Uyghurs

• Only weeks after the team’s headline-making tour, Australia’s then opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, led a delegation to Beijing promising to open diplomatic relations “when elected”.
• One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.
• One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.

‘A crowd of 8,000 people’

• A revolutionary who became one of China’s most revered statesmen, he advocated peaceful co-existence with the West and other nations.
• The American team embarked on their tour first – setting the stage for then-President Richard Nixon’s famous visit to Beijing in 1972.
• Paul Pinkewich had just turned 20 at the time of the visit, teammate Steve Knapp was only 18.
• Our first match in Canton, now Guangzhou, I think it was a crowd of 8,000 people,” he recalls.
• “Do you wear this hair because of your disagreement with society or because it is a style?” Knapp replied, “It is the fashion.”

• “Can you believe, one table in the middle of the Capital Stadium [in Beijing] with 18,000 spectators, and that was just an amazing experience.
• But they always let the woman win.” That woman was Anne Middleton, the other player on the 1971 tour, who has since passed away.
• After the trip we were labelled as communists […] but we were interested in friendship first, competition second.”

Why sport diplomacy matters

• Beijing has continued to use sport as a diplomatic tool, including becoming the first city in the world to host both a summer and winter Olympic Games (Beijing in 2008 and 2022).
• French educator Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894, believing Olympics were a global event.
• A new term has also emerged in recent years – almost always applied by researchers in democratic nations – to describe undemocratic nations’ forays into global sport: sportswashing.
• “Amity between people holds the key to sound relations between countries.” At the heart of such amity, sport continues to play a significant role.

Tracey Holmes was one of the fifty Australians interviewed in the 'Fifty People, Fifty Stories' book due to her experiences of previously living and working in China.

• Along with temporary bans of ChatGPT in Italy, some private organizations have started to restrict its use.
• TikTok has similarly been framed as a propaganda tool for the Chinese government, leading to U.S. congressional hearings about privacy concerns.
• Despite these growing concerns, there are few signs that investment in China-made AI has — or will — decelerate, with U.S. venture capitalists continuing to invest heavily in the country’s AI sector.
• But we cannot disregard how the Chinese government — or any government — is deploying AI to achieve their goals.

AI gold rush

• A speculative gold rush has followed the realization that AI — especially large language models like ChatGPT — has the potential to revolutionize business.
• Recent estimates suggest China has the fourth-largest number of AI “unicorns” — private start-ups that are valued at over $1 billion.

Ethical business of AI

• Research has repeatedly demonstrated that a product’s country of origin affects consumers’ perception.
• Following the communist revolution, the Chinese state has attempted to guide technology development for the purposes of monitoring and regulating society.
• Uyghurs, political dissidents and non-compliant people and groups have all been targeted by the Chinese government.

Western governments and AI

• Values inform the choices of AI designers, developers, and users.
• As recent revelations over the components of a Russian drone used in an attack on Ukraine have made clear, AI has both domestic and military applications.
• Three-quarters of the drones’ components were found to be made in the U.S. Investors cannot ignore the moral implications of global supply chains when it comes to AI.

Co-ordinated efforts are key

• While the Chinese government’s involvement in AI development might be too great, the hands-off approach of western governments have created their own problems.
• These issues include the spread of disinformation and polizarization and increased anxiety and depression associated with social media use.
• Illustrating this, Sequoia Capital, one of the largest venture capital firms to invest in China, sought advice from national security agencies.
• Strengthening democratic values in the face of AI will require coordinated international efforts between industry, government and non-governmental organizations.

• Social media has been awash with fake images of a stylish Pope Francis, Elon Musk protesting in New York and Donald Trump resisting arrest.
• Such AI-generated images and videos, or deepfakes, have become increasingly accessible due to advances in artificial intelligence.
• As more sophisticated fabricated images spread, it will become increasingly difficult for users to differentiate the real from the fake.

Fake news anchor

• Leading the way, China’s state media has experimented with an AI news anchors, named Ren Xiaorong.
• Ren, although not the first AI news anchor developed by in China, illustrates both the commitment to the technology and the incremental increases in realism.
• When looking at these anchors, we might object that only the most naive viewer would mistake them for real humans, such as Russia’s first robotic news anchor.

Fabricated news

• China’s transparency in using AI-generated news anchors stands in contrast to Venezuela’s fabricated news coverage.
• However, the stories and anchors are fabricated.
• Fabricated videos of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discussing surrender to Russia were also circulated during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Disinformation and believable fakes

• The spread of disinformation requires that we understand how ideas, innovation or behaviour spread within a social network, referred to as social contagion.
• Disinformation has the appearance of information, except uncertainty is reduced at the expense of accuracy.
• Observations that disinformation spreads faster that facts likely stems from the fact that when a message is simple, it increases our confidence.
• It must appear close enough to the “truth” that it is believable.

Social networks and contagion

• While we look for credible source of information — experts or peers — our memory stores information separately from its source.
• Over time, this failure of source monitoring results in our retrieval of information from memory with understanding its origin.

Legal, social and moral issues

• The accusation of “fake news” has become a tactic used to discredit any argument.
• Social media users have already falsely claimed that real videos of U.S. President Joe Biden and former U.S. president Donald Trump are fake.
• The time required for verification — especially if left to the user — allows disinformation to propagate.
• The only way to combat harmful forms of artificial intelligence is to cultivate human intelligence.

• The U.N. and many other global leaders have now labeled the atrocities occurring as a clear genocide of the Uyghur people.
• In reaction to China's egregious campaign to homogenize the region, human rights organizations such as The Peace Project are educating the public, hoping to put pressure on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to end their genocide of the Uyghur people.
• The Peace Project urges citizens to call on these companies to stop their business in the region, and acknowledge China's horrific actions.
• The Peace Project is a nonprofit organization that educates the public about the impacts of hatred through their Hate Free Initiative and Uyghur Initiative.