Pride & Shame: The Roots Of US-China Tensions | When Titans Clash | Ep 1/4 | CNA Documentary

china's rampant theft of intellectual property is real about financial war with us the sparring between the united states and china has taken a new twist with student visas now in the firing line the conflict with china will outlast the trump administration the root causes of the conflict stretches back decades they blame china's entry into the wto as being responsible for the loss of their jobs and their communities what happened to the factories they used above everybody downsized they split for china the reason for mistrust even goes back to the last century foreign shame and anger bite on both sides of the conflict we talk about this being the land of opportunity and if you're poor this is not the land of opportunity this is the land of a very deep funnel that you've fallen in and you're trying to climb back up and there's no handles [Applause] [Applause] [Music] my son he's 21 his best friend had just passed away people were blaming china there's no end in sight in terms of the damage to the economy to jobs and what do you do do you blame yourself for not taking it seriously or do you find a scapegoat and china is a convenient scapegoat [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] in the sega deal sally foreign shoes tensions with a foreign power has made the chinese more patriotic than ever this doesn't just stem from current geopolitics it has deep roots in patriotic education [Music] is um [Music] [Music] foreign when it comes to patriotic education there is one site in china that is essential for every school child yuan min yuen every year tens of thousands of chinese visit what they regard as a crime scene the destruction of the yuan ming yuan palace in 1860 during the opium war continues to hang over relations between beijing and the west [Music] is regarded as china's ground zero the looting of countless valuables by invading french and british forces and then the decision by the english forces to burn it to the ground is part of mandatory lessons for every [Music] chinese [Music] to help people imagine in its full glory her yen and her team has been working painstakingly on the digitization project for the last 20 years [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] when the communist party took power in 1949 it proclaimed an end to the century of humiliation the visit of nixon in 1972 changed the trajectory of modern china and how it engaged the west in 2001 with the support of the u.s china joined the world trade organization bilateral trade boomed even chili sauce made in china found its way to american homes by allowing china to integrate into the global economy it left 800 million people out of property so i think china has indeed benefited tremendously from the stability fostered by the u.s in the post-cold war era [Applause] i think the beijing olympics signaled china's arrival as a global power and it was evident for those of us in washington watching the drummers that this was a new kind of power 2008 i think historians will look back on it as a consequential year in part because of the beijing olympics but also because of the global financial crisis [Applause] [Music] now vice president at the time who was the vice premier in charge of finance and trade with the us basically lectured the u.s side you know we china thought you washington and new york knew how to run a modern economy we china were figuring out different aspects of our economy and our financial system based on what you guys were doing and now because of your mismanagement the whole world is in crisis [Applause] you are no longer able to teach us you are no longer a teacher and we are no longer a student in the next decade the sense of patriotism and pride that the chinese felt kept step with economic growth [Music] and this patriotism reached a fever pitch in 2019 [Music] the 70th anniversary of the founding of the people's republic of china was marked with great fanfare china had a lot to celebrate [Music] millions lifted from poverty futuristic cities a wealthy middle class and a global belt and road initiative that saw massive projects flying the chinese flag everywhere from russia to myanmar to africa [Music] but as china celebrated voices of descent were building in hong [Applause] [Music] [Applause] kong for the chinese leadership there was one country in particular to blame for the unrest in hong kong foreign [Applause] [Applause] foreign oh october 1st 2019 as mainland china celebrates the 70th anniversary of communism rule hong kong is shaken by protests as events escalated the u.s and china clashed over beijing's new national security law in hong kong washington criticized beijing's move to undermine hong kong's freedoms and autonomy while beijing accused washington of interfering in its internal affairs [Music] the trade war already made america seem an adversary to china in 2019 the american response to events in hong kong was like adding oil to fire in july 2020 the signatures of more than 1.65 million hong kong residents were submitted to the u.s consulate general to express opposition to american interference in hong kong affairs [Music] stanley ung is the president of the hong kong federation of trade unions the organization is the largest labor group in hong kong with over 410 000 members he led the protests at the u.s consulate [Applause] [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign stanley ung's views are consistent with what has been expressed by government leaders in beijing in 2019 the public security ministry in china told the police it must prevent a color revolution but opinions in hong kong are deeply divided over whether the u.s had a role to play in the city's troubles the u.s actually supports all any sort of any democratic movement in the world because that's their awareness they different democracies they are the best model in the world so they do get some moral support from the united states many people have that backhand theories and that all that may be a secret government probably the united states behind all the movement but if you chase all the resources of the protesters or the money they have or the supplies they have they are mostly coming from the people itself the people of hong kong because nowadays with the digital economy with all the internet all the technologies they can do the counselors and when you look at all the evidence or the news report or even from the reports of the government itself there is no evidence that the u.s are doing any concrete action to push for that protest or so-called kind of revolution in hong kong i think if you do a public opinion survey i think very few of them will believe that there's a bad hand particularly the us government behind the whole movement as debates still continue on whether or not the u.s had a hand in the unrest in hong kong the u.s in response to the national security law ended the special status that it granted hong kong in diplomatic and trade relations it also imposed sanctions to officials over their roles in cracking down on political dissent megocock [Music] even as the titans continue to trade blows over hong kong taiwan has become another flashpoint in 2020 the u.s enacted laws that allowed u.s warships to make port calls in taiwan and arms sales from u.s to taiwan increased with a high profile ceremony at the launch of a joint f-16 fighter jet maintenance center in taiwan in august 2020 this center is the first f-16 service facility in the indo-pacific region all of this is remarkable because washington once did all it could to downplay its military exchanges with taipei to avoid infuriating beijing [Applause] on the part of china an unusually high number of chinese military maneuvers near taiwan is increasing tension women [Applause] tv the united states superpower world's biggest economy home to the world's most powerful media and internet companies there are many things that americans can be proud of all of which was built on its industrial backbone but america has been grappling with something for two decades now de-industrialization [Music] [Music] dayton ohio is one city in america's rust belt with a long heritage of manufacturing [Music] [Laughter] what what happened to the factories they use the pup everybody downsized they just split they employed everybody for years and then they just i don't know what really happened they just paid them to retire and let them go and just that was it that's that there's your severance pay it's [Music] over is the place someday i'll return to my dad worked for general motors and my mom was like a real estate agent and they really brought home the idea that if you worked hard that you'd be able to do well in this country and so my brother's an attorney now in cincinnati and here i am the mayor of the city of dayton so uh you know that whole idea of the american dream played out well now it's lost on the waves of time far from the shores of this life gone baby gone [Applause] [Music] this kind of fell apart really i think in around the early 2000s this contract broke with the loss of manufacturing jobs that were slowly trickling in dayton the thought process in the second half of the 20th century was you work hard you play by the rules your children will reap those rewards and that's really what the american dream is for the first time in our country what we're experiencing is that's not the case uh you know children of families aren't doing better than their parents and i think that's the broken the broken dream that's happening right now from 2001 to 2007 the dayton metro area lost almost 23 000 jobs nearly one in three local manufacturing jobs vanished as that happened the poverty rate here climbed to 34.5 nearly three times the poverty rate nationwide how did dayton get here at one point it was considered the silicon valley of its age [Music] this community we were known as a city of one thousand factories we were producing all manner of different types of things we led the nation per capita in terms of the number of u.s patents issued there was really a spirit of innovation and creativity here [Music] dayton was where aviation was invented wilbur and orville wright really taught themselves how to fly while flying above an old cow pasture in dayton ohio in many real ways this is the world's first practical airplane dayton was where the cash register was invented every one of these registers was built every piece and every part of it built close by our museum at the national cash register company factory here in dayton ohio factories here manufactured stoves refrigerators bikes cars trucks you name it for much of the 20th century dayton ohio was the place to be if you were looking for a job and looking for a way to to get ahead by the time the 1990s and 2000s are rolling around we see a lot of our large corporations in this community starting to struggle to understand why what happened 20 years ago continues to reverberate in american politics today we need to turn back the clock to 2001. that year the u.s government supported the motion that china be allowed into the world trade organization [Applause] opening the economy of china the agreement will create unprecedented opportunities for american farmers workers and companies to compete successfully in china's market by bringing increased prosperity to the people of china as factories moved overseas some estimates were that 5 million manufacturing jobs were lost economists thought it would be temporary but some communities never recovered from the shutdown of these factories from 1997 which was a high water mark by the united states has lost about 5 million manufacturing jobs which is between 25 and 30 percent of the total entire industries have been wiped out sectors such as textiles apparel furniture also large segments of the electronic industry a lot of the trade deals that have been executed over the last 25 years have put america at a competitive disadvantage i think in the case of china what i would say is like what many people would say is just in sheer numbers you know the chinese population is so much larger than the u.s population i think one person uh at a at an educational conference i was at that put it best when they said china has more advanced learners than we have learners and so if you're involved in trying to find jobs you know at one point the chinese government was trying to find jobs for approximately 20 million chinese per year well 20 million is about the population of the entire state of ohio [Applause] globalization is necessary and it's going to happen but unlike other countries like germany or other other countries that protected their worker of the american government did not and the hollowing out of the middle class that has really happened over our country over the past 20 30 years has really sown this anger in communities across the midwest these workers find themselves in places like walmart working at minimum wage with no benefits and their children have no benefits likewise these factories were often the most important part of the tax base so income tax revenues go down as a result the communities themselves decay they have to lay off teachers police firefighters so it's become a well-known process of what's called the the rust belt the evolution of the rust belt here in the united states [Music] every manufacturing job in the united states supports about 1.7 additional jobs upstream and the supply chain these are people that provide services like law and accounting and when the plants go many of those jobs go with them [Music] here at house of bread the number of people seeking aid has been increasing steadily every year we are what's known as a community kitchen and by that we mean that we offer a place for people in our local community to be able to come seven days a week to be able to receive a free nutritious lunchtime meal we were seeing a huge increase in families coming into us in around 2005 2006. what poverty looks like in in dayton is of the 200 plus people that we're serving every day here about 40 percent of our guests are homeless and i mean street homeless some people have housing but it's not the suburbs that you think of it's housing where there may not be running water there may not be a working refrigerator there may or may not be a working stove it's houses that are next to other houses that that are boarded up that are not you know habitable but you may have squatters in because people need a dry place to sleep [Music] it's disheartening honestly that in in america you know in our country that that we really allow anyone to lack the basic resources we talk about this being the land of opportunity um and if you're poor this is not the land of opportunity this is the land of a very deep funnel that you've fallen in and you're trying to climb back up and there's no handles and you know really shame on us as a country for not really being able to address that issue the factors driving what i would call u.s child tensions they've been around for many many years there's a general perception of the american public that america is losing jobs to china the middle class feels like they're suffering because their wages have not gone up so you basically have what i call this middle class revolt an anti-globalization spirit in the sense the trade integrating with the global economy symbolized by china somehow has depressed the welfare of americans and china is basically the target it's so big its economy is now the second largest in the world so this sentiment has been building up for what i would call seven or eight years and then came the 2016 elections trump went to these rust belt towns and ran a campaign targeting china we can't continue to allow china to rape our country when president trump ran in 2016 he cited a number of the papers that i had written about job sauce due to china trade and he used those aggressively in the campaign he came across as an outsider somebody who was going to be the bull in a china shop and shake up washington and working people like that image they want somebody strong who's willing to fight with the powers to be they blame china's entry into their wto as being responsible for the loss of their jobs and their communities ohio voted for trump in the 2020 elections from the time when china joined the wpo in 2001 throughout to the end of last year china has gained in total 13 trillion gdp increase and the u.s over this period has gained 11 trillion the total pie have grown essentially at a similar size the problem really is how the pie is being distributed in the u.s the top one percent of the whole population has a similar amount of wealth uh as the bottom of 90 percent of population so that just gives you idea how lopsided to the distribution of wells that the u.s has has experienced and so you can't really blame china for how the pie is being cut in the united states right studying the effects of trade is a complex matter what would a company such as apple have done without low-cost chinese assembly workers without china would manufacturing have moved out to india mexico and southeast asia anyway what about the robots and fancy machines that had supplanted workers globalization is going to happen and automation for sure is happening across the world but for me it's really about how america decides to protect its workers and that's i think the most important thing in our relationship with china as heated debates continue about whether china was to blame for america's economic woes a pandemic tears through the country [Applause] millions of americans have been infected with the coronavirus and hundreds of thousands have died even before the current crisis erupted the sino-american relationship was on life support but the pandemic may have sounded its death now [Music] sales were probably down at least 75 percent economic impact disaster loan has been a great help of keeping me afloat without that i probably would have been one of the ones you would have seen that shut down as well i think i may be able to hang on to september or maybe a year and that's mainly because of the fact that i owned the building i was into the 14th year of a 15-year mortgage now imagine if i was into the fifth year of a 15-year mortgage we may not be having this conversation last count i heard statewide it was like 700 bars and restaurants were shuttered due to the coronavirus and i know that every other day in pittsburgh you name it you're just hearing them every day that's disclosing unfortunately most people they usually waited a couple months too late to close up where they're usually really upside down by the time because their emotions is into it and their heart is into it so usually by the time they close up they they're forced to close up like the debt is like insurmountable at that point [Music] my son he's 21 his best friend had just passed away a week before his 21st birthday he had passed away from coronavirus i got a cousin who was in the hospital for about seven days of with the coronavirus he was a he was on oxygen never made it to the ventilator [Music] people were blaming china i think everybody felt as though china wasn't being on the up and up when they got their very first outbreak according to a pew research center survey 73 percent of u.s adults say they have an unfavorable view of china 78 also placed a great deal or fair amount of the blame for the global spread of the krona virus on the chinese government's initial handling of the kovit 19 outbreak in wuhan around 1 in 4 describes china as an enemy of the u.s [Music] the timing of the warnings that came from china to the world is a matter of dispute between china and the us that is unresolved china state media produced a clip around this targeted at an english-speaking audience december strange pneumonia cases reported roger that january we discovered a new virus it's dangerous don't wear a mask stay at home amidst the heartache and destruction the politics of blame has taken root trump was saying that the virus was not serious he would go away in a matter of a few days that hasn't been the case and there's no end in sight in terms of the damage to the economy to jobs and what do you do do you blame yourself for not taking you seriously or do you find a scapegoat and china is a convenient scapegoat to add insult to injury china claims to have just had about 85 000 cases and less than 5 000 deaths in a nation of 1.4 billion the u.s has a death toll that's more than 60 times over [Music] in the months leading to the elections both biden and trump have taken out advertisements blaming china i would be on the phone with china and making it clear we are going to need to be in your country you have to be open you have to be clear we have to know what's going on but trump rolled over for the chinese he took their word for it the president tweeted china has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus all the negative ads in the world can't change the truth china is going to eat our lunch come on man they're not bad folks folks the election may be over but for many the reckoning will continue [Music] i blame the the president on down i mean start at the top everything's the governor's fault because he has to make these hard decisions whether that's about schools opening up or bars remaining closed and if it would have just came a uniform decision i'd like to see us go to me personally through a complete shutdown to try to uh to try to get a hold on the virus i would have liked us to mirror some of the methods of wuhan china and they get a hold of this virus and baby be on a total lockdown but the way people lost their minds about wearing a mask and the freedom not to wear a mask you've got the original tensions between the us and china because of uh american concerns about china's economic model and then you've got the pandemic which comes along and from washington's perspective china hid the information and then you've got an election campaign in which the president needs to look tough and you've got hawks within the administration so those variety of factors push the us to push extremely hard on china what i'd make china do is play by the international rules we are making sure that in order to do business in china you have to give all your intellectual property you have to get a have a partner in china is 51 we would not do that at all number one number two we're in a situation where china would have to play by the rules internationally as well when i met with xi that and when i was still vice president he said we're setting up air identification zones in the in the south china sea you can't fly through them i said we're going to fly through them we just flew b-52 b-1 bombers through it we're not going to pay attention they have to play by the rules there is little doubt that u.s china tensions of some sort will continue this is sort of the long-term you know major geopolitical battle that we're going to be dealing with uh for the foreseeable future it's just the the the specific implementation of it will differ and a biden administration might be better suited to to working with others and develop an alliance foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] in 2015 chinese company fuyao invested about 500 million dollars in a factory in this rust belt city even as a national debate on china and job losses was unfolding after the general motors plant closed in 2009 if we out came and we are pleased that that plan is being reused we've taken our blows we've lost the jobs we've had all the the gloom and doom but i think we've turned a corner in dayton we had this huge facility in the dayton area that had been sitting empty and to have the chinese glass manufacturer come in and bring that factory building back to life is certainly a great thing for the community in the next episodes we look at the fallout from this superpower rivalry what happens to companies in china trading with america and chinese people living in the us i think being a chinese person in america especially this year with the coronavirus pandemic a lot of that makes me feel or relate to how it might be similar to how muslims and brown people felt after 9 11. there is a white supremacist nativist xenophobic atmosphere that has been inflamed and what will the millions of people who depend on bilateral trade between these two superpowers now got trouble in my heart got trouble in my mind digging through the wreckage but trouble's all i find [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] traveling you

Channel: CNA Insider

Views: 657,286

Rating: 4.6104436 out of 5

Keywords: CNA, CNA Insider, Channel NewsAsia, Asian perspective, People stories, When Titans Clash, documentary, US, China, US China, politics, trade war, tech war, Biden, Donald Trump, geopolitics, COVID-19, pandemic.coronavirus, communism, democracy, history, economy, Hong Kong, government, WTO, World Trade Organization, globalisation, Rust Belt

Id: FL2gBUxblO8

Length: 49min 31sec (2971 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/xerotul]

Fairly neutral reporting

The Real Losers Of The US-China Trade War | When Titans Clash | Ep 2/4

What’s The True Cost Of A US-China Tech War? | When Titans Clash | Ep 3/4

US Or China: Will Southeast Asia Have To Pick A Side? | When Titans Clash | Ep 4/4

[u/whoisliuxiaobo]

Thanks. Looking forward to the other parts of this documentary. Xi was correct about not being laxed otherwise they will end up like what happened to the Qing Dynasty.