David Barboza

I think that's the thing also the Chinese love is that they know you can't punch back in certain ways. This is their advantage to use the US system, the openness of the US, the universities, just an open freedom rule of law society and say, let's take advantage of that. Let's find the holes and we know they can't strike back in some ways, right?

So I think it's been, that's the game they've been playing for decades and now they're getting really good at it.

I would imagine his takeaways are celebratory, that he sees a bit of chaos in the US. If they're laying off at CISA, he's like, wow, this advantage is going to come even faster. And I think back to the earlier question that it's not just about Taiwan. I think even if Taiwan were not the case, they would still be in the infrastructure. It's about leverage. It's about the rise of China.

challenging the U.S. in every realm. We're talking a lot about infrastructure, which is important, but they want to challenge the U.S. in everything, the top universities, the top AI, our own semiconductors. They want to be self-sufficient. So Xi Jinping, I think, is really looking at what's happening in the U.S. and saying, this is a great opportunity for us.

The decline may come faster because it seems that they're tearing apart the country and the government is not sure. what they're doing so i think it's emboldening actually china uh right now which is sad to see and i i've spent a lot of time with people who are in government or formerly in government and you really want the us to have the best capabilities i can tell you when i was Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I just wanted to add that one of the things I covered in China was the city of Shenzhen, which is one of the manufacturing capitals of China. And when you think about TP-Link or almost any electronic today, everything is made in China. So if they have... one over every market, and I've been to Huawei's facilities.

So if they're involved in every part of the electronics chain, they know how to make them, how to rewire them, how to control them. A lot of the surveillance cameras in the US are Chinese-made surveillance cameras, even at, for a while, military sites, the drones. So this is a huge advantage China has, which is we're making everything so we can get in every home.

You know, I don't think it really changes their strategy, but it sort of accelerates it at points, right? So they're going to do the cyber attacks. They're going to do the leverage. But I think COVID and attacking China on COVID, the origins of COVID just makes them more angry and says like, let's unleash all the hackers in these different places.

So I do think one is they get an extra jolt from that and they will, You know push more But also they are thinking in the long term anyway, right which is they're gonna they're gonna find the openings to do it they're gonna probably take advantage right now of the situation in the US if there are more tariffs on China and

If Trump calls out China more, I think you'll see them double down on getting into US infrastructure. You can guarantee that they're going to be more aggressive because if they see that as leverage, then this is what we need to do for the next negotiation. And I think a lot of these things about Taiwan are also about

giving them the leverage to say, if the US in any way moves on Taiwan or changes the policy enough, just letting you know we're in everything. We want you to know that. We want to show that. And the other part of your question is about them disliking criticism. In your first episode, you talk about the Dalai Lama, the dissidents. The Google hack was really about dissidents.

It's certainly true, and in my own story, they're very worried not only about their own population seeing criticisms, but they don't want the outside world to badmouth China or to diminish China's prospects in other countries. So with Huawei also, they really went aggressively at the US on Huawei and on Canada, right? So you can just expect that, as Jim was saying earlier,

China is more powerful now. They're probably going to show that they don't have to bend or bow as much or even negotiate in the same way. And this environment is ripe for them to be a bit more aggressive. So I think we should expect more from China, especially with export controls. They hate the export controls, right?

So they are gonna figure out not only ways around it, but what are the other leverage points we need Chinese export controls, right? We're going to put our own export control regime in place. So I think that's what we're going to expect in the next couple of years.

Yes, thank you. Great to be here with you, Nicole. I think this is one of the things, it's a great journalism question, it's also great that your first episode mentions, like, we need to deal with this issue. As a journalist covering China, you know you've gotta write about the Communist Party, you've gotta write about the toughest things that China's doing. hacking my own email.

But also, that's going to affect the readers. That's going to affect politicians. That's going to lead to a little xenophobia. As you probably know, there's FBI investigations. There's concerns about Chinese students at universities. You may or may not know this, but the three major American chip companies are all Chinese Americans. So China is a source of talent.

You have just discrimination, human rights, all of those things. So I think as a journalist, maybe the first years I was in China wasn't a big deal. But every year since then, especially now, you have to think in journalism, but not only in journalism, about What is the story? Is it the Chinese actors, the Chinese cyber spies? Could that become easily seen as Chinese?

These are suspicions about Chinese students. Or my colleague is Chinese. My wife is Chinese. So I do worry a lot about that. I think every story we write, we need to think about not only is it true what we're saying, but what could be the impact of this story? Could it lead to xenophobia in the country?

So I think saying that up front and thinking about that, there are lots of Chinese Americans, Asian Americans in this country. We know what happened during COVID. So I think keeping that top of mind, we're going to say some really tough things about China, but we shouldn't think everyone who's Chinese is a spy, is a hacker, is the threat.

I know this is going to be the most dangerous thing I do, that my wife and myself are somewhat at risk. So my goal early on was no phone calling, very careful like strategy of rather than calling up people and saying, can I talk to you about the prime minister's wife who's in the diamond business? My strategy was, I think I'm going to do a story about the diamond business.

And I'm going to ask people about the diamond business and then say, by the way, who is this woman? So, you know, how do you roundabout try to understand areas and then touch upon the thing without going directly for it? So I had a pretty complicated strategy going into it. But the key part of that was do not let people know what I'm doing. And if you looked through my reporting of 2012,

I think I wrote 50 or 60 stories outside of this project just to sort of make people think I'm doing my regular job.

So imagine like we're getting a set of documents in. It's coming from the Chinese government. It's stamped. It's coming in the mail. We open it. It's in Chinese. And we're like, wow, in these documents, here's the name of the prime minister's wife. Here's the name of the other relatives. Here's their ID number. Here is their resume. Is this a trick? Do they know that we're looking at this?

In about May of 2012, we started to notice that maybe someone was on to what we were doing. And people started to question our driver, the New York Times driver for the Bureau in Shanghai, and some of my colleagues. And so in July of 2012, I said to The Times, we're quite nervous. We think they're on our trail. We don't know for sure, but they're asking questions.

I think I should come back and finish the article in New York.

They would be like, wow, your Chinese is really good. Because it was all in a lot of Chinese documents.

I just scrambled every day thinking, if I get anything wrong, it's the end of my career. Believe it or not, the scariest thing for me about this story was not that the Chinese government was going to capture me or arrest me or kill me. The scariest thing was that The New York Times was going to capture me and kill me because I had gotten something wrong about it and that I would have no career.

So I had both the excitement of this great story, but also the fear that a lot can go wrong when you're dealing with this many documents in a foreign language with so many moving parts.

We started to call the people who were involved with the family of the prime minister and get them on the phone, which was so important to, you know, it's great to do something based on documents, but you always need someone who's been involved with those documents to say, what do they mean? Do they mean what I think they mean? Is this true?

And believe it or not, they talked to me and they helped confirm some things.

The government was not happy, obviously, but we were going to publish.

The most memorable part was the editors told me we're going to publish that evening. It was late in Tokyo. It was early in New York. And I recall calling Jinggang, calling the foreign minister, who was our window into China and the Chinese government. He'd already denounced me and the Times and said that we were damaging U.S.-China relations and we should not publish anything.

And I told him that we were going to publish within hours. And I remember him telling me, no, you're not. And I thought, really? I think we are. And he kept saying, no, you're not. And I said, I think we are. It's not my decision. I think the editors are already decided they're going to publish. And I remember him saying, don't do it, David. Like, don't. You're not. Do not do this.

And I kept saying to him, it's beyond my control. We have everything we need, and we're going to publish. I remember them telling me this would have grave implications for your wife, who's Chinese, and for you in China, but also for the New York Times Chinese language site, which they had just started. I might have been six months in operation.

No.

I remember all through 2011, 2012, I had refused to use the New York Times, davidbarbozatnytimes.com or whatever, barbozatnytimes.com. I was using Gmail because I thought it was better and safer, which really annoyed the editors. And I remember when we were finishing my article, they said, Will you stop using this Gmail and put your stuff on the New York Times account?

Which is exactly the account they hacked, right? So when they hacked into my account, they probably were like, why is this account so empty? Why isn't this guy, where are his sources? And I remember the editor saying, you cannot go back to China to pick up your things and pack until you publish the second article.

And it was almost comical to me that after we published the second article, the Times was like, OK, you can go back to Shanghai. We have the articles. You can go back. Great work. And I went back and I didn't realize it, but they had arranged for a New York Times reporter, Andy Jacobs, to cover my arrival back in China and possibly my arrest.

And so as I touched down in Shanghai from Tokyo, the Times had the expectation I very well could be arrested at the airport. I went through customs. No one said anything. My driver showed up. I was going back home and I got a call from Andy Jacobs saying, did you arrive? And I said, I arrived. He said, well, where are you? I said, I'm at Hong Chao Airport. And he said, oh, I'm at Pudong Airport.

He was at the wrong airport. So I thought, great, Andy. So if I was arrested, you were supposed to cover my arrest, but there's no one there at the airport when I was actually cut off. But I went back to China. Strangely, I was able to renew my visa. I think the Chinese government basically did not want to make a rash, quick decision, and they let me renew.

And then it became awkward to kick me out. New York Times reporters were not allowed to enter China after the story, but those in China were not kicked out. And for three more years, I continued to report. I did get lots of death threats. And at the end, you know, by 2015, Lynn and I, my wife, knew it is too dangerous.

They're basically having people call us saying they're hitmen and they're going to murder us and our children. So then it was clear, like, we have to leave.

Right, right. So David Barboza, and I'm a former New York Times correspondent.

And so I actually wanted to do this story looking into the secret wealth of Chinese leaders for four or five years, but I didn't think I could get the documentation. But I had collected really in paper notes over years, many dinner discussions. I would go back home and I would write some notes. I heard this about the prime minister's family. I heard this about another Politburo standing.

committee member, I heard this about how they had this secret wealth through private companies and public companies.

So eventually, by 2011, I had talked to the editors and I said, I'm going to try to figure out whether there are documents and evidence to prove what I've been hearing about year after year in private meetings with friends and with business people that there's this huge amount of secret wealth in their hands. I was a documents person. I had written about Enron and others.

I love documents and corporate records. And I actually mapped out like everyone who had been on the Politburo or the Politburo Standing Committee for the last 20 years. And I ended up focusing on the prime minister at the time, Wen Jiabao, because I had so many notes about him. My friends had met his wife, who was called the Diamond Queen.

I had heard about his son, who was in private equity and worked with Goldman Sachs and others. And to be honest, I was hoping to find $2 to $3 million worth of hidden money. I never imagined that we would end up with $2 to $3 billion, and that was our conservative estimate.

Any foreign correspondent, especially for an American outfit, would know that when you're in China, you are followed. State security has assigned people to follow you, to interview your research assistants, to camp out sometimes in front of your building to see where you come and go, to take them to tea, to ask them, what is David reporting on? Where is he going? So the entire time I'm in China,

I know I've been followed many times. Our car has been tracked from hotels. When I check into hotels in China, I give them my passport, which says I'm a journalist. And therefore, the next morning, state security or public security is there and they might follow me for the day. They are very concerned with what you're writing about.

And there's no concern greater than the personal lives or the families of the leaders. If you're going to be dealing with anything about leaders and their families, you're going to be really a top target of the Chinese government. We know not to make phone calls, not to meet people that give away what we're working on.

I didn't even want my New York Times colleagues in Beijing to know what I was working on, because if they mention it to someone that they meet, then this is a really... I knew by... 2011, but especially by 2012, my life is in danger. They could easily kick me out. But also, my wife is a Chinese citizen. This is a super sensitive topic.

And I remember calling one of our lawyers and telling him about this story. And he said to me, your life is in danger before you publish. That is going to be the most dangerous time for you before you publish this article.