Bulwark Takes - The China Threat Is Real And Trump Has No Plan | WTF 2.0

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

Sinocism’s Bill Bishop joins JVL on WTF 2.0 to talk the China threat, Trump’s inaction on the problem and how the dismantling of USAID threatens the US’ power around the world.

Hey guys, it's JVL from the Bulwark here with the great Bill Bishop from Cynicism. Cynicism? Cynicism, but that's okay. Cynicism? Call it what you want, just be nice. And we were just chatting about, Bill was Substack number one, first outside writer on Substack in 2017. Did you come from Axios? No, so I had my own blog that had turned into a newsletter. first outside writer on Substack in 2017. Did you come from Axios? No.

So I had my own blog that had turned into a newsletter and I was sort of casting around for how to turn into a business. I'd been talking with Ben Thompson over at Satechery and looked at his tech stack, which worked, but at the time was a bit kludgy and I have no technical skills. And so I was about to launch what he had in the sort of mid spring of 2017 and then had some family issues.

I pushed it off. And, you know, you never want to launch a newsletter in August, so to speak. Yeah. And in that interim period, I heard from Hamish who I know from his reporting days. And he's like, hey, we're working on this thing. And I was like, why not? I'll give it a try. I liked Hamish and I like Chris best when I met him. And it seemed like they knew what they were doing. And so I figured I'd just take a flyer. So we launched in September, October, 2017. And it was just email.

It's very primitive. Wow. And you, so your focus is China. Where do you live now? You lived in China previously. Yeah, I live in D.C. now. I studied Chinese in college back in the late 80s, lived in Beijing in 1989, and then in the, like, 91 and 93,

and then did graduate work, got a master's in, like, basically Chinese politics, and then went and worked at Silicon Valley for about 10 years and did a startup that became marketwatch.com, which we ultimately sold to Dow Jones in late 2004, late 2005. Then I moved back to Beijing in 2000, end of 2004, tried to do another startup that didn't work, but ended up leaving there for 10 years, doing some other things. And during that period, while I was in Beijing, I ended up launching what became this newsletter. So I've been doing cynicism in one form or another for probably,

I should know by now, I think 13, 14 years. Jeez. It's a long step, man. It's a lot of words. Yes, it is. It is a lot of work. It's a lot of words. It's a full-time job, but, you know, happy doing it. Good. So, I mean, you couldn't have picked a better subject because China is, like, eternally important.

And it's even more – it's funny. We haven't had, like, direct conflict with China conflict with China since the Trump inauguration. And yet, because of what Trump has been doing at home and abroad, China has gotten all sorts of opportunities. And I guess I want to start with just an open-ended, what does the world look like from China's perspective now that we are in the second Trump administration? Does the Chinese government look at this and say, things have shifted and there are opportunities for us and we can start making moves on the street? So I think they have a sophisticated view of how things are. I think there are certainly, and they talk about this, they see challenges, they see increasing external pressure, most of it driven by the U.S. on trade issues, on technology issues, things like

the chip controls. They also, though, see massive opportunities to continue to reshape the international system in ways that are more favorable to the PRC and its view of how the world should be ordered. And, you know, that in many ways, what they're doing is they, there's a long sort of strand of consistency in PRC foreign policy going back to the Mao Zedong years when they sort of hooked up with then the developing world and Latin America, African countries, and other Asian countries. And now it's the global south. And so they are, China calls itself a developing country. They say they're effectively the leader of the global south.

They advocate for the global south. And so they're pushing for a more, quote unquote, democratic international order, right, with the UN at its core, with the WTO as the core of the trading system, but of course, revised in ways that are favorable to China. And, you know, as the US appears to be pulling back from those key institutions, it creates more space for the PRC. It's not clear, though, from the PRC perspective, they may make more inroads in the global south. They have their own problems with Europe. They have their own problems with other countries in Asia, like South Korea, like Japan, like Vietnam, like India, and obviously the Philippines. And so it's a very complicated picture. I think the Trump administration

especially adds a lot of volatility to the relationship and a lot of uncertainty, and they don't like that. But at the same time, again, they create space for certain opportunities. And so it's a mixed bag, but it is a, you know they're, they're, you know, and this is the thing when, when Trump, when we go to the election last fall, right, there were countless op-eds about who China preferred. And the answer was, you know, they, official line was they don't, they don't prefer a candidate. And I actually think most people I talked to were like, well, on the one hand, Biden's been tough on us, but he's stable and predictable. On the other hand, Trump is transactional and, you know, maybe there's a bigger deal to be had, but who knows, because he can stable and predictable. On the other hand, Trump is transactional and maybe there's a bigger deal to be had,

but who knows because he can also be crazy, right? And he causes the Chinese a lot of problems in his first term. And then they got a trade deal that was kind of a BS deal, but everyone said we got a deal and then COVID hit and then the floor fell out. And so that's a long answer to say,

I think that they are, they see opportunity, they see risks. The one thing I think a lot of people need to remember or pay attention to is that in the intervening years since the first Biden administration, they have put a lot of work into hardening their system, hardening their economy to be able to withstand increasing US pressure. And they've also built the whole pretty significant toolbox to be able to strike back in ways, you know, not just additional tariffs. If the U.S. tariffs them, they tariff back, but other ways to launch investigations, to restrict access to certain critical minerals. So they have a more sophisticated approach. Their economy also has a lot of problems. And so there are significant risks for them.

But in general, I think they, you know, the Trump administration, you know, here we are, what, 70 something days in the Trump administration. I think it's also still unclear exactly how Trump is going to go after, like how he's going to deal with China. Right. It's still, they're still waiting for the sort of to figure out what does the Trump administration want and what are they really going to do? And I mean, I again I'm not I'm in DC I'm not sure that people in the Trump administration necessarily know so you yesterday you you mentioned sort of uh sardonically you asked if anybody understands why the Trump administration is pulling the plug on all this research and tech while China is trying to get more invested in it and exert more influence on it, let me know.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Because it was a statement that they, was it the Politburo just put out? Well, so yesterday there's a magazine that comes out twice a month that's under the Central Committee of the Communist Party called,iuquan, which is Seeking Truth. And every edition, every issue, the lead essay is something from Xi Jinping. And this one that just came out yesterday, the lead issue is a speech he gave last June at the National Science and Technology Conference. Because China under Xi, you know, they've long predating Xi, long predating Trump. The Chinese have wanted to achieve self-sufficiency in certain core technologies.

The Trump administration's actions and then the Biden administration's actions really accelerated that process. And so there's a massive whole of nation effort underway to achieve science technology breakthroughs, especially in core areas like semiconductors. And so the Chinese government is spending massive amounts of money on research and development. And over the last couple of years, they've also embarked on a really significant sort of bureaucratic government restructuring to try and streamline the process for research development and actually do a much better job of taking research output and then being able to productize it, turn it into products, turn it into companies, raise money. And, you know, and so this speech last summer was, again, was a reiteration of those goals, announcing some new initiatives. And, you know, the ambitions are breathtaking

what the Chinese want to do. And it feels like in some ways where we were, the U.S. were in like the 50s and 60s. You know, you think back to some of the speeches about like John Kennedy about the space program and sort of how it was inspiring the country. There's a lot of that going on in China. And so the question, right, is on the one hand, you know, the U.S. government identifies China as a, you know, really its main strategic competitor. And, you know, the U.S. government identifies China as a, you know, really its main strategic competitor. And the Chinese feel the same way about the U.S. They see, I'll just read a quote from this article, if that's okay. I think just it gives a good encapsulation of how Xi Jinping and the Chinese system see this. And so he wrote that the world is undergoing changes unseen in a

century that are accelerating with technological revolution and great power competition intertwined, making high technology fields the forefront and main battlefield of international competition, profoundly reshaping the global order and development pattern. Science and technology undertakings have made significant progress. Original innovation capability is still relatively weak. Some key core technologies are controlled by others, others being the U.S. particularly. And top scientific and technological talents are insufficient. We must further enhance our sense of urgency, further increase efforts in science and technological innovation, and seize the commanding heights of technological competition and future development. And so, you know, it is run by the Communist Party. You know, the party is driving this process of S&T development. But people, I think, underestimate at their peril both the focus of the system on these

problems, the amount of resources that are going to it, and really the ability for them to innovate even while they're still an authoritarian country. Yeah, it's funny here, just hearing the verbiage, it really does sound like the old Soviet. Yes. Yes. Right. And it's easy, though, to say, oh, the Soviets failed. You know, the Soviets actually had pretty good science. You know, I think, you know, one of the things, too, is, you know, Xi Jinping, one of the animating sort of ideas in the Communist Party and Xi Jinping is basically how not to be the USSR. Yeah. Right. To basically, like, be the Soviet Union, but actually succeed in a lot of ways.

That's very impressive. And we are, I mean, you know, I mean, just for instance, with, like, biotech, it does seem like America has decided we're going to take a big step back. Yes. I don't know. Like, if you're a researcher and you want to work in this field, like, why would you stay in America? Right. Well, and that's, you know, and that's and that's the real question, right, is, you know, the researchers need money and they need support. And if we if the government is now cutting all this funding, right, and their massive layoff today, I think they hit NIH as well. You know, researchers are going to go where there's money and freedom.

And so, you know, China, they want to attract global talent. And, you know, that has always been our strength, right? Right. We have been the place that's attractive to the best scientific and technological minds around the world. I think it's a challenge for the Chinese to attract global talent given the nature of their system. However, it is not – I think there are still some pretty terrific international talent who will want to go to China, but more likely you'll see Canada, Europe benefiting from the cuts and the pressures here in the U.S. that are driving some of these, potentially either driving them away or having people decide they don't want to come to the U.S. right now, they're going to pick another country. And that's to our detriment. That is absolutely to our detriment.

This is one of our core strengths. What made the U.S. so attractive, for instance, was we had strong rule of law, predictable institutions, and people didn't get disappeared off the streets. Yes. No, that, I mean, this is— Those things aren't true anymore that we're America, we're exceptional, we'll recover. And I think I worry people underestimate how deep and long-term damaging these cuts are, but also how quickly the idea that you're a stable place with rule of law to invest and live in, that can be damaged quite quickly. And then it takes a really long time to recover from that. Yeah, those things don't recover. Those things take a generation to recover because once the seal's been broken, you have to prove

that it can, first you have to fix it and then you've got to prove that it can stay fixed. What about the USAID? So with USAID fed into the wood chipper, I mean, does China have any specific response to this? Has this created any, like, where they decide,

oh, we can go into developing countries? You talked about the global south and how they want to make that sort of more multinational, more, you know, large-D democratic. Now, it's small-D democratic, but basically not, you know, unipolar. What does, what impact does the demise of USAID have on China's approach to that world? So they don't have a sort of a like-to-like replacement. But the USAID was – and again, just to be clear, governments have big bureaucracies. There are reasons to regularly look at bureaucracies and certainly make some cuts and clean some things out if you need to, but you do it with a plan and a strategy and you do it in a measured way, right? That's not what clearly is what is happening in the current administration.

So the Chinese don't have a, like, they have an aid agency. They don't do what the USA does. They, I don't think they will sort of take it on like for like, but they will fill the gap in some areas. But at the same time, it's also, you know, when you talk about the importance of soft power, right? You know, the fact that the US was showing up and was contributing in ways to, you know,

all sorts of medicines for healthcare, healthcare solutions for people in the global South, that's all gone. You know, we've not only, you know, from a moral level, are we probably contributing to the deaths of lots of people now because we're no longer supporting them with healthcare and medicines, but also it really, it damages America's brand, right? It creates a vacuum that someone will fill, right?

Because nature forms a vacuum. And that, you know, the Chinese are certainly one of those countries that is well-positioned to fill. One example right now is, at least as of yesterday, this terrible earthquake in Myanmar. Usually the U.S. would surge. You know, they'd figure out how to get people in there. They'd surge all sorts of aid. At least as of last night, we weren't doing anything. That's great.

What a country. Very quickly, so when you and I were emailing before this, I said, hey, I want to pick your brain about the announcement yesterday about some sort of partnership between China, Japan, South Korea, just because like, hey, these are three countries which historically have a lot of history between them. And you were like, I think that's overreported. Can you tell me what the real story is on this? So the three countries had a triadal meeting. It was the economic and trade ministers meeting between Japan, South Korea, and China. Sorry, I thought I was going to have to start,

but I apologize. And so the headlines that came out, picked up, I think, by Reuters, were that the three countries had agreed to jointly respond to U.S. tariffs. And that appears to have been based on a report from the Chinese side. And, you know, one of the challenges is the Chinese side readouts reports, they don't always fully reflect what was discussed or agreed to on the meeting. And so that story got a life of its own. Based on the official readout from the other two or from the actual media statement from the three, there's nothing in there that says that. And so I think they are concerned about sort of disruptions in trade. But this is not something like we're going to work together to respond to the U.S.

That is nothing that they said publicly. That is very helpful information. I mean, you know, I think there are reasons to expect, you know, there are increasing trade tensions between the U.S. and South Korea, U.S. and Japan. It would be pretty shocking if suddenly those three countries said, hey, we're going to work with the Chinese and counter the U.S. That would be, I think, and that's why it got such a,

you know, it sort of went viral, but I think it's kind of BS. Good. Well, that is very helpful to know. So in a past life, I spent many years writing about demographics. And so China was always of particular interest to me just about demographics. And they put aside the one-child policy. This is now six years ago, I want to say, maybe seven. And getting demographic information out of China is difficult because you're never sure how accurate it is. It does not seem as though getting rid of one child has materially raised the total fertility rate there. And so this isn't a problem now, but projecting out into the future,

is demographics on the radar of leadership in China? Absolutely. It's been a real switch from, you know, we have to have the one-child policy because we have too many people, to now they are in the process. Over the last several years, they've started to try to roll out pro-natatalist policies, get people to have more children.

It was fast, right? I think it's slow. Various subsidies, various policies, and they are now – they're now intensifying those efforts because they haven't worked to date. And so they're doing trials where they're in certain cities. They're giving a bunch of money for your second kid and even more money for your third kid, preferential housing. The central government – Spoiler, none of that is going to work. Probably not. The central government just last week announced they're sending out these teams to do research around the country to figure out how it is. But if you look at other countries who've sort of gone into this demographic decline, it doesn't work.

But it's something they're clearly concerned with, you know, that they have a lot of big problems in their pension system. I think, you know, there's some talk, well, you know, they're probably the leader in humanoid robots, so maybe robots can at least replace the labor force. But based on what the top leaders are doing and the policy pronouncements, they are displaying a pretty significant concern about the demographic challenges. Yeah. So, I mean, when people talk about demographics, there is a lot of like, oh, well, robots will take over the labor. That really, I would say, you know this, I'm just talking to the audience here. That is at best half the problem. The problem really is like

getting from here to there, because what happens is you wind up with an enormous number of old people and not enough resources to support them. And in China, you then also have a problem of sex imbalance, because they have massive sex-selective abortion, which is, I forget the number, but it's something like 117 boys for every 102 girls. It was something like that, and I think it's narrow, but not fully. Yeah. So you wind up with a whole bunch of men who are

basically unmarriageable. And historically, unmarried men, when the labor force is a little bit slack, are trouble. Like Like it's just, throughout history, it's never good to have single men who don't have jobs. But so this is, I do have a labor force question for you though, which is like, and that is, where are they now? So in China, what does the workforce look like? Are they still at full employment? I mean, what is the the current

state of play and what is again not talking about recession or booming town but like over the next five to ten years what is that they're not i mean the official employment rate unemployment rate is like five percent thereabouts and it's remained steady um they have a significantly larger unemployment rate among um youth especially new graduates. They put a lot of emphasis on and expanded the sort of the tertiary education system, a lot more universities, a lot more spots, and then it turns out they've been graduating more people than there are jobs for white collars. They have a significant gig economy, people doing things like their version of Uber or the food delivery services, et cetera. So unemployment, the employment situation is not great.

It's also, I mean, the economy's been struggling for several years. COVID, again, COVID was one of the things where the first year after the outbreak, China actually did better than most countries around the world, because they were able to really tamp it down and then stay open.

But then 15, 18 months in, when Omicron hit, it just destroyed the economy. And they're still struggling to come out of that. And it did a lot of damage to confidence, consumer sentiment. And then so I think employment is, it's again, one of the things that the leadership talks a lot about. They're doing a lot of things to try and improve the employment situation because they see rightfully so that large numbers of unemployed or not fully employed people are potentially social stability problems, which is true. But they're not yet doing the kind of things in terms of economic policies to really resolve those problems. So it is a real challenge for the country. Interesting.

So talk to me about Taiwan. This is one of those problems that is intractable, I think. Yes. And has no good answers. And we're also, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's really, really, what's the word I'm looking for? Path-dependent? Is that the term? It's like, you know, contingent, I would say. Maybe contingent is a better word, right? Like, nobody knows how this story ends. And it really could go any number of different ways.

Is that right? Or do you think that there is a likely ending to this or a likely path for it? So I think, you know, Taiwan effectively operates like an independent country, although it's not. And the mainland, Beijing, they see it as a renegade province that needs to be brought back into the country. Plenty of people in Taiwan don't like to use the term reunified because they say they were never part of the People's Republic of China, right? Taiwan is a democracy, right? It is one of the most vibrant democracies in the world. And I think that there was even a decade,

maybe a decade plus, there was some way to see a path where there could be some sort of a political condominium or political settlement that allowed for a solution that was acceptable to both sides. That path, I think, is gone because of the way the society, the politics that developed in the PRC, what happened with Hong Kong. I was going to say Hong Kong, right?

And sort of the crackdown there. You'll find very hard to find serious people in Taiwan who think they want to be part of that. I mean, there are some, but you'll get any polling, it's a very small percentage. Most prefer the status quo. They just want to be left alone. But the Chinese side, the PRC side, can't leave it alone. For example, just a few hours, like 12 hours ago or 15 hours ago, they announced a new round of exercises to practice blockading, I think is practice blockading Taiwan. Very aggressive, you know, showing off lots of new weapons, put out some

propaganda videos, including one depicting President Lai Ching, the Taiwan president, as a parasite and then sort of burning him alive over an exploding, burning Taiwan island. Yeah, it's pretty gross. It's pretty grim. And that kind of dehumanizing— A little unambiguous. No, and that kind of dehumanizing of a democratically elected president is also one of those things

that people can sort of say, oh, that's just BS propaganda. But that's really disturbing. So how does the Chinese leadership think about the cost-benefit analysis on this? Like, when they look at Taiwan, I mean, I understand the benefits, I guess. I don't fully understand their view of the cost structure to this. You know, what are acceptable costs that they'd be willing to pay? What do they think they would have to pay in order to do it? I mean, do they, and how much are they influenced by, for instance, the Russian invasion of Ukraine or, you know, America pulling back from NATO? So those are great questions. I think, you know, America pulling back from NATO? So those are great questions.

I think, you know, it isn't known, at least publicly, what sort of the acceptable costs to them. I think, though, you know, the sense I get is, you know, their preference is for political solution. And if they had to use force, it's actually a failure, right? Because they have a massive, and for a long time, many, many years, massive political apparatus to try and effectively soften up Taiwan and create the conditions for peaceful unification. And, you know, I think on the, you know,

what they appear to be trying to do is on, yes, they're building up their military capabilities so that if they had to, they could get to a point where they could actually achieve success in an invasion or a blockade of Taiwan where Taiwan basically had to surrender and sue for some sort of a condominium. But their military is untested. The U.S. is making it very clear that, has made it clear that, you know, they're trying to get Taiwan to arm up. They're giving Taiwan more capabilities. They're working with allies like Japan to prepare for contingencies, to raise the cost for the Chinese if

they wanted to use force. And so that equation keeps changing for the Chinese, where I think their capabilities get better, but the cost also keeps rising as the U.S. leads countries like Japan and other countries to say, we're not going to allow this to happen, or we're going to inflict some sort of pain for you if you take these steps. And so I don't think that the Chinese side is confident that they could successfully execute, say, an invasion of Taiwan. And, you know, if they were to fail in an invasion, that would be catastrophic from a political perspective domestically. But at the same time, if, for example, Taiwan were to announce independence or the U.S. were to recognize Taiwan as an independent country

or other countries were, there's probably a point at which the Chinese, assuming Xi Jinping is still the leader, the Chinese would just go anyway, because it really is an existential issue. It's become an existential issue in the political system and in the national psyche, right? And so, you know, the best piece I ever read in D.C. from, you know, one of the think tanks about how to sort of how to work this, as you called it, intractable problem was, it was by a guy at Brookings, Ryan Haas, and a guy then at CSIS, not Range, Blanchett, which basically the piece was like, we just have to figure out how to kick the can down the road and hope something changes in the future, maybe

different leadership so that there's some sort of a different approach to a political solution. Because there is, this is a totally intractable problem. The only thing we can hope for is time, status quo, and over time, maybe things will work themselves out. That's pretty sad. That's more wishful thinking, I think, than a strategy. To your question about sort of how they saw the Ukraine, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you know, I think there's a bunch of lessons they learned. I'll focus on a couple. One

is first that, wow, the Russian military was woefully underprepared. The equipment wasn't working right, and they're massively corrupt. And so the PLA and there's been a rolling wave of pretty significant investigations, corruption and loyalty sort of related investigations in the PLA that are ongoing. They also, though, I think, looked at all of the ways that the U.S. and its allies sanctioned Russia and all the pain or the economic damage from those types of sanctions if it were to come to that. Yeah, that's what you talked about from the very beginning today. You talked about how they are trying to harden themselves and become more independent and stuff. Yeah, no, I guess, I mean, the U.S. policy really has always been just kick the can down the road and hope that at some point, someday, there's regime change in China so China doesn't want Taiwan anymore, right? That's the American hope. The thing is, I think that China will always want Taiwan.

The question is whether or not there's a different leadership that then the two can work something out. And I think, again, it's hard to be optimistic that's the case. But that seems to be the best solution anyone can come up with at this point. But that's, again, Taiwan should be, and I think people, that Taiwan should be very concerned. The president, you know, they are clearly getting more concerned about PRC rhetoric, PRC actions, PRC's constriction of Taiwan's international space, exercises like the one that's ongoing today. The trend lines are all bad. And how about the American pullback from NATO? It's my thesis is that NATO is dead and that it was put on life support when Trump was elected.

And the hope, the best-case scenario, was that Trump would just sort of neglect the NATO alliance. The Greenland stuff seems to suggest that he views Europe not with the intention of benign neglect, but basically as prey, and that this is problematic. He's actively working against European interests, voting with Russia and Belarus and the United Nations, those sorts of things. What influence is that having in the Pacific? I mean, do people look at it and say, oh, well, this is just the United States pivoting to Asia, and this means they'll become more involved over here and we should take them more seriously?

Or do they look at this and say, yeah, America's withdrawing from the world. The country's public does not have the stomach for overseas adventures, and we can expand to fill the vacuum? So the journey's out. I mean, I think that, you know, the Secretary of Defense Hegstas was just in the region. He was in the Philippines, in Japan. He also went to Guam, I think, in Hawaii. And his message was very much, no, we're not. We're focusing on this region. We're focusing

on the challenge from China. and we're going to work more with the Japanese, we're going to work more with the Philippines. And, you know, he said then there was this memo that the Washington Post reported on yesterday, this internal guidance memo that he signed is based on a heritage report from last year. But it was very clear that the U.S. needed to build up deterrence around Taiwan to deter the PRC from taking any military actions. And so that message from the Secretary of Defense or those messages were, I think, sort of run counter to the idea that, oh, the U.S. is going to leave NATO and therefore they're going to leave us too. That said, there's all these relationships. You have to have more security, right?

You have to have trade, right? You have to have all these other ties that we're, you know, smacking them over the head about. And ultimately, one of the challenges, right, with President Trump is what does he want? And what does he want at that moment of that day, right? And so we just don't know, you know, his staff, and I'm, you know, a secretary of defense is basically like his staff can go out and say things that sound like they're the right things and say we're going to make these commitments.

And yet he'll wake up one day and potentially he'll decide he wants something else. And so I will say on the NATO side, China is happy probably for a couple reasons. One is during the Biden administration, there was a push to actually expand NATO into parts of the Asia-Pacific. For example, and the Chinese were going nuts about, you know, NATO is sort of the, you know, it's a Cold War relic and, you know, bringing it to the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific will just lead to war. And so I think that's probably off the table, right, in this Trump administration. And then, you know, again, it's a mixed bag on, okay, if NATO really does collapse and the European countries all, you know, many of them or some of them really do arm up, you know, I think the Chinese hope, and they've been pushing

for a long time, this idea of, you idea of pushing the EU and especially countries like France, Germany for strategic autonomy, right? Multipolar world to prize them apart from the US, right? Because the thing the Chinese fear the most is a united front from the biggest and most powerful and richest developed countries around the world. And so Trump breaking NATO would help on that bit, but also could cause, you know, if it leads to some, you know, more conflict in Europe or parts of Europe, that isn't necessarily good for China. I mean, China, you know, I think that this goes back to earlier comments, you know, they are, you know the the thing i read where she talks about sort of the the um changes on unseen in a century and he's been saying that for several years it's actually true right you see how the world is changing and so so much of what they're trying to build around is this concept of sort of how to be flexible and how to protect themselves

while figuring out the places where they can maximize their opportunities. And, you know, chaos is bad. Chaos is good. Right? It depends on how you look at it. Yeah. Last question, then I'll let you go. What does Japan do with all this change happening?

Japan's right there. I mean, that's a great question. I'm not a Japan expert. I will say I think that you've seen a pretty significant shift in the national security parts of the Japanese government and establishment towards really being significantly concerned about the PRC, significantly concerned about taiwan and and really feeling like taiwan becoming a part of the prc is almost an existential problem for the japanese and so um the japanese i think they're they are starting to trying to increase their military budgets they certainly did a lot with the biden administration um to um improve sort of sort of working with the U.S. military. But, you know, ultimately, if Japan gets the point,

I mean, they're also a democracy. They certainly could, you know, their prime minister is not particularly popular. It's possible the next prime minister is someone who has a different view of China. And so that could shift some of those views. But ultimately, you know, Japan, if the U.S. you know, and if the U.S. were to really pull back and say, Japan, you're on your own, go

spend 15, 10 percent of your GDP on defense. Otherwise, we're going to cut you off, which I don't think they're saying yet. But, you know, ultimately, they're a neighbor of China, and China is a big, powerful country getting more powerful by the day, and so they have to live in that neighborhood. And so if we're not leaving the U.S. or not there to support them,

then they have some really difficult decisions to make. If I could add one thing on your USAID question, which actually goes back to it ties into also the guiding of like the voice of america radio free asia etc also the usa idea usaid it turned out was was a a huge funder of um a large number of ngos um that were doing work around uh chinese activities globally and in China around things like human rights issues, labor issues, information, disinformation. You know, the Chinese have a long and very well-funded effort to what they say, improve their global discourse power, right? Which has effectively shaped the conversation about China globally, not just in the Chinese language, but in any language. And so, you know, they view themselves

as in an information war globally. And the U.S., and they looked at the U.S., they're very critical of AID and the NGOs it funded. They're very critical of Voice of America, very critical of Radio Free Asia and some of these other organizations. You know, they even, they passed an NGO law a few years ago because they were so concerned about some of the work organizations. You know, they even, they passed an NGO law a few years ago because they were so concerned about some of the work NGOs were doing in China and how it was actually, you know, potentially giving people wrong ideas

about like rule of law and political systems. And, you know, so the Chinese have responded in many ways, both defensively, but also offensively globally in the information space. And then the Trump administration came in and unilaterally disarmed and just withdrew from the field, right? And so that, from the Chinese perspective,

is like, okay, for that, we love you, right? That's great. Yeah. Couldn't ask for it. No. Couldn't ask for more. And the thing is, is for all this talk about master dealmaker and maybe there's a big deal with China,

we just gave it up for nothing. It's kind of weird. And also not surprising. Bill, thank you for being so generous with your time. Guys, if you're not subscribed to cynicism, cynicism,

cynicism, cynicism, it's really one-stop shopping for for trying to get smart about this stuff which is what i like actually um with my i subscribe to i won't even tell you i do not let my list of substack subscriptions be public because people would shame me for how so much money i spend on Substacks. Oh, I should turn mine off. I'm in the same camp, fortunately, right?

I mean, we should. There's so much great, there's so many great people on Substack. That's the thing, and it's our business. But what I like to do for specialty stuff is to find one person who is a deep enough expert that I can get all that itch scratched, and Bill is it for China. And not just in, like, sub-stack world, like, out in foreign policy world, they

all read Bill. And it's fantastic. Bill, thank you for doing what you do. I really appreciate it. And everybody who's on this, hit the button to give Bill a follow, and go subscribe and support what he's doing. And we'll be back.

I think we got one more of these things next week. Anytime. Happy to chat. I love these lives. Actually, they're super useful and they help me procrastinate. So it's great. Awesome. Thanks, Bill. Guys, take care. Good luck. Thanks, everybody.