Front Burner - When China and the U.S. fight, who wins?

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

A big part of Donald Trump’s global tariff regime targets the Chinese economy in a bid, he says, to force the country into a deal favorable to the United States. Despite this, officials in China have been undeterred — claiming that tariffs will hurt Americans more than Chinese, and drawing comparison between the actions of Donald Trump and Mao Zedong’s ‘cultural revolution.’Chinese officials have also responded to Donald Trump’s tariff program saying, in part: “if war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end." David Rennie is a columnist with The Economist, where he formerly worked as the magazine’s Beijing correspondent. He joins us for a conversation about the China-U.S. relationship, why officials in China view Trump as a ‘revolutionary’ figure, and this as a one of the great moments of opportunity in China’s modern history. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Readers have been waiting for a new novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for 12 years. On my podcast Bookends, Chimamanda tells me what was happening behind the scenes, about the sudden loss of both of her parents and how her mother's spirit brought her back to fiction. Sometimes I do not even want to talk about my mother because I get ridiculously emotional. But she kind of helped me start writing because she realized that I might go mad if I wasn't. If the thoughts all had to stay inside. Search for bookends with Matea Roach to hear the rest of that conversation. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. I don't worry about others. So you don't worry about President Trump's next moves?

Of course. Nobody worry about it. That was the voice of a Chinese bureaucrat in Beijing last month in response to Trump's first round of levies on Chinese exports and in anticipation of what was to come. That sentiment is a really great illustration of what appears to be China's general approach to their relationship with their once adversary turned ally, turned strategic rival, turned adversary once again.

A few days after that clip, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a statement directed at the United States which read in part, Bullying does not work on us. Pressuring, coercion, or threats are not the right way to deal with China. If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war, or any other type of war, we are ready to fight till the end. The two superpowers currently find themselves in an enormous trade conflict.

The US has placed a 145% tariff on China, and China has responded with a 125% levy of their own, including halting the export of critical minerals and suspending the purchase of Boeing jets. Now the China-U.S. relationship is long and storied, but if we are to understand the logic of Trump's tariffs, we must first understand their primary target and the relationship with binds together the two strongest, richest and most advanced countries in the world. China is reported to look at the destabilizing force of Trump as a moment of opportunity,

and they've drawn parallels with the unpredictable and violent behavior of their most famous modern leader, Mao Zedong. David Renne formerly worked as the Beijing correspondent for The Economist, where he today works as a columnist. And he's here to join me for a conversation about why, as world leaders scramble and panic to respond to Trump, China is playing hardball. David, hi, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Glad to be with you.

It's such a pleasure. How would you characterize the current trading relationship between China and the United States, the two largest economies in the world? Are these two partners in a struggle for primacy, you think? Is it a strategic rivalry? What is it exactly? It's a huge relationship, but I think its future is really sort of hanging in the balance. And that's an extraordinary thought because I spent in total 10 years in China in two chunks. And even my most recent time there, I was the birch tree from 2018 to late last year. You know, the beginning of that was very scratchy.

It was the first Trump term. We had a trade war. But the reality was that Chinese exports to America just kept going up and up. And it was one of those things that there was a disconnect between the very angry political rhetoric and the sometimes very aggressive anti-China stances. Some important developments in our war against the Chinese virus. It's not racist at all. No, not at all. It comes from China.

Our relationship with China was good until they did this. Once we found out about this, was it a mistake that got out of control or was it done deliberately? Particularly at the end of that first Trump administration and yet, you know, American businesses were all over China. Chinese businesses were doing very nicely selling stuff to America and it seemed as if that might last forever. And then at the very beginning of the most recent Trump administration, you know, the Chinese, I think, were pleasantly surprised that they were not hit by the 60 percent tariffs that you'd seen candidate Trump talk about

on the campaign trail. And actually, I was just in Beijing with my big boss a couple of weeks ago. And scholars were saying this is before April the 2nd, before the big latest trail. And actually, I was just in Beijing with my big boss a couple of weeks ago, and scholars were saying this is before April the 2nd, before the big latest terrorist, they were going, you know, we were sort of braced for all kinds of things. The one thing we had not seen coming was that he would go off to Canada and Mexico before he went after us. And so they were sort of slightly pinching themselves at the sort of the idea that they might not be his primary target. Now, clearly, we're up to, every day it changes. I think we're now at 125% in each direction on tariffs.

I think the Chinese just recently said yesterday, he can put them higher, but at this point, 125% is effectively total shutdown in trade, so we're not actually gonna match him anymore, which almost shows a sense of humor on the Chinese side. It's like the corpse is already dead, so you're not actually going to match him anymore, which almost shows a sense of humor on the Chinese side. The corpse is already dead, so you can shoot it and drown it, but it's already poisoned. We are in a very strange moment because the trade terms, there is still, or there was

until very recently, still a lot of trade. There are things that China makes that American companies really can't easily go without. And where things get seriously interesting and I think stressful for the Trump administration's whole strategy right now is that China's retaliation has not just been to kind of put on kind of tariffs to match tariffs. They have been preparing. In fact, when I was in Beijing, they told me that nine different government agencies and ministries had been preparing to find sanctions and trade weapons that they could use

that would be as painful for America as quickly as possible to really sort of maximize the pain on Donald Trump and his supporters. And so some of these controls like, you know, rare earths, some of these very specific minerals that are needed for building everything from car batteries to fighter jets, China is pretty much the only source of some of those

and China is now barring their exports. So China is playing pretty tough right now. Yeah, I see they recently just announced that they're suspending the purchase of Boeing jets too. So I imagine that that is part of what you're talking about as well. And just on the Canada stuff that you mentioned, I think it's fair to say we were pretty surprised by the order of all of that as well too. David, I just want to talk to you about how we got to where we are now with China. So they frame themselves as leaders in sectors like electronic vehicles,

zero carbon energy systems, battery supply chains, advanced shipping, the kind of tech the world needs today in order to move forward. But I want to ask you specifically about the manufacturing sector. There was a time in the post-war period that the US was known as the factory of the world. The US produced half the world's manufactured goods, but that moniker now belongs to China, of course. It is home to a manufacturing sector carefully built over decades, right? Even Trump himself used to make his namesake products in China.

Ties were the ties made. These are beautiful ties. They are great ties. The ties are made in where? China? Ties are made in China. Well, I'll tell you. And you know what? And just if you could tell us how it is that China became the place the world went to, to make things, and what that has meant for its standing in the world. Maybe its ability now to play such a hard ball. I think it's a story in two kind of broad sections. There's China becoming the workshop of the world. Maybe it's ability now to play such hardball. I think it's a story in two kind of broad sections. There's China becoming the workshop of the world.

The China that means that if you go to a superstore, you know, almost every good on the shelf seems to come from China. That's a 30, 40 year story. The architect who laid the foundations for its economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping. He became the country's leader in December of 1978. Under him, private companies were allowed into China along with foreign investment. As multinational companies flocked to China, it quickly became the world's manufacturing hub and growth became and still remains the Chinese Communist Party's number one priority.

That was seen as very good news by big American, Canadian, other Western corporations for a long time. They were finding cheaper places to make things and the payoff for a long time was that if you went to the superstore, things were really cheap. And so, I remember covering the politics of China trade back in say 2004. That was the first American presidential election I covered as a reporter. And back then the China trade political row was basically, where did the jobs go? We used to make t-shirts in America or we used to make televisions in America and they're

now made in China. And how did that happen? And who stole the jobs? But it was kind of an argument with something on each side, because yes, you could go to a place that used to have a big textiles industry like South Carolina, and there was very concentrated pain there. But you could make a pretty solid counter argument back in, say, 2004, that far more Americans actually saw the dollar in their wallet go a lot further because they go to

Walmart and buy a seriously cheap t-shirt. And that story is part of the Donald Trump charge that the jobs were stolen, that big companies were greedy, that those manufacturing jobs should come back. And there is something quite retro in some ways about many of the justifications that we're hearing from President Trump this time around.

The core to our workforce is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America. Think the heartland of America. President Trump is adamantly focused on bringing those jobs, that investment dollars, back into our country to re-industrialize America. For 40 years, we have gone down that pathway. We've seen closing factories.

We've seen rising inflation. we've seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can't afford to buy a home right now. President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction. He ran on that. They are kind of familiar, going back to those political rallies that I heard on the campaign trail 20 years ago. But you then have to look at a second overlapping story to do with technology and fears about national security and fears about the kind of country that China is, and

that overlays everything else. And so if for a long time the China is the workshop of the world story was basically one that triggered an argument about jobs versus people's spending power in the West. More recently, so in the first Trump term, certainly in Joe Biden's administration, we saw a big roundabout. Well, what if Chinese companies have now become so advanced that they want to make our 5G networks? Should a company like Huawei be seen as a safe supplier of something as vital to modern

life as the mobile phone networks that we use for everything from making phone calls to banking to moving important data around. And the answer increasingly over the last few years has been, actually, maybe that isn't so safe. Maybe that isn't so smart because China didn't just want to be the workshop of the world. It wanted to be at the top of the value chains of modern globalisation. That turned into a pretty serious problem to do with trust. Because suddenly China wasn't just making t-shirts and tennis shoes. It was making the TikTok app that sat on your teenager's smartphone that they spent hours of their day sharing

their most intimate data with. And people started to ask hard questions about what did that mean that the parent company was Chinese. This morning, TikTok is shut down for 170 million US users as a landmark ban on the app takes effect. Late Saturday, this message appearing on screens saying a law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated he will work with us on a solution. Stay tuned. But actually, as I say, Donald Trump actually doesn't seem to care that much about it.

He's really focused on cars and steel and, you know, old fashioned manufacturing jobs. And so China, as well as every other trade partner in the world, is left really wondering what America, what the end game is of this absolutely extraordinarily aggressive trade war. Is it kind of to limit China's rise as a high power, high tech superpower, or is it kind of back to the future? It's kind of, we want the 1980s back. I mean, do you think that they know what the end game is, the Trump administration? No, I mean, I was just in Washington last week, and I had meetings with people inside the Trump kind of machine.

And it's almost kind of a point of pride with them to say that the, you know, the whole genius, the kind of the 4D chess of president Trump is that he doesn't give the end game away. I think one's entitled to be a bit skeptical and to think that that's kind of a sort of It's a good way of describing the fact that there's a really really Kind of muddled Rationale being made by different people at the top of the Trump administration You know people say with a completely straight face that this is about bringing the manufacturing jobs back

In the next breath another cabinet secretary will give an interview saying, no, no, no, the whole point is that this is an invitation for the world to come and negotiate and suck up to Donald Trump and cut a better deal and lower their tariffs in exchange for some mercy from us. Oh Canada, a vast idyllic land filled with beavers, loons, lumberjacks, and polite friendly folks. We have those things for sure, but there's a darker side to the Great White North, full of mystery, crime, the paranormal, and dark history. Join me, Mike Brown, and co-host Stockton, every Monday for the Dark Poutine podcast

as we tell dark stories from north of the 49th parallel. With the Ottawa Game covering more international cases, you can listen to Dark Poutine for free wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Regardless, I guess, of what their end goal is, I'm just curious. The Americans have been able to really kind of bully nations around the world into making and remaking deals. But can the US force China to do anything here, force Xi Jinping into a deal? Are these countries economic equals, I guess is my question. Who has the power here?

So the claim on the American side, certainly from Trump world, is that America has the power, has all the cards, because America buys more from China than China buys from America. And that sounds kind of reasonable. You think, yeah, OK, that makes sense. But in this kind of trade war, you also need to ask, can China get its stuff from someone else? Can America get its stuff from somewhere else? Because if you're trying to kind of work out relative leverage, you need to know whether

people have alternatives. And there, the picture gets a lot less comfortable for America because China, for example, buys an absolute ton of soybeans from American farmers. And that's been really good in states that reliably vote for Donald Trump. But if it can't buy them from America, or if it chooses not to buy them from America, it can buy them from Argentina and Brazil. And that's a point that you hear made by government advisors in Beijing. I mean, they made it in meetings I was in.

The Americans, you know, if you're trying to buy specific rare earth minerals, actually some of those China has, you know, 90 plus percent of the market. And that suddenly means that China might have more leverage than you think. And then, you know, as the dollar comes under really very unusual, I don't want to say completely unprecedented but very, very unusual scrutiny this week as markets go kind of crazy to use the technical term. You know, there's been real doubts about the safe haven status of the United States dollar, which is pretty unusual territory to find yourself in.

And normally, when things are really rough, the safest investment in the entire world is a United States Treasury bond. And right now that is being kind of questioned. And you know, there's new notes of data around that well If the United States is really concerned about whether its Treasury bonds are going to come under new scrutiny that immediately starts a whole conversation about China which doesn't have as many Treasury bonds as it used to but still has a really huge amount of Treasury bonds Which you know was where it you know It earned a lot of dollars selling stuff to the world and it stuck them in treasury bonds because that was the safest of all places to put it.

So actually China is one of the biggest single holders of US treasury bonds. If US treasury started to get into real trouble with international doubts about the state of the dollar and the state of those bonds, normally you would have a conversation with the biggest holders of those bonds to make sure that they were happy. But right now, that's overwhelmed by everything else that's going on in the US-China relationship. If you can imagine a financial dashboard where every single warning light is flashing red at the same time, that's kind of where we are. Just continuing with the dollar for a minute, China has had this role in decentralizing

the US dollar, right? And working to create an alternative economic pathway that's now called BRICS, something the US is very concerned about. An official with the Deutsche Bank said last week, quote, the market is reassessing the structural attractiveness as the dollar is the world's global reserve currency and is undergoing a process of rapid de-dollarization. So with BRICS and China in mind, I just, I wonder if you could talk to me

a little bit more about their general, what their general attitude has been to de-dollarization, how it functions in all of this. So there's been a really big shift over the years. I mean, one of the things, if you go back 20 years to the days when everyone seemed broadly happy with China and America's sort of incredibly beneficial and profitable mutual relationship, one of the things that American economists and leaders would talk about is this kind of virtuous cycle where America bought tons

and tons of Chinese stuff, paid for that with dollars, the Chinese then needed to stick their dollars somewhere safe, they would buy US Treasury bonds, and if you go back to say the days of George W. Bush, that torrent of Chinese money coming in and buying US Treasury bonds meant that the US government didn't have to pay very high interest rates to borrow. It was a massive source of really, really cheap credit for the American government, which allowed American successive American governments of both parties to run up enormous deficits. And, you know, basically a lot of ordinary Americans also had, you know, enjoyed very low interest rates. And part of that

was this torrent of Chinese money looking for somewhere safe that was dollar denominated. That is over. And we're now in a world where as trade currently is decoupling, that is joined by China's unwillingness to be so utterly dependent on decisions that the Federal Reserve makes about monetary policy. Because one of the things that America has enjoyed for a very long time is as the world's reserve currency, it got to take decisions that were, you know, basically in the selfish interest of the American economy and everyone else in the whole world had to basically just go along with it because dollars were the safe haven, but you didn't control the monetary policy attached to that reserve currency. Where we are now is a very complicated finance moment, but also really, really gnarly kind

of political moment. Remember in the campaign, Donald Trump started threatening to go after any member. You mentioned the BRICS groups, that's the emerging markets that have been lumped together in this BRICS kind of grouping. So it's Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, the original founding members. And they have been talking for a while about how unfair it is that the world has to use the dollar, which leaves them at the mercy of the Federal Reserve's decisions. And wouldn't it be a good idea for the BRICS to form their own currency? Donald Trump was so upset by that, that during the campaign, he said, anyone who tries to move away from the dollar and found

a BRICS currency will be hit with, I forget, it was like 100% tariffs, which in those days sounded like a big number because we hadn't lived through this week where 100% is no longer the highest number. They said, sir, what about the BRIC states are going to take over the dollar, the sanctity of the dollar, they're going to create a new currency to rule the world. I said, no, they're not. They said, yes, they are, sir. They said it. I said, no, they're not. Tell them 150% tariff. Plus we're not going to do business with them.

So that was an interesting development. And actually, you know, you know, if you go back a month, so the ancient history of a month, there were Chinese scholars who would say to me, you know, one of the things that we might be able to offer Donald Trump in a big kind of grand bargain would be, okay, we won't challenge the primacy of the dollar. We won't go all in on a bricks currency, maybe that would be something we could offer Donald Trump to make him happier. There is a separate story to do with China, something that China absolutely is already doing and wants to keep on doing, which is China likes to do more and more of its own individual trade with other countries in the Chinese currency. Now the Chinese currency is not

a hard currency, it's not conversable. You can't go to your local money changer in downtown Toronto or Vancouver and change Canadian dollars into renminbi. It's not an internationally traded currency and China very strictly limits the amount of Chinese money that its own citizens can take out of the country every year. It's not an open currency. But if you are, for example, Russia selling oil and gas to China, particularly gas, they have increasingly, because they don't have a lot of choices right now because of Western sanctions, the Russians have been accepting payment in China's currency for that gas. And over the whole kind of universe of China's exports, more and more contracts to sell Chinese machines, cars,

batteries, buy gas and stuff, they are denominated in the Chinese currency and not in the dollar. And that is a direction that China would like to go in. And part of that is because they saw the United States over several administrations using the incredible power that the US dollar has in the global financial system as an ultimate sanction. And so, you know, Iranian banks, Russian banks, you know, you name it, when they get hit with a sanction that excludes them from the American dollar-based financial system, that basically

brings an international bank to its knees. And that's been another reason why China has been increasingly determined not to be quite so dependent on the dollar. So that is, you know, you can add that to the brimming basket of things that America and China strongly disagree about right now. One of the core questions here for me is about China's general attitude towards these actions from Trump right now, even in like a cultural sense. And you mentioned you were just in the country. From what I've read

and watched, Chinese officials seem to have a real air of confidence or defiance in this moment, even maybe arrogance. I don't know if you would agree with that. They're saying things like... China is fully prepared to fight to the very end because the world is big enough that the United States is not the totality of the market in the world. So if the United States wants to go in that direction of completely shutting itself out of the China market, be my guest. My advice to my alumni at Yale Law School, JD Vance, is wake up or you go back to school

to study more diligently to avoid making yourself a fool in front of the world. It's also the case that five out of the top ten trending hashtags last week on the Chinese social media website weibo were about tariffs. The top one was quote America is fighting a trade war while begging for eggs. I've seen tons of videos of people in China memeing and mocking the American position on the trade war. Mockup people, you guys are really dumb. Seriously, the whole world knows you guys are dumb.

Only you guys don't know about it. The vice president of great country called us Chinese peasants. We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things this Chinese peasants manufacture. It's not AI, it's real. Are you surprised to see this kind of reaction? No, look, it's a mixture of propaganda, because China has a gigantic propaganda machine. But like all the best propaganda, it definitely captures something that is also real. And China has used nationalism to prop up its own one-party state for a long time.

And a lot of Chinese people are also genuinely and understandably indignant at what they see as the latest example of a jealous, selfish, frankly, in many cases, they would say racist America that is trying to choke and keep China down because Americans simply cannot cope with a non-Western rival becoming a peer competitor. That is the story that we've heard from Chinese officials, Chinese diplomats, Chinese scholars, and many ordinary Chinese for a long time now. And so the story has been for a long time that Americans can't cope with a rival that doesn't look like them, that is Asian, that is non-white, non-Christian, non-Western. That's the argument they make.

And so going back to the first Trump term, then certainly through Biden and now second Trump term, it's all part of one long, unhappy story of a jealous, jealous declining decadent America that is lashing out as it kind of goes down. The kind of the aging heavyweight stumbling against the ropes, kind of punching blindly as it goes down. That's the kind of vibe that you hear. And so to a lot of ordinary Chinese people, this is surprisingly almost what they were expecting.

There's been a lot of reporting in recent days with Chinese officials framing Trump as like a revolutionary force. Some have compared him explicitly to former chairman of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong, who led a campaign of violence and revenge against his country's cultural and political elites known as the Cultural Revolution. Of course, you know, a lot of these officials and establishment figures in China making these comparisons will have themselves lived through

and been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Do you think they're making this comparison to Trump in earnest? If so, like on what grounds? I think they are. And it is really startling when you hear people make that comparison who lived through those years, you know, who may have lost their youth, you know, may have had no education in their youth because, you know, the university they wanted to attend

was kind of shut down and the persecution of the professors, you know, I have sat through meetings in Beijing where, you know, really well known older scholars will make that comparison with the Cultural Revolution will compare, say the doge kind of activists being sent by Elon Musk into government ministries to destroy the bureaucracy them to the countryside to kind of perform hard labor. And so it's not a comparison that I would ever dare make because it's such a dramatic comparison and a 70-year-old professor making it is also describing something that may have destroyed his own youth, may have led to the terrible suffering, even death of members of his own family. They are making it.

The fact that I've also heard Chinese diplomats make it does make me wonder whether some part of the propaganda machine has sent out a signal that it's encouraged or permitted to make this comparison because normally the Cultural Revolution and criticising Chairman Mao for being a kind of very destructive force, which he absolutely was. That's normally taboo. It doesn't suit the Communist Party to allow any criticism of any former leader of the party 5,000 years, making it one of the oldest civilizations in the world. China has been here for 5,000 years.

Most of the time there was no United States and we survived. And if the United States wants to bully China, we will deal with the situation without the United States. And we expect to survive for another 5,000 years. Well, the US is 249 years old. These are two countries that are very different, despite their destinies being so closely linked. But I wonder, when thinking about those differences, there are these abiding misconceptions about China that I think it is fair to say Americans have ranging from the beliefs that it is a hardcore communist dictatorship to some kind

of peasant nation to quote JD Vance recently. We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It's not a recipe for low prices, and it's not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions that Americans, and really Westerners at large,

have of China? In some ways, there are comparisons. So I was the Washington bureau chief, and then I was the Beijing bureau chief. So I spent a lot of time talking to Americans and Chinese about their own politics, their own countries. And, you know, one obvious comparison is that they are both continent sized countries with

a strong sense of exceptionalism. And they're kind of Americans are not always terribly curious about the rest of the world and ordinary Chinese are not always terribly curious or knowledgeable about the rest of the world either. These are very big countries that spend a lot of time thinking about themselves. They're very proud of the idea that they represent. But you're right, the idea that each represents is fundamentally very, very different. At the crudest level, America is about individual kind of prosperity and individual liberty and freedom and autonomy.

And China is much more of a collective rise, a collective society. And you know, if in terms of the biggest misconception, I think that people who've never been to China in America have occasionally told me, this includes members of the US Congress, that there is no such thing as a private company in China, that everyone in China is basically too frightened to speak the truth to anyone at any time, as if it's basically kind of North Korea or Chairman Mao's China. And that's not true. As a journalist in China, I would get followed, I would get spied on, interviews would, you know, interviews would get cancelled, people might get into trouble for talking to a journalist like me and that was a huge concern for me. So it is absolutely not a free country and Chinese journalists exist in a sort of incredibly

constrained space where they're taking huge risks if they write the truth in lots of circumstances. So it is not a free country, it is a repressive authoritarian country, but it is not North Korea. There are lots of gaps. There are Chinese people with opinions that in private they will share with you. There are private businesses that absolutely would like to have as little to do with the Communist Party as possible. Now you may not be interested in the Communist Party, but if the Communist Party takes interest in you, then you don't get much choice in that.

I think, you know, I don't get much choice in that. I think, you know, I don't want to kind of sound like a cheerleader for the system because there's a tremendous amount of cruelty to the Chinese system, particularly in the last few years where it's got more and more repressive. But I do think that any honest reckoning with the West's relationship with China and our ability to influence China. I think one of the dangerous myths that you do hear from, say, members of the American Congress is, well, if only we could speak directly to the Chinese people, they hate

the Communist Party and they're on our side. And it's a lot more complicated than that. It is partly to do with nationalism. It's partly to do with an increasing sense in China that America has had its better days, that Chinese students will come back from studying in the States to say, you know what? Their airports are really shabby and rubbish

compared to ours. I'm really stunned about how backwards America is. The propaganda machine is always pumping out stories about mass shootings and racist shootings in America. So there is an effort to make people disapprove of America and to be disappointed by America. But you know, I think that the Communist Party has also just genuinely done a very good job of presenting itself over, you know, decades and decades of one party rule as it just is authority.

And, you know, a line that I've sometimes tried out on Chinese friends who do agree with it is for an ordinary Chinese, you know, day to day, the Communist Party is a bit like your parents. It's not like a government that you chose at an election as you would in Canada. There's no choice about it. It just is authority. It's like your teacher at school or your parents. And so a good day is when your

parents are nice to you and a bad day is when your parents are mean to you. You don't want to be an orphan. You don't want to have no parents. And they have very cleverly positioned themselves as, you know, without the Communist Party in charge, there's just chaos. There's just a kind of howling void of anarchy and chaos and division that allows foreigners to come in and dismember China. And that story has been very, very deliberately pushed by schools and universities for 80 years. And that has had a very big effect on how Chinese people think. And unfortunately, Donald Trump coming in and looking chaotic, looking incompetent, looking as though he is in hock to big business interests, is a

win for China's propaganda machine because he is reinforcing everything negative that China has been saying about America for a very long time. I wanted to ask you directly about the two men at the center of this conversation. So Donald Trump and China Xi Jinping. So Trump, as many will know, spent his life pre-politics as a New York kind of socialite, reality television host, real estate figure. Xi, on the other hand, has been closely involved with the Chinese Communist Party for most of his life and descends from the kind of political family we talked about being persecuted

during Mao's Cultural Revolution. He is a product of the Chinese political and intellectual system and the Communist Party's line of secession. Trump is someone who does appear to respect power, right? Strong men, and she is maybe the defining strong man of our time. And I just wonder if you could talk to me a bit more about these two, about how she has approached the Trump relationship and give us an insight into the kind of man that Donald Trump appears to be

trying to bully or pressure into a deal. Yeah, you must have read my mind. So I actually just filed a column to my editors where I make the point that Xi Jinping has been a hard man, you know, back when Donald Trump was just playing one on reality TV. And this, you know, he comes by this, as you say, from a very brutal childhood. I mean, in his youth as a teenager, Xi Jinping's father, who was a member of the Politburo was purged in the kind of the worst of the Mao years. And one of his half sisters killed herself because she was being persecuted. Xi Jinping was exiled to a dirt walled cave for a while in the countryside

in a very poor area of China was threatened with execution at some points. And there was a fascinating interview that Xi Jinping gave now, you know, more than 25 years ago, when he was still a provincial official. And he was talking about politics. And he said, you know, people who don't know about power, they think that it's, it's kind of glamorous and remote. And he said, what I see is not the superficial things, not the flowers and the glory and the applause.

I see the the Red Guard detention centers, and I see people betraying each other and blowing hot and cold. And so I think that there is a sense that Xi Jinping is a man with an exceptionally bleak sense of a world that is kind of naturally chaotic and dangerous and brutal and aggressive. And you know, maybe that's Donald Trump's worldview, but I think Donald Trump has actually led a very privileged and sheltered life in comparison. And I think there is, among some in China, a sense that Donald Trump is an unserious man, a selfish man, a kind of spoiled rich guy, and that Xi Jinping has the measure of him. But that,

that I think is not necessarily only to China's advantage because I think that what you see right now is that the rigidity and that obsession with order and discipline that Xi Jinping has kind of really inculcated in his now, you know, 13 years at the top of the Chinese communist party, I think makes it very hard for the party to deal with Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is so unpredictable. He likes to pick up the phone to a world leader, cut a deal on the phone, on the fly. That's absolutely not how the Chinese Communist Party kind of works. It's certainly not how Xi Jinping's party works.

And so I think there is a sense in which, for all that the Chinese Communist Party, as you said at the very beginning, is feeling quite confident and feels that it has lots of leverage right now. There is something about the total chaos and the unpredictability that is tough on all governments, certainly tough on Canada's, but it's exceptionally difficult for the Chinese administration to deal with it because, you know, they like to pre-prepare every summit to, you know, to negotiate every last agenda point. They can't cope with a guy who just wants to call up their leader and kind of chew it over on the phone.

That was a very fascinating analysis. Nearly 85 years ago, the phrase the American century was coined in Life magazine. And it went on to project a 20th century, in which the United States would establish itself as the most powerful cultural, military, economic, technological force in the world, which is what happened. Do you get the sense that officials in China feel that their country is on the precipice of a similar kind of moment, that the Chinese century could be a real possibility?

That's a great question. I think that there are clearly some Chinese nationalists who have that dream. My sense is that there is maybe a larger group. I mean, you know, we don't get to opinion polls with kind of the Chinese communist leadership who have a slightly different ambition, which is somewhat more inward looking, which is that by mid-century they would like China to be so powerful that no other country in the world gets to say no to China or defy China or thwart China in any way. They would like kind of total visa control over everything that happens. But a world that speaks Chinese that is, you know, absolutely in line with Chinese political ideology, I'm not sure that's their ambition. It's, they would like a world that is absolutely safe

for China, that doesn't constrain or bind or thwart or frustrate China. But China is an ethno-nationalist project that is basically quite inward looking. The total number of foreigners in China before the pandemic was surprisingly small. And now after the pandemic, it's basically tiny. When I left, I think the best guess for all Europeans living

in China, including Brits and Norwegians, so not just the European Union, was around 20,000 in the whole of China. So you could put them in a reasonably small football stadium. That's astonishing for a country of 1.4 billion. It is a very, very, very, I'm going to say something amazingly dumb, but it's

a very Chinese country. And I think there are limits to the extent that china is interested in a chinese. Sentry you know that they're not a country of immigration they have absolutely no desire to fix their population crisis by letting non chinese in their or you're not. And they put that in incredibly racial terms. Xi Jinping has talked about, you know, Chinese Canadians or Chinese Australians as children of the dragon with yellow hair, yellow skin and black hair. I mean, incredibly kind of socially Darwinist language that I think would be kind of baffling in a modern multicultural society like Canada's. And so there is a sense that I think that China is clearly determined to become extremely powerful and extremely strong. But a Chinese century, if that was

meant to be kind of China taking over from America and replacing it as a global cultural, political model, I'm not sure that China thinks that's likely or even particularly has that as an ambition. It's determined to break and bend and twist and redefine what it needs to to make sure no one gets to criticize their authoritarian government system. And I would say that that is already an extraordinarily disruptive ambition before you get to whether it wants to have a completely Chinese century. Okay. David Renne, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, please visit cbs.org.

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