Spirit welcome to the policy briefing a serious bid im tom gilligan, director of the Hoover Institution. Its at Stanford University and one of the most preeminent research centers. For more than a century homage and has been dedicated to generating policy ideas that promote economic prosperity, National Security and democratic governance. The assimilation of our work has led to sin of vacant impacts on important Public Policy initiatives here and around the world. We begin to take steps that will lead us of the crisis i hope you find value in these important discussions as we look forward to ways to mitigate potential effects that the coronavirus has had on the u. S. And on the world. As a reminder, we will be taking audience questions and encourage you to submit yours using the button at the bottom of your screen. Todays briefing is from larry dimon, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Larrys advised the world bank, un, state department and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. His recent books include, chinas influence in american interests. And ill winds. Larry, thank you for joining us today spirit yeah, thank you tom. Pleasure to be with you and all our audience. Un experts on china and on Democratic Institutions around the world. Let me jump right into the middle of this. Several Leaders Within the Chinese Communist party have claimed that their government has performed well relative to democracies in the world and theyve controlled the spread of the virus in china and providing aid and critical supplies to other nations. Has the current pandemic been a boom for authoritarian regimes like china and the reputation for dealing with pressing social problems . Well, tom, thank you. I dont consider myself an expert on china but i have been trying to understand what it has been doing to project inappropriate power around the world and to impress its population at home but i dont thank you need to be an excerpt on china to know that the claims it is making are false and the challenges it is posing for democracy have a lot of holes in them. Lets begin with how this virus started. We know it began in wuhan and it went from being a kind of early crisis that needed radical containment to become Global Pandemic because china was not transparent with its own society or the world about what was happening and those that were trying to ring the alarm bell about the inception about the virus that could be dangerous to human life were punished and suppressed and ultimately one of these chinese doctors, of course, lost his life and many of them fighting the epidemic but more globally tom its important to recognize the first of all but we dont know what the death rate in china is because we cant believe any of the sadistic six that they have used but they are all manipulated. We do know what the death rates are in democracies around the world and they are transparent in the assembling of data and in that record shows wide variation among democracies in the world and how they are managing the crisis so in spain you had over 500 people dying from the virus in over 400 in italy over 300 in britain and nearing 200 in the u. S. And some countries have had very little impact on human life. Israel has had only 25 deaths per 1 million, south korea only five per 1 million and taiwan has had under one death per 1 million. Spend the greatest Success Story of any country in the world and managing the virus. Democracy is very alive and i think the lesson here is not to just take chinese propaganda on its face but rather to look and see why if some democracies have been doing better than others. [inaudible] i want to ask you what expensive variation and success across the democracies. What about chinas claims of providing critical and nations around the world and what is the validity of that claim . Theyve been sending planes and personal protective equipment and facemasks and so on but it has been nothing, at the level, that they promised or the propaganda initiative and good, thank you and so on but people open up the boxes and find which is often been the case with their belts and Road Initiative that what they deliver is a lot less than what they promised and some of the materials have been distinctly inferior quality and people feel a little bit cheated. Interesting. Lets go back to talking about the Cross Country variation. If you look in democracies and the success in forwarding the pandemic i would imagine there are some democrats or demographics variables that disclaim the variation and i want you to focus also on the differences in governance across these countries and how that may affect their ability to combat the virus. I think if you study what countries like taiwan and he had a very deep dive into the one week from now tom in the Hoover Institution will host at 9 00 a. M. Pacific a really extensive of the policy taiwan experience in managing covid19 and we will have the Vice President of taiwan in the secretary of state in science and Technology Advisor speaking to us along with several other panelists including our own lonnie chen. But we learn from the taiwan experience, from south korea, from israel and some of these other countries like germany and scandinavia then Early Warning made a big difference and where countries responded very rapidly and very vigorously with Public Health measures in Public Education measures they were able to get ahead of the virus and often contain it through identifying the sick, isolating them, Contact Tracing thomas greening at the airport and so on. Early in widespread testing made a big difference as well and another of these countries taiwan was doing testing of people in terms of their temperature and movement and so on. Korea manufactured quite a lot of viral tests that they applied very early and taiwan, korea, israel they been using big data to try and track the pattern of the virus and the countries in the democracies that have had success have other common features with strong Public Health systems and the populations tend to be healthier with long Life Expectancy and lower levels of chronic diseases. One of the things i worry about in the United States that if you look at the advanced industrial democracies in terms of one indicator of Public Health which is the rate of obesity, the rate of obesity is 36 which is twice the level or may be percent higher than many of our advanced democracies. We have work to do in these successful democracies were able to acquire and widely distributed facemasks, Hand Sanitizer and they push the Public Health experts out there in front to beat the authoritative voice and coordinating a response and they elicited or started from the beginning with higher levels with public trust and confidence and therefore cooperation then in some of the other democraci democracies. Good starting discussion. I know you are an expert on governance around the world and in particular you study the emergence or the contraption of the use of Democratic Institutions and countries. A few years ago you coined the phrase a recession and democracy in the kind of characterized the rollback of growth of democracy around the world. What is this pandemic doing to this constant struggle between democracy and authoritative regimes around the world . Well, it is deepening and accelerating the democratic recession and some alarming ways but first of all, you have authoritarian regimes seizing on the public emergency of the crisis to become even more comprehensively and persistently authoritarian. You saw that Vladimir Putin was to be expected that he was going to do this but he used the crisis to illuminate term limits so he can stay in power into his 80s or beyond. You have had hungry which already crossed the line to authoritarianism and passed a measure in the parliament that gave Prime Minister to create power in suspended parliament and by elections and the Prime Minister canal rule by decree and you had countries banning newspapers, arresting opponents and critics and even india has been using the emergency to prosecute critical journalists and intellectuals, including the brother of one of our esteemed hoover fellows who [inaudible] his brother who edits a major indian online newspaper and is being prosecuted for just reporting the truth in a critical fashion so you have illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes seizing on the crisis to narrow freedom. Then there is another thing we can talk about if you want tom, it is something we all need to ponder which is the challenge to human freedom that comes from even liberal democracies like korea and israel implementing these tracking and surveillance apps on mobile phones. What happens if those dont go away after the crisis. Let me frame it, were listening to larry diamond, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and talking about the effects of covid19 on democracies and authoritarian governments. The tracking and tracing that countries are using, many of us might consider it invasive surveillance with Health Conditions of a citizen and the imposition of restrictions on them based upon data. Seems on the one hand its sensible and makes sense to combat that Health Challenge but it does create problems and i know you thought about the problems like you thought about ways to mitigate those problems. Could you talk about that . Yes, im glad that these are watchwords and ideas defining a free society at the Hoover Institution and this is a pretty important problem from the standpoint of human liberty. The problem in part is that these message work and they have helped states identify where the virus is cropping up, who has it, who theyve been in contact with and then you can alert the people that they have been in contact with. It does automate and speed up the Contact Tracing. On the other hand governments can use them to monitor people for other reasons and what happens when we surrender our privacy, surrender our freedom from state surveillance and we dont get that freedom back after the crisis so i think we cant trust governments, even very liberal governments to surrender these tools after the crisis is over but first of all, i think we should have a debate about what extent people want to surrender their freedoms even now but in particular after the crisis ends and while it is going on i would say we need independent review boards of respected jurors, Civil Society religious leaders, who can monitor what the government is doing in the claims the government is making and get authoritative information from the mobilephone companies about the how they are these applications so that we can have a full and frank discussion within the society about how much freedom we want to surrender and when that surrender should be terminated and returned to the people. The three democracy you mentioned has been successful in managing the south korea, taiwan, israel and at least two of those have very aggressive tracking and tracing techniques involved. How did they navigate the civil liberties, democratic governance concerns associated with that . I think this is very much a matter of debate now in korea where the current president moon has a lot of popularity and at the moment strong support and in israel, israels is a very kind of independent minded society and people are concerned that the message that has been used by the Israeli Intelligence organization, by the way, to track terrorists are now being used to track the virus. I think this is ongoing. I think maybe the problem is less serious in taiwan because they had such enormous success in containing the virus very early on. In reducing the infection rate to pretty close to zero and of course it is easier to do if you are in a state but it requires strong Republican Health coordination and early action so i think they have the compromise of individual freedom and the temporary emergency has not been such an imposition on people. Larry, i dont know how much you know specifically about the apps and technologies that allow tracing but a couple questions that are interesting but joseph suggests that these apps or technologies could be built with Self Destruct system so they would automatically expire at a certain point, sixweek out, eight weeks out and wondered if you heard that discussed and has a way to balance of her liberty with surveillance issues. Neville makes the following claim that the google app around Contact Tracing is claiming to protect individual privacy and do you know much about that and how does it protect privacy . I dont know how they do it but i know that they do it and i know that one way to ensure greater privacy is to use immediate neighborhood bluetooth connections to identify who you are in contact with. This is rather than the more centralized cell phone system so some of the apps are limiting the exposure in terms of freedom by relying on more neighborhoods immediate geographic connection of bluetooth. With respect to the selfdestruction i love that. I think that definitely all legal and technological steps towards eclipsing liberty have to have sunset clauses attached to them and it can be a time related one or it could just be an independent review board having the authority to order the mobile phone companies to implement the selfdestruction button when the crisis is pass passed. Rate ideas. I want to come back to the challenges that the pandemic is imposing on democracies but ive got a really good questions about what they are doing to authoritarian regimes. James asked the following question when it comes to taking broadbased crisis such as covid19 due to a utilitarian routine with topdown control government have an inherent advantage over countries with open decentralized government and economic structures. If such an advantage exist how can countries with decentralized structures neutralize or mitigate that competitive advantage and ramon asks, covid impacts on authoritarian regimes in venezuela have there been any and if so, what are they and how they really have tightly held authoritarian regimes in the world react to the pandemic . Okay, well, it is impossible to claim that there is an intrinsic authoritarian advantage for managing a pandemic and you can see how democracies have done a pretty animal job of doing so and frankly in terms of the immediate and transparent reaction to the first signs of crisis are much better job than china is done without the cause in terms of human freedom. I will say korea, taiwan, singapore and so on, countries that have had more success they did have the 2003 experience of the sars epidemic and they learn from that about the need for a lot of the measures that i spoke of. The claim of intrinsic advantage for authoritarianism simply doesnt wash and the second question again what has gone on in places like cuba and israel . You know, its very hard to know what is going on with respect to covid in countries like cuba and venezuela because we dont have honest reporting of information and because in venezuela the population has been so devastated by hunger and malnutrition that it is hard to know who is dying from what. I will say it is interesting though as you looked at these infection rates and there is a website where i have gotten the data that informs my earlier point that it is intriguing that countries in the equatorial region that cuba and venezuela are either in or border countries that are more in the hot and humid climates in the global south have not yet been hit with anything like the level of epidemic that europe, u. S. And so on have been and is that because of their climates or is it because they just havent been in the global transmission belt quite as much . It remains to be seen but it is noteworthy that i will say iran has been hit pretty hard by this and again, we dont know what the real rates of infection are because who would believe Iranian State authorities in terms of the accuracy of reporting . We know there have been no infections in north korea. Yeah, may be of the dear leader. [laughter] amazing. I want to get back to democracy and talk about the ways in which the pandemic are threatening the pillars of democracy. Lets talk about the free press and the media. What pressures are being placed on the free press in the media and western democracy generally as a result of the pandemic and will the free press continued to say vibrant and an important part of democracies . I think what we are finding now is a heightened need for an effective, vigorous, independent press. Now, we would like it to be one that doesnt further feed our political polarization, right . We want pluralism of ideas and we want a contest of perspectives and we will have media, print media, online media, Television Media that will have different editorial orientations perhaps but pluralism is crucial and what we dont want is government threatening the pluralism or threatening investigative reporting with laws like what hungary has passed that threatens five year prison terms for any quotes, false reporting of the covid19 pam beneke who the hack is supposed to determine what is false reporting and what inconvenience faxed the government and especially authoritarian or liberal governments dont want their people to know and again, i will say india has become, i think, and importance friend of the United States and the rela