Chris Fenton
speaker
150 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 9 Jul
Chris Fenton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, we were late August of 2018. I'm sorry, 2019. We were in China for about 12 days. Xi'an, Chengdu, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macau, and Beijing. So I hope I wasn't the one that brought it over initially to the U.S., but the timing was around that period. Obviously, we sort of really discovered it in December of that year.
Yeah, well, there's definitely a bottom-up, top-down part of that system where there's a lot of fear base among all the different officials, whether you're at a very local level, municipal level, provincial level, and then all the way up into central government. So no one wants to report bad news up the chain of command. Right.
That combined with various other puzzling problems that they weren't sure that they were fully comprehending really muddied sort of the ability to tackle the problem quickly and effectively and keep it from spreading outside of the country.
Yeah. it all comes down to money, quite frankly. And what was interesting is that a moment that I think really woke up a lot of the American public to the fact that maybe we're not getting a complete straight story out of China in terms of a lot of different narratives was earlier,
pre-COVID in the fall of 2019, Daryl Morey, the GM of the Houston Rockets, tweeted out, fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong. And that was a tweet that he made outside of China that China heard. and immediately punish the NBA over in a way that made the NBA stumble and fumble on how to correctly respond to that and solve the issue.
We saw Adam Silver come out and say, oh, no, no, no, no, he didn't mean that. And then Daryl Morey saying, yeah, I did. And then, oh, we protect free speech, et cetera, et cetera. But it was that moment where you saw how carefully cultivated the narrative that Beijing wants to create, both inside of their country and outside.
I think a lot of people knew there was lots of censorship that occurs inside of that country. And a lot of us were OK with that. In fact, us in the film business, we would cut all kinds of things out of movies in order to get those things through so they could be viewed by Chinese consumers. knowing they had to be censored or being told they had to be censored. We didn't have a problem with that.
But it was really when we saw Daryl Morey and the aftermath of that tweet around the world and the way China was dictating to the NBA what they can and can't do, where we realized, wait a minute, they're trying to control narrative outside of their borders. And they're really trying to cultivate a certain messaging about the PRC. And that led into COVID, which
i think a lot of us started to look at a lot of the different messaging that was coming out of beijing about the pandemic about the sourcing of it and where it was and we started noticing the pressure points they were putting on various organizations whether it was the wto or say dr fauci and the cdc here or whatever it was because there was so many people
so many different parties with money tied up in that country. They had no other alternative than other to listen to Beijing and do what they were telling them to do.
Well, China, it's very interesting. I mean, if you want to peel the onion back in a more macro sense, I mean, obviously you guys have studied the COVID pandemic and the controversies around various parts of that whole period of our history.
But if you look at just sort of the macro sense of the way China tries to really control messaging and narrative, both inside their country and out, just look at the movie business. I mean, We can't put things such as criminals or drug abuse or dirty clothes on clotheslines inside Shanghai.
We can't depict anything bad about that country in the television and films that we do, whether we want them released in China or not, because We have so much money coming from China in the Hollywood system, it's less than it used to be, but it's still there, that we're beholden to them with all content, whether it's something that's going to play in the market or not.
So if you peel it back even further to, say, circa 1980s, when I was growing up and in junior high and high school, when somebody said to me, what do you think of when you think of the Soviet Union? I would immediately think of sort of a gray... dreary Cold War type of thriller or a gorky park or something like that. And that was the way I thought of the Soviet Union.
I never saw it in a blue sky and people happy walking around and milling. China's trying to do the opposite. There's generations of kids that have never seen, obviously, Tank Man, the guy holding back the tanks during the Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989 episode. There's lots of kids that have never seen bad weather in China in the form of television or films. They've never seen drug use.
They've never seen criminals. Or if they've seen criminals, they've only seen criminals get caught by the police. So eventually, China is going to look like they're the ultimate system, the utopian part of society on a global basis to everyone, because no one's going to see any of the bad that happens inside of that country the same way it would happen anywhere else in the world.
Not every country is perfect, but China wants to make it look perfect. So if you extrapolate that to COVID, you start to realize what that narrative was.
oh so so at least the the heavy hand of china was in there you could you feel it you see it i'll give you one other example we have one other example when you're in china everything that you see on the news every part of the news anything that got information wise press wise is controlled by the ministry of propaganda
They don't want you to see certain things, particularly handguns or gun violence. But I happened to be there shooting Iron Man 3 late 2012 during Sandy Hook. And I'll tell you what played the whole week I was on the ground in Beijing, 24-7 on every station.
sandy hook and the sandy hook coverage why because they wanted to make the united states look like the wild west a completely violent place with no rules or laws and people shooting each other and look at us beijing we run the best system in the world that is the way they work when it comes to manipulating narrative and they're not far off but anyway but
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