Shibani Mahtani (left) speaks to Sonny She (right)

Protests taking place across Myanmar in the aftermath of the February 1 military coup are unlike any prior demonstrations because of the unity between different generations and the use of technology, said Sonny Swe, co-founder and publisher of Frontier Myanmar, in a Zoom webinar hosted by the FCC. 

“It’s a lot more organised, it’s a lot more tech-savvy and there are three generations working together,” Swe said. “This is a different resistance now.”

The COVID-19 pandemic had forced people in Myanmar to unify and help each other, a trend which has carried over to the country’s Civil Disobedience Movement, which aims to cripple the military through strikes that will weaken the economy. 

“That’s why you see citizens helping each other and helping each other. It comes from the COVID [response],” Swe told FCC Correspondent Governor Shibani Mahtani during the discussion. “This is the positive sign of this country.”

Swe said the junta has been caught off guard by the overwhelming backlash to the coup, and that the military’s way of thinking hasn’t changed in decades. Investor confidence has plummeted in a way it didn’t in past times of social unrest, he said.  

“A lot of people don’t trust in the military regime,” he said. “The strategies they’re using aren’t working obviously.”

Asked to comment on the controversy surrounding CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward’s recent reporting trip to Myanmar, Swe said that it had been misleading to label the story an exclusive – “the only exclusive was getting the permission” to enter the country. 

He understood why a news outlet would accept such a trip, but “CNN should have done the proper homework before she flew into Myanmar”.

“We have the other international news outlets here and also we have local journalists who are risking their lives every day on the street reporting everything”.

As for Myanmar-based media organisations, he said that they were facing an increasingly difficult situation.

“We are trying our best to stay alive at this point,” Swe said. 

Frontier had launched a membership programme before the pandemic and it was picking up, but safety was a major concern.

He described a situation of increasing danger for the journalists he employs, and the steps he’s taken to try to keep everyone safe and minimise harm, including only assigning people to cover their townships so they don’t have to travel. 

Still, the situation grows increasingly dangerous for journalists, and Swe shared the story of one of his journalists in Mandalay who’d been shot in the hand and will likely never regain full function in it, despite having undergone three surgeries already.

“If something like this happens, it ruins someone else’s life,” Swe said. “The only thing I can do is to keep fingers crossed and tell them to be safe, and I don’t know how long we will hold on to this.”

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FCC President Keith Richburg speaks to Fareed Zakaria via Zoom.

The relationship between the United States and China is set to define the global order for decades to come, and both countries will emerge strongly from the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways, said journalist and author Fareed Zakaria in a Zoom webinar hosted by the FCC.

“You’re going to be thinking about America’s relationship to China and China’s relationship to America, and everything will be read through that prism,” Zakaria said. “How do you maintain that open system while having this rivalry? That’s the great challenge for both the United States and China.”

Though he said that China will of course benefit from the pandemic due to its “vaccine diplomacy” efforts and by virtue of being the world’s second-richest economy, Zakaria, who hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS for CNN Worldwide and is a columnist for The Washington Post, was quick to argue that the U.S. will remain richer and more powerful for a long time to come.

“The United States has 59 treaty allies, China has one: North Korea. The United States has 800 bases around the world, China has three,” Zakaria said. “The truth is China is in a geographically very complicated place where as it rises, it annoys the hell out of its neighbours: India, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Australia.”

Zakaria, whose mother Fatima, died recently of complications caused by COVID-19, made the appearance to discuss his most recent book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. 

He spoke to FCC President Keith Richburg about how countries around the world have fared during the pandemic, and he credited smart governments and early intervention for staving off serious public health crises in various nations. Zakaria also singled out Taiwan’s government for acting early, aggressively and intelligently in response to COVID-19 by quickly identifying and quarantining infected and potentially infected people. 

“What’s remarkable is that Taiwan was able to get through this crisis with 10 COVID deaths with a population of 22 million and, much more importantly, not a single day’s lockdown,” Zakaria said. “Just to give you a comparison, Taiwan has 22 million people, New York State has 20 million people. New York State is at 40,000 deaths, Taiwan is at 10.”

Though he said Hong Kong has strong, competent institutions like Taiwan, he described the city as a “very peculiar, unique case” with regard to pandemic management and the vaccine rollout. He pointed to relations between Hong Kong and China as well as “Hong Kong people’s distrust of Carrie Lam’s government” as complicating factors. 

In his book, Zakaria elaborates on different ways the world is likely to change after the pandemic is over, and during the talk he said that where people choose to live and how they choose to work will shift significantly, with more people moving from big cities to suburban areas and smaller cities. 

“You will view offices as places where you meet, gather, plan, congregate, but you don’t have to do solo work there and if you do, you’ll get a cubicle where you will plug in” Zakaria said. “Other than C-suite executives, the idea of a dedicated office that you have 24/7 with your family photographs and memorabilia, that I think is a relic of the past.”

Despite many countries turning inward during the pandemic, Zakaria predicted that globalisation will continue, albeit in a slower, more thoughtful way. He also described the world as being in a state of “new class warfare” with democracy under threat as autocrats exploit the growing divide between urban, educated populations and their rural, less educated counterparts. 

“The autocrats have gotten very clever over the last 15 years, and they have figured out how to use democracy to subvert democracy,” Zakaria said. 

In spite of the technological advances that have made remote work and social interaction possible during the pandemic, Zakaria pointed to the shortcomings of remote education as a reminder that we are human and can’t interact solely on Zoom. 

“We will want to actually gather physically and get the social connection that comes from actually being in the presence of people and in groups and having accidental conversations and serendipitous meetings.”

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Eric Wishart (left) and Marianna Spring (right)

Misinformation and conspiracy theories may be considered problems that primarily affect social media and online discourse, but as BBC specialist disinformation reporter Marianna Spring explained in a Zoom talk hosted by the FCC, the negative consequences of viral falsehoods spill over into real life all too often. 

“I’m sure from watching what happened on the 6th of January, now the world has a better understanding of how online conspiracies and extremist movements can inspire real-world violence and cause serious harm,” Spring said, referring to the U.S. Capitol insurrection.

Describing the pandemic as a perfect opportunity for spreading misinformation about health and vaccines, Spring spoke about interviewing people who have lost loved ones due to dissemination about falsehoods related to the coronavirus. She added that online conspiracy theories have had other nefarious effects on people’s lives.

“There are people I’ve spoken to who’ve had relationships destroyed, friendships ruined, marriages ended because of the impact that these conspiracy theories can have and the extent to which they can radicalise people,” Spring told FCC First Vice President Eric Wishart, who moderated the discussion. 

Spring, who is featured in Forbes’ just-released 30 Under 30 list, is the BBC’s first specialist reporter focusing on disinformation. Her work humanises the cost of misinformation and the impact of conspiracy theories such as QAnon, an American conspiracy network which Spring said has gone global by tapping into different communities’ concerns and fears. 

As Spring explained during the talk, one of the consequences of her work has been online violence, including a torrent of messages and posts filled with misogynistic language. She also described the surreal experience of her first QAnon “pile-on”: she was eating pizza and having a pint with a friend and started receiving messages in which strangers called her a Satanic paedophile who kills children and eats babies, among other things. 

“The more reporting I do, the more abuse that I receive,” Spring said, noting that she had recently received threats which she had to escalate to the police. “There have been some quite scary incidents involving my personal safety.”

In spite of these personal safety issues, Spring said she was grateful for her job and for what she’s learned so far, including the importance of reporting with empathy. 

“I think it’s really important to try and understand why people fall victim to online conspiracy theories to better realise the structural problems,” she said, “whether that’s to do with social media sites, governments, or with other things that have led us to this point.”

In doing so, Spring said she was offering something that pure debunking of falsehoods cannot provide. 

“Fact-checking alone is not enough and what I do complements that,” Spring said. “I try and put a human face to the impact that online conspiracies have and the harm they can cause, and I hope in that way, I engage perhaps people who wouldn’t traditionally turn to fact-checking.”

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FCC President Keith Richburg (left) and Ambassador Christopher Robert Hill (right)

The United States needs to be proactive in finding ways to communicate and collaborate more closely with China rather than pursuing a policy of decoupling, said Ambassador Christopher Robert Hill, a former career diplomat, in a talk hosted by the FCC. 

“I do believe that we need to find patterns of cooperation with China,” Hill said. “I think China is the number one foreign policy issue that this administration has to deal with, and with the understanding that we can no more change China than China can change us.”

The former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International Public Policy, spoke on a range of topics relating to the U.S.-China relationship including Taiwan, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, trade agreements and the South China Sea.

Ambassador Hill said that he didn’t think the possibility of a military conflict in the region was imminent or even likely, though he acknowledged the possibility for surprises. “If you look through history at various wars and conflicts, accidents are often among the causes,” he told FCC President Keith Richburg during the talk.

One crucial area of cooperation for the two countries to focus on is North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, said Hill, who was the head of the U.S. delegation to the Six Party Talks. 

“I think we need to see if we can come to an understanding with the Chinese that we need to get North Korea to abandon these weapons,” Hill said, adding that the key task at hand was to make the case that the country would have a better future without nuclear weapons. 

He also said that Pyongyang’s ultimate goal is to remove the American presence in South Korea.

“I think the North Koreans have the kind of vague notion that if they can just get the U.S. troops off the Korean Peninsula, somehow things will go more their way,” Hill said. “They need to be disabused of that in a big hurry.”

Commenting on the situation in Myanmar, Ambassador Hill described it as “an extremely frustrating issue” and called for multilateral cooperation to address the country’s crisis following the recent military coup. 

“We need a lot of discussions in the region including with India and China and, of course, our ASEAN partners,” Hill said. 

“We need Myanmar to understand that this is leading nowhere and no one supports them in the direction they’re going.”

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Nearly eight years after it was first announced, the Belt and Road Initiative has a mixed record of successes and failures, but the panelists who participated in a discussion hosted by the FCC said that greater transparency from China and better decision-making from its partner countries were both necessary for the BRI to move forward in a positive direction.

“China needs to step up and follow international best practices, and increase transparency around lending,” said Jonathan Hillman, author of The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century. At the same time, he said, “Recipient countries need to be their own best advocates and make decisions that aren’t just a sort-of short-term political play but in the best long-term economic interests of their countries.”

Harvard University’s Nargis Kassenova, an expert in Central Asian politics and security, echoed the call for greater transparency. She used the example of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, two countries whose debt level to China is well documented, versus Turkmenistan, which she said has no transparency about its loans from China.

Despite some of the political and economic fallout in various countries participating in the BRI, James Wang, research director of the Bay Area Hong Kong Centre / Belt and Road Hong Kong Centre, said it goes both ways, with unstable regimes and uncertain economic situations posing their own threats to Chinese lenders and state-owned enterprises.

The panelists also spoke about the effects of the pandemic on China’s “Health Silk Road”, vaccine diplomacy and whether the U.S. and other Western nations could build a successful alternative to Belt and Road.

“The Health Silk Road is now being pushed and picking up momentum, but it did precede the pandemic,” Kassenova said. She added that the pandemic had complicated China’s standing in Central Asia, with demand for Russian vaccines outpacing demand for Chinese-made jabs.

Vaccines can certainly play a role in strengthening relations with other countries, Wang said, noting that it built on China’s history of sending doctors to developing nations in the past.

As for the U.S. creating its own version of the BRI in collaboration with allies, Hillman said that more choice and competition would be a good thing.

“I think we see along the Belt and Road, sometimes the worst-case outcomes are countries who just didn’t have an alternative.”

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Instagram is typically thought of as a lighthearted platform for posting food photos and looking at your friends’ vacations snaps, but as Bloomberg journalist Sarah Frier, author of No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, explained in an FCC Zoom talk, it’s also rife with misinformation and illegal activity.

“There’s still a hell of a lot of fake news and misinformation on Instagram,” said Frier. “It is just hidden in these communities of people who follow it really intensely and maybe doesn’t bubble up into the mainstream the way a Trump tweet would.”

She said that a U.S. Senate investigation found that Russia had posted more misinformation on Instagram than Facebook during the 2016 presidential election. She also said the app is being used for illegal drug sales, human trafficking and, over the past year, the spread of health misinformation from some wellness influencers who peddle bad medical advice to beat Covid.

“It is harder to find the dark sides because of the lack of virality, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible,” said Frier. “It’s harder to find manipulated media or false information in images as opposed to in text. And it’s harder to find it in video. So I think that it might be more difficult to clean up Instagram.”

Though Facebook, which owns Instagram, is regularly the subject of public criticism and negative publicity due to data privacy concerns, Frier said that Instagram has been spared even though all of its data is shared with Facebook. The two platforms share the same data usage and privacy policies, she explained.

“People have not been as critical of Instagram because they like Instagram,” Frier said. “The moment of reckoning for Instagram just simply hasn’t happened at the level that it should.”

Though Instagram has actively worked to create a wholesome ecosystem and amplify the voices of activists, the LGBTQ community, creatives and people of colour, Frier said the often-overlooked dark side of the app can no longer be ignored because of its outsized influence.

“This is an app that has had this tremendous influence on our culture, on our economy, on our sense of self, on what we consider to be relevant in our society.”

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Clockwise from top left: FCC Claire Hollingworth Fellow Jennifer Creery, Michelle He Yee Lee, Jiayang Fan, Eileen Cheng-yin Chow

 The mass shooting in Atlanta that took the lives of six women of Asian descent is another tragic event in the United States’ long history of anti-Asian violence and discrimination, three Asian American women writers and journalists — Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, Jiayang Fan and Michelle He Yee Lee – said in a panel hosted by the FCC. 

“Anti-Asian rhetoric may feel more scornful right now, but I think it is important to talk about the fact that this is not new,” said Lee, a reporter for The Washington Post and president of the American Asian Journalists Association. “This is part of our lived experience in this country.”

Chow, a visiting associate professor at Duke University, summarised a long history of anti-Asian legislation in the U.S. but noted that the country isn’t unique in this regard. 

“You can never talk about the U.S. or Europe and their anti-Asian sentiments without talking about a larger and longer history of colonialism and empire, and the ways in which, say, hypersexualisation of [Asian] women, are baked into the stories of these nations,” she said.

Fan, a staff writer at The New Yorker who published a piece titled “The Atlanta Shooting and the Dehumanization of Asian Women” in the wake of the killings, said the reactions to her story had been eye-opening. On March 16, a gunman killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at three Atlanta area spas.

“What struck me most deeply as I read through some of the responses to that piece is almost every Asian American woman I know has experienced some kind of sexualized racism, and how mundane and pervasive that sort of experience has been for us, to the extent that we almost brush it off as part of the American experience,” Fan said in the panel moderated by FCC First Vice President Eric Wishart. 

“I think that should really make us question what the American experience is for Asian American women.”

Moving forward, the panelists agreed that more education and awareness are needed for both journalists and the general public in order to combat anti-AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) hate. 

Chow said that government funding should be given to small grassroots organisations doing work in local communities like Red Canary Song, CCED (Chinatown Community for Equitable Development), The Butterfly Group and others. 

Fan said that money should be spent on the most vulnerable members of the community to assist with issues like mental health, financial literacy and finding employment.

Lee added that the Atlanta shooting had revealed the “cultural incompetency of newsrooms” and said that media outlets needed to do more to educate their journalists about AAPI communities year-round and not only in times of crisis. She also argued that it was time for Asian American journalists to be empowered to become more vocal.

“As Asians and as journalists, we’re not really wired to talk about ourselves or our experiences, but we’ve seen how far that has taken us and this is where we are now,” Lee said. “It needs to become the norm for journalists to share what it’s like to be an AAPI journalist during this moment so the rest of the country is aware.”

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FCC Correspondent Governors Dan Strumpf and Shibani Mahtani (left) and Te-Ping Chen (right).

Journalism and fiction are, by definition, opposite forms of writing, but as writer Te-Ping Chen explained in a book talk hosted by the FCC, the two aren’t as different as you might think.

“In some ways, [writing] fiction and journalism is a similar process in as much as you are taking the material at hand,” Chen said, “except with fiction, the material at hand you can just draw from, in so many ways, a deeper universe around you.”

Formerly based in Hong Kong and Beijing, Chen is a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and the author of Land of Big Numbers, a recently published collection of short stories largely set in China.

During the talk, moderated by FCC Correspondent Governor Shibani Mahtani, Chen recalled the experience of writing her stories in the morning before going to work in the WSJ’s Beijing bureau, and she said that being a journalist in China informed her work as a fiction writer. 

“I felt the sense of having the enormous privilege of getting to live in this country, and work in an occupation where my job was to try and understand it, and to travel and meet people and see things—what an extraordinary thing,” Chen said. 

“I also felt this extraordinary sense of stories and images and details that were arresting but maybe wouldn’t find their way into a news story, but still stayed with me and in many ways seeded some of the stories and characters and moments in this book.”

Though Land of Big Numbers has much to say about China, Chen described it as a human-centric collection of stories about “what it’s like to live in a society where your life choices feel constrained in many ways and things feel outside of your control, and how you try and create a sense of meaning for yourself.”

Chen also said she hoped that her book would give readers a better understanding of China and its people, in a way that news articles focused on politics and elites cannot.

“It’s always been a hard country to have a window on from the outside,” Chen said. 

“I really do hope that people who read the book will come away with a deeper sense of understanding for the place, which ultimately has to be rooted in a sense of the people and not just the government.” 

Watch the full event below: