Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Is China Turning Crisis Into Opportunity? With Josh Rogin

Episode Date: April 16, 2021

Josh Rogin is a long-time foreign affairs journalist, currently a columnist for the Global Opinions Section of the Washington Post. He’s also a Political Analyst for CNN. 

This is what they said to Brazil. Okay, you can have the vaccines, but you're going to need to take the Huawei tech as well. You have to reverse your decision to not take Huawei. And they did it. Okay, so that's vaccines plus industrial expansion and economic expansion. Right? That's how they think about it. And that's not how we think about it. We like to think we're above all of that stuff. But the fact is that geopolitics is a part of this pandemic, whether we like it or not, and it's going to manifest itself in lots of different ways. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. As it is to citizens in its own country, China's vaccination campaign is currently engaging 45 countries spread across multiple continents. Why? For what? What is China getting in return? And should the U.S. also be engaged in vaccine diplomacy? This is just one of many ways in which the pandemic has upended geopolitics as we know it. To better understand how China seeks to transform a global crisis that originated in China into a foreign policy tool, we sit down with Josh Rogin of the Washington Post. Josh is a longtime foreign affairs journalist, currently a columnist for the Global Opinion section of the Washington Post.

He's also a political analyst for CNN. And having written about China for years and traveled Asia extensively, Josh is the author of a new book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. Josh is one of the sharpest analysts on China and U.S. policy towards China that I know. I highly recommend you order his book. The pandemic has shaken up the U.S. policy towards China that I know I highly recommend you order his book. The pandemic has shaken up the U.S.-China relationship. Where does China's role in the world go from here? This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome Josh Rogin to the podcast, who is columnist for the Global Opinion section of the Washington

Post and political analyst at CNN and author of a terrific book, as I said in my intro, Chaos Under Heaven. Josh, welcome to the podcast. Great to be with you, Dan. And actually, I normally say welcome to post-corona, but normally when I say that to our guests, I always have to caveat that we're not in post-corona yet, even though that's the name of the podcast. But where I'm recording this right now, I'm in Israel as we speak. I'm sitting here in the capital of Israel.

And in the capital of Israel and in Tel Aviv where I was this morning, you definitely feel like you are post-corona. They are virtually everybody's vaccinated. And apparently the mask requirement is coming off in a few days. So the country definitely feels like a window into where we are hopefully heading. Okay, so Josh, we have a lot to cover. And before we get into the substance of your book and your years of reporting, our listeners are often interested in the career trajectories of our guests. So tell us just how you wound up as an opinion journalist covering foreign policy for The Washington Post. Sure. Thanks so much. So I fell ass backwards into journalism in my failed attempt to become

first a lawyer and then a scholar of U.S.-Japan relations. Two things that I failed at, actually. And at first, I went to the George Washington University and lived in Tokyo and learned Japanese and taught English there and studied there for a bit and ate a lot of ramen, and it was great. And then I came back to Philadelphia where I grew up and I began working at a law firm in Philadelphia on human rights cases and applying to law school. I thought that's what I was going to do with my life. As it turns out, it wasn't for me. And what happened was I found a bunch of research at the law firm that had to do with China's aggression, repression, and crazy diplomatic abuses of the country of Sudan. This is about 2003, and I saw all of this

research about how the Chinese government was helping the government of Sudan commit genocide against the people of what was then southern Sudan in an attempt to, you know, steal the resources of that region and give some of them back to China. And that scheme was so, in a sense, elegant and horrifying that I contacted some of my friends in Washington to see what they thought about it. And, you know, these days, stories of China's mischief in Africa are well, well known, but in 2003, that wasn't the case. And my friend Joshua Eisenman at the Center at a think tank in Washington called the New America Foundation said, we have to publish this. And that's exactly what we did. We wrote an op-ed in the Straits

Times of Singapore, making the argument that China's complicity and atrocities in Sudan was a moral and national security issue that the United States must not ignore. And two things happened. I got almost fired from my job at the law firm because I was a paralegal and I wasn't supposed to be publishing and they didn't appreciate that. So you didn't get clearance for running this piece? I took the George Costanza approach was like, was that wrong? Should I not have done if anyone had told me when I got here that I wasn't supposed to be publishing op-eds, I would have, you know, and they were like, sure, whatever. And I was basically almost fired. And so I started to look for jobs. And the job that I found was at the Japanese

newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun in Washington. And I applied for it and I sent them that op-ed and they called me in and they told me I had broken a big story and they offered me a job. And three weeks later, I was back in Washington working as a reporter for the Japanese newspaper. And they said, go to the Pentagon. And I said, why? They said, you're the Pentagon reporter. So you were basically a Washington correspondent for the Japanese paper. Yes.

But to be totally honest, I was the assistant to one of the correspondents. I was the 24-year-old kid who was helping the senior Japanese correspondents get around Washington because they weren't from here. And my job was to go to the Rumsfeld briefings. And you remember the Rumsfeld briefings. I remember them well. Right? Those were epic briefings. Donald Rumsfeld was the best briefer in Washington. He didn't care what the policy or the talking points were. He loved to spar with the reporters. Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork, he would hold court and give a lesson on briefing to everyone who would come to listen so i sat in the front row on my first briefing and i'll never forget because uh martha raddatz comes out of

the bullpen and she looks at me she says you're in my seat and i just looked at her and i said i don't see any names on the seats and she said what to be clear martha raddatz at that time the pentagon briefing room was like royalty. I mean, she was. Yeah, front row seats. Exactly. For the famous people. Right.

And I was a nobody. But I just sat there because I didn't know any of them. And she was the ABC, right? ABC News. Yeah, wonderful reporter. Good friend of mine. She's terrific. Yeah.

Top of the game. Yeah, I worked with her in Iraq. She's amazing. My wife, Allie, used to work with her at ABC. Anyway, long story short, we looked at the Wrangler. He said, yeah, this isn't high school. We don't have assigned seats here at the Pentagon. And so she had to go with her at ABC. Anyway, long story short, we looked at the wrangler. He said, yeah, this isn't high school. We don't have assigned seats here at the Pentagon. And so she had to go sit in the back. And Rumsfeld, because he's Rumsfeld, is holding

court about Abu Ghraib, and where's Osama bin Laden, and when's the Iraq war going to be over? Is the insurgency stronger or weaker than last week? And he's getting frustrated with these questions. And he calls on me randomly and i switched the topic to u.s japan relations and his face lights up and he talks about u.s japan relations for 35 minutes and drained the entire press conference and all of the other reporters were super pissed but i had 35 minutes of the defense secretary talking about okinawa and stuff my bosses were thrilled that was a front page news news article in seven million japanese newspapers i couldn't read it because I can't read Japanese. I can speak it, but I can't read it. I'm like illiterate, but functionally illiterate. Anyway, that became a thing. So for

two and a half years, I was Donald Rumsfeld's foil in that briefing room. And anytime he wanted to switch the topic away from Iraq or Osama bin Laden, he would call me and I would reliably turn the conversation to U.S.-Japan relations. And I didn't know if the fix was in until one time I didn't ask anything. And in the hallway afterwards, he stopped. I didn't even think he knew my name. And he's like, he said to me, Josh, what, are you tired today? I could have used the end there. And that's when I knew the fix was in. So after about two and a half years of just me and Donald Rumsfeld making news all over Japan, I hit what they call the rice paper ceiling, like the American kid at the Japanese newspaper.

There's no upward mobility for you. So again, I applied to a bunch of Japan-related policy jobs. I just wanted to be a Japan scholar and eat ramen and speak Japanese. Didn't get any of those jobs. But I got a job working for a federal computer week magazine, which at that time was a very prominent and respected, still is to a degree, trade magazine covering the federal IT industry, which is a multi, multi-billion dollar industry. But back in 2006, again, they weren't really focused on China, but because I was working

in the Japanese newspaper and I thought I knew something about the region, I started reporting on China. And what I found was that there was a big problem here that a lot of people were talking about privately, but weren't talking about publicly. So I started to break a bunch of stories. And then I got a more prestigious gig at Congressional Quarterly. And then that was when Congress was starting to grapple with a China that had clearly become more problematic in a number of ways that was abusing our engagement, including its PNTR status and its WTO membership. But at that time, 2007, 2008, we were still very Iraq-focused, and there wasn't the appetite to take on China in a comprehensive way as a policy

issue. Nevertheless, people were talking about it, and the repression was growing and the aggression was growing. Then I got a more prestigious gig at Foreign Policy Magazine. That was when Hillary Clinton and Obama came in, and this was during the pivot to Asia, and Kirk Campbell and Hillary Clinton were devising this pivot to Asia. Tom Donilon didn't like that idea. He wanted to call it a rebalance to Asia, and whatever it was, it kind of fell flat because they never resourced it, etc. But even at this time, this was a period of great consternation about what to do about a China that was becoming more and more internally repressive, externally aggressive, and interfering in free and open societies on a range of fronts. And Xi Jinping came to power. And, you know, for the last couple years of the— And it was clear when he came to power that china was pursuing much more cold war strategy it it became clear over time and you know he came to power at the end of 2012 beginning of 2013 and the obama approach was okay we got to make friends with this guy and john kerry invited yangji shir to his house in boston to have a nice dinner and

spend the weekend blah blah blah and they didn't they didn't know in fairness to have a nice dinner and spend the weekend, blah, blah, blah. And they didn't know. In fairness to them, they didn't know. But there were more and more people inside the system saying, no, this guy's a bad egg. By 2015. By 2015, it was clear. I think it was clear by 2015. About 49% of the Obama administration thought it was clear by 2015. But President Obama wasn't one of those people.

Ben Rhodes wasn't one of those people. John Kerry and obama wasn't one of those people ben rose wasn't one of those people because john kerry and susan rice weren't one of those people so the policy still didn't really change and then you know the opening scene of my book is when you know the the chinese leadership meets with the kerry and rice a week before the 2016 election can you imagine it by this time i'm working at i have worked at daily beast and then bloomberg view and weren't you at foreign policy magazine at one point foreign policy magazine yeah for four years i had too many i can't remember you know it's been a lot of jobs all right uh and over time i just continued to track this china story and then in 2016 the chinese government like all of us like i expected uh they thought they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election, and that they were going to be made in the shade, and everything was

going to be copacetic, and they were going to achieve what Xi Jinping always calls the new model of great power relations, the idea of a G2, that the United States and China would be co-superpowers, and we wouldn't interfere in their stuff, and they wouldn't interfere in our stuff, but we really would, but we would say that we wouldn't. And that the rise of China under Xi's vision for the China dream would go apace, unimpeded. And then Donald Trump gets elected and he flips over the chessboard. this question if you look at where journalism was around that time it was all during the 2016 campaign and then immediately after trump is elected as it relates to the inner intersection of foreign policy making and american politics it seemed like every journalist in washington was covering russia exactly and you said no i'm not gonna well it's not that it's not that i didn't think the russia story was a big story it was that i was i had come to the washington post from bloomberg view and uh russiagate was in

full effect and you know i knew a bunch about it i was you know i had written uh you know i was at the convention i broke that platform story i actually wrote the first piece defending carter page when everyone was attacking carter page so i was trying to go through it thoughtfully but the story as you can we curse on this podcast yes yes go ahead the story got all fucked up okay by everybody and at the washington post they had 50 50 people working on this story and some of the best national security reporters in the world work at the washington post and i said to my boss, Fred Hyatt, on the opinion side, I said, I can't compete with that. They have 50 amazing national security reporters who are going to be into this story every single day. I want to do a different story. He said, what story do you want to do? I said, China. And to his credit, Fred Hyatt and

Jackson Deal gave me the time and resources to report out the China story, which involved, you know, traveling to Asia on their dime, you know, two dozen times over three years and, you know, to a dozen countries. The first one I said I went to was I went to Dharamsala and I met with the Dalai Lama on the top of the mountain in India, where the Tibetan government of exile is located. And when I pitched that to Fred Hyatt, I said, can I go to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama and interview him about Trump? He looked at me and he said, I hope you find enlightenment. That was all he said. And I slowly backed out of the room before he changed his mind.

OK, so over those four years, you know, I just tried to be where the other guys ain't. And that happened to be the China story. But slowly but surely, first the government, then washington then the rest of american society realized that the china story is actually the more important story was it clear to you then that the trump administration was in the process of completely from day one yeah so so basically that they were going to transform or should we say they were going to establish a new consensus that would really be a bipartisan consensus well it wasn't clear that's that how it was that how it was going to come out, and we can debate about whether or not that's exactly what happened. But it was clear from day one that this was going to be a crazy story, that they were going to change the U.S.-China relationship in a way that even they could not predict because they were so dysfunctional and such a mess.

That's why the book is called Chaos Under Heaven. It's a quote attributed to Mao Zedong where he says, there is great chaos under heaven, the situation is excellent. It means that the more messed up our system is, the better it is for the Chinese Communist Party, and they know that. And so the overarching theme of the book is these factional battles inside the Trump administration that played out in unpredictable and often destructive ways. But what I knew is that, you know just listening to the campaign was that this was going to be a crazy story and that they didn't care at all what about the last 40 years of you know delicate you know relations managed by the

you know the china hands in washington who have like had a stranglehold of over this issue since 1972 and they didn't care about that at all. They didn't want to hear from those people. I remember the first time I met with Jared Kushner, he's like, well, I don't want these old guys coming in from these think tanks and telling me about foreign policy. Didn't they screw this up? And I said to him, I'll never forget, I said, well, maybe you should just listen to, hear what they have to say. You don't have to do it, but just take the information anyway. But he didn't, you know, that was the mentality. And so if you watch the campaign, you heard a lot of crazy and sometimes very accurate stuff said about china and this was rooted in donald trump's

30-year belief of that that the united states was getting screwed over by china economically and that he was the man to fix it and this was something that if i as i did if you read through the all of his books that he alleges alleges he wrote over the last 30 years, the books that have his name on the title page, the message about China is amazingly consistent, okay? And it carried through the campaign. And then once the administration started, all of that campaign stuff went out the window, and the hawks weren't in charge anymore, and Peter Navarro couldn't even get in office, and Bannon got fired seven months later, and here comes Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and Jerry Kushner to try to make a deal. And so that's the opening, is that they flipped over the chessboard, but they couldn't set it back up again. call from taiwanese president zhang wen during the transition because it was immediately reported as the biggest blunder in 40 years of diplomacy but what was funny about that i mean not haha funny

but kind of ironic funny and this is how i reported in the book is that trump didn't realize what he was doing in other words so he takes a call he takes a call from taiwan he's in the transition right and it's considered a total diplomatic faux pas because you're going to blow up the relationship with the most important other superpower, if you will, in the world. Exactly. And don't you know you're not supposed to be engaging directly with the Taiwanese government when you're a new president? Right. But Trump doesn't care about the policy. He cares that he's getting ridiculed by the New York Times for making a blunder that he didn't intend to make because no one told him that it was a blunder.

They're just like, do it, it'll be fine. And so he got really mad at his staff for not telling him that it was going to get reported this way. And then that turned him against Taiwan for many years and had an actual, totally backfired and had a terrible impact on US policy towards Taiwan to the point that Trump even told a US senator once, as reported in my book, that if the Chinese take Taiwan, there isn't an MFing thing we can do about it. And that's, yeah. Go ahead. So that's the chaos, is that you have people struggling to, some to persuade the president,

some to trick him, some to bring him along. And meanwhile, they're fighting each other. And down inside the government, two levels down, the bureaucrats and the intelligence people and the spies and the congressional staffers are playing their own games. And those narratives, the A-narrative of the political leadership of Bannon and Navarro and Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and Jared, and then the next level, which is like Pottinger and Matt Turpin and David Fyfe and all of these guys who were trying to link that to the system. And then inside the system, all of those things affected each other, and it's complicated, and it was happening in the most chaotic place. And that's before the pandemic. Okay, so let's get to the pandemic. So let's fast forward to January 30th, which is the first reported human-to-human transition of COVID that was confirmed in the U.S. So where were you at that point in following the story of

the pandemic? And did you anticipate at the time that it would become a story that would result in the pandemic, consume the Trump presidency, potentially the presidency of whoever succeeded Trump, transform our geopolitics with China? Did you see this as a big China geopolitical story struggle at the moment? Well, it's hard for me to go back and discern what I... So I reported the story twice. I reported it as it was happening, and then I went back and re-reported it with 300 plus additional interviews when I went to do the book. So what I can tell you is that at that time in our politics, in our government, there was a very small group of people who were sounding the alarm. And first it was the national security officials, and then it was the health officials joining them. And they were fighting on that day of January, on that exact day actually, about the China travel ban.

And what had happened was that Matt Pottinger and Robert O'Brien— Just for our listeners, so Robert O'Brien was national security advisor. Matt Pottinger was deputy national security advisor. But more importantly, Pottinger was really the architect of the administration's—the more hawkish, aggressive elements in the Trump approach to China— He would say hardliner. Hardline. The hardline approach were—Pottinger was the architect of it. He was a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He'd spent a lot of time living in Asia, also served in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Very interesting guy. Right. So Matt Pottinger was not only the head Asia official who spoke Chinese, he had sources because he covered SARS in China in 2002 and 2003. He had real sources. So he's talking to his sources. And he has all these family members who were infectious disease experts. His wife is a virologist who worked for the CDC.

His brother is a professor of epidemiology at University of Washington, who was one of the first breakouts. He's reading the intelligence. He's reading Chinese social media. He's talking to people in Chinese and in China. And he's trying to sound the alarm. Nobody will listen. And he convinces Robert O'Brien. Now he's trying to sound the alarm nobody will listen and he convinces robert o'brien now they're both sounding the alarm nobody will listen

and then on january 30th they're like listen we've got to shut it down and even the health people like anthony fauci were against it but once there was a that what you mentioned shut down travel shut down travel from china right now yeah and and that when there was the first example of human to human transmission in the united states that's when the health officials were like okay we got to do this but you know uh mnuchin and uh the chief of staff mcmulvaney were like no we can't we're going to tank the airlines it's going to tank the economy it's going to cost you the election don't do it and trump went with the national security people and he shut it down and he took a lot of

crap for that at the time. And that wasn't sufficient to stop the pandemic. Doesn't excuse Trump's other excuses. But it was an example where he trusted the professionals over the politicos. And by the way, the politicos were totally wrong because actually, if he had managed the pandemic better, he might have gotten reelected. So by delaying his response, he actually hurt himself and probably cost himself the election. And then six days later, Xi Jinping calls Trump and he tells him a bunch of

lies about the coronavirus, namely that it would go away in warm weather, and that herbal medicine would treat it, and that it was under control in China. All of these lies fed into that garble inside Trump's head and then came out of the garble out of his mouth and formed the foundation of our terrible confusing response policy at that time and then Trump starts to repeat Xi's lies in public and telling the American people that it's going to go away in warm weather many people are saying but he didn't say that the many people was the Chinese president who has an interest in lying to him because they're covering up the coronavirus that That's crazy. That's a crazy story. So at that time, did I realize all of that was going on? No,

I didn't know all that. I figured it out later when I retraced all the steps. But I did think at that time that, you know, when I saw what was going on in China, my first instinct was like, oh, I understand the character of the Chinese party better than most. I know that they would hide the science. I know that they're jailing the journalists. I know that they're keeping the information away. They're lying to us about our public health, and we're about to suffer greatly for it. That's what I instinctively knew. That's the big difference. And that's when you listen to these scientists, quote-unquote, friends of the lab, people who are definitely, you know, 100% sure it couldn't have been the Chinese Wuhan lab that had all the bad coronaviruses, they were the ones who were telling everybody, you know,

oh, whatever the Chinese government says is right, we're pretty sure the scientists wouldn't lie to us, but they didn't understand either that those scientists in China, those health officials, if they speak up up if they told us the truth they would die they would get thrown in prison okay so let's talk about that so we now know to your point that the chinese communist party punished doctors as you said jailed journalists inside china they're still still today's day anyone sounding the alarm was basically you know and here the science took what they knew and locked it in a vault and and barred the cdc from traveling to china right cdc officials wanted wanted to travel to china they weren't allowed they engaged took what they knew and locked it in a vault. And barred the CDC from traveling to China, right?

CDC officials wanted to travel to China. They weren't allowed. They engaged in a disinformation campaign about the origins of the pandemic. Correct. So through the president of the United States who bought it hook, line, and sinker. So based on your reporting of the early moves of the Chinese government decision makers, what was their calculation at that point? Did they really believe that they could sweep this under the rug and the world would just move on and not focus on China? I mean,

it seems a little naive. Well, it's impossible to know what happens inside the top ranks of the CCP. It's essentially unknowable. But the best speculation I can give you is that they had no, inside that system, there's no dissent mechanism anymore. In other words, whatever the top says, everyone does. And what everyone's trying to do is not to make any decisions that are going to get overruled by the top guy, and then they're going to get killed. And in that system, that's a dysfunctional system. We like to think, oh, authoritarianism is so efficient blah blah blah but actually it often leads to these terrible decisions and these terrible outcomes and we can trace this through the china's entire response starting from the origin story and the initial handling and leading all the way to today where they're doing the vaccine diplomacy which i

know we're going to get to uh how they they went around the world to blackmail people with masks, you know, just think of China. Ventilators, PPE, they control that. All of it. Right. You know, and just to think of like the cruel calculation of going to a suffering country and then kicking them in the gut because they won't do what you want on like Taiwan or shut up about the genocide of the Uyghurs and dangling masks over their heads for their political agenda. And that's what I'm trying to get to, is that all you need to know about the way that the CCP operates is informed by the fact that they were using their power and influence to save lives and to do the opposite, but not out of China's interest, because you're right. It's not in China's interest to do any of these things. It's in the party's interest. It's in Xi Jinping's interest to protect himself, to protect the party. And for

that to happen, the party has to be omnipotent. The party is God. The party is the religion. And the party can't make any mistakes. The party is infallible. And so that's the religion. That's the one thing they can't sacrifice. So how could we be responsible? How dare you say we're torturing Uyghurs? How dare you say that the lab was involved? Because once the party is wrong, the whole religion is called into question. And we might find out that Emperor Xi has no clothes. That's why they're making the decisions that are not in China's interest, not in the interest of the Chinese people who suffered greatly, and definitely not in our interest, because as we saw, it corrupted

our response in a way that cost lives, that made people sick and die. Yeah, but China's image globally has been on the decline, and this seems to have accelerated it considerably. So there's this Pew study from a few months ago, just reading from the Pew study, I think they surveyed 14 countries, thousands of respondents in 14 countries. And today, according to the survey, a majority in each of the surveyed countries has an unfavorable opinion of China. In Australia, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the US, South Korea, Spain, Canada, negative views have reached their highest points since Pew began polling on this topic more than a decade ago. And a lot of the survey work was done during what you're, you know, not only all this noise about the origins of the pandemic, but China's manipulation, as you said, of the ventilators and the PPE. So I take your

point that it was in the Chinese Communist Party's interest to protect the institution. But if you just look at that data, it backfired. It didn't just not work. It blew up in their faces. Exactly. That's exactly right. And it continues to because they continue to double down because even today they still won't give us the science. Even today, they're blackmailing countries like Peru. They say, you want your vaccines peru uh you're gonna have to dump diplomatic recognition of taiwan that's a real example but of course the peruvians are like oh well we can't accept that we can't yield to the blackmail because then we'll just be beijing's bitches forever and you know they it's it's too humiliating right but they can't do the other thing either which is what

they're doing which is to refuse the chinese virus because their people are like how can you not give us the vaccines over taiwan you know so they put the government of peru in a position where it might collapse and you know what my argument was to when i was talking to the pide i'm trying to convince people to care about this right that you know that we've all had this awakening okay well and what i keep getting back is like oh well we can't play games with vaccines we don't want to do vaccine diplomacy like the chinese do but they're doing it and in in a vacuum even their horrible tactics will have a lot of success in other words if we don't have something else to offer a lot of these countries who are suffering this pandemic they'll be forced to take this corrupt and sort of

uh sinister chinese faustian bargain and that's what we're seeing so and less and less effect less effectuous vaccine i mean the vaccines are worse too right but it's better than nothing if i had a choice between nothing and the chinese vaccine i would put that shot in my arm right now okay so so let's i want to get to. First, I just want to talk about China's vaccine campaign domestically. On this podcast, we have done episodes on the state of the U.S. vaccine campaign. We had a conversation with Scott Gottlieb. We've done a lot on the Israeli campaign with Yonatan Adiri. And we've touched on the U.K. and European campaigns with Brett Stevens and Neil Ferguson. But we rarely talk about how the Chinese vaccine campaign is going in China. Now, I've seen numbers, I saw numbers late February, March, where China had just vaccine something like, just administered something like north of 50 million doses for a country of 1.4 billion people. And those are public numbers. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference spokesman released those numbers. Compared to the U.S. at that time, 75 million

doses had been administered for a population of 330 million. So whether you compare it on a per capita basis or you compare it on an absolute basis, China's domestic campaign is really, really slow. Why? Okay. So I think there's a couple things going on. And, you know, one is that countries with low levels of outbreak, in other words, the countries that did the best at the front end of the pandemic are doing the worst at the back end of the pandemic, right? And it's an interesting because we see this in Taiwan, in Japan, in South Korea, in Singapore, you know, they had lockdowns. They had low rates, low deaths. In Taiwan, they had 10 deaths total of the whole year, 130, something ridiculous like

that. But they have no shots, right? And so for most of these countries, it's a story of, oh, well, we got the first thing right, but we got the second thing wrong. Where in America, we got all the early stuff wrong, but we did really well in the vaccines and that you know that's that's one part of the story but again in china what they're doing with all of their vaccines is they're using to expand the ccp's power and influence all over the world they're giving away more vaccines than they're putting in the arms of their own people there's a reason for that think about that for a second it partially it's because they have less cases it's true okay and the p and but the other part of it it's a form of clinical trials it's a no it's a it's a it's a form of uh of of economic

and uh industrial expansion because you get the vaccines this is what they said to brazil okay you can have the vaccines but you're going to need to take the Huawei tech as well. You have to reverse your decision to not take Huawei. And they did it. OK, so that's vaccines plus industrial expansion and economic expansion. Right. That's that's how they think about it. And that's not how we think about it. We like to think we're above all of that stuff.

But the fact is that geopolitics is a part of this pandemic, whether we like it or not. And and it's going to manifest itself in lots of different ways. The vaccines is just the first phase of it, by the way, and how we approach vaccinating the rest of the world, which I think we're failing on, clearly, despite some noble efforts and COVAX and all that stuff, and the Quad's going to have a million shots. Too bad they chose Johnson & but they could they didn't know that when they chose it but the chinese are way ahead on that okay and again this is they're not 10 feet tall they make mistakes it's a bad system but there are some things that they do that are very smart and getting way ahead on being on exporting

vaccines has given them a lot of options diplomatically militarily industrially and we have to respond to that okay and we're not doing that right now the biden administration is just not okay so let's hold on just so that so china has has pledged something like 10 times more vaccines abroad than it has distributed at home they're they claim they're on track to you know manufacture something like i don't know what the number is, 2 billion vaccines by the end of the year or something. And they're engaged with like 45 or 50 countries. So it's all over, right? It's in the Western Hemisphere.

Yeah, including in our backyard, the Western Hemisphere, where it's the most prevalent. Right. Okay. So now come to the- We ought to think about that. We ought to do something about that. So let's talk about that.

So let's talk about, so should the U.S. be doing the same thing? Not the same thing. We should be doing the better thing. What's the better thing? Giving countries shots without strings, okay? Okay. Were they like bad shots with strings from the Chinese or good shots without strings? If they had one choice in the matter besides that or dying, they would take the good shots without strings.

But we're not giving them to them for a lot of bureaucratic and stupid reasons, okay? So we can't fight something with nothing. If the rest of the world has a chance to do business with us and join us in our aspiration for things that we believe in, like human rights and the rule of law and freedom and democracy and the freedom to think what you want and choose your leaders to some extent and participate in the world community and love who you want, that's better. People around the world will like that better than what the Chinese are offering, which is you better shut up about the Uyghurs, take the shitty vaccine, stick it in your arm, and then we're going to send you a bunch of hair that we shaved off the Uyghur women's heads. You're going to put it on your arm and then we're going to send you a bunch of hair that we shaved off the Uyghur women's heads you're going to put it on your head and you're not not going to say anything about it

and then we're going to pick have them pick the cotton and then we're going to send you the shirts and you're going to put those on your on your backs and if you dare speak up about it no shots that's what's going on right now and our response is oh we'll get to you when we get to you we we got a America first and then you know we'll put a bunch of money into the problem and you know come see us in six months okay that's why we're losing the vaccine diplomacy not because we uh the the chinese are so smart it's because they have the only offer on the table and these countries are suffering and you know we're not safe until everyone's safe and it makes economic and strategic sense without the chinese even being involved for us to export more shots and to stop the variants in the worst places

because that's they're going to come to get us and we're going to have to have come up with new vaccines and we'll go do you want to do this every year i don't want to do this every year but so the chinese vaccine take take you know sinovac or sino, the efficacy rates are something like in the low to mid 60s percent. And in many countries where they're going, when they're surveyed, whether it's Turkey or the Philippines, the Chinese vaccines are unpopular. People are uneasy about taking them. Your point is something better than nothing and people will suck it up. They're using antiquated development methodologies for these vaccines. They're not, you know, they're basically, they're not antiquated uh development methodologies for these vaccines they're not

you know they're basically they're not using they're not using mrna technology they're so go ahead yeah no so now there's a push by the progressives left on the left and human rights organizations including nancy pelosi by the way to get biden to hand over all the intellectual property for vaccines the mr mRNA research that was funded by DARPA, by the way, that we spent 25 years developing to release the IP and just get rid of all the patents, which on a human level sounds like such a wonderful idea, but if you just think about it for 10 seconds, you realize that it's crazy and naive. Because once you do that, essentially what you're doing is you're taking our entire biotech industry and you're delivering it to the Chinese Communist Party in a silver platter.

And what they'll immediately do is just steal everything, build a thousand factories and put all of our biotech out of industry, industry out of work. And then because they always screw it up, they'll, you know, that's going to be billions of bad, more bad vaccines. God knows what they'll do with that research. And, you know, so this is, again, it's complicated. It's very easy to sort of, you know, simplify everything down to like, you know, China bad. But the truth is that we have to get our act together. The grand strategic competition with China can only be won if we engage in it and if we devote our time and resources to it. That's what the book is about, is that we got to do more. And it doesn't mean we have to do everything.

It doesn't mean we have to overreact. We don't want a Cold War. We don't want a hot war. Those are bumper stickers that the sort of pro-China community will throw at you to dissuade you from responding to China's aggression. When it comes to vaccines or anything, we just have to be clear-eyed about what they're doing and then actually have a response. We have to have our system work, which it hasn't done in quite a while.

And is the Biden administration's resistance a just general foreign policy directional decision, or they're concerned that we don't have the capacity? They're trying to figure out how to work their computers and they're they just got there and they're they're they're they're setting up meetings to set up a process to uh determine how to write a paper and then the paper's gotta you know be workshopped and then they gotta have a meeting about the workshop and then they gotta start the process and then they gotta review the process then they gotta socialize the process with allies and get their input and then they gotta feed that back into the process you know this damn good, you know, it's a difference really like I'm not the Trump administration had no process It was a disaster, but the Obama administration was all process and this becomes an alibi for inaction

And this is what we're seeing Okay And I was talking to State Department officials this week because I was about this very problem and they were like listen Josh we just got here seven days ago half my staff isn't there and uh you know i really i want to get into this and i'm going to get a briefing in a couple weeks we're going to have an ipc meeting and in in july and i'm like jesus christ you know what i mean like the whole world's going to pass us by well these guys figure out you know which office to sit in and uh you know again that's not a democrat that happens in

every administration but meanwhile things are going on in the world so i think a lot of it is just regular old bureaucratic yeah dysfunction and washington malaise i mean derrick scissors at the american enterprise institute argues like even if you don't have a a total global campaign on vaccinations pick a few strategically important countries right well we have right so we we we have a loan program with mexico and canada yeah and but what about south but what about southeast asian countries and we have the quad program to right for a billion shots for asia right so that's for where philippines indonesia asia all of it okay and and that's a small step in the right direction right i'm right so again praise where it's deserved and credit and criticism where it's deserved and you know there are some things

happening but it's just like you know it's just not enough it's just not quick enough people are dying and uh you know the the chess board is is advancing and uh you know it's just it's just too little too late what is the chinese government's propaganda narrative about how the u.s has handled the vaccine i'm sorry how the u.s has handled what's the chinese government's propaganda about the how the u.s has handled the pandemic for anyone who wants to read a lot of like chinese communist party propaganda just search my name on twitter and my feed, you will see the of dancing Uyghurs and hostage videos with Uyghurs praising Xi Jinping and telling us, how dare you say there's a genocide? That's the easy stuff. That's the obvious stuff, okay? The more insidious stuff is the stuff that

they launder through American institutions and American voices. And this is a lot of what's in the book. It's called Chinese Influence Operations and Political Interference, and it's a huge problem. And at this, the Chinese Communist Party is way better than the Russians ever have been. And what they do is they seed our institutions with millions of dollars, billions of dollars, actually, at campuses and companies and Wall Street firms and Hollywood studios, and they corrupt as many elites as they can on both sides, right? So, Hunter Biden and Neil Bush, two sons of two presidents who are compromised and took a bunch of Chinese money for a reason. It's because they don't care who's in power. They'll try to corrupt anyone who will be corrupted. Ivanka Trump, Neil Bush, Hunter Biden, three children of presidents who took

corrupt money from the Chinese government through proxies, right? It's done through proxies, all sorts of proxies. That's the biggest problem. And what I'm getting to is that if you listen to those proxies, you will hear the same messages and that's how you trace the influence how why is it that the same uighur genocide denialism is coming out of some american voices and some chinese communist party propaganda voices you know why is it that when on the same day that they attack somebody for you know the lab theory in the global times that it happens to come out of this american think tank in the same way on the same exact day i happen to see it because they're both attacking me on

my twitter feed that's that's how it works they they bombard you with uh in your language from your people in a way that's why influence operations are so insidious is because you know everybody does soft power everybody everybody does spying, but in that middle ground, in that hybrid gray zone, are overt actions that conceal a covert purpose, and that's what makes them dangerous. And so when you go to a Confucius Institute event, it might be fine or it might be, you know, corrupt. And when you go to a think tank that's getting funded by a Chinese energy company, it might be fine or it might be corrupt because the money is the is the conflict the money is what compromises us and that's how they do it china's the world's top pharmaceutical manufacturer

speaking of some of their some of their power right including the chemicals that are used in the pharmaceuticals correct do you so do you it sounds like you do believe the relationship that whole supply chain relationship is just going to change dramatically yeah so okay yes one way or the other so you know i see the sort of this phase of the pandemic crisis meaning the actual pandemic this is the end of the beginning assuming we don't go back into another surge which i i pray we don't uh even if another surge, which I pray we don't, even if we all get shots and nobody gets the coronavirus or less people get the coronavirus, that's just the first phase of this, okay? Because the pandemic has changed geopolitics

in ways that we can't, we're just beginning to understand. I identify sort of five different areas. One is the vaccine diplomacy, which we just talked about. The second is supply chain reorientation. It's a limited, limited decoupling of critical technologies that feeds Biden's plan to build back better and return good manufacturing jobs for the industries of the future. That leads to the third one, which is a high technology decoupling and competition. That takes place not by onshoring critical things. In other words, okay, it looks like we're going to need to make our own masks from now on. Why? Because there's going to be another pandemic, and we don't want to get blackmailed for masks again. Okay, so we can build a bunch of masks. That's easy, right?

That happens on, and okay, if we can get some of those chemicals and rare earth and all that stuff, and maybe build some semiconductor foundries, that's going to be better if push comes to shove, right? The high technology competition happens off of our shores. This is about what will be the infrastructure for economies of the future in the rest of the world. And that's a competition between our system and China for the third world or the second world or the fourth world, okay? And that's about Huawei and 5G and artificial intelligence and all of these things and that those those industries will also fuel our future economy so we can't afford to ignore them and they're also where some of the chinese communist party's worst actions

sit because they combine that technology expansion as we discussed with all of their other mischief okay so that's number three number four is the recovery and reconstruction competition because all these decimated economies are going to need huge, huge amounts of investment. Where's that money going to come from? And who's going to get those contracts? And who's going to do all of that recovery and reconstruction? Well, the Chinese are thinking about that very hard, and they're building the capacity right now to do that recovery and reconstruction, and we're not. And that leads you to the fifth one, which is the Wall Street collusion battle, which has been brewing for a long time. And that means right now we have a situation where all of these malign Chinese companies, which are more and more

controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, are being funded by American investors, hundreds of millions of American investors who are doing it mostly unwittingly because the investment is done through passive means. I'm talking about index funds and institutional investors, your pensions, the Army's pension. And this is a fight that really got kicked off. It's in the book and in the end in 2020 when people like Robert O'Brien started battling with Steve Mnuchin about this very issue. But then it ended, right? And the Biden administration hasn't figured out what they want to do about this, but the fight goes on. And the idea is, do you want your pension, and this is my pension too, going to the company that builds the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls? Does that bother you? Okay. You may say yes or no,

but then even if it doesn't bother you, do you realize that when the U.S. government sanctions that company, this is a real company, it's called Hikvision, that that's going to hurt your portfolio, okay? Because you're invested in Hikvision even though you didn't know it. Do you care about that? And this is the fight that's only just beginning. All right. I want to wrap up by talking about the origins, what we know now at least about the origins of the virus. So there are, by my lights, there are basically three theories. There's the animal wet market theory, you know, bat in a cave,

bite some pangolin, which winds up in a Wuhan wet market, and that's how it ultimately transmits to humans. That's the most common explanation, or has been at least. The second is there was a lab in Wuhan and there was some deliberate nefarious activity to leak the origins of the virus. And the third is that it was in a Wuhan lab that is trying to predict the next, doing research to predict the next pandemic, which is funded internationally by hundreds of millions of dollars.

And it got accidentally accidentally leaked from that lab you know some 10 15 miles away from the up where the outbreak broke out where are you now in among those three theories yeah i'm of the view that we should investigate all the possible theories as much as we can and figure out the origin of the coronavirus, no matter what that truth ends up being. Now, that is not a dodge. That is actually what we must do. Now, the implications of that... By the way, that's kind of a controversial position. Believe it. Tell me about it. Again, look at my Twitter feed. You'll find a lot of people

criticizing me for just saying just that sentence. Now, what the implications of that is that we actually have to include the lab in that investigation, necessarily, that it can't be avoided. The reason that that's controversial, of course, is because for a year, the Chinese government and the Wuhan lab people and their

best friends, who are the American scientists who were involved in this gain of function research, led by Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIAID. Explain who Peter Daszak is, because he comes up commonly. He's the guy who was funding a bunch of the gain of function research at the Wuhan lab. The same research, by the way, that Robert Redfield, not an anti-China conspiracy theorist, a virologist, the head of the CDC during the outbreak,

said he thinks that came from an accidental leak from the lab, from this gain-of-function research. But for a year... Explain what gain-of-function research is. Gain-of-function research is where Peter Daszak and Dr. Xu Zhongli and their 100 best friends go to Yunnan, the bats are or anywhere where the bats are. Keep in mind, the bats live 1,000 kilometers away from the lab. And they dig up all the bat coronaviruses they can, and they bring the most dangerous ones into the lab.

And then they do experiments to make them more virulent and more dangerous and more infectious to humans. That's what they were doing. That's what they admit that they were doing. To try to predict and anticipate the next pandemic. Exactly. Using $200 million of U.S. taxpayer money, the PREDICT program was meant to, quote-unquote, predict and preempt the pandemic by finding the most dangerous viruses, making them more dangerous and more infectious to humans, and then playing around with them and then trying to predict how they might break out. Now, it is a crazy thing to think about that the predict program

it not only did not didn't predict and preempt the crisis but may have accidentally sparked the crisis that's a a very disturbing thing to think about not because it implicates china by the way because it implicates us because that's our too, because we were doing it with them and because diplomats warned in 2018 that this exact research might cause a pandemic. So let's stay on that for one second. U.S. diplomats two years before coronavirus. Right. They this coronavirus. They U.S. diplomats say, like Houston, we have a problem.

This could leak. And then they were sounding the alarm and they went to the lab and they found that they didn't have enough safety procedures but specifically they wrote in these cables we're worried about the research where they're using bat coronaviruses to to increase the infectiousness using the spike protein to the ace2 receptor what that means is that they would take mice give them human lung characteristics and then run bat coronaviruses through them until the bat coronaviruses got really good at infecting human lungs that's what they were doing and the two years prior these diplomats were like this is dangerous we should probably take keep an eye nobody listened nobody cared

and then when the outbreak broke out right next to the lab and it was a bat coronavirus that had a you know spike protein that infected the ace2 receptor all of the friends of the lab, and it was a bat coronavirus that had a spike protein that infected the ACE2 receptor, all of the friends of the lab, all the Peter Daxons of the world were like, don't look at the lab. Whatever you do, do not look at the lab. We're going to go look in the markets. By the way, the Chinese CDC disavowed the market theory in May 2020. Nobody cared. Then they have a WHO investigate. So in other words, these guys are conflicted. It's the clearest conflict of interest you could imagine. it's the definition of a conflict of interest it would be like having robert kardashian investigate oj okay it would be like sending it would be like if because

this is what peter daszak said on 60 minutes he says oh well don't you want the people who are the best friends of the lab to investigate the lab we're trained virologists it would be like robert kardashian going to the jury and saying, listen, I know OJ real well. I'm going to go and ask him. I don't think he did it, but I'm going to go ask him real seriously. I would know if he's lying. He said he didn't do it. Case closed. We can all go home and I'm going to go look for the one-armed man. That's the analogy. And what Peter Daszak did is he took this, then the WHO, to its great shame, makes an investigation team handpicked by the Chinese government. The report was written, according to Anthony Blinken, in part by the Chinese government. And the only American they include is Peter Daszak.

Okay. And they rejected the people that the US government wanted to have on it. And he says, oh, well, I don't think it was the lab, but we're going to go there anyway. And we're going to look them right in the eye. And we went there there we looked them right in the eye i believe them and i'm the expert so no more looking into the lab now what's funny about that not funny haha funny but kind of ironic funny is that as peter daszak is releasing this whitewash report which is meant to tell you that we don't need to look at the lab dr tedros his boss the head of the who not a pro-trump anti-China conspiracy theorist, says, disavows it, takes a crap on Peter Daszak's report and says, no, no, we have to look at the

lab. And the reason that he was doing that, not because he's a big fan of the lab theory, it's because he realizes that we have to take a look at the lab and that he's trying to save the credibility of his organization, which the Chinese government and the Peter Daddys of the world have destroyed through their very shameful and very obvious whitewash. And for the Chinese Communist Party, for their propaganda, that's enough for us to not know, for us to not think about, like, we're going to be able to figure this out. That's a win for them. But the last thing I want to say is that the craziest part is that they added a fourth theory because once they disavowed the market we found that it wasn't the market actually because the first cases had no connection to the market they found some old guy who had never been to the

market you know about the market so they came up with a new one which is who was an early who was an early patient or an early patient in other words they the they proved scientifically that it couldn't have originated from the market market The market was just one amplifying event of many. Anyway, the Popsicle theory is that it came into Wuhan on a frozen food package from somewhere. Could have been Italy, could have been Norway, could have been Bishkek, could have been New Jersey. Daszak wants to do is he wants to go and go around China and the rest of the world searching for every palm civet and prairie dog and mink and pangolin and frozen package of fish sticks that ever might have gotten its way to and look for the virus there and I say let him I say have fun with that go do that for

the next years meanwhile someone's gonna have to look into this lab okay and it can't be him you can't have the robert kardashian into investigate oj we're gonna have to find somebody else who doesn't have a clear conflict of interest to investigate the lab if we want to have any sense that we actually gave it the old college tried it doesn't mean it's gonna be easy it doesn't mean we're gonna figure it out it means we have to try and we have to uh you know realize that we've been tricked as a sort of a media environment and in large ways as a country into thinking that, oh, there's no evidence for the lab, but there's a ton of evidence for the market theory. When actually there's no proof of either, and the circumstantial evidence is much higher on the lab side. You know, if you would have thought if this pangolin theory was true, that they would have had some pangolin, they would have found some. You know how many pangolins they found to tie to the outbreak?

Zero. They tested thousands of pangolins and raccoon dogs and minks and all over China. They found zero that were connected to the outbreak. That's zero evidence. Okay. All right. Lastly, the legacy of the international public can i say one more thing about the origin sure yes this is it's not about blaming china it's about solving the

origin so that we can prevent the next pandemic we can't prevent the next one if we don't know how this one started that's how serious it is and the current plan to respond to this pandemic is to take that research that gain-of-function research and throw another 1.2 billion dollars into it in other words to times sixfold the dangerous research that might have caused the pandemic and to dig up literally 500 000 new dangerous viruses and bring them to a bunch of labs and play around with them and see what happens we could be spending we could be spending that kind of money on monitoring and surveillance. Exactly. That's exactly right. So the public health authorities and the post-corona international public health authorities, their post-corona reputation, will we listen to them next time? I'm pulling up a tweet here from January 14th, January 14th, the World Health Organization tweets out, preliminary investigations

conducted by the Chinese authorities have found, and I quote, no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus. So preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan, January 14th, World Health Organization. Right. I mean, their continuing error, their original sin in their continuing error was to accept Chinese government claims at face value and then regurgitate them, giving them more credibility to assign the WHO's credibility to the Chinese government's information. And in doing so, you know, helping

the Chinese government cover up their own crimes and destroying the WHO's credibility in the process. Now, I was not a fan of how the Trump administration reacted to that. I think that these multilateral organizations are flawed but should be engaged and fixed, not nixed, okay? That's what I think, and, you know, when we yield yield the playing field that vacuum is just filled by more Chinese corruption and Etc. So that's so again We have to have two ideas in our head that the W the multilateral organizations are useful but flawed and you know with Russia Reagan said trust but verify but with China we have to distrust but verify we have to first

Assume that they're probably bullshitting us, but not always, you know what I mean? And so we have to, you know, follow the facts, but we have to realize what we're dealing with. Josh, thank you for joining this conversation. I encourage everyone to buy and read Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st century. There's a ton in here about this emerging consensus, political consensus, on U.S.-China policy, and I think Josh would argue that we turned a corner

on how we approach China, and we're probably not going back in some way for a long time. Sorry. It's the end of the beginning. It's the end of the beginning, right. So read the book, read Josh at the Washington Post, and thanks for a spirited, albeit somewhat depressing, but frank conversation. That's my specialty, depressing but frank. Depressing but frank.

All right. Take care, Josh. Thanks a lot. You too. Thank you, my friend. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Josh Rogin's work, go to the Washington Post Global Opinion section. He has a regular column there. And you can also follow him at Twitter at Josh Rogin, J-O-S-H-R-O-G-I-N. And again, I highly recommend his book, Chaos Under Heaven, which you can order wherever you buy books, especially Barnes & Noble. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me, at Dan Senor. Today's episode is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm Dan Seymour.