Some More News - SMN - This Whole China Thing

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Hi! In today's episode, we discuss the USA's best friend and worst enemy, China. Please support: https://uhrp.org/Donate/ https://www.saveuighur.org/donate/ Please fill out our SURVEY: HTTP://kastmedia.com/survey/ We now have a MERCH STORE! Check it out here: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Stop overpaying for shipping with Stamps.com. Sign up with promo code MORENEWS for a special offer that includes a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Athletic Greens will give you an immune-supporting FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 free travel packs with your first purchase if you visit http://athleticgreens.com/morenews today. Listen to American History Tellers: Lewis and Clark on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or you can listen ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Source List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kPmofO37NXV_17P3odGJ91DMnXBdALerigIzgQfzCfI/edit?usp=sharingSupport the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I scream, you scream, we all scream! That... well, it's not wrong, but I... For the news! It says we scream for the news. You understand my confusion. And today we're talking about... China! Okay, I really should start reading these ahead of time. But I mean, China, that sounds like a lot. China. That's what I said, China.

China. Why are you saying it gross and weird? China. Okay, are you fucking with me? China, big league. Fine, China, begone spirit, torment me no longer. Okay, well, I guess I'm here to read news to you all about the complicated subject of China,

a topic you are all no doubt very excited to sit here and think about, but it seems somewhat valuable to actually just explain the broad situation to people, which is what this video is about. And listen, if you watch the whole thing, I promise to do something really cool at the end, maybe involving a skateboard,

bet you didn't know I could skateboard, ha ha. Anyway, America's relationship with China is a constant subject of conversation in the media. And no one knows exactly what to say, including me, especially me, but especially this guy. Meanwhile, in China, where the coronavirus originated, a top advisor to the Chinese government declared that the country was experiencing a very different kind of threat, a more profound threat. The problem, he said, was a national masculinity crisis. Chinese boys, quote, have been spoiled by housewives and female teachers, and they were becoming, as a result,

quote, delicate, timid, and effeminate. In essence, they were becoming people who might listen to someone like Tony Fauci. What the hell are you talking about, Tucker? Is this what your show is always like? Just a rambling of bizarre misconceptions about what it means to be masculine? Once a society collapses then, you're in hard times. Well, hard iron sharpens iron, as they say. And those hard times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive. Oh, right, I guess it is, my bad.

So yeah, some people perhaps know a bit less than others when it comes to discussing this issue. On the one hand, America can't afford to upset China or its ruling communist party because they're extremely important trade partners. But politicians and media figures also need to seem tough on China because we're losing to them and we need enemies.

And of course, because of all their pesky nuclear weapons and human rights abuses. Shoo nuclear weapons and human rights abuses! Didn't work. They're the other massive global superpower, the Wario Wario to America's Mario Mario. And to a lesser extent, the Waluigi Wario to our noble Luigi Mario.

Or maybe we're the Wario Wario, ever think about that? No? Point is, this is from the point of view of America USA number one. So we're the Mario Mario or Luigi Mario, and we're rivals, but seamlessly interconnected rivals. As a result, the US is stuck in an almost brinkmanship situation with China.

We're just holding all of this baggage and tension around the topic in our national shoulders, which I guess are probably where New Hampshire and Vermont would be, and then the other one is Washington State. All I know is that New Orleans is the vagina. And of course, you can't even wade into how we discuss China without talking about

the significant spike in anti-Chinese sentiment in the wake of COVID. An October 2020 report by Pew found a major spike in negative views about China across 12 different countries from 2019 to 2020. In the US, negative views on China jumped by nearly 20 percentage points during the Trump administration and 13 percentage points in the year 2020 alone. Sadly, this isn't just an abstract discussion about diplomacy or international relations, the way pundits and the media discuss America's relationship with China has an actual impact on the safety and security

of real people. It turns out you can't just throw a necktie on a mutant pumpkin and have him rant on TV about how China created coronavirus to destroy masculinity by locking poor Chinese boys indoors and forcing them to spend time with women. Not unless you wanna turn several million saps watching your program into violent white nationalists,

which that is what some of them want. Of course, my bad. A study from San Francisco State University observed a 50% increase in news items relating to anti-Asian discrimination during the same time that news reports about the spread of COVID were growing more and more intense and frightening.

And it's important to remember that this is only the tip of the iceberg, meaning these are merely the incidents severe enough to get reported in the first place. Some of this was likely inevitable considering the illness's initial association with the city of Wuhan on account of it ostensibly being from there.

But the situation definitely wasn't helped by a bunch of Americans going on TV and suggesting that the Chinese purposely gave a virus to everyone and also themselves for no clear reason other than to just do communism more, I guess, and without any actual evidence, as Republicans and right wing news outlets did repeatedly. So as you can probably imagine,

politicians and the media all deciding to be tough on a country and then holding them personally responsible for the existence of germs has resulted in a lot of negative feelings, not all of them fully rational. 89% of Americans consider China to be a competitor or an enemy rather than a partner,

and 48% told Pew that limiting Chinese power should be a top foreign policy priority for the United States. That's despite the fact that China remains our second largest creditor, holding more than $1 trillion of US debt, and that we've basically spent the last 50 years making them an increasingly important market for our goods and the primary manufacturer of everything we use to live our lives. America can't really continue to exist without China, at least not in its current state. That isn't to say we should be sucking up to them either,

but rather that every factual look at US-China relations is riddled with seemingly contradicting complexities that make it extremely hard to know exactly what to do. It's like playing Gloomhaven on acid or washing the dishes on acid or doing acid and then looking up what the fuck Gloomhaven is. Chinese President Xi Jinping, for example, might very well call Joe Biden an old friend,

but he did so soon after going viral for vowing to leave his rivals around the world with their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel. That's fucking hardcore, and not usually the kind of thing you can hear your old friends say and continue to be friends with them. Even our international peacemaking forces sometimes stumble around this subject and end up saying the wrong thing. More like John Soyna. No, not even our greatest ambassador can avoid putting his

mighty foot in his mouth. A lot of this discussion comes down to a simple and unavoidable truth. Whether you agree with this way of viewing the world or international relations or not, we are in competition with China, a country that has done a whole lot of human rights abuses. And in a larger sense, our societies and economies are completely intertwined. There's not a whole lot the U.S. can do to penalize China that won't damage itself in return. That's the aspect of mutually assured destruction we don't discuss, the mutually assured part. America can do pretty much whatever it wants. This is America after all, but so can China. By creating a nuclear arms race

to galvanize ourselves against our enemies, we've allowed our enemies to do the same. It's like that spiked mutant from X-Men 3 in a wrestling match with Beetlejuice. Nobody wants to throw the first hug. This became increasingly obvious over the last few years, as first Trump and later Biden have pursued a strategy known as decoupling, an attempt to gather leverage

against China and shield US industries, companies, and manufacturers from their Chinese competitors. This was mainly done through new tariffs on Chinese imports. Since 2018, US taxes on imported Chinese goods have increased by six times. These taxes still cover about two thirds of goods imported from the country, even after the US and China signed a phase one trade deal

in early 2020. And the idea here is obvious. If we make imported Chinese goods more expensive, people will be more inclined to buy products that were made here in America. And if those Chinese made items stop selling in large enough numbers, maybe the companies that moved overseas

will move their manufacturing back to America. It's genius if the intent was to absolutely not work at all. See, because China continued to attract record amounts of foreign investment, even after the tariffs went into effect. Much like the rad skateboard tricks I'll definitely do at the end of this video, the global market and supply chain

are extraordinarily complex. We can't make alterations that achieve our goals with scalpel-like precision. China still has all of the other benefits that turned it into a manufacturing hub in the first place, from infrastructure to skilled labor to a massive domestic market for its products. Plus a lot of the largest multinational corporations

that do business in both the US and China also do business in a lot of other places and can absorb the new costs in all sorts of ways without shifting around their entire model. So rather than completely altering the way that they operate, these companies are just staying put and passing the new expenses onto consumers. One paper compiled for the National Bureau

of Economic Research found that approximately 100% of Trump's new import taxes were paid for by American companies and buyers, rather than Chinese companies or multinationals. Now, I don't know if you know this, but 100% is all of the things. Another reason this didn't work is because the US sells China stuff

that they can buy from a lot of different potential sellers like soybeans, because there are a bunch of soy boy cucks who are too scared of our masculine soybeans. Sorry, excuse me. Tucker Carlson told me to tan my balls, and so I did, but the side effects are weird. But on the flip side, the things America imports from China

aren't as easy or affordable to just buy somewhere else, specifically vital electronics like laptops and smartphones. In other words, in terms of trade, it seems like we kinda need them more than they need us. And that doesn't seem good, unless you're not us, in which case, hell yeah. And speaking of vital products, this feels like the ripest, most engorged place

to slap down a meaty ad break for you to gobble up. Think of it like a trade deal we've made with these companies where we sell our bodies and voices to them while they give us money in return and everyone feels good about it. But when we come back, you better believe we will get into the real juicy good stuff like semiconductors.

That's hot? Well, ideally not, actually. That's the point. And if they get hotter than they were during manufacture, then the junction structures will be ruined by diffusion. Some semiconductor humor for you. Okay, just cut away, please. Hey, Mac, are you a small business owner? Perhaps you've made an independent film about two kids who find a magical stone and then one of those kids grows up to become an author and hacker

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to take control of your health and give AG1 a try. Boy howdy, we are all just drenched in goods and services now. Thank you to the powerful stream of that ad break covering us in commercials. I hope it revitalized your soul as fully as it has mine because it's time to talk about those hot with a W semiconductors. No need to sexy this segment up.

Just look at those erotic chips, like a bunch of robot nipples on a square. I swear, just the coolest skateboarding tricks at the end of this. Better than Tim Pool, the best skateboarder. Okay, well, transistor-filled semiconductor chips are vital for keeping a whole range of electronic devices running and operational.

From cars to smartphones to John Cena, they have become a crucially important resource for not just companies, but entire nations. Currently the US accounts for just 12% of global semiconductor chip production, while 75% comes from Asia. President Biden has suggested allotting $50 billion to boost domestic chip manufacturing incentives,

but even that may not be enough. By 2030, China will likely be the world's top producer of semiconductors. For now, that remains their island neighbor, Taiwan. Bear in mind, making these sensual little bastards isn't the sort of thing we can just turn on and off like a faucet or a robot's penis, which also would require a semiconductor chip to work.

Interesting. Boosting US chip production, or Chinese chip production for that matter, requires the construction of new facilities and a lot of intensive training. It's quite possibly the most complex manufacturing process on the planet, involving more than a thousand steps and hundreds of advanced machines,

packing tens of billions of transistors onto a chip the size of a quarter. So these chips are both absolutely essential for the global economy to keep running, yet also pretty rare and tough to make. Consider the Idaho semiconductor company Micron, a seemingly ideal case study for Trump's war against the Chinese economy, whatever.

Not only are Micron in fierce competition with Asian rivals, but they actually had their innovation stolen by a Chinese competitor right before getting banned from doing business in China by the actual government. Our then president, an unsellable yard sale cookie jar somehow made flesh, met with Micron's CEO and even talked about their case in an address to the UN. And Micron was banned from selling its own goods in China.

But we are seeking justice. Oh snap, justice. You know how much Trump loves justice. Except that justice included a government blacklisting of the smartphone company Huawei, which it turns out used semiconductor chips made by Micron. And so there's that mutually assured destruction whereby boycotting China, we ultimately hurt ourselves.

Unless, I don't know, man, like, do we really need smartphones? They seem to have made things worse somehow. Maybe we can just yell louder or something. But this isn't an isolated incident. Some of 2021's famed supply chain issues were the lingering result of the Trump administration limiting the number of U.S. companies that are allowed to supply materials and goods

to the Chinese chip giant SMIC, which created all kinds of global shortages and manufacturing slowdowns that whipped back around and hurt American companies. Chip shortages led to cascading problems for a whole host of industries, including delaying the production of GM's latest cars and trucks, which led to the temporary delays for several US-based plants and impacting thousands of workers. For you people who perhaps can't afford a new car, this is also what made it so hard to find a PS5. Disappointing gamers everywhere who had been so pumped

to play the new Bassmaster fishing game. I mean, it is available for PS4 too, but then you're not gonna get that full Bassmaster experience. So despite the increasingly intense rhetoric, the Chinese and American economies remain more deeply integrated than ever. This has led to a widespread perception

that the US and China are involved in what's functionally a new Cold War. And while it may be tempting to make this comparison, it's pretty far from a perfect metaphor. Though American leaders obviously had several reasons for pursuing Cold War classic, officially it was in response to the Soviet Union's attempt to spread communism to other countries.

America's struggle with China on the other hand, is centered more around new technology, much of it consumer facing. We're racing to be the first to produce 5G artificially intelligent robots, and whoever gets there first, I don't know, wins, dies, creates the oasis from Ready Player One?

Is that even a reference that registers with people? Anyway, it's definitely one or all of those. It's also worth noting that China today is far more wealthy and influential on the world stage than the Soviet Union ever was, relative to the United States or otherwise. At its peak, the Soviet GDP was about 50 to 60% of the United States, whereas China will probably have close to our GDP

within this decade. It's just not the same situation, despite it still having anti-communist undertones. Then again, for some people, modern day Russia has communist undertones, so I don't know. But it's less that the China situation resembles the Cold War,

and more that we only have a limited number of metaphors for discussing America's relationship with other countries and often revert to some version of good guys versus bad guys. America is always under threat from evil countries where they hate us for our freedom and are always ready to attack us for no good reason at all. To us, geopolitics is just America, the UK and Canada

and then a bunch of messy bitch nations who love drama. We the people are not here to make friends. Pretending it's a new cold war is not just because our entire economy and government are so closely tied to the defense industry and the military industrial complex and we need the imminent threat of attack by bad actors around the globe as an excuse for maintaining an enormous standing army.

It's mostly because of that, but it's not just because of that. It's also just a handy rhetorical device and easier than explaining to people what's actually going on in the world. We have barely scratched the surface of this thing and I've blocked out several times already, but we've got to keep going if I want to do my due diligence as your precious little news boy who definitely knows how to skateboard.

Obviously we have several fundamental conflicts with China that don't have anything to do with economics, especially where human rights are concerned. And boy, we will get into the specifics of those in a bit. But what I'm circling around here is that at the moment, our relationship with China is way less like a war and a lot more like a sibling rivalry,

or at least a strong passive-aggressive disagreement between longtime roommates. China and the US have a lot of overlapping problems. And in some ways, not always, but in some ways, it's almost maybe a little hypocritical for us to pile on what they're doing without taking a deep, dark, ruminating, existential, staring into the void, Samuel Beckett-like look

at our own actions at the same time. Like, did you hear about this climate change? Give it a bing if you haven't. China and the U.S. are two of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, especially on Taco Tuesday and any time who wants to shit like a millionaire is on. Now, Americans love to point out that China's current emissions are about double those of the U.S., which is true and objectively really, really bad. In fact, China emitted 2.5 times as many greenhouse gases in the US in 2019,

racking up about 27% of total global emissions compared to America's 11%. But this is a recent development. We've been dumping CO2 into the atmosphere for a century and China only caught up to the US in 2006. If you go by total emissions throughout all of history, America is still number one by a considerable margin, responsible for about twice as much of the total CO2

in the atmosphere as China. Hey, Katie. Yeah, what? We're number one. Oh, for real, number one? We're number one. Well, yeah, we're number one. We're number one.

We're number one. We're number one. We're number one. We're number one. We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! Yeah! We're number one! We're number one!

We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! Plus, China has a much larger population than the US, so even though they're making a larger overall contribution to carbon in the atmosphere today,

their per capita emissions are still lower than Americans. 10.1 metric tons per person in China versus 17.6 metric tons per person in America as of 2019. I'm sure Tucker will be pleased to know how thick and full our emissions are. But for the rest of us, that's not great. And take creeping government surveillance. That's extremely bad and genuinely frightening.

And it's easy for America to condemn the Chinese government for spying on Hong Kong protesters and arresting them, or convincing America's teens to put TikTok on their phones as a way of secretly accessing, I don't know, their apes? Whatever they're looking at on there. I tried to check, but I got scared. In 2020, Trump's State Department even introduced a proposal for a clean internet.

The idea was to keep Chinese phone carriers out of US markets, kick Chinese apps out of US app stores, remove data on US citizens from Chinese cloud servers, and even ensure undersea internet cables aren't tapped by Chinese intelligence services. After all, using the internet to spy on people is a totally unthinkable action that the United States would never resort to.

If you don't count the NSA listening to Americans' phone conversations without any court approval, but that's it. And the US government seeking private telecommunications records from individual citizens and then stopping the sources from speaking publicly about anything they were forced to provide. Oh, right, and those documents released by Edward Snowden

that confirmed Microsoft had collaborated closely with the US intelligence services and helped the NSA circumvent their own encryption to look at your Outlook and Skype records, but that's it. And those other documents leaked by Snowden that confirmed the US government created its own backdoors into Chinese companies in order to spy on them. One of those companies was Huawei,

the company the Trump administration banned from doing business with Americans because we were scared they were gonna spy on us. The NSA, by the way, was hoping to use those back doors to sneak into the networks and equipment of other countries Huawei does business with, like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, and Cuba. You know, so the US government could conduct surveillance

and cyber warfare in those countries, but like in a cool way. So it's not the same because of the way we talk about it. Where the US after all, the place where the bad things we do are totally justified. Freedom crimes. The Belt and Road Program to expand Chinese trade and influence around the globe is colonialism, all caps.

But America just wants to offer its neighboring economies room to grow. Economic inequality in China is actually improving, but the economist still describes it as Dickensian. Meanwhile, income inequality is higher in the US than any other G7 nation. And the wealth gap between the richest and poorest families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016.

But headlines lead with the great news for billionaires and the Wall Street Journal opinion page feels the need to point out that, hey, those low income households have a choice, right? And they chose to be poor. The New York Times shouts about fake Chinese elections, but treats voting rights in the US as a political football and an exciting heart-stopping race to the finish line.

When Chinese officials make up a story about the US causing the pandemic, it's scoffed away and dismissed out of hand, but equally invented American allegations about China creating the virus are tagged as fringe theories that are gaining traction. Did you know China uses its economic influence to squash dissent from athletes?

It's true. Here's CNN's John Avalon with a reality check. Suspending ties with the Houston Rockets after their general manager spoke out about democracy in Hong Kong, and pulling a Boston Celtics game from Chinese broadcasts after player Enes Kanter Freedom spoke out, leading the NBA to basically adopt

an official position of silence. Hard to imagine U.S. government officials throwing their weight around to influence the political rhetoric of athletes, except for all the times they constantly do that exact thing including the literal president who declared that any NFL player kneeling in protest during the national anthem should be fucking deported.

When we talk about China's militarization of islands in the South China Sea, and don't worry, we will get deeper into that in a few. I don't wanna disappoint all of the South China Sea heads out there. The language is always about aggression. It's a power grab by a bunch of bullies. But our military bases literally everywhere

are simply for our safety and security. We're a small being and we want our military bases. Also, when the US backs a literal coup in Bolivia, headlines question whether President Trump supports democracy in Latin America. That is when American media actually bothers to cover it. In fact, the Trump administration ramped up US interventionism across Latin America. That is when American media actually bothers to cover it. In fact, the Trump administration ramped up U.S. interventionism across Latin America. In addition to questionable involvement in coup attempts against leftist governments in Venezuela

and Nicaragua, the U.S. also announced a significant expansion of its military presence in the region. In recognition of the complex threats challenging our neighborhood, there will be an increase in U.S. military presence in the hemisphere later this year. This will include an enhanced presence of ships, aircraft, and security forces to reassure our partners, improve U.S. and partner readiness and interoperability, and counter a range of threats to include illicit narco-terrorism. That's the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Craig S. Fowler, testifying to the House Armed Services Committee in January of 2020. He was talking about the need to ramp up

the US military's presence in Latin America in response to a vicious circle of threats from malign state actors, referring to China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela specifically. The silver haired pirate king said, and I quote, "'Russia once again projected power in our neighborhood. "'The aha moment for me this past year

"'is the extent to which China "'is aggressively pursuing their interests "'right here in our neighborhood.'" But how is that different from the rhetoric of the Chinese government? Isn't the South China Sea in China's neighborhood the same way Latin America is in America's neighborhood? And does America somehow have more of a right

to try and control all of the areas that share the same page on the Atlas than China does? Because it kind of sounds like the same thing. We just don't talk about American intervention into the affairs of Latin South American countries, even though it happens all the time. It can be pretty hard to cut through all the noise and propaganda to get to the facts about what's really going on. But we're also not trying to draw false equivalences or suggest that China's purely the victim of some kind of messaging war. Just like the US and a whole lot of other countries

and also most people and definitely robots and honestly most ghosts and a shocking number of fish. China does a lot of reprehensible shit that they should not do. And we can't just brush past that shit. What we can do, however, is cut to a few ads first. Maybe for products that somehow involve China. Don't know? Don't care. The important thing is to, you know, really milk you dry with consumerism before getting to all of the atrocities you're all

really so excited to hear about. Enjoy. Learning? Who does that, right? If you're like me, your only source of childhood education was a guy named Mick the Eagle who lived on your parents' compounds. But luckily, now there's a podcast called American History Tellers that will fill you in on all the stuff your Mick failed to tell you about. And their newest season follows the legendary expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. You know the two.

Mick always told me that Lewis and Clark was a myth concocted by the mole folk in Washington. But turns out that in 1804, they actually did set out to find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean. And during their journey, they encountered all sorts of obstacles like harsh weather and disease, dangerous terrain, and grizzly bears, which until now I always thought were actually just large beavers programmed to spy on Americans. Darn you, Mick! American History Tellers takes you on a journey not just about exploration and science, no,

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Well, those were ads, alright. You all saw them. You can't say they weren't ads. Thank you for seeing them. I'm excited to reward you all with a montage of skateboarding at the end of this. But right now, it's time to talk about some really dark shit, specifically how a lot of what you've heard

about China's record on human rights issues is true as far as we all can tell. You may have heard a few things about the majority Muslim Uyghur population that lives in the region of China known as Xinjiang, a resource-rich, vital strategic corridor that links the rest of the country to Central Asia and then Europe.

In 1955, communist China annexed Xinjiang as an autonomous region. And there's long been a lot of simmering tension and ethnic violence between the Chinese government, which wants uniformity, and locals who enjoy things like, you know, their own culture, religion, stuff like that. In 2014, an attack by Uyghur militants at a train station led to nearly 150 injuries and 31 deaths.

And according to internal government documents obtained by the New York Times in 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping laid the groundwork for an elaborate and extensive plan to essentially crush any dissent. By some counts, authorities in China have corralled as many as 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other minority groups from Xinjiang into brutal re-education camps and prisons.

Two Uyghur children who spent 20 months in mandatory state boarding schools in the region described the experience to NPR, stating it left them malnourished and traumatized. They had forgotten their native languages and reported being subjected to both physical and emotional torture, including being locked in a dark basement for hours and repeatedly placed into painful stress positions as punishment. An independent UK-based tribunal concluded that the goal here is genocide,

a deliberate and systematic policy to reduce the Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations. And while it's worth mentioning that Xi claimed his policy was modeled on the US's post 9-11 war on terror, kind of like how some elements of Nazi Germany were based on America's racist racism. And some Chinese officials have even dubbed it

the people's war on terror. The point isn't to draw a false equivalence. There's no defending any of this on literally any level. It's absolutely enraging and heartbreaking stuff that needs to be stopped. But we can also illustrate that China and the United States are separated by a much finer line than you may realize, and that glossing over America's horseshit while condemning the exact same horseshit being committed on a larger scale in China just pulls America further towards an oppressive dictatorship.

And that's a bad thing, no matter how hard you stan your elected officials' Twitter accounts. But they're just like us! In Hong Kong, Chinese authorities used the pandemic as an opportunity to pass a repressive new national security law, criminalizing secession and subversion, practically eliminating the free press and most forms of public protest.

In just its first year, 117 people have been arrested under the new law, with 64 facing criminal charges. A popular newspaper has been entirely shut down, the protest movement has all but died out, and nearly all of the city's most notable pro-democracy figures have either been jailed or fled. In fact, the entire population of the island

shrank considerably after the law passed in June, 2020. Meanwhile, China continues beefing up its military and naval presence in the South China Sea, over which it claims exclusive ownership, despite the fact that the South China Sea, over which it claims exclusive ownership despite the fact that the South China Sea is physically touching a whole bunch of other countries. Also like, does anyone really own the ocean, man? At issue specifically are the Spratly

and Paracel island chains, which are claimed either in part or in their entirety by China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei, and Malaysia. Man, those island chains have more entities claiming guardianship than a child star. Bazinga! You cats love Bazinga, right?

Yeah, we love it. Ah, Bazinga! China's claim over the so-called nine dash line dates back to ancient times, which is a tough thing to argue against because most people from ancient times are deceased. But this conflict has very real present day implications. While China builds artificial islands

that erects multiple story buildings and military airstrips on them, they're really bolstering their claims to a vital shipping corridor, valuable offshore oil and gas deposits and fishing rights. China even disrupted Vietnam from exploring for oil and gas off their own shoreline. That's like your neighbor telling you that you can't put a bouncy castle in your own front yard.

It's my yard! And the castles are rented. And of course, there are many other famous examples of China bossing around its neighbors and aggressively expanding across Asia. You remember how upset Brad Pitt and the Beastie Boys were about Tibet in the 1990s? That's totally still going on. During an event in August 2021, How upset Brad Pitt and the Beastie Boys were about Tibet in the 1990s, that's totally still going on. During an event in August, 2021,

celebrating the 70th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army of Tibet, senior Chinese official Wang Yang encouraged Tibetans to embrace the Chinese Communist Party and share cultural symbols and images of the Chinese nation and adapt their Buddhist beliefs to China's communist society. Sort of a, hey, we love everything you're doing here,

but we're gonna need to make this whole place more like China, pretty much exactly like China. Like a passive aggressive art teacher, except it's, you know, a country, people die and stuff. As we mentioned earlier, Taiwan remains indispensable to both China and the US as the leading producer of those extremely valuable little semiconductor chips. Those semiconductors have perhaps helped keep the island safe

from direct Chinese aggression so far, but it could easily become the flashpoint that draws the US and China into a larger conflict. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has warned of terrible consequences should China cross the Taiwan Strait. And to be honest, those consequences sound pretty terrible. Meanwhile, President Xi has said out loud

that despite unification in a peaceful manner being most in line with the overall interest of the Chinese nation, including Taiwan compatriots, no one should underestimate the Chinese people's staunch determination, firm will, and strong ability to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity. And the historical task of the complete reunification of the motherland must be fulfilled

and will definitely be fulfilled. So this could be bluster, it could be a legitimate threat. We don't know. And there's still also the risk that an invasion would interrupt the semiconductor supply chain. The chips must flow. Dune 2021, Warner Brothers pictures. And look, I'll just say it as quickly as I can,

lest my skeleton detach itself from my sweet internal meats and climb out of my mouth and protest, but... Trump was not totally wrong in his depiction of China's trade practices. Oh man, you did it Skelly. Great job. You get all the calcium you want tonight. It's true that China sells a lot more goods around the world

and to the US than it imports. Chinese officials promised during the phase one trade agreement in January of 2020 that it would import more American products, but so far they have fallen short of expectations. In fact, China's trade surplus hit its highest level ever in 2021, reaching $94.5 billion in December.

That's like watching a friend who owes you money spend $300 on a wet sack of Pokemon cards on eBay. Some analysts think this might be the main engine powering China's economy, now that the country's real estate market has started to dry up. And that's not even the end of the list. China regularly pulls some rascally hamster shit

all around the world. Their intensely restrictive zero COVID policy seemed to work pretty well at first, but their vaccines seem far less effective than those of other nations. And the government has so far failed to approve Pfizer or Moderna shots on the mainland, even though they're already available in Hong Kong,

Macau and Taiwan. They really did manipulate their currency for years in order to gain an unfair advantage against the U.S. and other competitors, though this policy has likely tapered off recently. And sometimes Chinese manufacturers really do rip off the designs and intellectual property of foreign companies. A 2018 report by the U.S. trade representative estimated that IP theft by China cost the U.S. up to $600 billion a year. Of course, maybe China's not purely good or purely bad

any more than the US is good or bad or any country is good or bad because that's, I don't know, it's really juvenile. After all, there are things China is doing that perhaps we should look to. Have you heard about this high-speed rail that's cheap and efficient and maybe a better idea than a tunnel for one type of car?

Also things like the Made in China 2025 initiative, which aims to commit substantial new funding into the development of stuff like energy efficient cars or the country's aggressive pursuit of solar power. China's government has put so much funding into solar initiatives. By 2023, they'll have the capacity to deploy it nationwide at the same price as coal.

Now that doesn't mean they will actually do that, but they could. It's undeniably a positive step for a country that currently produces our favorite cheap plastic toys by burning just like all of the coal, just so much of the coal. There's also a harsh reality about China that America needs to face.

China has spent over $3 trillion in the past three decades building up a military while simultaneously blunting US power. And though the government has denied this, China also appears to be upgrading their nuclear arsenal. By 2030, they'll have tripled their stock of nuclear warheads to 1,000. Now, sure, the U.S. has a lot more, something like 5,600, and Russia has even more than that. But it only takes one drunk captain to crash the Exxon Valdez, and a single nuke will kill way more penguins. another Cold War rival for America to defeat because currently that simply doesn't seem possible. So it might be logical to start thinking about China

as a reality that Americans have to carefully navigate like a hurricane or a sick laser flip while coming off of a front side grind. The pickle here is that I have no real call to action or like idea of what to do. No links to donate to or definitive answers on how Joe Biden or some other dipshit president should deal with China.

This is just an episode trying to give a fair and balanced description of a situation. But there are still things to be done. We can mentally separate the people of China from the government of China for starters, both to just not be a bunch of racists, but also to address the human rights abuses going on there. I feel like we sort of rushed past that part.

And I think most people feel helpless to do much about it. And while I just said, I have no links for you, that was a lie because you can donate right now to the Uyghur Human Rights Project. And here's another group you can also donate to. And if we put in the work to make our elected officials aware of our distress over what's happening there, maybe they will be bothered to actually give a sliver of a rat's ghost of a shit. But as I think we've made painfully clear, it's hard to imagine what the U.S. can do to put pressure on China.

And so another thing we can do is perhaps oddly look at China as an inspiration and motivation for changes here in the United States. Because we're never going to go backwards to the time where we didn't have China as a global superpower, nor are we going to become less of a global society over time, but we can accept globalization and still do things to make this country a little more economically independent. Both things can be true.

In fact, many things can be true at once. Not according to literally all of the internet. In early February, House Democrats passed the America Competes Act, designed to bolster our competitiveness with China by strengthening our own technology, manufacturing and research sectors, while addressing the semiconductor chip shortage.

Republicans complain that it's not tough enough on China, of course, but they've got to complain about something. That's what they do. They'd be lost without it, lost little Fonz with naught but potato heads and Dr. Seuss books to keep them warm. MIT economist, David Alter argues that the issue isn't so much competition from China

or general globalization, but that the American labor market is not reacting and responding to new situations with enough speed. In just 20 years, China went from being a struggling country in a perpetual economic crisis to a vital global supplier, a high quality, low cost manufacturer popular among Americans and everyone else who likes good cheap things.

That had a devastating impact on the US economy. In the early 2000s, 40% of the total manufacturing decline in the United States was likely due to China. But it's not realistic to think we can just demand China or any other country be worse at manufacturing than us. Autor argues that the solution is not to punish China, but to make sweeping internal changes like strengthening trade adjustment programs

to help move workers into new industries, changing our tax system to treat imports and domestic products more symmetrically, and investing more in emerging technologies and fields that we know will be important in the future. You know, like China does. Rocky didn't defeat communism by making it illegal

for Russia to have boxers. He looked inward and sweat mightily upon the snowy mountains of determination to build himself up to perfection. So maybe that's what America needs to focus on for the time being, without also forgetting that there are real atrocities happening over there that need to be stopped.

And then maybe we can do a little communism too, as a treat. We just, you know, we gotta work on ourselves a bit, sort out our semiconductor issues, push for clean energy, workers' rights, stop spying on us so fucking much, strengthen democracy, avoid the same kind of human rights,

abuses we see overseas, yada, yada, yada, and maybe, just maybe, stop lying about how good we are at skateboarding because we can't skateboard. And telling everyone watching our video that they'll be rewarded with skateboarding tricks when we know it's a lie is wrong, just like how other stuff and things are wrong.

And so in a lot of ways, it's all of your fault that you definitely believed me when I said I would be skateboarding at the end of this. Boy, look what you've all become. I hope you're happy with yourselves. Seems like I'm not the one who has to change after all. You know, in fact, I'll never change. To teach you a lesson about expectations. Okay, now go.

Go and think about what you've all done. Go on! Just kidding! That lie was a lie! Whee! Wow. What an Ollie. Thanks for watching and liking and subscribing

if you've done that. And if not, do it now. We've got a patreon.com for some more news. We've got a podcast called Even More News and this show, Some More News as a podcast, if you prefer. And also merch with stuff on it that you can wear. And we've got new we've we've got we've got we've got that's it actually bye