Digital Social Hour
China's Economic Time Bomb: What Entrepreneurs Must Know | Jan Jekielek DSH #1055
Sat, 04 Jan 2025
Discover the hidden truths about China's economic time bomb and what it means for entrepreneurs worldwide. In this eye-opening conversation with Jan from The Epoch Times, we uncover shocking revelations about China's business practices, economic challenges, and human rights issues that every business leader needs to understand. 🔍 From Jack Ma's disappearance to the truth about China's organ harvesting program, get an insider's perspective on why China's economy might be facing a slow-motion collapse. Learn how the Chinese Communist Party maintains control over tech giants, why traditional media often misses the real story, and what entrepreneurs must know about doing business with China. Jan shares exclusive insights from his years of investigating China's regime, including never-before-told stories about the CCP's influence on global business, the truth about Chinese manufacturing dominance, and why understanding these dynamics is crucial for your business success. 🌏 This powerful discussion reveals why China's economic challenges matter to entrepreneurs everywhere, exposing the complex web of business, politics, and power that shapes global commerce. Whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, or business leader, this conversation provides essential knowledge for navigating today's complex global marketplace. Get ready for an unfiltered look at China's economic reality and what it means for your business future. 💼 #chinastimulus #chinabusinesscrackdown #venturecapital #globalnews #chineseauthorities CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 01:49 - Organ Harvesting in China 05:02 - Trump Administration's China Policy 07:25 - China's Influence on International Institutions 09:18 - China's Long Game Strategy 10:32 - Falun Gong Movement 12:16 - Epoch Times Overview 18:09 - Truthfulness and Transparency 18:37 - Shen Yun: Reviving Traditional Chinese Culture 20:06 - Forced Organ Harvesting Survivor Testimony 23:34 - Attacking the Credibility of the CCP 25:37 - Getting Information to the Chinese People 26:48 - The New Administration's Approach 28:45 - Three Warfares Doctrine Explained 29:40 - Economic Warfare Tactics 30:25 - Legal Warfare Strategies 31:00 - Media Warfare Techniques 31:33 - Where to Find Jan APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Jan Jekielek https://www.instagram.com/jan.jekielek/ https://x.com/janjekielek LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/
Chapter 1: What is the background of Epoch Times?
For those that don't know the background of Epoch Times, you know, we were actually founded by Chinese Americans back in 2000. And back then it was a completely different picture. Tom Friedman from the New York Times wrote a column, we should learn from Chinese governance practices because they're so efficient.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of organ harvesting in China?
It was unbelievable because I was sort of in the midst of the human rights side of things. That's what actually got me into Epoch in the first place. There's a whole organ harvesting regime. There's a whole business of using these people, murdering them for organs. I was saying, no, these are not good governance practices. We do not want to replicate this.
All right, guys, we are at Amfest. We got Jan from Epoch Times today. We're going to talk China, man. That's awesome. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. And we were just talking about how a lot of the media doesn't really, you know, articulate it in the right ways. Oh, absolutely.
And first of all, you know, I'm thrilled to be here with you, Sean. We've been at this for years. I mean, I don't, for those that don't know the background of Epoch Times, you know, we were actually founded by Chinese Americans back in 2000. So almost pushing 25 years ago, right? With the express purpose to expose the Chinese regime for what it was.
And back then, it was a completely different picture of what China was about. I mean, people writing, I still remember back in 2009, Tom Friedman from the New York Times wrote a column where he was basically saying, you know, we should learn from Chinese governance practices, right? Because they're so efficient and things like this.
It was unbelievable because I was sort of in the midst of the human rights side of things. That's what actually got me into EPOC in the first place. And there's a whole organ harvesting regime. They take prisoners of conscience and there's a whole business of using these people, murdering them for organs.
And no one wanted to cover, you know, I was saying, no, these are not good governance practices. We do not want to replicate this, right? So, you know, just to give you a little, little bit of background. So yeah, I'm ready to rock here. Wow. When was that order harvesting? So we learned about it first back in 2006.
There were these two Canadian, one of them was a human rights lawyer, another was a former secretary of state. They got together, they were asked, hey, can you look into this? We've heard rumors, right? They looked into it and they made a report in 2006, which basically said there's no other set of circumstances that would account for everything, the evidence that we do have.
I'll give you an example, okay? There were newspapers that were advertising at the time, you could go to China and order a new heart if you had 200 grand or something like that in two weeks. They'd service you in two weeks for a new heart. Normally, you have to wait years, right? Because someone has to die, but not be completely... dead, right?
They have to be brain dead, body alive because you can't organ harvest from a cadaver except corneas and things like this. So it was, you know, this was a big deal. This is just one piece of evidence. They actually found 17 that all corroborated that this existed. There was no smoking gun, but there was like, hey, this is whatever is happening here is grossly unethical.
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Chapter 3: How did the Trump administration approach China?
They have all these different indicators that come down to one number, and they measure themselves against every other single nation in the world along all those features, right? And so America, of course, is their number one competitor in their view. Now, Xi Jinping is waging a people's war against America. That's only a few years old, but that's official.
He said, we are waging a people's war against America. Now, that doesn't manifest... mostly as kinetic warfare. It manifests as all kinds of other ways, okay?
But to make a long story short, what happened in the Trump administration is, to me, for the first time, with the imposition of these tariffs, okay, that Robert Lighthizer pioneered in a way to try to get the trade deficit into, you know, just this unbelievable trade deficit. Robert Lighthizer's, by the way, philosophy is,
If there's a huge sustained trade deficit, that means that someone is gaming the system. He's not looking at it ideologically. He's just he's looking at it as, OK, these guys are taking advantage of it in all sorts of different ways. And I could enumerate that to you if you would like. But he put forth the first policy that said, we're going to make you do something that you don't want to do. OK.
And the response, if you recall, was just, you know, all hell breaking was this is unbelievable. How is this possible? And so forth. And but the effect was the Chinese regime actually had to do something that was in America's interest for the first time in quite some time. And again, you know, some people would say, yeah, that's that's very, you know, you're exaggerating here.
I, you know, I don't think I am actually. Right. Because the only way you can really tell. if you're doing something in the interest of America versus the CCP, they don't believe in win-win. This is what this gross national power metric tells us, right? They only believe that they're winning if you're losing. Either you're suffering or they're growing much faster than you are.
One way or the other, you have to be on the losing end of it.
Well, I think they've harmed a lot of mom and pop businesses in America because you could just order the same product in China for half the price these days.
Well, and not even that, like the last Trump 45 was actually trying to deal with this. They kind of they basically worked. There's something called the Universal Postal Union. OK, and that determines, for example, let's say you're sending a package from China. You want to send it to America. Right. something governs who pays for that.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of China's influence on global institutions?
Yeah, they're willing to operate at a huge loss at first, right?
Exactly. On certain things which are of strategic importance to the regime.
100%.
Exactly. Yeah, I feel like they're really a superpower. Like, we're neck and neck. Some would even say they're ahead of us.
Well, and... We could talk about that. I mean, there's tons of indicators. I just had Kyle Bass, for example, on the show, who's, I don't know, probably one of the smartest guys on the realities of the Chinese economy. And he would say, well, the Chinese economy is in kind of a slow motion collapse, as we see. Oh, really? Well, you know, the housing sector, which is like 30% of the economy, is...
dead, struggling, right? I mean, there was this massive, massive bubble. The bank failed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. All sorts of banks failed, all sorts of these huge, huge state, you know, essentially any, again, any very large corporation is in effect a state corporation, right, in China. Because again, the regime has complete on-off and decision-making error ultimately, right?
You know, TikTok would be a fantastic example of that. And these recent court ruling that came out actually speaks to that exactly, that issue, right? It's like they're basically saying, well, the Chinese regime won't let us share the algorithm, right? Well, you're saying you're a private enterprise, but the regime dictates whether the algorithm is something you can actually sell or not.
Something doesn't compute here, right? Yeah, absolutely. And they're really interesting because I mentioned how we were founded by Falun Gong practitioners, right? with the express idea to expose the regime. We've made, you know, a project, if you will, of exposing the realities of the regime. It was needed at the time because at the time, you know, people, like, it was Kissinger doctrine.
I don't know if you remember this, but basically the idea was you have to get into China If you don't get in now, someone else will get that massive market. And we have these great methods for you to do it. And they set up all sorts of ways in which they could do it without great risk to themselves, but of great financial benefit to themselves. And so...
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Chapter 5: Why did Jack Ma disappear?
Because what that told, the message was, hey, we can actually do anything to these people to reform them, to re-educate, to what they, you've heard about these forced confessions sometimes that are televised. Yeah. To basically speak up publicly against what they had been doing. But it turned out these people were really resilient. And remember, so it's very, like it's a very self-directed thing.
And I don't think they could understand that because of this unbelievable hierarchical nature and totalitarian nature of communism. Wow, I didn't even know that happened. So what's the status of that these days? Well, so it's very... There's kind of two sides to it. On the one hand, and you can look up, for example, the Freedom House reports on this, on religious freedom in China.
On the one side, it remains... one of the most, if not the most persecuted group in China. And this is, you know, kind of what this new information, maybe I'll talk a little bit that we got from a Chinese dissident who's been in Australia for years, is talking about. But so it remains one of the most persecuted groups simply because it dares to survive in resistance to the regime, okay?
You remember, so I don't know if you remember, there was a huge thing about Tibet, right? Free Tibet for years. And back in 2008, I remember I was with the International Society for Human Rights in Poland at the time. There were, you know, basically the Tibetans, they did this huge action. They had this huge banner.
They took it, I forget exactly where they unrolled it, but they went to a bridge and they unrolled this massive banner off the bridge that said Free Tibet or something. I can't remember exactly. But that was the moment when the Chinese regime said, we're going to wipe this out. We're going to elevate the level of resources we're committing.
They want to wipe out every resistance movement, anything that remotely doesn't agree. But with them, they said, OK, we're going to wipe this out for good. And today, you don't even really hear much from Tibetans. And it's really terribly sad because Tibetans remain a hugely persecuted group. I'm trying not to. Exactly. Right.
But at one point, you know, there were even Hollywood was behind, you know, Free Tibet and so forth. So my point is they're very, very effective at wiping out the resistance movements, both within China and overseas.
But the ones that are most resilient, and I would argue, I think Falun Gong has been by far the most resilient, both to infiltration for a bunch of reasons, and also to, you know, in America, right, you have, you know, from, again, in their view, Epoch Times, you know, remember, truth is the first principle of Falun Gong.
I like to say that that's really influenced how we've operated over the years, right? Like, we can talk about our record. I think we've been right on every major issue, and there's a lot of media that have been very wrong on it. Why? Well, because simply we wanted to find out the truth, whether that's China or otherwise, okay? But there's also, you know, Shen Yun.
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Chapter 6: What is the Falun Gong movement?
And so they started this in Middletown, New York. And, you know, fast forward to today, there's eight traveling companies of Shen Yun. Each one has a full Western orchestra with some Chinese instruments. An amazingly unique sound. I don't know if you want to be able to cut a little bit of that in here because it's so, I find it incredible.
My wife and I go every year and get like a ton of, you know, fantastic energy from it. And they have a million audience every year with a tagline, by the way, of China before communism. Wow. Right.
So what they're showing, the grandeur, the beauty, the splendor of and, you know, the complexity of traditional China, which from the Chinese regime's perspective or any Chinese or any communist regime's perspective, no, we're the ones that are responsible for everything that's good about China. Right. But this show basically epitomizes the idea, no, that's actually untrue.
The truth is China has this grand history of 5,000 years, and we're going to show it to you. And we'll show you a little bit how the Chinese regime is actually not so good and isn't really responsible for much of that goodness. So anyway, so there's that piece.
And there's another piece, which I keep thinking about a lot, because this is an issue I've been covering for so long, is this organ harvesting issue that we talked about earlier, right? There's actually, about six months ago, a survivor of this forced organ harvesting came forth. Whoa. And I... Listen, that's how I feel, because I never thought we'd ever see one, exactly, right?
And so, you know, my father-in-law, he was a Holocaust survivor, and his story, we made a film about it. Every Holocaust survivor I've ever talked to, they have this story where there's this one step they took, and it was almost death. But for whatever reason, they chose a path, and it didn't happen, and, you know, and goes back and forth like that.
And at the end, they're like, oh, my goodness, I'm in Canada, and I'm free. How did this happen? It's almost a miracle. Yeah. That's how this guy, Chen Yiming, that is how he survived. Basically, he almost died multiple times along the way. But the bottom line is he's got a 14-inch gash across his side where they took out part of his liver and part of his lung. Whoa.
And he's alive to tell the tale. And since that time, you want to talk about breaking narratives, right? This is one narrative that the CCP has been trying to, you know, smirch, basically slander the worst possible way. Because, you know, how can you be admit? to having a $10 or $9 to $10 billion organ harvesting industry in your country. It's that big, right? It's that big.
I mean, this is, again, it's very hard to estimate the exact numbers. I don't want to, but the estimate is 60 to 100,000 transplants every year with no real credible organ donor system. Wow. Okay, and so how did this all happen? Well, what we think, and this is what the China Tribunal that happened back in 2020 would have asserted, is that
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