When 'America First' meets 'China First'

0:00Scott Tong:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

0:22Yu Jie:It's clear the sanitizing of speech of the internet is more of a thing than years ago. And what it means is a lot of the only voices left online are the nationalistic ones. Scott Tong in China, for the first time in years, his first impressions upon returning? The air is cleaner, but online speech has also been sanitized.

0:55Yu Jie:it's monday may 11th and this is here and now anytime from npr and wvr i'm chris bentley today on the show what does china's xi jinping want from his summit with president trump well

1:11Scott Tong:I think there's one thing that Beijing wanted from both United States, as well as the rest of the world, the word of stability.

1:18Yu Jie:Also, Russian President Vladimir Putin says the war in Ukraine is potentially coming to an end. But it's unclear what that means on the ground.

1:28Scott Tong:Yes, he's certainly weakened and Russia is certainly weakened. It doesn't mean that it cannot go in this wounded condition for quite some time.

1:40Yu Jie:before we get to Russia though our own Scott Tong is in Shanghai ahead of that summit between Xi and Trump in the Chinese capital Beijing this week Scott used to live in China but it's been more than a decade since he's been back and he told Deb Becker it was obvious how much China has changed in that time as soon as he took a breath and my impression first impression in Beijing a couple days ago was, my goodness, the air is so good and the sky was blue. And Beijing, when I was living in China, never had that. Now, I have asthma, I have breathing issues, so I noticed this a lot. Beijing forever was notorious about smog and bad air.

2:21Yu Jie:A bunch of Western journalists, they left Beijing a decade ago, moved back to their home countries because the air was so bad. Now, the city has moved away from burning coal for electricity. They've moved at the big steel mills that were ringed around the city. And notably, they're really promoting electric cars. And all that's adding up to something. It also seems a little quieter in the streets. Some Beijing friends of mine say the drivers honk a little bit less. Still on the fence on that one.

2:50Scott Tong:So what about when you're meeting with people and you're out and about talking with folks? What is standing out to you?

2:57Yu Jie:Well, this is anecdotal, Deb, But I hear a confidence that I don't think I heard as much of back in 2010 before I left, moved back to the States. There are people who say directly, you know, China seems to be rising in the world. The world can't push us around anymore. That was long the complex in China. Beijing residents know President Trump is coming. And more than one person was not shy to say they think America's best days are behind it. Now, this is not everybody I've talked to. You know, others say, and this is empirically true, the economy in China is kind of wobbly. It's hard for young people to find jobs.

3:36Yu Jie:But I sense a tone, a shift in tone that life is getting better here in China, and certainly in many ways it is.

3:43Scott Tong:And what about technology and sort of daily life? How would you compare it to the U.S.?

3:51Yu Jie:The smartphone ability to do everything is so different here. There is no cash. There's no credit card here. You do everything on a single app here in China. So, you know, I bought a dumpling at a stall for 50 cents. I took the subway on the same app. I got a ride share, got food delivery. I could have traded stocks, you know, all on one of two homegrown Chinese apps. Now, it takes a while to sign up for these things if you have a foreign passport. If you don't have a Chinese phone number, it's kind of, it's a little tricky. So there's a digital moat you kind of have to swim across to get into this ecosystem.

4:32Yu Jie:Once you get in the castle, it's amazing, Deb. It's really something. And it does overlap. It does go to an emphasis by the Chinese government of self-sufficiency. They don't want to depend too much on the outside world for much of anything. And so this Chinese smartphone digital ecosystem, it's not brand new. It's new to me, and it's amazing.

4:54Scott Tong:And what about, though, openness, censorship, right? Those things that we also hear about. And how do you think folks treat you as a member of the U.S. news media?

5:08Yu Jie:Yeah. Censorship, absolutely true. Surveillance, absolutely true. Getting worse. Even before I got to China, several people I was planning to meet, to set up meetings, said, you know if you're using the domestic Chinese app don't say too much because it's being watched we can meet in person or you can use a VPN and an international app so there's a keen awareness of the digital surveillance machine in China one journalist in Beijing he told me that a lot of his friends artists, filmmakers, other journalists have left Beijing or left those professions because freedom of speech is so much of a smaller thing than even a few years ago.

5:50Yu Jie:And they tell me a lot more stories are just undoable in China. And you get in trouble, your stories get taken offline. So it's clear the sanitizing of speech of the internet is more of a thing than years ago. And what it means is a lot of the only voices left online are the nationalistic ones, the kind of pro-China jingoistic voices. and the Chinese voices who disagree, this journalist said, they're still here. They just stay silent.

6:26Yu Jie:Scott Tong. Scott has lots more on China's view of the U.S., including what a China-first strategy might look like after this short break.

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7:07Yu Jie:I'm in China today, where there is much anticipation ahead of the summit later this week. Chinese President Xi Jinping is hosting President Trump in Beijing. It's the first visit by an American president to China since 2017, when Trump came in his first term. Almost 10 years later, Beijing sees itself in a stronger position in the world, presenting itself as a reliable global partner, drawing a contrast to the United States. China is also seeking stability in its relations with Washington after damaging trade disputes last year, as it pursues a long-term goal of technological self-sufficiency.

7:44Yu Jie:Yu Jia has been thinking about this. She's a senior research fellow on China at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, in London. Yu Jia, welcome to the program.

7:55Scott Tong:Thank you, Scott, for having me.

7:57Yu Jie:You have studied for a long time what China wants in today's world. First of all, let me ask you, with this Xi Jinping-Donald Trump summit coming, Above all, what does Beijing want from this meeting?

8:11Scott Tong:Well, I think there's one thing that Beijing wanted from both United States, as well as the rest of the world, the word of stability. Essentially, China's own economic success, China's own foreign affairs, and also the importance of China's relationship with its neighbors. They all come back to one word of stability. And for now, what we have is that sense of low-intensity competition between China and the United States since President Trump came to power during the second term. So perhaps this summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump would be a perfect window to observe that sense of searching for greater stability of this bilateral relationship.

8:55Yu Jie:And stability, why? Is it to try to calm the waves as much as possible overseas to build the technology, the economy that China needs for the longer term?

9:11Scott Tong:Well, I think stability in two senses. The first sense of stability is China's own domestic political economy. And obviously, what we've seen so far is that Beijing introduced its latest five-year plan with much focus not exactly on growth generation, but more about how to secure China's economic resilience. So in a way, Beijing answered the question themselves of searching for stability. The stability that connected with the rest of the world in terms of trade, in terms of running an export-oriented economy, and the stability at home that is able to create some jobs for young people to make the party stay within power.

9:54Scott Tong:So that sense of domestic stability is much needed. Now, this domestic stability is also connected to the foreign affairs, that China's foreign policy now become an instrument of pursuing that sense of stability. This is the country that shares its borders with 14 different countries. And with every single country that China shared a border with, Beijing needs to find a way to peacefully coexist. Now, the second layer of foreign affairs stability also comes into that China's overall relationship with the rest of the world, and particularly with the collective West. Now, we know within the recent years that Beijing's relationship with the collective West is much fraught.

10:35Scott Tong:But I think for Beijing, the rivalry with the West, it cannot be overcome. It can only be managed. And hence, to manage that rivalry, to make this not out of control, is absolutely essential. It's absolutely important to search for that stability.

10:52Yu Jie:Yeah. Interesting the way you put it, kind of managing this rivalry in the world today. Of course, a big source of instability last year was the trade war from the second Trump administration. There's a bit of a truce between the two countries now, still uneasy. And a key moment is when China retaliated against the U.S. tariffs by cutting off critical minerals from China. And you've written that weaponizing supply chains is a key piece of the story here. Can you describe that?

11:27Scott Tong:I think what we can conclude is that really Beijing has learned this from the United States. That is to say, a sense of interdependence, something which we treasured in the past, in the heydays of globalization, is an advantage. But these days, a source of interdependence also become a country's vulnerability. Washington knows that very well. Hence, Washington has done that towards China in terms of imposing export control towards the semiconductor.

11:55Yu Jie:Right, cutting off top-level chips, yeah?

11:58Scott Tong:Yes, and also cutting off the supply of the critical minerals, not just with the United States, but also with Europe, with Japan. So I think Beijing realized the weapon or the trump card that Beijing can play, which determined the situation of the trade war of last year.

12:15Yu Jie:From far away, you know, the world sees a China that is leading in many economic technology categories. Batteries, of course, electric vehicles, renewable energy, advanced manufacturing, very impressive AI. The list is long. And you have said that this kind of falls under a basket, a priority of economic resilience for China. How does that feed into its, I guess, economic self-sufficiency?

12:43Scott Tong:Well, economic resilience and self-sufficiency are very similar things. Essentially, it is about managing the demand and supply in China's own hand. It's the world's second most populous country. The amount of demand and the amount of supply is enormous. And one thing Beijing, which is really obsessed about, is regarding control on its own supply chain, to have certain raw materials and also equipments that would enable China to produce things, but also the control regarding the market that would allow the rest of the world buying from China. So that sense of economic resilience both comes in the amount side as well as the supply side.

13:26Scott Tong:And I think Beijing has learned a quite pointing lesson from the previous round of trade war with the United States, that China will have to diversify its market. China will have to diversify its suppliers of food and energy.

13:43Yu Jie:So just stepping back finally, let me ask you about what China as a great power might look like. Say, if we look at a decade and imagine Beijing's good case scenario for being a great power in the world, what does that look like?

14:04Scott Tong:Well, if we have the slogan of America first, chanted by MAGA, and we would equally have a slogan, but also a strategy largely pursued by Beijing already, the so-called China first, that's really put its own economic interest right in the heart and center of its own economic management and microeconomic policy, as what Beijing has doing right now, the pursuit of economic self-reliance. Now, secondly, by being with China first, it is really about managing its foreign affairs with its closest neighbors, not to get entangled themselves with the global crisis far from its neighborhood, far from its shore.

14:47Scott Tong:Now, thirdly, I think also by largely applying for China first, it is essentially about how to manage its own economic transition, really from reliant property and export into something empowered by artificial intelligence, empowered by high-end manufacturing export. So I would say these are the three things that Beijing will become. A great power that is largely self-centered, look after its own national interest, and less interested in taking a global leadership role on every single major crisis that happen across the world. And Beijing will only do so very selectively if it is that conducive to its own domestic political economic development.

15:36Yu Jie:We have been talking to Yu Jie, Senior Research Fellow on China at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Yu Jie, thanks very much for the time.

15:46Scott Tong:No problem. Thank you.