Pod Save the World - China 101

Episode Date: December 29, 2021

Tommy and Ben are joined by Asia policy expert Danny Russel for a special episode that is entirely focused on China. They discuss Chinese President Xi Jinping’s background and worldview, Wolf Warrior diplomacy, China’s human rights record and suppression of the Uyghurs, and the fear that war between the US and China is inevitable and could start over Taiwan.

Welcome back to POTA of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben Rhodes all the way live from Washington, D.C. I can see his hotel room, and I want you all to know that he cleaned it specifically for you. I made my bed. You did make your bed. It looks really good.

Making the bed in the hotel room is something that I felt good about. That's some next level shit. You were raised as well. That's my dedication to this podcast and you listeners. And to the listeners, the YouTube audience. Today we're doing something really special, which is we're focusing an entire episode on China. Truthfully, we could lead with China on every show because from COVID to military competition to human rights and censorship, it is one of the biggest issues we face. All the smart people in

D.C. say that our competition with China could define the next century. So we are incredibly excited and honored to have a gigantic brain with us today, a special guest who can explain it all. Danny Russell is the Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Before that, he was assistant secretary. Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, special assistant to President Obama in the White House and the National Security Council. Get a billion other jobs before that that I will spare you. But Danny, so great to have you back.

Thanks, Tommy. It's great to be here. Ben, great to see you too. You also have a nice backdrop. It's very techy. Looks good over there. All right. So, Danny, let's just like set the stage a bit.

Because Ben and I have talked about this offline and on the show in that we feel like we both sort of struggle to explain to listening. adequately who Xi Jinping is because he is sort of shaping up to be this towering figure in Chinese history. Can you help listeners understand the man, the amount of power that she has? And, you know, maybe a story or two about some of the people he knifed along the way to get here. And how he might be different, right, from some of these, the Hu Jintao's of the world. Yeah, the technocrats. Yeah. I mean, I think what I'd say is like this guy is a true believer. He believes in Marxism.

I mean, I remember sitting in the great hall of the people with him, and I think it was Biden on one of the visits when he started going on and on about where China was in like the 13 stages of socialism. And I realized, like, Jesus, this guy is all in on the ideology. This is not just a device to him. I think he's a true believer in Leninism. And the notion that the party must control not just the means of production, but sort of every aspect of society. And he has that sort of Leninist conviction that they're out to get us, that there are domestic and international threats that are just like,

constantly circling and he and China as a nation need to be on its guard constantly. I think he is a true believer in Chinese exceptionalism, that China is like nothing, that it is great, that it should be great again, that China is in danger constantly from within and from without, and that it needs the firm hand of the party and the party is in risk and it needs the firm hand of a single strong leader and so on. So 10 years ago when Xi Jinping was sort of preparing for this job, I think it was pretty clear that the greatest concern of the leadership was the risk that the Chinese Communist Party might go the way of like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or more recently the bathist parties in the Middle East that had been overthrown. And so they saw

risk factors like corruption within the party and factionalism and loss of control, you know, of the party, social discontent. And the internet, the internet, you know. Well, yeah, and that, and the internet slash color revolution. In other words, the malevolent infusion of sinister, subversive foreign ideas and so on. But also remember, like, this was the hangover from 9-11 and the G-Watt of Bush. So terrorist threats were very much on their minds, and especially from their own ethnic minorities. And I think Xi Jinping was really determined to tackle these problems.

And I remember him talking about how the, party has to has to fix itself. And what we got in the ensuing years when he took over were like the anti-corruption campaign and all of these purges that just shocked everyone. I mean, nobody was really expecting him to come out guns blazing the way that he did or over time to really take the military to, you know, chop off the heads of the top military brass and re-orreported. organize it and really subordinate it to the party. And then you see these draconian social controls, not just, you know, limiting the internet, not just censorship, but all kinds of crackdowns right now.

What's happening like this war on entrepreneurs like Jack Ma and Alibaba, the social credit score system, like your kid gets a little game boy where he can play Xi Jinping thought ideology and like if if he gets a low score then you know that dad loses his job or something this is pretty serious shit um and all then the police state tactics against minorities especially the the muslim wagers uh and you know at that time you had wiggers going to fight in afghanistan in iraq they were becoming radicalized so you can see the sort of seeds back then in what had become these full-blown policies champion by Xi Jinping. And he's proven to be sort of vastly more assertive, much higher tolerance for risk, much more ideological than certainly I imagine based on the early.

encounters. We used to joke that when you'd meet with Hu Jintao, you didn't actually need to have the dialogue because all Hujentau did is read his prepared talking points. And so like Hujentau would read his talking points and then the interpreter would literally just read what was prepared for him, the interpreter, in English. And Hujentau never deviated from whatever talking points were produced by the manufacturing of the Communist Party. So he was really just the frontman for this organization. And the first meeting we had was Xi Jinping in Sunnylands. Obama spent hours and hours with him in Palm Springs at this golf course kind of throwback 70s type place. And from the get-go, suddenly that interpreter Singh-Nex-Zer-ji is furiously writing. He's not reading. He's sitting back.

He's giving his own talking points. He's giving his own views. He's debating Obama. He is saying things that we hadn't heard before from Chinese. And from the get-go, you're like, oh, this is this is his own guy. Like this is a guy with his own individual ambitions beyond just being the frontman for the band, you know? And then the other thing that I really dug into in my book was the appreciation of the extent to which post-Tienaman, you know, the Chinese Communist Party had really embraced Chinese nationalism.

Right? If you think about Maoism as attached to the idea of kind of global revolution, they did a lot of work, not just to kind of suppress the memory of Tiananmen, but to kind of rehabilitate Confucius and bring back all of this Chinese history and to gin up anti-Western anti-Japanese sentiment in the 90s and aughts. And then Xi Jinping becomes the perfect expression of, as Danny said, someone who is both the kind of Marxist-Leninist state control guy,

but also the like serious Chinese nationalist guy. And they've got scores to settle from 100 years ago with Europe, with the United States, with obviously Japan. And so he kind of brings together these strains in a very powerful way, a strongman individual, a Marxist Leninist, and a Chinese nationalist, right? And that's a potent, potent combination. Yeah, I totally agree. Just the background for listeners, right? I mean, so Mao's in charge. He attempts something called the Great Leap Forward. It is a catastrophe. Tens of millions of people starve to death. That kind of pushes Mao out of power or out of favor a little bit.

So he launches the cultural revolution, which is this horrific purge of all intellectuals, all religion, all sort of like old order Chinese things. And I think at the end of those excesses, the Chinese Communist Party decided like, okay, we've banned religion, we've banned sort of any sort of spiritual, cultural life. Like, what do we allow back in?

And you're right, it was sort of this interesting reemergence of Confucius and Confucianism and nationalism. And it does also dovetail with, you know, The private tone of a Xi Jinping in a conversation with Barack Obama dovetails with this new public tone from the Chinese Communist Party, which is more aggressive. It's more caustic. It's often called Wolf Warrior diplomacy, which I believe is named after a Rambo-like hyper-nationalist series of films called Wolf Warrior One and Two, where I think a bunch of Chinese troops, I think, defend, I think Africa or other nations from American commandos, basically. it's, you know, some intense stuff. But Danny, like, what do you, do you think that this wolf lawyer

diplomacy, this new assertiveness, this new aggression was a bunch of Chinese diplomats trying to kind of follow the lead of Xi Jinping? Or how did this come to beat? Yeah, well, there are two things at work. One is that Xi himself has been banging the drum of what he calls discourse power, narrative power. In other words, the problem isn't that China is, you know, running rush out over the rights of the minorities or coercing neighbors and using, you know, cyber to steal intellectual property. No, the problem is you're not telling China's story right. You know, you got to, you know, it's messaging.

Tommy, you live this. Like, oh, no, you know, you should stand up at the podium and persuade all those reporters that were right. Yeah, that always works. So there is a lot, you know, there's been a lot of pressure on diplomats in the field to, you know, sing the National Anthem to score points. And they found, particularly as the Chinese netisms became more empowered and more active as a political force domestically, that they could get a lot of positive feedback by kicking ass and taking name. So rather than going out and trying to solve it.

problems or trying to persuade people in win hearts and minds in a foreign country, you can bolster not only the institution of the foreign ministry, but your personal standing by being seen as going out and being a champion. But the other thing is that the increased kind of ideological rigidity and conformity, the so-called rectification of ideology campaign that Xi Jinping has unleashed means that these bureaucrats are always looking over their own shoulder. And nobody wants to get caught, you know, being timid in defending the motherland. So as Ben pointed out, there's this real surge of nationalism. And so I experienced myself once Xi Jinping took office the phenomenon where I've gotten to know Chinese

counterparts really well. We have co-conspired on organizing visits and meetings and things where, you know, I was helping him to understand how he should frame the message to get agreement in Washington and vice versa. We really knew each other. We could work together. And I would sit across from this counterpart in a meeting in Beijing. And at one point, it started to dawn on me. this guy is no longer talking to me. He is giving a theatrical reading of the talking points into the microphone for the benefit of the Memcon that's going to be circulated and specifically for that little shit hill, you know, political commissar who's sitting in the back row behind him waiting ready to

pounce to see if he like deviates from the party line. So there's huge change in the atmosphere. And just like as Ben was saying about Hu Jintao, you know, the Zhang Zemin Hu Jintao era, these guys were engineers. They were apparatchiks. They were institution guys. And they were selected on purpose because China was in a rebound from like the chaos of Mao and one-man rule. And this is what they want. This is why they instituted term limits, right?

And collective leadership. but now Xi Jinping is kind of a return, reversion to the meme. He is so different than Hujintao in many important respects. Ben outlined a few of them. And I also remember vividly one meeting on the margins of like the G20 or something early on where Obama was just laying into Hujint Tao over North Korea. And both sides had delivered the first round of their talking points like, you know, artillery fire. And then Obama came back and who were really hard like that.

You know, we can't allow this. This is on you. And this is going to be incredibly damaging to China's own interests, blah, blah, blah. And I saw Fujintel for the first time in all the meetings we'd had pick up his pencil and make. and make some note on the margins of the piece of paper he was reading from it. I thought like, oh my God. Breakthrough. Breakthrough.

Totally. I got a reaction of this guy. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, is a politician. He's a political animal. And the second point I'd make on that is that he's a political animal at a moment when China has gained unprecedented national power. And so he's got power and control at his disposal, at the party's disposal, that is really formidable. And, you know, you can see it in the things that he's doing and the attacks on private entrepreneurs. It's like, this guy just banned after school online education in a country that's obsessed with educating their one child.

Like, what is with that? Why would he do that? Why would he ban education? So he's talking about leveling the economic playing field in a kind of old-fashioned socialist way. Common prosperity calls it. And there's huge economic disparities between the urban elites and the rural sort of peasants in China. And so this is a play to say, you know, you urban well-eastern, Chinese can afford to send your kids to these after-school programs and do all these online

education and so on. But number one, that's creating a social divide. And I need to show that I'm sticking up for the little guy. And number two, you're teaching all this suspect Western shit in your online courses. What you should be teaching is what the public schools are required to teach my ideology, Xi Jinping thought. And so he just cracked down on that. He cracked down on video games. So he decreed that kids can only spend one hour a day, three days a week, playing video games, you know, or else. So good luck with that. Good luck with that. Danny, you mentioned the Uyghurs earlier. I mean, we've been talking now for literally years about the brutal suppression of the Uyghurs in Western China.

For those who don't know, I mean, there's reports that up to 2 million Uighurs who are a Muslim minority group have been thrown into these reeducation camps. There are reports of torture, sexual violence, forced sterilization, kids separated from their families. It's some of the most evil stuff you could imagine. It's state-sponsored. Initially, the government denied that these camps existed. You know, they were proven beyond a doubt.

Now, they just sort of, I seemingly just argue that, yeah, we're doing this and it's necessary. Are there things you think the U.S. or the Western, the international community can or should be doing that might actually exert enough pressure on them to try and force them to stop? I mean, one recent example of attempted pressure is the diplomatic boycott of the Olympics by President Biden. Yeah. So the ability of the U.S. or even the collective international community to actually get China to change its behavior and its policy in Xinjiang against the Uyghurs is slimmed of none. The Chinese didn't begin with the Uyghurs.

They have been persecuting and imposing really draconian constraints on ethnic minority, in China. I mean, you know, people aren't really talking much about it, but like does the word Tibet ring a bell, the Dalai Lama, this is not new behavior, but it is more deliberate, it's more extensive, it's more scientific, and it's more horrifying, frankly. The further complication slash irony is that if you interviewed 100 people just randomly off the streets in a major Chinese city, a hundred of them would say the government's doing absolutely the right thing. It's imposing discipline and it's fighting terrorism and we can't afford not to do this. Now, some of this is a testament to Chinese propaganda machine, censorship and so on,

where the extent of the really brutal measures is unknown. But, you know, just like the U.S. went through a convulsion in the aftermath of 9-11 where we were obsessed with hunting down terrorists, et cetera, and combating violent extremism, in the name of anti-terrorism, in the name of national unity, in the name of domestic security, the Chinese are pursuing these egregious policies and are doing it. So with the pretty straightforward support of the vast majority of the public, which is ethnically Han Chinese. So it's a mix of elements, including racism, that give them the domestic space. As far as international criticism, look, this is also not new. I mean, administration after administration has tried to address China's appalling human rights record. Now, you know, directing the international spotlight on the behavior is not just one of the only tools we have, but is a tool that has an effect.

Believe it or not, really is possible to embarrass the Chinese Communist Party. but the hard part is doing it in a way that leads to some change in behavior where we're not, you know, getting in the way of the message, stepping on the message by turning, you know, turning this into just another front in the U.S. China battle. Right, right. You know, we've had some limited successes at times, the release of a dissident or getting them to ease up on home churches somewhere and so on. But when it comes to imposing costs like the Olympics, you know, it's easy to poke them with a stick. But sanctions and things that are mostly symbolic don't get you very far. It's very hard to develop leverage to use with the Chinese. It's not impossible, but you've got to be clever and you've got to have kind of a united international front.

So in the case of the Olympics, I mean, I think there was. significant potential leverage when the decision about awarding the Winter Olympics in 2022 was in play. You really got to choose your moment. There's an art form to how you frame it so that it's sort of generalized pressure and anxiety on the part of Beijing that, oh my God, this could go badly wrong, and not those goddamn Americans are trying to, you know, humiliate and deprive us of our rightful sponsorship. Tommy, I'd say on the, I was just going to add on the weaker thing that the, you know, part of what Danny's absolutely right, that, you know, if you look at the treatment of

minorities, right, Tibetans most prominently, you know, this is of a piece. Obviously, what's different is the technology that they could utilize, right? And so what you've seen, right, is that the development of when you already have a totalitarian system, and then suddenly you start to have the capacity to gather massive amounts of data and to utilize artificial intelligence to kind of mine that data, you can take what used to be, if the old playbook was we're going to move a bunch of Han Chinese to Tibet and we're going to have a ruthless local official who's going to crack down on dissent. We're going to try to change the curriculum in schools.

And it's kind of the old version of police state. When suddenly you can deploy cameras and checkpoints and all the kind of, you know, 2.0 version of totalitarianism, when suddenly you can mine all that information from facial recognition technology to total digital surveillance of what everybody is doing and looking at online. you suddenly have like, you know, eyes literally on every single individual there. And then if you add to that, okay, we're going to set up these concentration camps, essentially, where you never know what the thing is that's going to get you sent to the camp. Right. And there doesn't have to be a thing. It doesn't have to be a thing.

But is it, I mean, when I was researching my book, what was so chilling is like, if I grow a beard, will I be thrown in the camp because that's a signal of religion? If I quit smoking or drinking, will people think I'm more Islamic? That gets me thrown in the camp. If I have a cousin in the U.S., and they figure out about that, and nobody knows the thing that's going to land you amongst the million people in the camp, you have a degree of, like, total social control, and really debilitating totalitarianism. And so I think it's both the more aggressive, less give a shit about international opinion

of Xi Jinping married with this technology. Now, the flip side of that international pressure side, and we talk about this a bit, but like, some of that technology was financed by, you know, Chinese investment. A ton of it was financed by American venture capital, you know. Right. And over time, and, you know, you see these bills in Congress about, like, essentially divesting from Jingjiang. But I think over time, you know, in addition to the spotlight and the multi-lower pressure, as Danny mentions, You know, if the idea is that China is going to suffer kind of its capacity to attract international investment, international events, all the things that have allowed it to really

emerge as a great power because of its behavior, that might have an effect over time, you know, maybe not right away. But they've been getting a pass here for 30 years since Tiananmen, where everybody knew the human rights record and yet the money's still pouring in, the business is still pouring in. The international events are pouring in. And I think turning that ocean liner around is what's necessary. I agree. And look, Dan, you alluded to this, Danny. Last night I watched The Forever Prisoner, which is this new documentary by Alex Gibney, it's about CIA Black Sites, torture and the indebted detention of a man named Abu Zabeda. And it's, you know, this like every time I watch something about the early 2000s, it's another horrible reminder

about the evil things countries do in the name of counterterrorism. And it's a reminder. And this conversation that China took inspiration from the U.S. War on Terror in shaping its policy towards the U.S. and they justify their actions in the name of fighting terrorism. And in 2002, the U.S. put a U.S. group on our terrorism designation list. And Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, when they freaked out and prevented us from closing Guantanamo, it's because we were going to resettle a few Uyghurs in the United States because we couldn't send them back to China. And they wrote a letter to Obama saying that their radical views prevent them from being assimilated into American society precisely the language that Xi Jinping uses to describe why he's putting them in camps.

And on top of that, Ben, Chinese officials were allowed to come to Gitmo to interrogate Uighur prisoners that were being held there. So I guess what I'm just sort of like setting up for you, either of you, is like, how do we recognize and reconcile that history with the current pressure campaign on China to stop what has been called by the U.S. of genocide. Oh, this is, I, so I, I, I write about this in after the fall, like the, you know, again, obviously they're taking this to much greater extremes. But the reality is, Xi Jinping calls what they're doing against the Uyghurs,

the people war on terror, people's war in terror. They call a stabbing attack by some Uyghurs against Han Chinese, China's 9-11. He is instructed, based on really good reporting the New York Times, some of the most ruthless officials in Jiangzang to study the early tactics of the war and terror. And so I do think for the United States to make this turn towards prioritizing human rights, number one, we have to end the war on terror. Number two, we have to acknowledge its excesses. And then number three, we have to embrace a kind of universalism about how we defend human rights as something that's actually central to our policy. Because with China, it's never been the case that human rights was the thing that we prioritized over counterterrorism or security or some geopolitical interest or economic interests above all. And so you're totally right, Tommy, that we have to like getting our own house in order, acknowledging those.

excesses and signaling to the Chinese and the rest of the world that like the that the prioritization of things like human rights is is elevated you know that has to be that has to be a part of any approach it can't just be like you know we're going to issue some speeches and statements about this and expect everybody to listen to them so ben you i mean you pointed out that one of the fundamental changes in the way that uh china is applying repression in ching jingang is that infusion of cutting edge technology. And that really is important. They have kind of mechanized, automated, systematized repression in a way that we haven't

seen since kind of you know who in the 40s. But there are two other big differences, one of which applies directly to the point you just made about us. But one is that the growth of Chinese influence, diplomatically, internationally, it's sort of geopolitical heft through Belt and Road and commerce and making common cause with strong men around the world. And applying their economic leverage very deliberately in a coercive way means that there is not a single Islamic Muslim majority country on planet Earth or probably in the solar system that has really, called out as a government the Chinese treatment of the Muslim minority in Xinjiang. And to the extent that there has been criticism, it's from Turkey or from other sort of Turkish,

you know, second cousins of the Uyghurs. And as canter. But it's right, but it's been pretty desultory. So the Chinese ability to muzzle and the U.S. failure to rally the Islamic world has created an airbag that has shielded China to some extent from the impact of international criticism. But on the U.S. side, I think, I mean, it's certainly been my observation as a diplomat working, living abroad, that the most important thing is finding ways to keep faith with people within the country, within the system, who themselves are pushing for

their rights, civil rights and human rights, by, in the first instance, modeling those principles in our own society, in our own behaviors. So definitely the universality application of rights and respect for law and norms. The more that we depart from that, the less credibility we have. And China has had an opportunity of kind of unparalleled value in the four years of the Trump administration to sort of shrug off international human rights complaints on the basis that, A, look at the United States and B, president of the United States couldn't care less. I think Biden is working to try to change it. Trump reportedly told him he was doing the right thing by building concentration cans for the week. I mean, John Bolton is the source of him. It's not some squishy liberal.

Right. Absolutely. So it's always going to be hard to reconcile competing priorities of economic interests, geopolitical and values. But integrating the values agenda in our foreign policy and reflecting it, manifesting it in our domestic behavior is a precondition for gaining the the respect and the credibility that we need to try to have an impact on a country like China. So, Danny, for a while, people in D.C. became fixated, I think, on a theory called the Thucydides Trap, which basically says when you have a rising power like China, and it's threatening to displace the ruling power of the U.S., war is not inevitable,

but if you look through history, it becomes very likely. Good diplomacy can avoid war, but often and it does not. Do you have a dog in this fight? Do you have a take on this debate and I guess sort of the broader growing sense that there is a cold war happening at the very least with China? Yeah, well, look, I mean, we're not Athens

and China's not Sparta. And my experience, and your experience, you know for a fact that international relations isn't just a bunch of billiard balls hitting each other on the table, that human agency really matters, that leaders really matter, that decisions really matters.

So I don't subscribe to the belief that there's an inevitability there, but I do believe that there's certainly a kind of systemic structural challenge as China grows stronger and stronger and as the U.S. continues to struggle with all kinds of primarily domestic issues. But look, in the last five or so years in the U.S.-China relationship, things have gone from bad to worse, not because of an abstract, you know, principal, the lucidity's trap, but because the two sides are caught in this vicious cycle of mistrust. It's sort of a classic security dilemma. You know, each side is convinced that it's the innocent victim and that the other side is the aggressor. and they point to things that the other side does. And in response, they take steps, you know, to defensive steps to deter or steps to retaliate that they feel it justified given what the other side is doing. But, you know, what's deterrence or justified retaliation to me is a threat and a provocation to you. And so it's been escalating to the point where I think both systems right now are sort of throbbing at the mouth with,

a kind of nationalist fervor, and both sides are wedded to a two-dimensional caricature of the other. So the Chinese are the ones who love the Thucydides trap construct, because it fits their argument that the U.S. is just this mean-spirited decaying, flailing, has been lashing out because it's been overtaken by a new great power with a better system. And, you know, the U.S. is like treating China like it's the invasion of the body snatchers that here's this, you know, dictatorial hellscape with a diabolical plan for world domination. Now, I'm not saying there is a grain of truth to both of those stories, but it does have, frankly, the makings of a Cold War.

And, you know, remember, the first Cold War wasn't all that much fun. So, you know, it's not identical in any way. China is not the Soviet Union and so on and so forth. But there are some analogies. And, you know, ironically, the people who debunk and dismiss the Cold War analogy are consoling themselves that because we have deep economic interdependence, right? This is fundamentally different than the way that we. dealt with the Soviet Union, but at the same time, both sides are trying to unwind that

internet, that economic and tech interdependence, you know, decoupling. So I mean, I think we're at a very dangerous threshold. You know, there's a consensus in China, which is, I'm sorry, there's consensus on China, right? In the U.S., that's kind of a code word for a group thing. That's very zero-sum. And as I've been saying, like, the Chinese Communist Party is a paranoid, leninist syndicate that is, you know, convinced that the United States is out to get them. Their whole deal is they need to catch up and surpass the United States. They need to fight while talking, right? That all's fair and love and war. So, you know, the Chinese Communist Party has been in that mindset for a while.

They're just a lot better at concealing it than we are. Yeah, I mean, and Ben, I mean, 67% of Americans have cold feelings towards China that's up from 46% in 2018, 48% say limiting China's power and influence the top priority. It feels like, you know, we're reciprocating some of these cold feelings right back of the Chinese. Yeah, and I really wrestle with this, Tommy, because, you know, I don't like, uh, you know, I don't like, uh, wars, hot or cold. But I also like in really going deep on China for my book after the experience of the later Obama years, you know, there's a lot of cause for concern, right? Here's one way to think about it, though. What is the purpose of all this for the United States? Is the purpose to retain hegemony? Is it the purpose to be able to call the shots

essentially in the world, or is the purpose to kind of defend universal principles that we care about? And here's why I think that distinction matters. You know, it just is the case that for, you know, most of the last however many decades since World War II, and particularly after the Cold War, the U.S. could kind of call the shots. And we could kind of set the agenda. We could, you know, invade and occupy, Iraq, which is an insane thing for a country to do, right? But that's how powerful we were. It could do something so outside the boundaries of what even we said the world should do. And then here comes China. And by the way, not just China. If you look at China, India, if you look at demography, demographics in terms of where population growth is happening,

it's just a fact that in the rest of this century, the U.S. is not going to be able to do that. And so that means we can't say, oh, if China is building infrastructure in this African country, that's a threat. We have to get rid of that. Or if China's opening Confucius centers to kind of spread their version of values, that has to stop, full stop. And we do that, you know, or that if Chinese students are studying here, you know, and learning certain things that, you know, we have to kick them out, you know, that if the goal of the China policy is to kind of preserve our dominance, that's a Thucydides trap because the Chinese won't accept that. And frankly, I don't know how we'd achieve that absent, you know, more direct confrontation. But if the goal is, hey, we believe that

in this world, you shouldn't have a million people in concentration camps. Or we believe that countries generally should be able to make their own choices and not be bullied by China, then it gives you more of a platform where what you're defending is not a world that is about kind of keeping China down. It's about, you know, because this is, frankly, an easier sell to the rest of the world. You know, the audience is less China. If we're not going to be able to convince them, the audience is Europe and Latin America and Southeast Asia and substand Africa. that like this is the kind of world that we're just trying to work for. And so, yes, there's going to be a competition because the Chinese are working for a different kind of world.

But the framing does matter. And it's not just the framing in terms of your messaging. It's the framing in terms of how are you thinking about the problem. Like Taiwan, right? Do we want to preserve Taiwan's current status as basically its own autonomous entity? because that's our platform for us to have a certain degree of influence in Asia. Or do we just also, or is this about, hey, you shouldn't be able to invade a place of 24 million people and swallow them up, right? I think the latter is a more powerful argument to the rest of the world than the former, right?

And so I know it's sometimes it's a bit of a distinction without a difference. But I think there is a difference in the sense that like we have I, I accept that China's going to have increasing amount of influence in the world. But I don't accept that that means it's okay to put a million people in concentration camps or it's okay to do what they did in Hong Kong or it's okay for them to invade Taiwan, you know? Well, so Danny, right, I mean, to Ben's point, the rubber meets the road in Taiwan, right? I mean, I agree with you, Ben, that that frame is absolutely far more preferable, but, like, ultimately, you know, you're going to be called on to maybe steam a bunch of ships into the Taiwan straight or not. I mean, first of all, are you concerned about, you know, the invasion of Taiwan? I mean, the discussion now in D.C. is, like, how imminent is it? You know, will he, will she time his invasion of Taiwan with Putin when Putin invades Ukraine?

Like, that's kind of the level of fever pitch you're hearing in D.C. Do you think that's likely and do you think that there's things the U.S. can do to really deter them? I think there are things that the U.S. can do to precipitate military action on Taiwan as well. Look, it's not the sort of thing that you can afford to get wrong. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the PRC and Xi Jinping could yield to temptation and conduct, you know, an amphibious invasion and occupy Taiwan by force. But I think it's very clear that that's not their plan A and it's not even their plan B, that they have a lot of other tools that are coercive or co-optive that they are refining and using to try to bring Taiwan to heal. In some ways, like they brought Hong Kong to heal.

They lost patients, but they didn't actually use the PLA military garrison. there. They use quasi-legal means and other forms of pressure. Now, they don't have exactly the same tools in Taiwan, and Taiwan is a much harder nut to crack. But

I don't disagree with the stated concern of a lot of analysts that if the United States inadvertently convinces the Chinese that the window of opportunity is closing and that it's act now or see an

dependent Taiwan, which would have devastating political consequences for Xi Jinping, that, yeah, they've got a drawer full of plans for use of military force from the high-end invasion to low-end, scare the shit out of everybody and prove the U.S. is kind of powerless to intervene, that they could go for. It comes at a very, very high cost. For the U.S., I mean, I not surprisingly agree with Ben, that the U.S. has a huge stake in the continued ability of the democratic society on Taiwan to function to flourish, to not be exterminated by the PRC. We got a lot of reasons to want to see Taiwan continue as is to maintain the status quo. We got economic interest. And look, TSMC, the – the – the – it was. world's number one, number one, two, and three chip manufacturer. Like, they're basically the people that, that produce the Tesseract.

You know, this is like magical stuff. And they're the only ones who can do it. And on top of that, the Taiwan's make the best shrimp dumplings on planet Earth. So, you know, there's a lot to love. But Tommy, the question is, are we going to accidentally love Taiwan to death, right? Well, and what do you mean by that? Are you talking about like selling them too much military hardware? Are you referencing, I don't know, the U.S. giving nuclear sub-technology to the Australians

and some say precipitating an arms race in the region? Like what are we talking about? So Taiwan has become the rope in a tug-of-war between Washington and Beijing. And the Trump administration, changing metaphors here, basically used Taiwan like a two-by-four to just, you know, Pompeo was just like whaling on the PRC. with Taiwan. And that wasn't doing the Taiwan's any favor,

and they didn't like it. Now, the Biden administration has begun saying that, hey, Taiwan is this vital, you know, node in our military geography. We can't allow it to fall into PRC clutches and so on. Look, I don't disagree. That's

the kind of thing you can say in the tank, right, in the sit room. but it's very risky to like jettison 40 years of policy about how, you know, Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits should decide their own future and, and we're, you know, we're open to peaceful unification. So if you rule out even the possibility of peaceful unification by saying we can't allow Taiwan to fall into Chinese clutches, which is very, very different from saying, we cannot tolerate the use of military force to resolve this issue,

then we are in effect telling the Chinese, if you want it, you're going to have to take it. And we're in a syndrome where the more that Beijing threatens, the more Washington and others push back, and the more resistance to unification grows on Taiwan, then the more, you know, these stark warnings we're going to see from, we are seeing from Beijing. And this is the sort of thing that can easily, you know, spiral into disastrous crisis. On top of that, there is a lot of movement of military hardware by the U.S., by the PRC all around the Taiwan, you know, air defense zones and so on.

on. Okay. But it raises exponentially the risk of an incident at a time when we simply don't have any of the like fire retardant mechanisms like hotlines and dialogues and our military people don't know each other anymore. We've been completely incommunicado now for years. And so, you know, I've said before, it's like, you know, exposed wiring in the relationship. We get a crossed wire then in the form of an incident, like the EP3 surveillance plane that was hit by a intercepting Chinese fighter back in 2001. That was resolved. The crew was repatriated to the U.S.

after like two weeks, after a lot of high-level president-to-president negotiations. We could not do that today. So there is really a high risk, not just the action by China, but action that neither side ever intended, but it is powerless to keep under control. That's daunting. Yeah, and the most recent meetings between Biden and she have all been Zooms, and we know nothing. Nobody has a good meeting on Zoom. You know what I mean? It's not going to be a good time when you're on Zoom. And Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken are getting screamed at when they have the in-person meetings with their counterparts. Although I think the last one went well. Ben, any concluding thoughts on, you know, the Danny's concern here that, you know, we're nothing but frayed wires and the risk of an incident is higher. And that, you know, I guess what you're

you're sort of saying, Danny, is there needs to be much more diplomacy. Yeah, I mean, I guess, like, I definitely agree that there needs to be, like, more diplomacy and more capacity to, you know, hotlines, pick up the phone. You know, two ships get too close to each other. It doesn't start a war by mistake. I guess one way to think about this, though, is that we tend to steer these debates in the U.S. into kind of brute force or like we need to build more ships and, you know, give the Australians nuclear-powered subs and all this stuff. When I've experienced is we need that stuff, but like

the most dangerous thing potentially to China in the Chinese Communist Party is in a lot of areas them overplaying their hand, right? And, you know, since, you know, since we're having kind of like the, you know, step back, lucidity's trap type discussion, you know, one of the things that I begin to see the later Obama years in Southeast Asia, for instance, was the beginnings of like a post-colonial backlash to China, not the U.S. And this connects to Taiwan and I'm working my way around to Taiwan. I remember being in Laos, Tommy, and some young people. took me up to there's like an arc to triumphant and vintyne the capital house which is kind of random but

that's because it was a French colony right and we're looking out over the city and there all these big buildings going up um and I said what's that over there like these tall buildings in the city that doesn't have a lot of tall buildings and like oh that's the Chinese zone and with a lot of bitterness and resentment you know they like you know you need a Chinese passport just to go in there you know And that's a sentiment I started encounter across Southeast Asia. That China was polluting their rivers. China was corrupting their governments. China was basically acting as a de facto colonial power.

And in Hong Kong, you know, China overplayed its hand in the sense that it's successfully, for the time being, you know, stamped out a protest movement kind of swallowed that city. But guess what that did? That made the people in Taiwan vote much more overwhelmingly for the leader of the party that does not want to succumb to one country, two systems, peaceful reconciliation that has been associated, if not without right, independence with Taiwan retaining its own democratic society. And I guess the point I'm making here is that, like, our, if we truly believe in, in democratic values, what China is doing and intimidating Taiwan is pushing Taiwan away from them.

And frankly, even potentially increasing the risk or cost of trying to invade and occupy a place of 24 million people. And so, you know, if we, yes, we need to have credible. military deterrence. Yes, we need all these things that are obviously a part of great power relationships. But we also need to recognize that what we're defending in Taiwan is the capacity of 24 million people to decide how they want to live. And we're defending the idea that a place that builds a democratic society like that, not only should we care about that, but other democracies should care about that in Europe and Asia and other places. that the idea that we should be encouraging other countries to not be bullied by China into having

like no contacts or trade or whatever with Taiwan, that's, I think, something worth doing because it's upholding a principle about self-determination and about democratic principles and peaceful reconciliation of differences. So to me, like, we need to have enough confidence that, you know, what we represent is more attractive than what's on offer from Beijing. Now, that has to be fortified by enough strength. You're not just like, you know, it's not, it's not, you know, just pure idealism up in the air, you know? Also tough to do when you've got a bunch of lunatics storming the fucking capital. It is.

Yeah. Point taken. No, that's why that most important thing that we need to fix is our own democratic example. far more than building a few more ships in the defense budget, like cleaning house at home and having a real democracy that can actually be a beacon for people is what matters. I mean, I realized when I was left Hong Kong on my last trip to Hong Kong,

when you could kind of feel like this is going south. And I write about, you know, in the book, like being there during the last election that may ever happen in Hong Kong that's free and fair, where the opposition went overwhelmingly in these local district council elections and seeing these young people that what needed to happen to quote unquote safe Hong Kong was not some mix of sanctions and pressure.

The world needed to change in order for Hong Kong to change. You know, that essentially we need to reverse the democratic backsliding in the world and the perception that all the momentum is behind this Chinese authoritarian model

as the next stage of authoritarianism. Under Trump, the United States, has embraced authoritarianism. China just has the best. model of it, a more efficient delivery system for authoritarianism than the Trump represented. You know, 30 years from now, Taiwan will be in a much better place if we have preserved and strengthened our own democracy and set an example that is relevant to democracies around the world, then, you know, that, so that, that, it's not just about, you know, the right military deterrent

strategy. It's about how does that come, what the Chinese have recognized is, there, there, They're selling a model, right? And we've gotten away from that. And you know, the model, you go to Africa and, you know, you hear a lot of people say, well, you know, maybe it's more efficient to grow our societies in the way that the Chinese do. We can't just go there and say, no, that's wrong. You know, we have to demonstrate that it's wrong, that there's a better way of doing it. Well, look, as Ben pointed out, and I also experienced, there's definitely a huge backlash

against China in the developing world and certainly in Southeast Asia. The Chinese are often their own enemies, although that's not a strategy that we can ride to victory. And the countries themselves have no illusions about China. They've been contending with China in one form another for, I don't know, last three, four thousand years. But Xi Jinping's PRC would rather be feared than love. And, you know, think of historically like the Boy, Mutiny, the Zulu Rebellion, you know, backlash against the neocolonial power doesn't always end well for the, for the smaller countries. So they have to believe that there is really an alternative available to them. They have to believe that the United States is credible as a partner and stands for what it claims to represent and to believe.

And I think that Biden gets it right in the sense that, you know, nothing short of authentic domestic renewal in the United States is going to be enough to allow us to influence Chinese behavior for the better. And nothing short of demonstrating that the U.S. lives by its values is going to be enough to bring the fence sitters. which is what we're really seeing around the world, to bring the fence sitters to a place where they're willing to really push back and stand up not only for these values, but stand up for their own interests, in part because they believe that they can count on the United States, not just in the Biden administration, but sustained commitment to these values over time.

Can I give one more thing, because this has been bugging me recently, Tommy, and I've been, I've been, I meant to. Sound off. So I've thought a lot about, you know, Myanmar. And we've talked about it. And we've talked about Facebook and the Rhenja and the coup. And one of the things I thought about is this. Part of the reason why there was an opening in 2011, not the only reason, but part of the reason is there was beginning to be a backlash in Myanmar to Chinese influence there. They were building these dams and displacing all these people and, you know, and just kind of using the place for, like, you know, as a source of rubies and jade and all kinds of stuff.

And so there's this democratic opening that the U.S. comes in and the West is coming in and we're, you know, beginning to invest there and beginning to, you know, obviously support democracy there. And then there's this massive disinformation campaign, right, against the Rohingya that kind of jins up hatred of the Rohingya that, you know, kind of justifies or enables and helps facilitate this ethnic cleansing, which then necessarily requires the U.S. and the West to say, we're going to put sanctions and close the door. on this, which is kind of in China's interest, right? Because they want us out of there. And then there's a coup that puts the Tatmadaw back in power, the military back in power, beholden to China. And the thing I've always thought about, Tommy, is that disinformation campaign,

I don't think the Burmese military is sophisticated enough to set that up. You think they had a helping hand? So I've always wondered whether. Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Well, I mean, this is just a theory of mine, but I've always wondered whether that's what the Chinese did. Is they're like, well, we can, you know, help pour gasoline on the fires of these, you know, and by the way, helps the Muslim majority population. But, you know, what do we offer them? An American-made social media platform is the delivery system of the disinformation campaign.

And this kind of gets it kind of the, it's kind of a Cold War vibe, too, right? Like here's this peripheral country that was, you know, China heavily influenced. And then it looked like it was moving in the direction of the U.S. and the West. And then, you know, all hell breaks loose and there's ethnic cleansing. And then it's already drifting back to China. And then the military comes back into power. But now the military might be overplaying its hand and there's a civil war. And that's what you don't want, you know.

But one of the lessons is, you know, we can't. you know, we can inadvertently be like the junior partner here in the authoritarianism by having like an unregulated, you know, platform like Facebook that can just be utilized like that. So the point is that we need to fortify, you know, what happens when a country like Myanmar wants to take a different path? Is that available to them? How do we make that succeed? And part of the way is like, you know, strengthening the systems they're plugging into. Because one of the things that they were plugging into was the international information system, which was in this case, Facebook.

And that proved to be a very dangerous thing for them to be plugging into, you know? To me, it illustrates like the complexity of how what we're exporting, what democracy looks like today has to be something that is not so vulnerable to a pretty cheap. you know, kind of disinformation campaign like that, you know. I think there's a pretty clear take home from this entire conversation, which is maybe we should spend a little less time analyzing ancient Greek, fighting and civilizations and maybe just kind of get our own shit together. Maybe that's step one. That would help.

And look, even if that doesn't solve all the problems of China, it will still make things better. It'll make things better. I'm with you both, man. I personally live by the Melania Trump doctor. myself. Be better. Be better. Be better. She is

rolling out a new NFT, I believe, spont featuring the B-BEST campaign. So, yes, she's leading by example in all things. Danny, thank you so much for doing the show. It is always a blast to talk with you and make us a little smarter about all things, China. To close out this year and hopefully send us into next year where there will not be a Thucydides-Trap-style war with our friends across

the ocean. So that's all we got. Talk to you guys in the near. Take care. See it. Potsave the world is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford and film and share our episodes as videos each week.