Is China Leaving the United States Behind?

22:07What does Xi Jinping want from that meeting? Yeah, I mean, they're consequential because I think what China recognizes that for both systems, it's going to inhibit, you know, on the U.S. side, our appetite for taking competitive actions or doing things that could jeopardize those meetings. And so they know it gives them leverage because they haven't confirmed it on their side. So if things start to get hot, they can always say, well, maybe we won't, we won't do the meeting. And somebody is going to have to tell the president that his meeting that he seems very attached to could potentially go sideways because of something that happened at the Commerce Department or elsewhere.

22:39And their theory seems to be vindicated by events, right? There was reporting saying that Stephen Miller was going to be the commissar enforcing discipline on the U.S. side, that there would be no major competitive actions towards China. And I think that is what Xi wants, right? And I think this gets to a deeper imbalance in the relationship that really spans administrations, which is that the U.S. side often wants a laundry list of things from China, whether it's help with Iran during the JCPOA process, help on the North Korea issue, help dealing with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And from the Chinese side, I think they want us to get out of their way.

23:11And I think that is a win for Xi. There are other affirmative things that he wants. I think he would welcome greater access to the U.S. market. I think they know they still need U.S. technology and know-how. And so you do see elements of that. But even with that, they're being very coy about it right now. You see how this is playing out with NVIDIA, right? And there is a debate, is this just a negotiating tactic or is this real? And it's probably a little bit of both, in all honesty. They're not mutually exclusive. So I think that really gives China a lot of leverage. They want time. The point there being, they both seem to be signaling some desire for chips, but also then instructing companies to buy as few of them as possible.

23:48And that's the... Exactly. I think the divergence here is that the companies really want the chips because it makes sense for them from a business perspective. But I think there is some real hesitation among different parts of the of the apparatus, of the state apparatus about should we welcome it. And either way, it's proved to be an effective negotiating strategy, right? Because it seems like they're holding out for more and more advanced chips from the Chinese side. So it's just really interesting. So I think there's actually very little that they want from the administration at this point.

24:15We'll be back after a short break. What if you could explore places in the news like a reporter does? I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with the New York Times and BBC. And 16 years ago, I created the travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world. In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan, and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com. This September, Independent 20th Century presents more than 130 artists at the legendary Broyu building at 945 Madison Avenue.

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25:36That's foreignaffairs.com slash J-U-L-Y.

25:46And now back to my conversation with John Zinn. If you'll let me indulge in a flashback here, I'd love to go back a couple decades, I suppose, in your career when you were a CIA China analyst, I think watching Xi Jinping when there were not that many people doing so. This was before he had come to power. And you, again, were one of the people watching most closely as our understanding of who he was and what he would mean for China and the US-China relationship changed. I'm just really interested to hear how your understanding developed and when you started to see that this wouldn't be kind of continuation of what we'd come to expect from Chinese leaders earlier and why it took so long for the rest of the American system to really process that?

26:27Yeah, I mean, I think there was a real expectation. There were kind of two big expectations about Xi, I think, kind of in the public domain during that period was when he was heir apparent. I think one baseline expectation was that he might just be Fujintao 2.0. This is going to be another wonky technocratic guy who seems like a cipher from the outside and we don't really know a lot about him and he's just going to continue to pursue the dung legacy and then i think because so little was known about him there was also this other mode that you saw in some places where he became a vessel for some people's hopes that he would reinvigorate a reform agenda in china that had in many ways stalled under under fu jintao his predecessor when you had people on the Chinese side throwing around this term that whose rule had been a lost decade.

27:12They were really, you know, living off of the fumes of the reform efforts from the previous era in the late 90s and early 2000s under Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji. I think watching Xi closely, though, I think there were clear indications early on that this guy was going to be different. They were muted and they were subtle, but I think just the fact that he was a princeling, right, I think put him in a different position politically. I think he knew, had a better sense of the political system and how it was really wired in a way that, you know, neither Jiang Zemin had when he was thrust into the top job amid the Tiananmen crisis or Hu Jintao really did.

27:49And I think if there was any doubt during the period when he was the heir apparent, I think we very quickly got a taste within Xi's first year of office of just how different he was going to be. I think the challenge for a lot of people was just trying to keep up with him because he was breaking so many of the old rules of the game of Chinese politics by going after former Politburo, Standing Committee members, and Central Military Commission members. I mean, I think people kind of forget or kind of assume that this is a police procedural where there's corruption and then you pursue the corruption case to its natural conclusion.

28:19But that's not how it works in China. This is like going after made men and living to tell about it, right? Especially in the security services and the military. These are the guys who control the guns. They're at the heart of the party's control of the system. And I think when he started making those moves. I think that's when the ice started to break and people started to have this realization that the sky is not the same as what we saw before. And I think you saw a similar appetite for risk on the international stage too, right? Where he was making big muscle movements like the Belt and Road Initiative, or I think the one that really captured people's attention and imagination was what he did in the South China Sea.

28:51And I think that was when a lot of people who were not part of the China-watching community really had the realization, number one, that Xi is different. And number two, that when people say China is a long-term strategic challenge, this is what they mean, right? They have the capacity to make these big muscle movements that are inimical to U.S. interests. And I think that that was really when it became indisputable, right? In that kind of 2014, 2015 period that we were dealing with a different animal. I'm so interested in the kind of epistemology of this and realizing that when you were at CIA, you had access to signals and human intelligence that made this job easier in many ways, although probably harder in some ways as well.

29:32How you went about developing this picture and how much harder it's gotten now, not just because you're out of government, but because the opacity of the system, the lack of connectivity between the two societies. How do we develop these theories and what are the pitfalls in trying to paint that picture of someone where you don't get to spend a lot of time talking to them about their worldview? you? Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think the most important ingredient is just time, right? And just watching this guy for a long time. And I think the key thing is, in my mind, there's been kind of a cottage industry of people who are focused on she's utterances, which is appropriate and part of the Pekingology.

30:11But from my perspective, you've really got to watch what he does more than what he says and watch him over the years. Because I think there is kind of a certain logic and coherence to what he's doing. It's not just about the text, it's about the context. It's about what is he doing and why and what kind of system is he operating in. And so that is really one of the important ways to try to make sense of him. You know, to go back to that moment right after Xi took power, just to make it a little bit more concrete, and when he started making these big moves in the anti-corruption campaign, going after what the Chinese call tigers in their system, my operating picture of Xi Jinping is that it's like when an electrician comes to my house, right?

30:47He understands the wiring that's behind the wall, and he knows which wires he can clip safely and which ones are going to zap him, which I could not do, right? I would be zapped. And I think Xi as a princeling, this is part of his heritage. That's intuitive. He understands those networks in the system in a way that Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin wouldn't have. And this is why he's able to do it and do it safely and do it with impunity, right? But you kind of build out this picture over time as you watch him do these things and succeed in doing them or watching him recalibrate when he does hit some kind of roadblock, right?

31:19So I think it's less about evaluating any piece of data in a vacuum and more about building a composite picture of this guy over time. Because I think it's kind of a mistake to say, oh, well, he's just a cipher, he's inscrutable. This guy's been on the world stage for a long time. We actually know quite a bit about his background, his family history. And I think there's a lot you can say about him based on that. Did you have the chance to be in the room with him when you went from the intel side to the policymaking side in the Biden years? Yeah, I did. And unfortunately, you know, when I started at the NSC, it was still the throes of COVID.

31:53So a lot of those interactions were either telephonic or the Zoom where it happens kind of moment. So the one time I was really able to see him in person was when President Biden and President Xi met on the margins of the G20 in Bali in 2022, which was quite a moment for me as somebody who had spent my whole adult life studying this guy to actually see him in the flesh. What surprised you about seeing him to change your understanding of what he was like in any way? Not really, in all honesty. And I don't want to claim prescience, but he was very much what I thought he would be, right? And especially in that moment, keep in mind too, we did that meeting right after the party Congress where she had really cleaned house in the leadership, evicted every rump remnant of his former rivals faction inside the system.

32:36And it was really his own guys at the top. So he just exuded confidence. This is just after he had Hu Jintao marched out of the... Yeah, exactly. Hu Jintao is marched out. She looks on totally impassively, stone cold. And I think in that moment, he was feeling very large and in charge, right? And very good about himself and about his position. And so that confidence, I think, came through. And I think even in the way he comports himself and carries himself, I mean, you know, I've seen a lot, you know, many hours of clips of him, how he comports himself in these central committee meetings where when he gives a speech, he speaks in this kind of very slow, deliberate manner.

33:13He doesn't feel hurried. He knows everybody is hanging on his every word. And that's very much how he is in person too, right? That there's a certain confidence. I think what's striking about him too is that, again, I'm very mindful of the princelain heritage, right? The fact that his father was a big deal in their system. And he had these references that I think are kind of esoteric for most Western audiences about the Communist Party's history, very much front of mind, right? And I think he demonstrated a proclivity to frame things that way and to make analogies and say, this is like this moment in our history and in CCP's history.

33:46And so that was very unsurprising. So I think that sense of history and that sense of confidence, those were two important prompts in my understanding of Xi Jinping. And I think those were were in evidence in the in the opportunity I had to see him actually in action. And so he would be talking about CCP history and leaving Joe Biden just kind of scratching his head with confusion, I imagine. Well, my job was to make sure the boss wasn't scratching his head. it right. So hopefully there was none of that. But yeah, but I think unless you were a specialist or somebody who really focused on these things, I think there were some moments where these are not offhand references for a Western audience.

34:19You have a fantastic opening line in your fantastic essay in our November-December issue called China Against China, where you write, 13 years after Xi Jinping ascended to the top of China's leadership hierarchy, observers in Washington remain deeply confused about how to assess his rule. If we're getting him wrong now, if you're getting him wrong, how do you think you might be getting him wrong? If we're making a financial error right now, what would you be missing? So I think there's a few different ways. I mean, if the problems in the economy are much worse than we appreciate and there is some kind of really significant contraction in China's economy, that could be one way, right, where it kind of knocks them out of the running.

34:57But even then, I think there's probably a floor on it. I don't think there's going to be some kind of total collapse of the economy. I think they probably still will have the resources to, number one, get through it and be a formidable rival to the United States over the longer term. They just have that, I think, at this point. I mean, the one people always worry about, and I think especially in my line of work, is about the underlying stability of the system, which is hard to gauge from the outside. So it seems very robust. She has invested a lot in the security services, which people like Sheena Greitens have done a wonderful job documenting over time and Min Jin Pei.

35:31And so it seems very robust. And I think Xi has real confidence that he has a handle and a grip on the society. But that is always, you know, kind of the trillion dollar question about is there more fragility built in than we're seeing from the outside. But again, I think that they have a pretty good handle on things. And I think this is one of the ways in which we've gotten China more wrong than right over time. Right. I feel like people have been predicting the collapse of the CCP since I started doing this. And even if there is real decay in the system. Right. Rome didn't fall in a day. It takes time for these dynamics to play out.

36:05And I think she, again, one of the virtues that he has as a ruler is that he is not just focused on these problems in the system and their deficiencies. I think he is obsessed with them. They have studied closely what happened to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. And I think he is preoccupied from the first day of his administration about not going that way. Same thing with the Arab Spring, which happened right after he took over the number two job in the military. I think that really spooked him. And I think that's why there's been such a focus on rooting out corruption in the PLA, because I think a lot of these, not just analysts, but I think a lot of rulers in the Middle East thought that they had a strong grip on the security services and they had what they needed in place.

36:43And then that all just melted away in the face of mass protests. So I think that has fed Xi's preoccupation with the security services and with the military over time, making sure that that does not happen. You note this moment in the essay where she returns to Beijing to become Hu Jintao's number two to become the heir apparent from, remind me where he was prior to 2007. He was in Shanghai. He was in Shanghai at that point. Briefly. So he comes back and kind of sees a system that has succeeded in many ways, but where there's this kind of rot, there are problems of success. Describe that moment and what, as you understand it, he saw as these kind of vulnerabilities that had crept into the system over the preceding years.

37:25Yeah, I mean, I think the two big obvious ones, especially in retrospect, are really the corruption and then the insularity of the military in particular and what had happened there. So the corruption is kind of the obvious one. And the way I think about it is that there was this notion floating around in the West for a long time that as China experienced this economic growth, surely there would be a rising bourgeoisie or middle class that would want a greater role in Chinese politics. The irony is that the Chinese also appreciated this, right? And the party appreciated this dynamic too, which is why under Jiang Zemin, they had this very clunky ideological phrase, the three represents, where they basically co-opted those business elites.

38:02So they solved one problem and they solved it extremely effectively by bringing those people into the party and neutralizing that threat. The problem is, is that now you had this marriage of wealth and power inside the CCP that didn't exist before. And yes, corruption had always been a problem in China, endemic, and it had been a problem in earlier phases of the reform era. But I think this really accelerated it. And I think Xi knew that from being out in the provinces, and he probably got an extra view into it when he was in Beijing, because he would have just had kind of a stove pipe view of it, that it was bad here in Xiamen or it was bad in Fujian, but he would have had a bird's eye view once he got back to the top.

38:41And then I think with the military, there were obviously deeply rooted corruption issues within the military, but I think what may have been just as troubling, if not more so for Xi, is just how insular it is, right? Especially for somebody who grew up as the son of Xi Jiangshun, who had cross-cutting ties across both the party and military elite because he had been a leader in China's civil war, that didn't really exist. And I think Hu Jintao, throughout his tenure, he didn't have the network inside the PLA. He never really got his arms around it. And I think it's hard to appreciate from the outside, you know, the PLA, even within China's Communist Party, is kind of this sprawling, high-tech empire unto itself that's really impenetrable from the outside, right?

39:21There's no kind of oversight from Capitol Hill like we have in the United States. There's no army of think tankers who are military analysts and specialists the way that you have in Washington. There's not an office of the Secretary of Defense that's largely populated with civilians. There's nothing. There's really one node of civilian control, and that runs through the chairman. And if there's an heir apparent, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. And I think that was probably very troubling to Xi in a lot of ways. And I think, So because, again, because of that princeling heritage, I think he had insight into what was going on inside the PLA because of his network.

39:54Like there was a really famous speech at the time that was given by one of his fellow princelings where he said, you know, we've built a lot of impressive capability over the last couple of decades inside the PLA, but we have a real issue with corruption. And we're at a point now where only our own corruption can defeat us. And the shift from this kind of consensual collective leadership to much more centralized control under one person was Xi's attempt to, or a recognition that it would take that kind of stronger figure, that kind of assertion of dominance in order to break through these pathologies.

40:27Yeah, I think that's right. And there's this school of thought that there was a consensus that China needed a stronger leader, right? Somebody who had their hand more firmly on the Till. But, you know, I don't think the people who ended on the opposing side of that, right, were necessarily part of that consensus. I think Xi had an opening. And I think what he really did was take a crowbar to it and pry it wide open, right, and give himself a lot of space. And I think for a system like this, this is endemic. And I think I make the point in this piece, this is an observation that goes back to Aristotle about the way oligarchies function, right, that they tend to be subject to both centripetal and centrifugal forces.

41:01So when things get too loose and you're too much in this collective leadership, things start to stall, the system starts to stagnate. And the natural reaction is not to move towards a more Western liberal system with checks and balances. It's to go into the opposite direction, right? And to try to centralize power and clean house. So I think that impulse from Xi Jinping, I think it was there. And I think that there was a happy convergence in his mind of the party's interests and of his own interests. This is good for me. And it's also good for the party to concentrate this power in my own hand because having this loosey-goosey collective leadership approach is leading to rot.

41:35And I think some of that is actually built in, right? If your theory is that we're going to have this collective leadership model, we're going to have a, you know, kind of a balance of power at the top, what does that mean? It means you're going to have a more stove-piped approach. And the way you're going to have something resembling checks and balances on the top leader is that you're going to have this kind of factional infighting festering beneath the surface. And I think that's kind of what we learned. That's exactly what was going on underneath the hood during Ku Jintao's administration.

42:00So even that kind of collective leadership model is going to be inherently rickety in this kind of system. One of the really surprising but persuasive points in that essay is that the CCP, especially under Xi Jinping, has, quoting you here, demonstrated itself to be an incredibly effective learning institution. How did that come about and how does that learning work? It obviously doesn't have kind of democratic feedback, but it has found other ways to do that perhaps more effectively than we have? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it, this is part and parcel of the reform era, right? Where you have this effort to systematically study and break down problems.

42:37And I think this is, you know, where something like Joseph Terrigian's biography of She's Father is really helpful. You really get this sense of these major figures in the 80s. They didn't have a game plan. What they were doing was unprecedented in many ways. I mean, they had a little bit of a model from some of the other economies in the region that had developed, but they were really groping through this. I think it's really probably after the collapse of the Soviet Union, right, where there's this preoccupation and obsessive by the party about studying this moment over and over again and revisiting it and debating it to make sure that that does not happen to the CCP, kind of the last man standing, if not in an absolute sense, among communist powers in the world.

43:12How do we prevent that from happening? And so they do have this whole apparatus, I think a lot of it located at the Central Party School, but also throughout these other government-affiliated think tanks to think through these problems and to be deliberate about them and to study other systems and how they function and make sure that they are applying those lessons internally. And kind of, you know, to use their clunky phrase geology, they're sinusizing them. How do we take a little bit from here and there? And that's kind of been the story of their whole reform effort. How can we take what's worked on a Western factory floor and apply it here?

43:41How can we take a little bit of maybe what's worked in Singapore's political system and apply it here. And so they've been very methodical about doing that. And I think about institutionalizing a lot of that. After watching the failure of Putin's initial plan in Ukraine and coming to understand that he was surrounded by yes-men who would, you know, kind of nod along when he declared his intentions and not tell him how much rot there was and how much harder it would be than he thought. A lot of people assume that the same was true of Xi Jinping, that there was no one around him to tell him that an invasion of Taiwan might not work that well or that the economy was suffering as much as it was.

44:19Is it your sense that he gets good information and that people around him can tell him the truth about policies going badly? What's your sense of that dynamic to the extent we know? So my sense of him, again, I think this is as somebody who grew up in the system and took over the family business. I think he knows that he's going to get yes-mint, that when he looks around that room, everybody's going to tell him what he wants here. So my, again, my mental model from watching him over time, because we do see him recalibrate, and adjust policies over time is that he triangulates. It's not necessarily that he's getting good information, but I think he gets people in some kind of setting where they can maybe speak more freely or tell them what they think.

44:53And then he triangulates that. You know, if I ask one guy what he thinks about the situation, I ask somebody else, that's going to give me some kind of picture of what's actually going on, right? And you see this across, you know, among all kinds of shrewd politicians. This is kind of how FDR ran the bureaucracy during the New Deal in World War II, right? This kind of constant gamesmanship and triangulating. It's different in an authoritarian system, of course, right? And it's more intense. But I think that is part of how he operates, right? And I think that's what he tries to get. And what I've wondered about, especially as Xi's been in his third term, is because he cleaned house and brought in a bunch of people to the Politburo Standing Committee, who he's known not just for years, but for decades, that, you know, this is more comfortable.

45:33If you're Xi Jinping and you walk into that conference room for a standing committee meeting, you're looking around and you're seeing guys who are all your former you know aides at this point and that's much more comfortable you're not looking at lee kuch yang who was the potential alternative to you as the heir apparent and i think from their perspective too my theory about these guys is not that there's going to be some cinematic moment where they speak truth to power to the president in a closed door setting but they know how to talk to the boss and tell him things that might be uncomfortable right like i always think of that bbc show from the late 70s early 80s, yes, minister, right?

46:06So I've been calling these guys the, you know, they're the yes, but men. You know, yes, prime minister, this is a wonderful idea, but have you considered the following things that might delay us? Or maybe the timing would be better if we waited six months to do something like this. So that has been kind of my mental model of how he operates because he knows that that is a real risk, that everybody in the system is just going to tell you what you want to hear and that he wants to guard against that. And he's smart enough to want the right kind of people around him in some sense. Yeah, I think that's right.

46:34And I think for a normal person, this kind of constant improvisation and playing people off each other sounds exhausting. But I think Xi is a political animal and I think he kind of relishes it, right, would be my guess. You noted in the China against China essay how important the strike against the kind of insulator of the military and reforming the military was central to this project as Xi Jinping saw it. You also wrote a great piece with John Culver last year about the purges in the PLA. We saw another set of these just in the last few days. How significant are the latest ones and what's your theory of what's driving this?

47:07I think they are quite significant and they're potentially a seismic shift in Chinese politics under Xi's rule. And the reason for that is that when this anti-corruption campaign got underway, the focus was really on Xi's potential rivals, right? People who had been the incumbents of the system and allowed all this graft and corruption to fester, right? The people who had guarded the PLA for a long time from any kind of oversight from the party. And we've seen this shift. And again, this gets to the point about how do you do this kind of analysis? A lot of it is about contextualizing it and seeing it not just in a vacuum, but as part of a longer narrative arc.

47:39So that's how Xi starts his anti-corruption campaign. And then he moves in his third term, I think somewhat surprisingly, given how much he cleaned house, to focusing on people who he appointed to this position. But I think a lot of times his connection to them was kind of tenuous. And I think from Xi's perspective, again, it's like a mob boss. I made them, I can break them. They were disposable. So if there's an issue or there's corruption, he can get rid of them and just move on to the next person safely. This is without it being a threat to his power or reflection that there's something deeper going on.

48:08Now, with the removal of Zhang Yuxia, we're really entering a different space. And I think it's almost Shakespearean what's happened because Zhang Yuxia, I mean, they have a relationship that goes back to their fathers. They were comrades in arms in China's Northwest during China's civil war. This is somebody that she has probably known for decades. And I think until recently, I mean, we didn't just have historical evidence, but more recent evidence that she really seemed to trust this guy. At the last party Congress, he made an unusual move to keep Zhang around past the retirement age and bump him up and make him the top vice chairman on the Central Military Commission.

48:42I mean, I think that was kind of probably the greatest sign of trust. This makes him essentially the top uniform. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, he had been kind of the second ranked vice chairman in the last go around. And so then he gets bumped up. So it's not just that Xi has him stick around. He gives him a bump up and makes him the top uniform member of the brass, right? So a real sign of Xi's confidence in him. And, you know, my theory about how Xi Jinping was operating in his third term is that if you think of Chinese politics like a solar system, where Xi Jinping is at the center of it and everybody else is in his orbit, my theory was there was an inner circle that was inside the asteroid belt.

49:18And I would put almost all of the Politburo Standing Committee there and then Zhang Giosha in the military. And then for these other people who he had gotten rid of, like the defense minister, the foreign minister, these guys were kind of outside of the asteroid belt, right? And he could safely get rid of them. But now Xi has gone after somebody inside that asteroid belt, right? And so the question that's been on my mind that I am thinking through in all honesty, Dan, is that I think, you know, there's two ways to interpret this. It's either, I tend to think that Xi is just ruthless and rational in how he goes about things, right?

49:50That there's a certain method to what he's doing. It's not capricious. It's not arbitrary. It's kind of like the electrician metaphor I used earlier, right? He's very circumspect about how he goes about doing this. And this could, in some ways, I think this is my inclination, this could be the ultimate illustration of Xi's sang-froid, right that nobody is safe i will go after you even if we if the relationship goes back to our parents but i think given what's going on gone on too i do i do wonder a little bit in the back of my back of my mind is this kind of a psychological shift are we seeing she shift more toward a paranoid autocrat mode because he's going after people who are so close to him and if he doesn't trust them who is he going to trust inside the system i'm hesitant to say that but again that's I want to be transparent about how I digest something like this and how I think it through and try to assimilate it into the mental model that I have of Xi Jinping over time.

50:43That's fascinating because, I mean, in the piece earlier, and I think in your writing generally and speaking publicly generally, you've been somewhat averse to the tendency among a lot of analysts here to interpret these purges as signs of kind of insecurity or lack of trust in the military. But you see in some ways it turning into some slightly warped version of that in this latest phase potentially. Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think he's worried about his own personal grip necessarily. I mean, I think he's demonstrated that he's got a firm grasp of the military. I think the challenge for Xi is that I think he probably doesn't feel like he's getting what he wants from these guys, right?

51:17And that's why he's had to clean house so thoroughly. And I think that's one of the things that's really striking. It's not just that, you know, there's one uniformed officer left standing on the Central Military Commission. It's that if you look one level down at the people who might replace them, who are one great level down in their bureaucracy, a lot of those people are gone too. You know, this makes the Roman decimation system look quaint. Does it affect in any way the risks of some kind of precipitous action on Taiwan in coming years? I don't think so. I actually have been turning this question on its head.

51:46I actually think that Xi feels pretty good about the cross-strait dynamic right now. And I don't think it's driving him to clean house, but I think it makes him feel that he can do this with confidence, without too much concern. Because if you look at that dynamic in particular, the Trump administration doesn't seem to be overly focused on Taiwan. It doesn't even get a mention in the recent national defense strategy, right? And President Trump has made a number of comments about Taiwan that show a lack of firm commitment. Number two, President Lai Jingdeh in Taiwan is in political trouble, right?

52:16He had this recall campaign over the summer that failed. His party's in tough shape. And number three, there's going to be an election in 2028, which is going to be a year into Xi's fourth term. And the opposition KMT is making very favorable comments about Beijing. So if I'm looking at this from Xi Jinping's perspective, this feels like a relatively safe time to do what I need to do to renovate the high command and do something that's kind of complex and politically tricky to pull off internally. And I think it's because he has that sense of urgency. He wants them to get there. And I think even as impressive as the PLA modernization has been over the last couple of decades, he still feels like they're not.

52:52But that this is a moment where he will not need to order a cross-state invasion in the next year because of developments in Taiwan or shifts in U.S. policy so we can afford to do it now. Yeah. And I think this is the real paradox of following the PLA in particular is that, yes, there's this real corruption. There is this real operatic drama at the top of the system. But yet we don't see kind of a diminution of their modernization program from the outside. And even in their operational tempo, right, after they announced the, you know, finalized the purges of all these senior officers at the party plenum last fall, then they conducted a major exercise around Taiwan just in the closing weeks of 2025.

53:27So they're still able to pull off a massive exercise like that, even with all this churn at the top of the system. I want to go back to some of the tech issues that we talked about a bit earlier. This from the Biden administration, but I think also more broadly in the US-China dynamic, tech and AI especially has been really the kind of center of how we think about competition. How does China understand what that competition means? And how do they, when they do a kind of net assessment of where the two sides are? How do they see things? I think they see the U.S. side as still ahead in some key areas, and I think they recognize that.

54:00And again, I think they're probably frank about that internally and about figuring out reverse engineering, literally, what is it that we need to do, right? That's why they're making such a big push on semiconductors and these other areas where we have the lead. But I think what's really striking when you look at the five-year plan documents that came out of the last plenum is that there's a real mismatch between the two sides and how we're handling the tech competition. I feel like here in the United States, there's kind of this AI myopia, right? And if you look at even our own internal economic numbers from last year, I mean, there was this one stat Derek Thompson had that the build out of data centers contributed 50 % of economic growth in the first half of 2025 alone.

54:39What's striking when you look at the party's approach to these issues is that they have more of a portfolio approach. It's diversified, right? So they are focused on AI, but again, they're focused on deployment of it as quickly as possible, getting it out onto the manufacturing floors. And it's kind of become a cliche now in China Watching Circles, whereas we're looking for God in a box. And that's just on AI, right? Like, they're focused on how do we apply this and how do we increase our productivity? And I think there's not just the same overriding focus on AI. There's also the focus on green technologies and green vehicles, which of course has gone away in this administration, and robotics as well.

55:14And you see a little bit of that in the United States, but I think there is this real intense focus on hard tech, right? And about manufacturing capacity. And that's very explicit from the top of the Chinese system. And so this is something that I worry about, bracketing the issue of the export controls that's gone on in this administration. But do we have the right kind of approach to dealing with this issue wholesale? And are we looking at the right suite of technologies? Or are we just buying, in effect, the things we want rather than the things we need. The export control shift does seem quite significant, as you've written about, certainly, that we used to talk about export controls as this kind of sacrosanct space that we would never trade away for anything.

55:54And the effective use of leverage over critical mineral supply by China and the concessions by the U.S. in response to it does seem like a paradigm shift in some sense. Yeah, I mean, I feel like what we've done is we've shifted from a policy of export control to one of export promotion, right, where we're beseeching China now to buy not our frontier technologies or our frontier chips, but the penultimate ones. And it's really flipped. And what's striking to me, just in terms of the tactics of negotiating with China, I mean, we've made these offers on NVIDIA's H200 chips at the end of last year in exchange for nothing.

56:27We didn't get some kind of concession that's detectable from the outside. So there's the problem first of, number one, negotiating over things that we had long considered part of our national security. But number two, if you are going to open the negotiation, you better get something really good for it. And I'm not persuaded that we really have in the process. So I think it's really disconcerting. And the export controls, I mean, they're challenging. There's a lot of debate about them. But from my perspective, ultimately, it's not a question about whether or not they are the ideal tool or not.

56:56It's a question of what's the alternative, right? And if you really accept the premise, which I think most people do at this point, that we are in some kind of long-term strategic competition with China, then why would you sell them your most advanced technologies? Like, what is the real alternative to that. I mean, this theory that we're going to get them addicted somehow and that that's going to give us leverage, that seems to carry greater risk than the risk of equipping them with our most advanced technologies. This would be the kind of Jensen Wang and I think David Sachs in the White House would probably say the same thing.

57:24Yeah. And this is what I worry about, too, is that we're landing in the worst of all possible worlds. We've gone about doing these export controls. It stimulated the Chinese system. They already had pretty considerable efforts underway on this, but to really double down and reinvigorate or further invigorate those efforts. And now they're not interested. And now we've explicitly said the quiet part out loud, too, that the goal is to try to get them addicted. So why would they go about doing this? And this is illustrative of my broader concern of where we're at now in terms of our China policy.

57:51I feel like we're stuck. We've gone far enough down the path of competition with China that we can't really go back to the earlier era focused on commerce and comedy. Right. But the things we need to do in order to compete with China effectively over the long term, I think there's a real hesitation to go there, both because of the leverage that China's accrued over time, but I think also the hard reality is that great power competition is going to be expensive. I mean, the global war on terror was expensive. This is an order of magnitude of a greater challenge and more multifaceted. And I think that's hard, and I think people haven't really come to grips with that.

58:26This is a question that I ask in, I think, almost every episode at this point, but I'm still kind of flummoxed by it. On the critical minerals front, on the rare earths front, it is rather stunning to think that it's been 15 years or so since people in the U.S. national security world were focused on the risk here and saw what China was doing to develop leverage and our own inability to develop our own supply, even though that's technically possible. How do you account for that failure and what's going to change it? Do you have any sense that we have finally gotten serious about this? Yeah. So two thoughts on this.

58:57One is that I think it's actually illustrative of the broader deficiencies in our China policy over the last 20 years or so, right, where we've been slow to recognize the problem. And even when it's right there staring you in the face, we have not moved with alacrity to remedy the underlying problems. I think this is true on critical minerals, but it's also true, I would argue, on dealing with the PLA's military modernization. the last assessment from a bipartisan commission of the previous national defense strategy said for you know we've been saying for years now that china is the pacing challenge for the u.s military and it says they are out continuing to outpace us in a growing number of domains and negated many of our advantages in the western pacific so it's not that people haven't realized it it's that it's been very challenging for us to do what she has done so effectively say here's a problem here's a challenge to our interests and then marshal the institutions to try to remedy this.

59:50Now, I think on critical minerals, I think part of the conundrum is it's challenging for our government to do this. We're not designed for industrial policy, right? It's not even, it's not clear who is going to be the focal point of this, right? Are we going to have state-owned enterprises do this? We can do public-private partnerships. Who manages that, right? It's a little bit easier in the defense space, which is, I think, why the administration went there. But we're kind of late to the game. And I'm worried that for this effort, I think the administration deserve credit for focusing actual resources on this issue now at this point.

1:00:21But I do worry it's going to be too little too late. Even if you look at the case of Japan, where they have METI and they are equipped to conduct industrial policy, and they have been focused on this since 2010, I think they've gone from 90 % reliance on China for rare earths down to 70 % after 15 years. And I think it just underscores this idea that the administration has. And I think some people think this, that yes, we have to hit the pause button now. We've been checkmated so we can get our act together, remedy these deficiencies that we have, this dependency that we have, and then we can refocus on competition.

1:00:54I think it's going to be hard to do that. You know, this is not a this year problem or even this administration. This is going to be much more challenging. And this is just one area where China has this kind of chokehold on our supply chains. If you were going to suggest some lessons for the United States based on the Chinese experience and Xi Jinping's experience turning his own party into a learning organization, as you say in the essay, what would those lessons be? What should we learn from Chinese success here? I think what I'm really struck by is that I think in the broader foreign policy community, I think there's a pretty decent consensus on what we need to do.

1:01:29I think across administrations, there's been talk about refurbishing the defense industrial base. There are stacks of reports about the critical mineral problems and the rare earth problem. But what I'm really struck by and frankly frustrated by is that there's a real disconnect. We all finally have kind of a shared diagnosis of the problem or most people have a shared diagnosis of the problem. And we even have some pretty good prescriptions on the table about what to do about this. But there seems to be a disconnect about how do we move from point A to point B? How do we pivot to Asia? We've been talking about this for a long time.

1:02:00Some people are ready to put a toe tag on the effort. How do we refurbish our defense industrial base? How do we build up some of the power that we lost? Can we even do that at this point? And again, these are thorny bureaucratic issues, but these are also, like I said before, expensive problems to deal with too. And I think that is part of the hesitation about how do we get there. It brings to mind the fantastic last line of that essay, China Against China. You write, misreading Xi Jinping is ultimately part of the failure to address the problems facing the United States itself, which I think is a really powerful closing point.

1:02:31So, John, thank you so much for doing this, for this slew of pieces. I think we've got more coming from you soon, so readers can look forward to that. Thanks so much, Dan. I really appreciate it.

1:02:45Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreignaffairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Ben Metzner, Rachel Powell, and Kanesh Therroer. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Irina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning in.

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