The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: China Protests – Federal Funk

Episode Date: December 2, 2022

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.  In this week’s edition, Janice and Rudyard take on two stories in the news this week that made headlines. First up, China experiences protests in multiple cities over continued lockdowns and COVID controls that seem to have gotten the regime’s attention. What is really happening here? Are we seeing the signs of genuine, large-scale public opposition to Xi? The donors-only second half of the program explores the two challenges this week to Canadian federalism by the governments of Alberta and Quebec. Is Canadian national unity at a turning point, or is this just another predictable bout of provincial muscle flexing? To access the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates. To access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website. in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the

full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous contribution. Hello, Monk members. Welcome to this, the Friday Focus podcast, where we dig into the big issues and ideas shaping the news, hopefully leaving. you with some new analysis and insights. We do this each and every week with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, great to be in conversation with you, December 2nd, 2022. Wow, one more month in this

crazy year and then we're into 2023. Wow. If we were giving a prize, Red Year, for the craziest year of the century. This one would be right up there. It sure would. Let's talk a little bit about international events in the first half of the show and then in the back half, our members-only portion of Friday focus. Cancon, we got some provinces that are throwing up elbows, constitutional challenges in the future, sharp views on immigration. What the heck is happening to the Canadian Federation? We got that in the back half of the program. So stick with us, Monk, Donor. and thank you for your generous support. And thank you, Janice, you were there.

Just great to have a full house, 3,000 people at Roy Thompson Hall this past week for our Monk debate on mainstream media. It sure was great to be there. Roger, the debate was so interesting, but also to see Roy Thompson Hall full, crockling with people who buzzed about one side of the argument or the other. It was just a tonic for the spirit, I think. Yeah, it's nice to get that sense.

We're coming back to some normalcy. And if you'd like to watch the debate, we've got a beautiful, high-definition version online. If you're a monk member for as little as $25 a year, that gets you not only live streams of our debates, ticketing privileges, and also the full-length editions of Friday Focus, you will have had an email from us this week. So just go back and search from that to watch. And if you're not a member, what a great time to become a member. You get the second half of Friday Focus. You get the live stream of the entire mainstream media debate. And as I mentioned, you get advanced ticketing privileges at all of our future in-person debates. You can do that right now on our website, triple W monkdebates.com. Just click on the donate button at the top right,

25 bucks. Come on, that's 50 cents a week. And you get a charitable tax receipt. So what more could we do for you. Okay, Janice, let's dive into our first topic. It's got it. Okay, I'm actually recording on a separate mic here in front of me, so we should be okay. Okay, let's dive into our first topic. It's got to be what we've seen in China, just a wild week of protests, of a government surprisingly reacting to those protests, almost in real time, defying many analysts who thought that they would do the opposite. They would not show, I guess, some extent to which public pressure could sway their COVID-zero policy. How significant is this, Janice? Is this just simply a reaction to two strict epidemiological controls? Or is there something bigger going on here? Maybe a China

that is dealing with political discontent roiling beneath the surface of this authoritarian state. It's a fascinating question, Richard, and the honest answer right now is we don't know because we even need some people on the ground to tell us a lot more. But it does strike me that pandemic controls and China's pandemic controls are like nothing in the world. Let's just understand. When we say lockdowns, it bears no relationship to anything that we in North America experience. people were totally locked down, sometimes padlocked into their communities, inadequate food. And it went on for weeks and weeks, and people lost salary. So it was an order of magnitude different.

But even in moderate Canada, you know, vaccine mandates got people and trucks out into the streets to protest. There is something visceral about these rules. restrictions on personal freedom that I think is connected with politics, but different. It just evokes a response of fury. And what we saw, it was set on fire by tragic deaths in a fire where people thought that the people who died were walked in to their apartment building. And it's just like a damn burst. and really the courage that people have in China to come into the streets.

They are risking everything because their faces are recorded. But wow, this is just visceral. This is, first of all, before anything else, this is a warning to public health people. We need to understand differently what vaccine mandates and what restrictions and what lockdowns mean. and the limits of tolerance that people have, not only in democratic societies, but even in a rigorously authoritarian societies, to being incarcerated for weeks on end, frankly.

It's just an aside, but there was a report out of California about MRIs of teenagers' brains, pre and post, you know, lockdown. In fact, over the last two years, and there were demonstrable changes in their brain, in the relative size of different parts of their brain, and their brains had aged, in a sense, unnaturally versus what neurologists would expect of people that age

over a two to three year progression. So it is interesting to think that these lockdowns may be much more than just simply what we see, which are the physical and social controls. It's actually changing us. and who knows how far this has been taken, you know, in China with some of the most extreme policies in the world. I guess my pushback to this, I heard our friend Victor Gao, who's often a spokesperson for the Communist Party of China on the BBC this week. You can get a terrific monk dialogue of him in conversation with me on Taiwan on our podcast feed or website. But Victor made a point, you know, this is a country of 1.3 billion people.

and the fact that you have a few protests on a few streets in cities like Shanghai, where, let's face it, Shanghai has always been, to its credit, a kind of energetic, troublesome, much more liberalized, much more progressive part of China. So I felt the media coverage this week in the West was, once again, very Western. It was like, oh, look, they're like us. They're doing what we want them to do, what we would do, the march of democracy. democracy continues. You know, I agree.

I think people who imposed a Western, rights-based democratic frame on all this are probably missing 90% of the story here. These were people who were in push past the point of tolerance by being locked down and denied food and having their livelihoods threatened. And really interesting that, First of all, let's talk briefly about the scale rudyard.

People are calling this Tianan Square number two. Millions of people in 1989. Not in Beijing alone, over a million. Not so these are small, small demonstrations, number one. And when some of the protesters, a handful shouted political slogans, they were shut down by others in the street. No, stick to the point here. This is about changing.

zero COVID policy. And look, they've had an effect, as you said, in the introduction of Madrid, they have had an effect. Now, that was probably coming anyway. But this was a catalyst for the government to move a little bit. Interesting that the government in China has their kind of chief spokesperson on the Politburo responsible for the pandemic controls come out and kind of say, well, the virus is no longer as dangerous as it used to be.

and other, you know, virologists around the world are like, what? Unless you have a separate strain circulating China, I guess that's possible. But it's probably a big, bad old Omicron circulating there. So what happens here, Jess? You know, they can't really, it seems, afford to let this virus rip through their population. They have surprisingly low rates of inoculation amongst their elderly. And they are using, let's remind listeners, a Sino Farm vaccine that is not the Pfizer-Maderna cocktail.

It's based on older technology and arguably it's going to be less effective. So what happens here? Is this all just Kabuki theater and zero COVID continues on in some way or form? Or is China really going to take the Band-Aid off? Well, it's not Kabuki theater because the one thing, she does not want. there's a big funeral on Tuesday, too, of Shang Shigman. So the one thing that he does not want are these protests. That's his nightmare.

And they've got ease the policy because the economic consequences are terrible. This is a short-term problem, Richard, right? This is not a structural problem for China. It's short-term. First of all, the Sinoform vaccine prevents serious illness and death. That's what it does. It doesn't prevent infection, but neither do ours. Let's just get it.

is better than theirs at preventing infection. But there's good enough because their big problem is twofold. Their rural health care system is broken down of enough hospitals. Now, were they to lift all controls right now? There would be millions and millions of older people who have not yet been vaccinated swamped their health care system. And that's what the, but this is a short-term problem. Given the authoritarian controls in that society, he starts a drive to have,

vaccinate every older person over 55. How long is that going to take in China? Not long, right? And you add to that field hospital, but all sorts of there, they're great at standing up. So for everybody who thinks about the role of China in the global economy, there's a fix to this, contrary to a lot of what's being written. I saw the economists this week and other saying he's trapped. I don't agree. I think that's just wrong. But what this does say is, and I think it's interesting, there is a limit to intrusive surveillance, because that's what it is. It's intrusive. It's in your face surveillance, even in a country that deploys the kind of surveillance architecture that China does. Nobody is as intrusive as the Chinese regime.

Yeah. Does this, all of this, if you just look at it. the China that G is now facing in the opening days of his unprecedented third term here, it's a China that, as you say, is restive, suffering, laboring under these controls, which are as much political, frankly, as we know, as they are epidemiological. It's a China whose economy is knocked on its back feet. There are predictions out of the IMF of China growth at 3% for the coming year, not the usual six, which was already slow compared to the eight, nine, ten of the previous

decade. Do you think, Janice, that this moves up the timeline on something like Taiwan? I worry that, you know, societies and leaders that are often facing internal domestic unrest and stagnation often turn to an international competitor, to paint them as the source of all of their country's woes and to stoke nationalism, a fervor of nationalist mood and sentiment to redirect energy from criticizing within to attacking without. You're not wrong to worry about that. That is a pattern for sure that occurs, Roger. But my intuition here is that G really has his hands full right now. He's got to move off zero COVID. I think these are early indications.

And as I said, I think that could be done in six months, no longer. He has a very frail, if you complain about the real estate market in Canada, oh, wow, we should set you loose on the Chinese real estate market. It is far more trouble than ours. And in the middle of all this noise, the Chinese opened the spigots for banks to start to lend again, the preferential rates. state-owned banks to state-owned developers of real estate because they are again resorting to a pattern of stimulating real estate development in order to get all those promised apartments built. You know, apartments that Chinese people paid for this is their major investment and they aren't built.

He's got a ton on his plate, frankly, to stabilize the economy and more broadly to stabilize society. I go out on a limb here. Okay, let me give myself an easy one. Nothing will happen before the end of the year, but that's not fair. I actually think Taiwan is on the back burner for right now. Something like 70% of all Chinese wealth is tied up in the real estate sector. And I don't know, I have a different take on this. I think there's a clock ticking.

In fact, I urge listeners, check out. my monk dialogue in the last week with Kyle Bass, the kind of American China Hawk and investment hedge fund guru, fascinating guy, had a really interesting take on, you know, the economic kind of levers that could be pulled both by the Chinese and the United States should a conflict over Taiwan emerge. It's essential listening. I recommend everyone tune into it. But what I took away from that conversation, Janice, was that there are,

clock's ticking. And I think one of them is the Biden administration's final two years, that if you are, G, and you're sitting there looking at what is the moment of kind of maximum opportunity, it's one where you have a president who, you know, for better or worse, except as critics or not, is not politically powerful in the United States right now. You have a war in Russia, which is diverting massive amounts of U.S. ornaments. I've seen something like U.S. howitzer shells are down by like a third. And the problem is they can't make these anymore because the factories don't exist. So they're now going to defense contractors saying, you have to restart these old factories to make new howitzer shells.

And this could take five years. Yeah, but yeah. And the Europeans, I think, are starting to clue into this. The United States is making a lot of money on this war in Ukraine. But you put that together with G-Zone and internal problems. I agree. They may be a little too acute right now. But I don't know.

I think Kyle Bass could be right. One morning we could just wake up and there could be a Chinese blockade around Taiwan on the basis of, yes, large U.S. military shipments coming into Taiwan. I think there's a moment here where the Chinese just say, enough is enough. We're not going to allow you to send a surface to ship missiles, all kinds of serious heavy ornament into Taiwan to create a pillbox, you know, 100 miles off the coast of the mainland to assert what is an effect, you know, another choke point, limiting China's rise, curtailing their,

their sphere of influence in a way that the Americans would never accept in the Caribbean or even South and Central America. You know, Richard, I just think we in the West have different timelines than China does. They don't look at two years. They're looking past the Biden presidency. There's a reasonably decent relationship, reasonably decent, at the very top level between Biden and Xi Jinping. And what you saw at the G20 meeting in Bali was a kind of meeting of the minds between the two of them.

We're going to keep the lid on this thing, even as we're going to fiercely compete just below. That's my read of the next couple of years. And there's good communication between the two of them and directly under them. That doesn't change that they're going to go all at it, you know, on superconductors, on semiconductors, on semiconductors. and AI, which is in the pipeline and quantum. That's coming. But I think in China there is a much longer timeline. She is thinking 10 years out.

He's not thinking about the next two years. And by the way, he doesn't see much better coming down the road than Biden, frankly. This is a good president to have for G in comparison to DeSantis or a potential democratic alternative to Biden. He's not going to waste these two years. He's got a lot to do at home right now. So I'm more optimistic here. I'm determined to send a cheerful note here.

Okay, well, we got an informal bet. Two years, the clock is ticking. I think we're going to see some kind of standoff, stand down over Taiwan before the Biden administration is out. Let's take a break when we come back on the other side. We're going to go CanCon talk about Canada's troubled federations, some strange developments. both in the West, in Alberta, Quebec, something seems to be happening in terms of, I don't know,

those lofty ideals of federalism, of, you know, common Canadian citizenship, a sense of pan-Canadian unity. Wow. Boy, those seem almost like hoary concepts from a bygone time. We got that discussion for monk members and monk donors right after this break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt. of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, triple-w, the monkdebates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site.

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