Master of Wine Fongyee Walker on the Challenges Facing the Chinese Wine Industry
Offering a fascinating look at the inner workings of the Chinese winemaking industry, Master of Wine Fongyee Walker highlighted the many business challenges facing producers in a Zoom talk hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong.
“There are people making terrific wine, but who do you sell it to?” said Walker. “You’re trying to sell a premium product to a market that almost doesn’t exist — it’s a huge challenge.”
Speaking with FCC President Keith Richburg, who moderated the discussion, Walker explained that wine drinkers in China tend to gravitate towards bottles from regions like Burgundy and Bordeaux, while other Chinese only drink baijiu.
To build up international demand for their wines, Walker said that Chinese producers should open high-end Michelin-star Chinese restaurants in major capital cities.
“For a Western audience, wine and food is indivisible,” said Walker.
In spite of these challenges, Walker had many positive things to say about Chinese wine, including the superlative wines coming from regions such as Shandong and Yunnan.
She also highlighted one other thing that makes China unique: its wine industry features many women in positions of power, unlike the rest of the world.
“The most female-friendly wine industry in the world is in China” said Walker.
Watch the full discussion below:
Hong Kong’s Courts Need to Maintain ‘Focus’ for the City’s Legal System to Endure – Former Judge Henry Litton
Hong Kong’s judiciary has lost its former efficacy and judges need to focus on remedies and practical issues rather than esoteric arguments, said Henry Litton, former judge of the Court of Final Appeal, in an FCC webinar.
“What I think one needs to do is to really just focus on the actual issues, rather than to give the entire narrative,” Litton said. “What has been happening in a lot of the cases is that the judges really are not focused anymore.”
“That is how the rule of law is supposed to work, not dissolving into clouds of words, of theories, of arcane analyses and so on which bear no relationship with the actual issue and problem on the ground,” Litton told FCC Journalist Governor Cliff Buddle.
He outlined five cardinal rules for strengthening the judiciary and rule of law: effective action, discipline of law, ensuring the law has a cutting edge, focusing on remedies and preventing courtrooms from becoming places of debate.
The former judge, who previously authored Is the Hong Kong Judiciary Sleepwalking to 2047?, said these changes are needed to ensure the survival of the city’s legal system in the coming years. He predicted that a decision would be made in the next five or six years on whether the common law system will be Hong Kong’s governing system beyond June 2047.
The courts adopting a more common sense approach would be seen as a favourable move by Beijing, Litton said, noting that the central government will ultimately decide the fate of the judiciary. He argued that a straightforward and effective judiciary would have a better chance of survival.
“For stability and prosperity, everyone everywhere would accept that when you have a legal system that actually works and functions, you should not dismantle it and try to replace it because there would be total chaos for many, many years, for generations maybe,” Litton said.
You can watch the full discussion below.
Independent Journalists Crucial to Exposing the Scale of India’s Coronavirus Catastrophe – FCC Panel
Local and independent reporters have played an essential and often high-risk role in revealing the true scale of India’s CVOID-19 catastrophe while many in the mainstream media have preferred to parrot the government’s narrative, journalists Barkha Dhutt and Rana Ayyub said in an FCC webinar.
They spoke amid a spiralling death count from the virus in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been accused of downplaying the scale of the disaster while failing to provide essentials like oxygen to hospitals and vaccines to the population.
The government’s attempts to defend its response have been amplified by often compliant national media, the speakers said. Meanwhile, journalists reporting from hospitals and cremation sites have been branded “vultures” while Western coverage has been labelled anti-Indian and imperialistic.
“Most of the news channels are run by big investors, big industrialists who are craven and help Narendra Modi with his election campaigning, so you don’t expect them to speak truth to power”, said Ayyub, an investigative journalist and global opinions editor at The Washington Post.
As a result, grassroots reporting has been essential in telling the story, Dutt and Ayyub said in the webinar moderated by FCC First Vice President Eric Wishart.
Dutt, an opinion columnist with The Hindustan Times and The Washington Post whose father recently died of COVID-19, gave the example of images that emerged of bodies floating in Indian rivers as cremation and burial services became overwhelmed.
“These have come from people who are not famous journalists, who are just young stringers on the ground”, she said. “Despite the attempts to control big media, technology is liberating and anyone today with a phone and a spine is telling the stories that the world needs to see”.
“I want to acknowledge the work of really vulnerable reporters who do not have health insurance, have no organizational affiliation, these really extraordinary boots on the ground in our smaller towns and in our cities”.
At the same time, local journalists who dare to challenge local authorities live in fear of retribution.
Ayyub cited the example of a local journalist who sent her videos of 450 funerals in one day but refused to be quoted in an article she was writing for The Washington Post. “The chief minister of the state will make my life sad and miserable, and I will be thrown behind bars”, he told her.
Around 70 people describing themselves as “Concerned and Upset Indians” sent a joint letter to the FCC ahead of the event titled “Please Stop Providing Platform to Anti-Indians” and asking the club to cancel the discussion.
“Such people are completely biased and motivated”, it read, referring to the speakers.
Both Dutt and Ayyub, who have faced online violence including death and rape threats because of their coverage, said they were not surprised by the letter.
“What’s important to stress is that this is organized. Don’t think that this petition is a spontaneous reaction”, Dutt said. “There is now a clear attempt to deflect the scale and the enormity of what’s happening and create irrelevant side issues.”
“This takes us in a direction where we don’t have to talk about the fact that we are looking at a million more deaths by June, where you don’t have to talk about the fact that bodies are floating down the rivers of rural India”.
“We continue to be targeted for telling our stories, for doing our journalism, for going to cremation and burial grounds and showing you the pictures that have shaken the world”, Dutt said.
“We are being told we are vultures for feasting off the dead. Because we write for global media, we are being called anti-national. Whereas the true anti-nationalism we are seeing unfold is public relations between privileged over the lives of ordinary Indians”.
Ayyub, who spoke at the FCC’s 2019 journalism conference about the horrendous online violence she has faced, added: “This is how they shut independent voices, especially women journalists. You slut shame us all the time, you call us names, but you cannot silence us like that. So what better way to try to silence us than by calling us anti-Indian?”
Was there anything positive to take from the disaster?
“For the first time I see Indians united and not polarized by this Hindu-Muslim narrative” said Ayyub, who has set up a crowdfunding site to raise money for food and medical aid for the needy.
“They are united in helping each other out and amplifying each other’s voices, and I think Indians have now realized that this humanity will be the only savior at the end of the day”.
The full discussion can be watched below.
Governments Have Used the Pandemic to Curtail Press Freedom in SE Asia – FCC Panel
On World Press Freedom Day, an FCC Hong Kong panel of speakers representing press clubs across Southeast Asia painted a dire portrait of press freedom in the region as various governments have vilified, attacked and even arrested journalists throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the past year, the panelists said, a series of developments including the passage or threat of “fake news” laws, new visa restrictions, online harassment, physical violence and other forms of intimidation have led to a growing atmosphere of fear and self-censorship for reporters, particularly in Myanmar.
“Myanmar has hit a new low, and it’s been a very sobering spectacle for all of us in the region,” said Gwen Robinson, former president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. “Journalists are basically in hiding and fearing for their lives.”
Barnaby Lo, speaking on behalf of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines, described a similarly treacherous environment for Filipino journalists, who are treated as enemies by President Rodrigo Duterte. He noted that a total of 170 journalists have been killed in the Philippines since democracy was restored in 1986, including 19 of them during Duterte’s presidency.
He also spoke about Maria Ressa, the high-profile Filipino journalist and editor currently facing 11 court cases and potentially decades of jail time, whose story has garnered international attention.
“While Filipinos do appreciate the support for Maria Ressa, I think a lot more journalists here in the Philippines need that kind of international support as well,” Lo said.
Ed Davies, president of the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club, said that Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions law has been a cause for concern and has drawn criticism for its broad interpretation.
Similarly, Ate Hoekstra, president of the Overseas Press Club of Cambodia, said the government there regularly speaks out against “fake news” and is working on a new cybercrime law, which journalists fear may be broad enough to curtail press freedom.
Speaking on the situation in Hong Kong including troubling developments at RTHK and the prosecution of journalist Bao Choy, FCC President Keith Richburg said, “I would summarise it by saying we’re suffering death by a thousand cuts, nothing major but so many small things.”
In spite of the difficult environment in Southeast Asia, the panelists did highlight some positive developments from the past year, including the increased role of amateur journalists and eyewitness media.
“It’s raised the bar for conventional media,” said Robinson. “The images are out there, it forces you to go further.”
She also said the pandemic and the coup in Myanmar had changed the media landscape.
“There’s a lot that is positive that’s come out throughout the region in the new creativity in the ways journalists are pushing back, finding very resourceful ways to get news out, the way they’re operating,” Robinson said.
“People are starting to go back to SMS, old-fashioned text messages. We thought the era of transistors was dead, but actually I wouldn’t be surprised if soon you see a proliferation of transistor radios in Myanmar.”
Watch the full discussion below:
Anti-coup Protests in Myanmar Are Breaking New Ground – Frontier Publisher Sonny Swe
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.”
Watch the full event:
Fareed Zakaria on U.S.-China Relations and the Post-Pandemic World
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.”
Watch the full discussion:
BBC Disinformation Reporter Marianna Spring on the Real-World Consequences of Online Conspiracy Theories
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.”
Watch the full event:
U.S. Needs to ‘Find Patterns of Cooperation With China’: Ambassador Christopher Robert Hill
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.”
Watch the full event:
Belt and Road Requires Greater Transparency and Better Decision-making to Succeed in the Future: FCC Panelists
Clockwise from top left: Dan Strumpf, James Wang, Nargis Kassenova, Jonathan Hillman
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.”
Watch the full discussion:
The Dark Side of Instagram You Haven’t Heard About
FCC Correspondent Member Governor Kristine Servando (left) and Bloomberg journalist Sarah Frier (right)
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.”
