The US-China Competition: Who’s Winning?

[Music] good afternoon everyone um thank you so much for uh everyone for joining us here today my name is tyler jost and it's my pleasure to serve as the chair for this event today hosted by the watson institute at brown university i'm joined both by professor ed steinfeld the director of the watson institute as well as our speaker for today ambassador chaz freeman ambassador freeman is a senior fellow at brown university's watson institute for international public public affairs a former us assistant secretary of defense ambassador to saudi arabia acting assistant secretary of state for african affairs and charged affairs at both bangkok and beijing he began his diplomatic career in india but specialized in chinese affairs and perhaps most famously he was a principal american interpreter during president nixon's visit to beijing in 1972. the format of our event today will begin with ambassador freeman's comments uh professor steinfeld will then respond and then we'll open it up for question and answer uh for a question and answer period which i will kick off and then open up to the audience if you have questions you can either uh you can enter them into the q a feature in the zoom either during the comments themselves or afterwards and i will accumulate them so with that i'm over to you ambassador um so about five years ago the united states decided to set aside previous efforts to cooperate with china instead we propose to confront it and compete with it from a position of strength this administration like the last calls for a whole nation effort to out-compete the chinese and quote win the 21st century unquote how are we doing at this the short answer is poorly if we don't shape up we're going to lose china's almost the same size as the united states including alaska and hawaii but geography and history have given chinese and americans very different societies and ideologically favoring systems of government china has landed sea borders with 19 countries for about 600 of the past thousand years china was ruled in whole or in part by foreign invaders china has ample reason to want to keep foreigners at bay by contrast our borders are mostly ocean and openness to foreigners in their ideas is what made us great we established our settler society on an isolated continent of unexhausted abundance china has had severely limited per capita natural resources for millennia it has about four times our population but only two-thirds the arable land and nine tenths the water that we do despite this relatively neater endowment china manages to produce about five and a half times as much food as the united states but it has nothing like the margin for error we have chinese want a can-do government americans want one that leaves us mostly alone as both socrates and sims are advised to compete we need to know ourselves as well as our competitors frankly we're not bringing our best game to the playing field our politics are polarized and dysfunctional we're in chronic fiscal deficit our infrastructure is collapsing our educational system is increasingly mediocre our social fabric is fraying our international prestige is declining and we are more divided internally than at any time since our civil war we appear to have achieved herd immunity to strategic reasoning we pay lip service to the need to reinvigorate our economy and it's technological advanced but in practice focus instead on hamstring china this is the equivalent of smoking pot in a hot tub and fantasizing about tripping up competitors in track events when they're out training and trying out new equipment it's conceivable of course that china will stumble and fall and they rely enabling us effortlessly to quote win the future but it's imbecilic to count on this delusional complacency and reliance on dumb luck or divine intervention will not enable us to outperform china or any other rising power the lofty talk about what we plan to do means nothing if we don't do it we're not exactly in economic fighting trim our balances of trade and payments are in chronic deficit we no longer even try to manage balance our budgets so far this century our annual exports of non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft have fallen about 10 our imports of capital goods however now exceed our domestic production of them we've lost the industrial surge capacity that enabled us to win in world war ii the u.s share of global manufacturing has fallen to about one-sixth industry now contributes only eight percent of value added to our economy while finance insurance real estate rentals and leasing account for one fourth eighty percent of recent ipos have been in the financial sector ten percent in healthcare technologies and six percent in technical services ironically issues of ownership aside china's economy has recently ruled been ruled by something much more like capitalist free market competition than ours which is now dominated by rent-seeking oligopolies in our country price competition between small and medium-sized businesses has been largely replaced by administered pricing by large corporations our biggest businesses seem more interested in share buybacks mergers acquisitions and outsourcing than inves then in investing here at home in 1990 we had 51 major defense contractors now we have five china has plenty of problems but contrary to our complacently self-congratulatory national image the united states is no longer in most respects number one we're 12th in the world in per capita gdp our students rank 31st out of 35 countries in math confidence and 13th in reading we fall into 27th in social mobility we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as other countries like us but rank 49th in global like life expectancy and 178 in infant mortality inaccurate self perceptions and obsolete assumptions can be fatal we need to be realistic about both ourselves and china if we rise to the challenges we face to be sure china had a bad century or so but four decades ago it picked itself up and got moved it seems to be on the way back to the planetary preeminence and enjoyed for most of human history in the 50 years since president nixon first visited beijing our economy is nominally grown 18-fold while china's is now 130 times larger than it was china now accounts for almost one-third of global manufacturing roughly twice as much as we do china's share of world exports of goods has grown to 15 while ours has fallen to 8 in 1972 china's per capita gdp was 2 of ours now it's about one-sixth having grown about 80 times in military power the united states is still unquestionably number one after all we devote almost half of our discretionary federal spending about 3.7 percent of gdp to our defense budget and then we hide another 2 or so of military-related spending and other federal budgets we invest more in our armed forces than the next 11 countries combined our focus is the fear that china's growing economic technological and diplomatic role in world affairs will dethrone us from global and regional primacy but if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail so our response for the challenge from china is mainly military and largely irrelevant to non-military challenges china is without doubt a potential military peer competitor it may devote much less than half as much of its gdp to its military as we do but it's able to fund hefty annual increases in its defense spending its personnel and equipment are a lot cheaper than ours in terms of purchasing power china's economy is already one-fifth larger than ours chinese pay for their military from current revenues our spending on our military is about the same as our federal government's annual deficits china's national debt amounts to about 45 percent of gdp while ours is already 100 of gdp and set to hit at least 113 within a decade defense spending is in fact much less of a burden or a constraint on china than on us to compete with us militarily in the cold war the soviet union neglected its domestic economy and spent itself into bankruptcy we know it's doing the same and china's military remains focused on homeland defense while ours seeks to project power to every corner of the globe there are no chinese forces anywhere near our borders but our navy and air force taste test chinese defenses several times daily and we're planning to pivot still more forces to china's periphery power projection is expensive defense is much cheaper advantage china geography also favors the chinese military the most plausible battlefields taiwan or the south china sea are a hundred to a thousand miles from major chinese bases about 3 000 to 10 000 miles from u.s territory in the event of war almost all of china's navy and half of its air force can engage immediately whereas u.s forces could take weeks to arrive military balance in the asia pacific region continues to shift in china's direction there's no reason to expect this trend to reverse china now has the world's largest ship building industry its greatest number of shipyards and its biggest navy the china's chinese navy's 360 frontline ships are newer and outnumber the us navy's global complement of less than 300 ships only about one-fifth of which about 60 are within relatively easy reach of taiwan with the rest dedicated to missions elsewhere these numerical and regional imbalances in favor of china are likely to increase china's air force now boasts about 2 000 advanced combat aircraft over 1000 which are stationed in range of taiwan its bomber fleet is already the world's largest and its aerial refueling capabilities continue to grow but china's anti-aircraft missiles cover taiwan's entire airspace insanity ship and air-to-air missiles outrange ours china's rocket forces can mount precision attacks on u.s bases in japan within range of taiwan on guam in hawaii and aircraft carriers within 2500 miles of the chinese coast as well as on the united states continental united states itself china is heavying up its intercontinental nuclear forces to deter or retaliate against the us so a war with china now would clearly risk not just conventional but also nuclear strikes on our forces abroad as well as on our homeland this is not the time or place to rehearse the entire evolving chinese order of battle nor am i the person best qualified to do that suffice it to say that in all the simulations our defense department is undertaken to forecast the outcome of a war with china over taiwan taiwan's democracy and prosperity are destroyed and we get closer for almost five decades effective diplomatic management of the taiwan issue between beijing taibai and washington made active chinese military threats to taiwan improbable but the framework we crafted in the 1970s to keep the peace has now collapsed the danger of war is rising there is no non-violent endgame in sight we need to find a way to replace escalating military confrontation with the renewed prospect of a peaceful settlement of the taiwan issue by the two sides of the strait doing so would reveal that the real challenges we face from china are economic scientific technological and commercial at present the trends in these areas don't favor us by 2025 china will have more than 31 000 miles of high-speed rail lines serving 95 of its smaller cities we will still have none the subway lines in china's major cities will have grown by about one-third china's expressways will total 120 000 miles to our 47 000. seven of the world's largest and most modern ports are in china chinese companies own almost 100 ports in about 60 60 or so foreign countries and are investing heavily in their expansion china is by far the leading manufacturer of shipping equipment if we want to upgrade our own inefficient and overburdened ports we're going to have to turn to chinese companies to help china already has nine times more 5g base stations than we do and we'll triple their number by 2025. huawei which we have tried to smash holds 60 of the world's patents for 5g china's remarkably high savings rate generates the capital to take its cutting-edge infrastructure technologies abroad as china connects to the world the us seems to be doing its best to disconnect from it it's hard to see how this does not put us at a disadvantage china's advantages in technology development begin with an unparalleled pool of data drawn from the largest and most plugged in domestic market in the world they include culture that considers individual education and excellence the keys to national as well as family and individual success chinese universities now graduate at least four times as many students as the united states in science technology engineering and math or staff they're on track to educate twice as many phds in stem by 2025 in that year china will have more stem workers than the 38 member countries of the oecd combined even at nominal exchange rates china now outspends us on r d within the higher percentage going to basic scientific research rather than marketing related product improvement sixty percent of the workforce and u.s artificial intelligence or ai labs is foreign born about half from china the number of domestic born phds in ai has not increased since 1990. current yes u.s visa and domestic security policies reflect xenophobia rather than a strategy to recruit and retain foreign talent but we're actually driving such talent away china's share of global semiconductor manufacturing has risen from less than one percent in 1990 to 15 today while america's has fallen from 37 to 12 china is only a year or two behind the u.s and chip design and it's rapidly closing the 45 year gap with taiwan and chip fabrication ironically given the new dominance of financial capitalism in our economy china has become the world's leader in fintech it's also a world leader in electric vehicles solar and wind power and the contender for leadership in materials science chemistry nuclear fusion quantum communication and computing and genetic engineering among other fields china has a strategy for setting global and regional industrial and consumer standards to build and consolidate its market share abroad we don't johnna is restructuring his public health system to deal with the next pandemic we have we have great medicine but we're lousy at preventing disease as we've just shown by having a higher death rate from coated than any other western country through the current form we aren't doing anything about this many of the key inventions that made modernity possible from paper to gunpowder originated in china no one should be surprised to see the chinese resuming elite position in developing the technologies that will define human future that is what seems to be now happening and not just in the realm of affordable infrastructure and energy solutions in which china is now clearly the world leader while most chinese innovation is civilian in nature its military has also been invented four years ago china established an agency equivalent to darpa to coordinate further advances in military technology and it now has ballistic missiles with terminal guidance to kill mobile targets like aircraft carriers it has rail guns on its ships it has quantum communications devices robot combatants and hypersonic flying vehicles it also has systems paralleling our own stealth aircraft and vessels aerial and undersea drones directed energy and weapons precision guided and electromagnetic pulse munitions and so forth so china has been a convenient foil for americans who wish to blame anyone but ourselves for our problems in practice our political leaders globate about chinese and other foreign competition but protect uncompetitive economic actors here at home instead of incentivizing domestic investment favoring immigration by the highly educated and skilled reforming labor management relations to encourage the retraining of redundant workers and reduce outsourcing or reinvigorating free market competition to quote win the future unquote we'd allow tax cuts and subsidies to vested interests this is an approach that enables mediocrity raises production costs erodes competitiveness sheds jobs and fosters unjustified income disparities whining isn't competing the failure to take a hard look at our own shortcomings and doing something about them not china is the main threat to our global leadership the key to how competing china is not to out blather it about democratic values or how to do it and wolf warrior diplomacy it's to rise to the very real challenges that china's rise has exposed china is not the soviet union it's outdoing us and what it calls socialism with chinese characters characteristics and everyone else calls capitalism populist parodies of cold war containment policies are more likely to harm us than the chinese cost plus military keynesianism may boost a few jobs in congressional districts it will not make our economy more competitive with china's or anyone else's the key to out-competing china is in short to fix our system so that it once again yields better outcomes and greater prosperity than china's to do that we must make a determined effort to address the weaknesses that now impair our performance we need to repair our broken political system return to pay-as-you-go government revamp our physical and human infrastructure raise standards in our educational system presume the identification and adoption of foreign best practices reopen ourselves to foreigners in their ideas through immigration reform reinvest in scientific research and development reinforced antitrust policies to reduce market concentration and restore competitiveness to our markets reform our tax structure to support national rather than best invested interests and reward domestic investment rather than outsourcing we need to recover our modesty and redouble our efforts to set an example to the world our weaknesses are structural if we can't address them structurally we're going to fall behind four decades ago an ailing china got its groove back by doing things that parallel what what me what we must now do and we have a lot more going for us than the chinese we need to stop making excuses and get to work catherine died the u.s special trade representative is quoted as saying we need to go turn the page on the old playbook whatever china does she argues quote we need to start doing things on our side such as the reshoring and the rebuilding of our manufacturing base unquote i agree but it isn't going to happen if we preserve the strange combination of hubris denial and complacency we currently exhibit thanks thank you ambassador i'm going to turn it over to ed now who will give a few comments in response thanks so much tyler and thank you chess for those um incredibly profound i think uh comments both in terms of the breadth and the and the depth um so largely i agree with chaz freeman's diagnosis of america's contemporary social and political pathologies i think he's right about the fact that on in many uh technological um domains and and material domains china is out competing the united states right now and i think he's right in suggesting that it's necessary and and to some extent beneficial to think about the u.s china relationship in some kind of competitive terms that go beyond uh issues of national security and military affairs but i'd like to spend a few minutes talking about several pathologies in the chinese system right now that i i think both chas um neglected to some extent in his comments but pathologies that actually parallel some of the ones that are unfolding right now in the united states so let me just list three very briefly so first a pathology the undermining of institutions of succession i guess i would say that a signal achievement of the u.s political system ever since george washington's retirement in 1796 has been the really for the most part almost exclusively the peaceful and predictable transition of presidential power of course this is something that americans right now seem to be in the process of willfully undermining but that said peaceful and predictable transfer of power has been a major achievement of the us system i think a key matter underscoring or driving the years of turmoil in china from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s was arguably repeated crises of succession under mao the absence of a of a peaceful and predictable process of succession of power chas referred to four decades of china getting its groove getting its act getting into its group getting its act together i i agree completely uh with his characterization but i would say arguably the first 20 years of that period was attributable in part to it to a strong and determined leader uh xiao king having himself navigated a two plus year succession crisis following the death of mao in 1976 but the the next 20 years or the most recent 20 years of china's success has relied again in part on a predictable albeit opaque process of party leadership transition look we knew that each party secretary would would govern for 10 years we knew five years into that term who the next round of leadership was going to be it's obvious that xi jinping has dismantled those institutions of succession that deng xiaoping built the extent to which those institutions will be dismantled remains to be seen but i certainly feel it's it's it's unhelpful for any society when a leader deems himself indispensable um and then structures or or changes institutions to ensure that he leads indefinitely particularly as these leaders age and systems ossify often fears and paranoia on the part of the the ruler allah stalin tend to proliferate and metastasize the risk to that leader of the loss of power grow the risks to the nation become ever more acute of a crisis if we're not sure about this just look to some extent at russia today it troubles me deeply that china seems to be headed down that path away from a pattern of succession that drove so many of the successes that chaz mentions a second area the nature of civic discourse and the impact of social media forgive me for going off topic for a moment but the recent mass shootings in the united states are of course in part about the availability of guns including semi-automatic assault rifles something that china to its credit um doesn't have to deal with but i would say an added at least in my opinion an added element to the spate of gun violence and mass killings in the united states has to do with the nature of discourse on the internet and the social media platforms that are fostering it those platforms are rewarding and reinforcing anger and resentment and hatred the commercial realm with the complicity of the political establishment is basically in my view in my view mainlining rage to a willing and addicted population and of course the results we see the results a fractured society a destroyed sense of belonging of undermining of pluralism the pouring of fuel on the fires of misogyny and racism and xenophobia and jingoism that's the united states but alas in many ways speaking from afar i would say reading and witnessing chinese social media that's unfortunately china's reality as well today now in a lot of cases these fires are fanned by the state which is of course exercising censorship over the internet but it goes much deeper than that i mean witness the anti-vaxxing sentiment that's spread on the chinese internet today as far as i know there were no traditions of anti-vaccine sentiment in in china up until now look at the public backlash that we've seen against honest and even mildly critical citizen journalists reports from muhammad in the early days of the pandemic one need not spend much time on chinese social media to see vile racism and misogyny and racism toward muslims jews residents of taiwan hong kong it goes on and on in my view and living in various decades in china since the late 80s i would say that china through much of the reform era has been able to maintain a relatively sensible discourse about a variety of policy matters i'm not sure that discourse is operating really anymore some argue indeed that chinese foreign policy is increasingly pressured and pressurized by all the popular rage that's been fanned on the internet again in part rage in part fanned by the state but not entirely by the state and not entirely i think under the control of the state i think it's even clear today that domestic policy suffers from this problem look that doesn't bode well for china's future it doesn't bode well for any of our futures and it certainly doesn't bode well for the kind of um peaceful resolution to the taiwan situation which chas freeman rightfully it calls for a third and related pathology and that has to do with a possible not definite but a possible retreat on the chinese states part from the opening part of reform and opening the the the kaifeng part of daigo kaifang look i'm i am concerned that the chinese state and the system more generally is growing comfortable with being closed off i mean the closures were arguably necessitated by kovid but i think they've grown extreme and they've lasted longer than anybody would have predicted and i don't see those closures um being dismantled anytime soon look there have been many problems in china over the past 40 years but adherence to to to to the notion of being open that was never really one of the problems the ability to move in and out of china for individuals whether they're chinese or non-chinese that's had huge social benefits over the past 40 years the ability to collaborate either in person or informationally across borders and share ideas in my view that's been essential to chinese economic growth and to its global stature and certainly to its social dynamism none of this has come easy in china none of it has come without various kinds of ills deng xiaoping acknowledged that earlier on early on and i i say hats off to many people in the chinese system who've worked so hard to ensure even during the toughest of times that this openness continued from the 80s to the 90s into the offs the openness arguably traces back at least to the may 4th movement of 1919 and it's related concepts of of questioning a rejection of of some kind of glorification of the past or glorification rejection of ethnocentrism or rejection of reactionary attitudes i witnessed that commitment to opening being temporarily thrown off track in the late 1980s and early 90s when i was living in china but but openness was put back on track by dung and others surrounding him i worry that that we're off track for for the long run right now with opening in in china and i don't see any forces certainly at the top that are willing or able or committed to putting china back on that track of openness as i said at the start of my comments i i feel today that both the united states or and china are in a a kind of moment of reaction a reactionism or a reactionary moment one in which important parts of the establishment glorify a past including a china's case a pre-revolutionary past which arguably isn't worth glorifying or to the extent that it is it's worth doing so with a certain critical sense but i i worry even more that that glorification of the past isn't about the past it's instead a weaponization of history to lash out at a number of aspects of pluralism and wide-ranging ideas that are so important for dynamism in any society the united states or china democratic societies or authoritarian societies the the chinese concept today of of historical nihilism i think is deeply troubling maybe at risk of drawing comparisons which i shouldn't i think it's as troubling as some of the backlash against um critical race theory or the new york times 1619 project this kind of weaponization of history is um really counterproductive i think to many kinds of better social outcomes including technological uh innovation and social dynamism so just in in closing and these remarks i would say that when i see these unfolding pathologies in both china and the united states a piece of me feels a pox on both of their houses but as an american with deep professional and personal ties to china i can't reasonably think that way about either the united states or china more as a global citizen i can't just simply dismiss these two now superpowers um and and and and and hope they all stand out of the way of everybody else look chas and others are right to say that china now has the power and status and capacity to influence the world deeply and compete with the us that also still retains that capacity albeit arguably uh in a declining fashion i worry deeply that both china and the united states have have become unmoored not from each other but from themselves from their better selves i worry deeply about that and i worry that that unmooring bodes very ill for the future of the world it puts extraordinary pressure on those countries that are caught in the middle whether they're countries of the advanced industrial west whether they're countries of the global south unfortunately given the kinds of of developments that are unfolding in both china and the united states i don't think there's an easy answer to global leadership today but a great deal of pressure on those caught in the middle to to to contribute to the design and rein in the worst tendencies right now of both the united states and china thank you great thanks so much ed um so we're gonna start the q a portion of uh the event and if you weren't here at the very beginning or perhaps as a reminder if you have a question the right way to enter it in would be to click the q a icon at the bottom of the zoom and type it in and then i will read it to either ad or jazz to get things started i'm going to do two things actually the first uh given that ed's comments were very organized i'm going to kind of summarize each one of ed's points into a question back to uh chaz and then open up with a couple of questions of my own so this first one you know stemming from the change in chinese domestic institutions um what do you think we should make of this move away in china from institutionalized succession towards something more akin to personalized power in china well i i completely agree with ed this is a problem um china has many problems as i said um i didn't dwell on them because i'm concerned about our complacency but i think the one thing that uh justifies democracy uh historically has been the management of succession uh issues uh and in an orderly process um we're coming up on 2024 and presidential election there's some reason to fear that we're not going to have the usual smooth succession but i think in the case of china it's right this is perpetuating leadership in power increases the natural tendency in any system for sycophancy it it reduces the flow of information from the bottom up to the top it it tends as had said to ossify the system make it less flexible and adaptable and i think we're seeing that actually um with xi jinping's drive to have at least a third term term in office so i think this is a serious problem and i will just say that i think both of us have this problem but the chinese more acutely than we and so moving on to ed's second uh points um which is regarding social media and the way in which uh discourse uh is or is not leveraged by a government in order to make decisions in its foreign policy and to protect power internationally so what do you make of the fact that social media seems to be amplifying nationals perceptions in chinese society and do you think this is going to undermine the ability to maintain real discussion and dialogue in elite circles as well um actually i think it social media has proven enormously corrosive to civil discourse in wherever it's appeared whether it's in our society or in china um and and probably this is uh built into the technology uh and the structure from which it springs um basically we are we have entrusted uh communication on public policy matters and many other things through corporate oligopolies uh powerful corporations which have business plans that depend on ferrying out your prejudices your biases your preferences if you wish to put it positively and connecting you with people like mine why so that they can conveniently direct advertising to the group that this constitutes the advertising may be commercial or it may be political but in both cases it creates an environment which is has a lot of petri dishes in which to hatch conspiracy theories had spoke of it mainlining rage i agree this is a particular problem here with a heavily armed populace we've had 280 some gun massacres so far this year most other countries haven't had any or they've had one or two uh so and as far as i know china has had one incident of of this kind so um this is a hell of a problem um we're dealing with it in different ways the chinese way of dealing with it uh or are we i'm not sure chinese way of dealing with with it is censorship intervening to stop obvious violations of of the truth um uh obvious tendentious arguments that that are disrupted um we're asking the european union in particular what the united states is following asking the uh the the social media companies do the same thing and and this you know in the case of china and the united states they both face a problem these companies are taking over government functions regulatory functions of the public space and they're not subject to appropriate discipline uh i i interpret what the chinese have done with some of their social media companies as similar to um it's basically the application of antitrust policy uh to to this sphere maybe that's an answer we haven't done that yet um so i think this is a common problem in a rational world we'd be talking to each other about how to deal with it obviously our objective is to sustain the greatest possible freedom of individual expression that is not the chinese purpose they are aimed at aiming at social tranquility but um we have a common problem we ought to be talking about it i i don't see other societies having yet come up with an effective answer so i mean the answer that you pose leads into ed's third point because the deployment of censorship can be seen as a mechanism by which state authority over society is enhanced and so this this third point ed raises is you know whether or not this embracing of a closed off mentality coupled with um a rigorous uh adjudication or well uh a rigorous exclusion of information that exists outside of uh chinese society will that in some way undermine chinese ability to compete globally in ways that we won't see in the united states uh well this is a perennial issue and um the question is is often reduced to can you have scientific and technological advance when you don't have free speech and the answer uh is apparently yes you can now nazi germany did so did the soviet union and both were totalitarian that is to say they allowed freedom of speech within the scientific and technological spheres even though they didn't in this in the political sphere so it's theoretically possible for china to have a very uh suffocating media environment and at the same time uh continue the exchanges that you're essential for for uh for innovation um here i think um you know the chinese uh have some of the same phenomenon we do uh because of the prominence of social media and the internet a great deal of the censorship is enforced by political correctness and incivility rather than the government if you say something that is that someone else finds offensive you can expect whether whether that's offense is justified or not you can expect to be humbled um intimidated if you will um and i see in our own media are tremendously funny you know if you are multilingual and you use the global internet you come across all kinds of uh information that is simply not present in the american media environment in part because after world war ii we had 2 700 foreign correspondents and many many independent newspapers now we have something around 100 foreign correspondents and very few independent newspapers um the const where we have the point in common with the chinese and i really agree completely with ed on this is that both of us suffer from xenophobia and at the moment an effort to close our minds to ideas from abroad um and this is totally incompatible with the advance of science technology and even culture um these these areas of human endeavor flourish with free exchanges but we both banned people now from visiting us we both filter out ideas we don't like there are increasing number of subjects that are taboo for public discussion i think um this is very very injurious and it may be that china will um suffer more from this than we um but i think we're suffering from it too so i'm gonna i'm gonna ask two questions of my own in addition to the the three that i gleaned from ed's comments um the first is related to the points that you were making early i think the central point regarding um economic trend lines so much like that i found your comments really fascinating and illuminating but much like that i wasn't entirely convinced that things are quite as dire as the picture that you paint my read at least is that the aggregate economic power of the two countries is still pretty comparable i'm not really sure the balance of payments or declining american manufacturing capacity are the right indicators for economic power in the 21st century and while it's troubling to see the united states rank lower then we might hope along some of those metrics that you laid out such as social mobility or life expectancy i think it might also be important to note that the united states still leads china in both of those categories although not in some of the others that you discuss what i do definitely agree with you is that the trend line suggests that china is on the rise in the united states is on the decline um and so that's where i'd like to kick off if i understand your diagnosis of why this has occurred correctly please correct me if i'm wrong uh the reason why chinese socioeconomic growth is outpaced uh or is outpacing american growth might be boiled down to two factors the first is structural defect defects in the uh american institutions and second a kind of unwillingness of american decision makers to address these defects um to me this sort of implies that if only the united states could pick itself up and get moving these trend lines would be reversed but for me and somewhat counterintuitively this explanation strikes me as a a bit america-centric one could make the argument that american institutions and decision makers are really not all that central to understanding why the trend lines have shifted the way that they have one might alternatively point to structural differences and say latent economic potential one would wonder if the sheer size of chinese markets means that even accounting for all the pathologies political and economic and both the systems that both you and ed had talked about we might still well expect china's gdp to surpass the united states eventually as more people in china are brought out of poverty and into the global marketplace so my question that was a long lead in uh is what makes you confident that changes to american institutions in and of themselves would increase american economic growth to an extent that it would reverse or seriously dampen those trend lines i suppose it's basic optimism about um of the resource base and and demographics of the united states we just have so many advantages by comparison with virtually every other country not only in terms of geopolitics with two wide oceans on either side and um excessively polite canadians to the north and uh very uh very delightful mexicans to the south um but um we also have a super abundance of of everything uh this this continent is an amazing and amazing uh place and our population is the most diverse in the world we have every kind of talent every kind of genetic heritage you can imagine so i'm very optimistic about the united states and i go back to the early experience of china on the gun show being which to me proved conclusively that it's policies that make the difference if you change the policy in the right way you can activate latent uh capabilities that you didn't even know you had so that's the first comment um the second is that uh it is uh nothing is written um i say that despite nine years in the islamic world where it's thought that everything is written um nothing is written um uh i recall um there was a brilliant young foreign service officer who was at my embassy in beijing when i ran it who had worked for william h mcneil the great chicago historian on what became mcneil's pursuit of power and he'd done research on the northern song around 11 10 or thereabouts and um tongshan the tone county which is now part of beijing municipality between that time and another 20 years later was producing more steel than the uk in 1850 and doing it with private enterprise now china invented capitalism but it also killed it it was nibbled to death by bureaucrats taxes and the like so i would never underestimate the capacity to strangle their of the chinese to strangle themselves and to and screw up by the same type and we can do that let me introduce a strange concept which is suggestive and not provable uh and that is from chinese historiography the dynasties have a life of 225 250 years at which point they are so ossified with precedent and corrupted and by vested interests that one of three things happens there's a rebellion and they're overthrown a foreign invader comes and knocks them off or third they pick themselves up and have a second get their second win and go on for a silver if not another golden age uh the united states seems to me to be at this point in our history we're about 250 years into it and we're pretty also fine uh our constitution no longer functions in many respects separation of powers is gone we have misinterpretations and suspensions of the bill of rights we have inherited systems that in the modern context seem to deliver results other than those congenials the public people are even talking about a civil war in the united states now and doing that seriously um i'd like to see us us to pick ourselves up and go on to have a silver age i think we could do it um final comment um there's a problem with the concept of gdp uh this was invented back in the 30s it's basically an aggregate measure of all economic activity now if the united states and china were to compete let's say in the number of insurance brokers or accountants or tax lawyers we'd win hands down but i think there really is a difference between buck passing services if you will and actual production and in that realm china's already twice as large as the united states manufacturing sector now the services are not unimportant um and uh china has a long way to go in terms of developing financial institutions one hopes they won't develop financial capitalism leave their hope they won't um uh the way we have um uh you know with with with i think something like nine percent of our economy now in that sector um private equity and things like that which i'm very familiar with uh and which generally are not very good for the companies and people to whom they're applying anyway um so i think there's a problem um we need to make some differentiation between pure gdp especially when it's uh the comparison is done at nominal exchange rates so um you know there's ppp it's a mark is a marginal correction to this but it really doesn't address the fundamental problem economists need to re-examine how we look at economies at least in comparative terms and i think china really challenges us to do that i don't think i don't think we really understand the chinese economy very well so that's my my answer china could fall um we could fall um i hope neither of us does because we need each other and we can profit from each other's prosperity if we pursue the right policies i'll leave it to the audience if anyone wants to pick up the applicability of the dynastic cycle to american politics if there were no audience members i would definitely go down that that route but my second question then i will turn it over to the uh questions that we've gotten um has to do with the way in which you describe um the causes behind america's shifting perceptions about china and if i understand you correctly and again please correct me if i'm wrong but it seems to me that you're implying that changing american perceptions are driven largely by a kind of unwillingness to accept that we are in large part to blame a kind of geopolitical scapegoating about the the ills of american society and i'm certainly sympathetic to this argument for explaining uh shifting attitudes within certain segments or certain sectors of american society um but this would seem to discount the effects of chinese behavior itself whether that be in foreign policy behaviors like uh military policies in the south china sea or the tone of its diplomatic messaging or domestic policy behaviors like xi jinping's consolidation of power that we've talked about or repression in xinjiang and one bit of evidence that would seem to suggest this alternative conclusion that behavior plays a really strong portion as well as opposed to just american scapegoating is that unfavorable perceptions of china have increased among many other countries outside of the united states ranging from germany and france to south korea and japan over the last two decades um so again leading to my question how much weight do you put on chinese behavior and explaining why our perceptions towards china are shifting in the united states and if your answer is well not that much well why is it not that much we are we're in a feedback loop of course with each side reacting to the other and sometimes doing things without considering the probable reaction of the other side and of course chinese in many respects um uh have done they've done damage to them themselves a very good example of that is well warrior diplomacy which essentially is a substitution of invective for dialogue in the diplomatic sphere um something mike pompeo did for us i would say uh with with equally poor results um now this is a self-destructive behavior um i think uh there one has to divide issues the chinese um um have been accused with some justice of of doing what we did in the 19th century namely ripping off everybody else's technology until 1898 when we became a net exporter of intellectual property uh we took the official position was that it was the property of all mankind and that the people whose technology we were ripping off um you know could just bugger off and not be seen um 1898 we became a fierce uh advocate for um for intellectual property rights 20th century japan did much the same thing we did and then it too became innovative and switched and china's in the process of doing that and i think the figures that have bandied about were very much seat of the pants i know the people who did the estimate still china was insensitive to the effects of this on its major constituency the united states business the business community and um and it did itself a lot of damage by not um uh not cleaning up its act earlier than than it has um so yes chinese have done terrible things internationally to themselves um i think there is another set of issues which are ideological um the shanghai communique wisely set these aside and said well you know we don't agree about socioeconomic system or much else and um nonetheless we're going to find areas where we can cooperate mutual advantage we'll leave these differences for later resolution um these differences are irreconcilable um you know we're at different stages of this of history what the chinese are doing in xinjiang in terms of forced assimilation of the local population we did in indian schools uh in the united states and canada and aboriginal schools in australia but that's in the past so we don't remember it and in fact it was horrible when it happened and it's horrible when it's happening in xinjiang but then the question is what can you do about it and jumping up and down and shrieking and howling and giving the chinese the finger doesn't seem to persuade them of their evil ways and cause them to repent so i think we need to distinguish issues there are those where chinese behavior is malleable correctable where the chinese can be brought to see that they're making a mistake and arguably changed their their of their approach and this has happened over the last i mean i was part of for 50 years that was part of a process that did in effect house train china until the global system the united states created um on ideological issues i don't think you can do this any more than the chinese can tell us you know what to do about gun control or what to do about racism in the united states um these are problems we have to deal with ourselves and the problem of domestic unrest among minorities in china is something the chinese have to deal with um and you know i suppose we could give them the advice we give to the american indian population stay on your reservation and open casinos this will save you from poverty and integrate you into the uh modern world but frankly that is not a very good answer uh to the plight of tibetans or or weakers or other minorities and i wouldn't put that forward outside of something to emulate um so yeah um i think it's both sides both sides of native states but you know i'm an american i can't do anything very much about chinese policy i can give voice to my view that we need to get our act together and you know maybe someone will listen um others will throw brick bats uh going back to the internet what happens on it um but um i don't know i care a great deal more about my own country than i do about china okay um i'm gonna start going through the questions that have been put into the zoom portal again a reminder if you do have a question just please type it in and i'll read it aloud uh the first two i'm going to couple together even though they're quite different but they're from the same audience member so the first is regarding america's solution is the answer as simple as spending much less on the military and much more on everything else and the second perhaps it's a related question if we think about space as a militarized issue area although that it's not necessarily need be the case um but what does the competition look like regarding outer space competition between the united states and china i'm assuming oh very good questions um the answer is we have to set priorities we don't seem to have the ability to do that um the priorities uh are all you know if you put if you propose more military spending it's an automatic approval rubber stamp by the congress to propose you know fixing um uh problems of maternal leave or uh or doing something about unemployment or retraining workers it's not an automatic rubber stamp and we can't set priorities that's our big problem and that is the main element in our dysfunction at the moment um we can't set priorities abroad either we're we're trying to as joe and i used to say kill ten fleas with ten fingers at once um we're overextended um the the question so i think the question is really uh no of course not you can't just cut military expenditures and everything will be fine it depends what you do with the money and by the way there isn't any money since you're running an annual deficit of a trillion dollars regardless we have to borrow money even to run the government as it is let alone do new things so we need to get our act together fiscally and we need to we need set priorities which recognize that there are there are things that need to be done that aren't military um space is a very interesting issue on which i have had a lot of discussions with chinese in the past there's a wonderful book by a fellow named o'neill who was a princeton of physicist in the 1950s and 70s called the high frontier um and this is essentially it's an american book it's become the bible of the chinese space program the chinese space program i remember asking the minister of defense in china who runs the space program how much this is right after the first uh taekwondo so-called put up how much did it cost cumulatively and he said three three billion dollars and i said well god's name did you do that and he said at every point in this program we have tried to make a profit well we haven't often succeeded we've made enough money to offset and net out a good deal of the expenses uh went on to discuss the program which i think they have objectives it's not just you know exploring boldly where no one's been before um they have a program the program involves the o'neill proposal which is to establish probably robotic mining facilities on the moon use rail guns to shoot poor to the lagrange points where gravity is cancelled out build habitats and industrial production facilities there from which to beam electric power back uh to the the earth move the polluting industries out there this is a 50-year program and it starts with the low earth orbit uh space station that that the chinese are completing this year um now um sadly um the xenophobia and andy and cytophobia of the us congress 25 years ago banned any form of u.s cooperation with the chinese in space the chinese wanted for example to develop um uh to to make the the uh the locking facility and docking facilities um in their space station and in their rockets compatible with that of the of that which we had produced um no can't do that um and uh therefore uh movies that talk about chinese rescuing us in space uh don't work um so um i think this is an area where we ought to be cooperating carefully because it's also a military domain of increasing importance um and uh the chinese are doing things in space that are we can't do with robotics and they can the illustration of that is the landing on the other side of the moon uh which was very much a robotic driven uh thing so um again i think the key question of u.s china relations is not to start with the idea that we're going to confront china start the idea start with the idea that there are things we need to cooperate with them that put the chinese on but let's get doing that and we also recognize that we're going to compete with them in many spheres and in a few few areas we're going to confront them but start with cooperation not confrontation um and that is the approach that was used in the shanghai communique on which this relationship was built and the reversal of that is destroying the relationship uh so jumping down now that i've had a chance to look through all the questions i should have lumped this in together but uh jim head had another question about space specifically about whether or not there might be cooperation in this uh and you've already somewhat touched on this but more specifically i mean what would cooperation in space look like between the united states and china if the domestic political environment the united states changed well among other things the chinese space mining program is one that we could benefit from manufacturing facilities might be shared they have a program intended to capture asteroids and and bring them into uh earth orbit and basically take them apart to use their constituent materials um there are things that they are inventing they're very effective for example in 3d printing there's a lot of that going on now in china in ways that are not being done here that their moon program presupposes 3d printing we can benefit from these technologies we can benefit from from from cooperation common endeavors joint ventures not just for the chinese we ought to be doing this with other space powers japan india russia which we were cooperating with but not anymore um and um we all benefit by spreading costs and by taking advantage of the inventions that each of us make tyler if i could just add there's also a basic science to collaborate on we have a model a long-lasting model for collaborative work in basic sciences fundamental sciences you know sharing and not treating that as either the domain of intellectual property or the domain of national security i fear we we've increasingly moved toward treating basic sciences as both ip sensitive and national security sensitive but i think one could easily imagine cooperative efforts on planetary geology geology and you know other other fundamental science areas build trust and perhaps give us a glimpse into some of the very interesting technology system integration efforts that the chinese are using that whether they're better or worse than the american approach they're different and worth worth paying attention to and learning from i completely agree and i i think it's unfortunate that we have taken a since the trump administration and openly neo-american talents approach to international uh economic and technological relationships i think we lose from this as you suggested so jumping around this be a question for for both you and ed uh from lyle goldstein one of the visiting professors here um so lyle uh commended us for steering away from the russian invasion of ukraine however uh he found it refreshing which i suppose has a uh but nevertheless nevertheless however this event is normally important for the future of world order and u.s china relations as well is it possible that the russian invasion could actually help the u.s china relations by diverting washington's attention from the pacific and simultaneously showing beijing that war does not pay or alternatively it could make u.s china relations worse it genocides more and more with the kremlin deepening tendencies towards a new cold war like the 1950s what do you think i will go first ed shall i um i think um there's a there's an underlying question that needs to be addressed and that is whether this crisis in ukraine in fact will end it's entirely possible that what we're looking at uh is the development of a content of a disputed frontier between ukrainian and russian forces in uh what was formerly ukraine um uh which would be a tinder box that could always be in danger of exploding that would give europe um an eastern frontier that was always in danger of erupting into uh into broader warfare and it would also cement the u.s russian hostility which we see see now um uh if that if the war doesn't end and if there's no negotiation and obviously we're not supporting a negotiation or are we have begun to admit that one might be necessary um the if there were a negotiate if there were no negotiations uh well the world that i see is one in which china's russia has increasingly bolted on to china with india competing for russian favor against china and trying to keep russia from falling totally into the chinese orbit so 300 years of russian efforts to integrate with europe will now be might now be replaced by uh by russia looking east and trying to adopt aspects of the chinese system chinese system works um the russians haven't really come up with the system that does so far um and um so that could be uh that could be quite uh formidable in that in that case um uh china and russia would be for all intents and purposes a combined enemy of the united states that's entirely plausible i don't think it's going to be possible given the absence of any debate in the united states about the ukraine issue i mean there are a few people raising questions on the margins but there's a suffocating unanimity about american opinion um we're in the world's most intense information war ever russian sources are completely excluded from our consciousness we don't see them we don't hear them we don't trust them you know we trust ukrainian sources or sources supportive of ukraine uh in this circumstance i don't see any possibility that our attention would shift from away from china to russia in fact we seem to be doubling down on hostility to both ed i'm hesitant to comment given that both the questioner lyle goldstein and the respondent chaz freeman know infinitely more about these issues than than i do but um well that won't stop me from commenting briefly so i i i found several people have have argued publicly in recent months that the war does provide a kind of a respite for u.s china animosity and acrimony and i found that persuasive originally for a number of reasons i i my sense is that the chinese care about their relations with europe particularly west but western and central europe and the rapidity with which western and central europe cohered in a position with the united states in opposition to the russian invasion i must have been somewhat bracing to the chinese and that and the chinese state reached out pretty quickly to major european powers for meetings i think was indicative of a chinese interest in cooling things off a little bit or lowering the heat with with europe if not entirely with the united states and that gave me cause for optimism i think the the the rapid coherent response to the invasion i think probably did send some kind of a signal to anybody contemplating military conflict whether it's the chinese or others that um maybe they should think twice about it one need only look at the american experience in iraq iraq and afghanistan to get a similar message that message often hasn't landed particularly well with with observers or with the united states itself but still i think probably healthy for the chinese to to see this and i think one one would have met i would have imagined that the american government would have tried to avoid a multi-front conflict certainly a multi-front hot war war let alone a multi-front cold war and i would have expected the biden administration to maybe take some opportunities to um tone down the public acrimony with china but i've been uh disappointed on on kind of both fronts um one i've been surprised by the extent to which chinese state media within the country and beyond has so aggressively at least in my view supported the russian position on on the wars i mean it's not obvious that china should have done it's obvious to me that china would not have supported the united states for a variety of reasons but it's not obvious given chinese long-standing principles of you know sovereignty and non-interference it's surprising to me that in china's public diplomacy there'd be such an embrace continued embrace of the russian position that this is basically a u.s and nato instigated conflict um and then on the other side i cannot for the life of me understand the bi-administration's public or at least president biden's public statements about taiwan i don't take any position upon quieter efforts to arm taiwan arm it differently in response to what's been viewed in in ukraine but why there are public statements about statements that go beyond what was made in the past about america's commitment to defend taiwan is a little puzzling to me because that is provocative in the current moment so sorry that's a long-winded way of saying i would have expected a cooling of u.s china animosity but it doesn't really seem to be happening i think if i may um very briefly um uh i think the explanation for this lies in the nature of the leadership we currently have in our system secretary of state lincoln's speech on china the other day was clearly directed almost entirely to an american domestic audience with a little bit of attention to our fellow travelers abroad it was not addressed to the chinese um for the chinese it was a message of unremitting implacable opposition um why the president has 40 some years of experience in the management of foreign policy in the united states senate uh he's never engaged in diplomacy or statecraft himself this is the first time he's been in an executive position and responsible for foreign policy mr blanken is a congressional staffer whose experience is also in the management of the domestic politics of foreign policy not in the conduct of it and mr sullivan is a campaign manager and political and farmer political adviser to hillary clinton at the state department not so much be very much focused on the packaging of foreign policy for domestic audiences so what we're seeing is self-referential decisions which really are more responsive to domestic opinion maybe pander to it uh and are not instrumental they're not aimed at accomplishing very much abroad um you know this is a big topic which we don't have time to flesh out but my impression is that we're much more focused on the domestic politics of these issues the relationship with russia the relationship with china than we are on the international implications i wonder chas what sorry to go on about this but i wonder whether some of that applies to china as well in the sense that it's pushing the you know the anti-american anti-nato agenda domestically i think the reasons to do that it's powerful it it's it's it's there's a receptive chinese public for that but i wonder to what extent that then finds the hands of the chinese government maybe to play a role as a negotiator or play a role as a more neutral player the chinese i know haven't used the term neutral but but um they may be limiting their room for maneuver given the public discourse both countries are large both have forbidden cities ours have chain link and secret service people around them the chinese have something more concrete and ancient um and within the walls of the forbidden cities the eunuchs play games and they don't really care too much about the impact of those games on the people outside the walls so we have the beltway the chinese have jonathan and beijing and i agree this is a problem in both societies domestic domestic um priorities overwhelm the sensible foreign policy on many occasions a related question from another audience member asks about the lessons china is learning from the ukraine conflict particularly the analogies that they might be forming with regard to a future conflict scenario across the taiwan straits neither of you have thought from there i i think um i i wish lyle were on to help me answer but my uh my impression is first of all there's a strong possibility that they're learning something very dangerous and that is that you can fight a conventional war um with an armed nuclear power if you have the convincing ability to destroy that power in retaliation for and its use of nuclear weapons in other words uh the russian nuclear capability has caused the united states to hedge its bats and not send of the ukraine supply ukraine with weapons yes but to be very cautious and that in the taiwan context the current heavying up of the chinese icbm force that we see is intended to ensure a similar ability to hold us at bay if there is a conflict so that's one lesson the others seem to be fairly obvious and there's nothing there's nothing new about them uh surprise is key um mass is key you need to go fast and heavy um you need to decapitate the leadership china will not want to have a zolinski emerge in taiwan if um if it feels obliged to attack um the media will be taken down uh there will be no similar phenomenon to the one where kiev is constantly advised by public relations firms in the united states and the uk um and uh of course there are differences um taiwan is an island doesn't have a border with poland or anyone else through which you can funnel weaponry it's much smaller but i suppose the biggest lesson the chinese must have learned is that you should apply worst case analysis not wishful thinking to the reaction of the populace you're invading you know the ukrainians turned out not to just like iraqis you know when we invaded iraq uh they did not greet us for flowers and dancing girls uh nor did the ukrainians do that for the russian troops that went in nor would i suspect what anybody in taiwan do and so speed mass decisiveness decapitation silencing media and a very heavy role i suspect for the peoples aren't the least in sustaining order and applying some of the nasty lessons of xinjiang and the shanghai lockdown to to an occupation let's hope it doesn't come to that ted any additional thoughts here i thought those were great and chas is last point about um worst-case planning and a certain conservatism i guess with respect to projection of power um i i am concerned that this relates a little bit to earlier discussions about succession and um the problems of having a leader for life or a leader indefinitely i am concerned that in systems that have these indefinite um strong men in virtually all cases that the maybe the military or civilian leadership of the military doesn't communicate the truth and vice versa i mean from the wonderful seminar that lyle goldstein's been running here at the watson institute on the ukraine and the russian invasion of ukraine i mean i remember one speaker commented on the seemingly reality that in russia there were lies from the top down to the military about whether there was going to be an invasion or not or the nature of it and there seemed to be lies from the bottom up from the military to the civilian leadership about what the capabilities of the military are and i i don't have any empirical evidence that that's the case that that kind of thing is happening in china today but i do worry with a a kind of a cult of personality i think that's too strong a term but uh something like a highly personalized form of strongman rule that maybe some of those patterns of communication between the military and civilian leadership going both directions will be undermined which would militate against the kind of um caution that that chas is suggesting i think that's a a really good place to end the q a um although i'll leave opportunity for both ed and chaz to add any final comments if you'd like um i i think we've covered a lot of the important um aspects of this and i i come back to the point which everybody i think agrees with that you know the decisive factor here is whether we pull our socks up and and and cure ourselves of some of the weaknesses um that we know uh evidence um uh uh well i'm i'm very depressed by the fact that um we still haven't got an infrastructure bill uh that's worth anything um we don't have you know they they added 110 billion dollars a year for five years to the previous expenditure but the the infrastructure deficit is estimated at 2.7 trillion so this is just going to keep the problem uh from becoming more acute no it's not going to solve it the effort to plus up science and technological research and uh and so on has gone nowhere uh buildback better died in the at the hands of the usual uh naysayers in congress and um there's a lot of talk about doing stuff and and not really any action and i see the chinese you know that's had pointed out very correctly having all sorts of problems um but they seem to be trying to tackle um practically uh maybe they'll fail we're not even really trying at this point and that bothers me ed yeah i i um i definitely agree with that last point jazz made that we're not trying and it it it's very hard for me to understand why we're not and it i think there may be two points i'd make with respect to that both of which i think i've learned from chaz in his comments today and previously one and chaz please correct me if i'm wrong i don't think anybody here i don't think chess you're suggesting that this is about primacy global primacy or quest for primacy one need not have aspirations as a country and to to have social aspirations whether for more equity or just more wealth and better living standards better public health one doesn't need to link those to global primacy and i think in america's better moments we haven't necessarily linked that to global primacy and in fact in china's better moments many of which you know happened over the last 40 years the achievements that were realized weren't i at least in my view linked clearly to some kind of desire for global primacy and that leads to the the second point i want to make that a number of us myself i think chaz i could speak for you saying this over the last 40 years what's appealed to us or what's appealed to me in china it's not the politics it's not the institutions but this kind of um societal desire to be better to be better not better necessarily relative to anybody else so there's some of that going on certainly desire to learn from others but just to be better i mean i was briefly in korea in the 1980s at the time of the olympics similar kind of feeling of you know desire to be better and to do better than what everybody else was saying that this country or these people are capable of i think that kind of aspirational quality for all the divisiveness in society that kind of aspirational quality is really to be admired and i think the u.s even in my own life has had it at various periods but i don't think it has it now and i think we do need to get our act together for for the sake of ourselves but also for the global commons and that's also going to involve somehow getting our act together in a way that can tolerate a strong and globally present china as well thanks well certainly a lot to think about not always the most pleasant things to come to the conclusion about but uh thank you so much both to uh ed and to chaz for joining us today and for those in the audience uh particularly those who asked great questions really appreciate you being here and hope you have a great rest of your week

Channel: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs

Views: 119,043

Keywords: Watson Institute, Watson International Institute, Brown University, Brown u, Brown, Public Affairs, Tyler Jost, Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., Edward Steinfeld, China a, U.S., Chinese foreign policy

Id: ThQfmZSrQVY

Length: 92min 10sec (5530 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022