being hostile towards them and that risk, well, negative consequences in the forms of, you know, trade wars eventually? maybe conflict? >> right, that's a good question. um, you know, i think they look at us and just laugh. you know? you have the president of the united states, i mean, still technically speaking the only sort of superpower on the planet doing a full-blown bow to the president of china, and there's nothing -- i mean, you can't take that seriously. how can you take a country

seriously that has a head of state that bows to, you know, people who call them an enemy or a competitor, a strategic competitor or a threat or whatever you want? he's a president of a communist state, and the president of the united states is bowing to him. i think, i think they're not worried about us at all when it comes down to it. i think they're more worried about their interim problems than they are about us -- their internal problems than they are about us getting our act together. >> um, i was just curious, obviously, the human rights issue over in china's important, but when we also have our own human rights problem here with the trafficsing of aborted baby parts, how are we to even care about china's problems at this current point? >> i mean, i think that's a great question too, and i think we need to lead by example. one thing is after 9/11, i was

stationed overseas after everyone in, -- after 9/11, and the one thing i did learn that the world is anti-u.s., is totally garbage. i actually had a member of the pla, i was going over the border into mainland china, and this is the week or two after 9/11, a pen of the red army just came and said, you know, sorry for what happened to your country. you know, we all look up to america. but everywhere you go especially in poor countries, people, people love america and look to america and aspire to be more like america is. i think that's just a reminder that we need to be what people look up to us as being. and what we used to be we can be again, so when it comes to things like our own policies and abortion and all these horrible things, um, you know, we need to be the america that people think we are, and, you know, nobody

can touch us if we have our act together, if we're doing the right things, if we're being an example to the world, if we're the shining city on a hill, we'll continue to be number one, and we'll be number one for a reason. not just because we're powerful, but because we're good. >> thank you.

then sold those of the friends they're going to show up on your home page. so if you're having friends, birds of a father flock together, people tend to have friends with similar political views that diaz to a market research showing of. the new stores that the post will but ends up happening is a lot of people get information that reinforces there own predisposition because they're getting things that's are supportive. will we found in the book is we used survey data and measured

how much and it will waste people are using social media test to see if it actually does increase political pressures bashan which was to me know, if social networking is stimulating social capital we would expect there to be a relationship between social mediate use and political pulpit to -- participation. we found that is the case. even when holding traditional predictors of participation. if we control for people's socioeconomic status, age, you know, income and education. the traditional protectors of whether somebody is going to participate on how, in holding those things constant, huygens official media use critics in

increase in voting and political participation in the whole range of different things. we think will political puppet -- participation most people tend to think of it simply as voting. that's true. we conceptualize the following scrawler's that came before us on this front. political participation is much broader. writing letters to your congressman or state legislator. contributing money to a campaign . a whole range of different things of that nature that we call participation. will we end up doing is creating a measure that incorporates all of most kinds of things and then look at how on-line social media used relate some of those and find that online social media

use prefix that type of broad participation. where i think the biggest ramifications are, it is around the way people process of formation card into the. most of the things in the fall will waive the covenant uses the internet, to campaign on whether it be for open source kind of information, that kind of thing, that is all getting a workout. will we don't know a lot about yet is the way that it changes how people perceive the world. i repeat that people, in the attitude that we have about our surrounding rural is really nothing more. it's just a product of the information that we have a card to the excess -- excess of will. my draw upon whenever for

mention i have to evaluate or to think about it. when it comes to politics most of that information is coming from media gimmick conversation with friends, these kinds of things. we are constantly updating this information. that is just a theory about how people evaluate the world around them and how we've process and while we would think one thing over another. you have this type of information. you can predict a range of things that they're going to think. if that -- it all of this affirmation is coming from the outside world and we have this new mechanism, the internet, that, i'd think, is coupled with the fact the people to know like

to take in information that challenges their own predisposition. it's uncomfortable. carded to dozens. it goes back to the fifties, psychology. we don't like information that challenges of our predisposition this is why your fox news, m.s. in b.c., why are hits because they feed people in for ration their reinforces their umbria's position. everyone is happy and comfortable. people can sell so it. you are going to be forced to get some of the alternative view . the internet, not so much. i mean, it is very easy for

people to pick belongs, pick a range of information and supports their own predispositions. social networks from the people. i think that the future, the future of this, is that the internet as the senators the reformation, media and would not wall becomes more and more savvy to this and use it as for marketing. it is going to have further pelorus people because of going to happen is people attitudes are going to come more and more crystallize because back to my original point, if your attitude is nothing more than a summation of the information that you have extensible and now the more and more you're constantly updating misinformation and the more and more you get is just reinforcing information, your attitude is doing jury crystallized from the

left and the right. and so it creates polarization. we measure this in the boat and find evidence that people did, indeed, so select information and that as a result their attitudes become more extreme and polarized. now, after we look at that, that is one of the implications. everyone automatically assumes that a poll of his country is a bad thing. people think, oh, that's terrible. conflict. one of the other things we found , one of the most interesting things in the book was that the more one-sided information that people get it, the more likely they were to participate in the brussels.

i know that most americans think that they believe that it is a good thing for us to participate it is a good thing. you know, we know that people will leave and so strongly that if you look get a survey and ask post election, serve the public on what are up they voted, after every election somewhere in the range of 75-80 percent of the public instead voted. somewhere in the range of 20-30 percent of the american public is willing to live to a complete stranger and say they voted. that's funny. there is an incredible pressure in this country that we are socialized into this idea.

you have to go. get out there and vote. people are embarrassed. their more comfortable lying to somebody about it and they are saying it did not fit with. that tells me that americans tend to think participation is important. if that is the case people, not as a country. a positive byproduct of that is increased participation. >> reformation on this and other cities this is it by the local content as a "-- beatles visit c-span.org / local content. later today live on book tv