U.S.-China 2039: The End Game? Book Discussion with Admiral Bill Owens

okay all right good morning uh welcome to our uh 8 a.m zoom event with um admiral william owens admiral owens is the former vice chairman of the u.s joint chiefs of staff our event today is moderated by jody schneider our club president um so before we begin i just want to go over some of our upcoming events that we've got at the fcc um we've got brian stelter coming up on september 15th at 8 am brian is the chief media correspondent at cnn and author of the new book hoax donald trump fox news and the dangerous distortion of truth uh that book is the product of a two-year investigation into fox news in its relationship with donald trump and again that's tuesday september 8th at 8 p.m hong kong time and we've also got on september 15th at 8 a.m uh professor joseph stiglitz nobel laureate in economics and professor uh at columbia university and the announcement for that event will be going out later today so uh that's a new event that we that we just got and we'll just be announcing today so um so again thank you for uh everybody who's joining us today my name is dan strumpf i'm a reporter at the wall street journal and a correspondent governor here at the foreign correspondents club in hong kong um just want to remind everybody that our event today is live and we are accepting questions as the event goes on so please feel free to submit those questions the best way to do that is at the email address question fcchk.org that's question singular fcchk.org and please feel free to sort of send those along as the as the event goes on and we'll be sure to ask those of uh admiral owens um so again it is my pleasure to introduce uh admiral william owens uh former vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff uh admiral owens is the author of the new book u.s china 2039 the end game this book looks at two decades of foreign policy between the two superpowers and gives a view into the future relationship and what we should expect admiral owens provides 12 policy recommendations in the book for that time period with the goal of avoiding future conflict and confrontation between the two powers and with the hope that a more constructive relationship can emerge between what are the world's two largest economies uh our moderator today is jody schneider our club president and a senior editor at bloomberg news here in hong kong and with that jody i will turn it to you great thanks so much for the introduction dan and thank you very much admiral owens for joining us from seattle washington uh it's very exciting to have you in the zoom room we've had a number of uh very successful zoom events recently we had gary kasparov last week we had john bolton a few weeks ago we had noam chomsky so it's really been an exciting series and we're we're really pleased to have you today i must say i've been to bismarck north dakota where you grew up uh i i am also a midwesterner so it's fun to talk to another midwesterner we'll get to your book in china soon enough but i wanted to to ask you first what what has been like to serve in the u.s navy for 35 years completing uh your tour as vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff be a commander through desert storm and then return to civilian life uh how has that been or is running a company and doing all that um some somewhat similar to leadership in the military well uh jody thank you for having me here today it's nice to be back at the fcc i'm very familiar with the fcc uh my wife and i are hong kong residents we lived there for eight years and traveled a lot in china every week during my time there as i headed up a private equity company so it's great to be with you all at the fcc um you know in 35 years of navy i have a lot of navy stories so you want to be very careful how you ask those questions but you know one of the one of the great things about the military is that it is a great uh leadership um uh test bed and so you learn a lot about good leaders by watching them and bad leaders by watching them and then you try to form yourself into what you think is going to be a good leader and certainly that that was my uh case i learned so much in the military and and making the transition from being the second senior guy in the united states to being a businessman you know honestly was i i retired one day and i went to work the next morning in a large company and never looked back i my life is a blessing in every way and i feel that way about it and i've had some great experiences in in business uh none quite so satisfying though as being with some of the great men and women of the us military and so i miss that from that standpoint i think in business we try to build that comradeship that that togetherness sometimes we succeed to some extent but usually we don't do it quite as well as i think the uh the military does so it's it was a an easy transition for me i've had a blessed second life i retired uh 25 years ago and so i don't feel much like a navy guy anymore i feel like bill the businessman not bill the admiral uh but um but it's it's been an easy transition for me thank you what can you tell us your highlight of your military career what for you was the you know what is it that you remember most what you're most proud of wow i mean it's it's so much jody i uh i i really you know i was in vietnam as a young officer uh not an easy time for our country and the profound lessons that i took away from that were very important and then i was a i was blessed to go off to uh to college again i was a naval academy guy but i went off to oxford for three years and i think i was the only guy at oxford who had served in the vietnam war and therefore i was not a popular guy but it was good for me because i had to debate a lot with those who were on the other side of that equation and even though i look back at it now and they were right it was that that was a a changing time for me that interface uh with a school like like oxford to do that but as uh you ask for the single most um i think i think it is when you get to a position where by yourself you can make some uh differences that change the lives of the people around you so i was the captain of three nuclear submarines and um and there you know you're out there in in that time it was the cold war and much of our time was spent under the north pole and we were there by ourselves there was no help and when you're the captain of one of those ships it's it strikes you that everyone is depending on you and i would say those were the highlights when i was with my own men 160 of them at a time for 70 to 90 days at a time and it was just us depending on each other and doing a pretty important mission and and finding myself as a result of that but i i had many other blessings with desert storm and my time on the joint chiefs later on with president clinton as the president and and so there are many other stories to be told look good well no i would like to talk about your book which we have here i will show it whoops can you see it it is called uf china us 2039 the end game question mark uh first i'm interested in the title and why that year because it was 20 years after you wrote it 20 years in the future after you wrote it and also in the book you seem optimistic in your 12 policy recommendations that the world could avoid future conflict and confrontation and that the u.s and china could have a constructive relationship which given the couple months here we've had of increasing tensions um is it seems you know very very optimistic so if you could talk a little bit about the book and and your thesis there and and the title yeah well uh for all of our listeners i feel passionately about china united states we can talk forever about this but having been there a lot and having experienced china a lot and of course being deeply engaged in the united states in the government and the military i felt like i needed to try to tell a story of a pathway that could be taken to make for a peaceful relationship between the u.s and china it's not playing out that way but it was the intent of that book to spend about a year and i did with five or six other people every week spending a lot of time trying to get a feeling for the way it was going to be in 20 years and looking at all of the the commentators and looking at all the authors and asking ourselves what is this really going to look like in 20 years and when you look at what could happen it's terrible and it's about our children the book as you know jody is dedicated to the to the young adults of china and the united states because this isn't about me i'll be not around but for them uh this is such a critical issue and the wrong steps being taken on the basis of political uh wishes on the basis of lack of thought on the basis of knowledge of what the future portends for us doesn't look good either for the chinese or for us and so i thought it was important to tell a story that was a possible way with some specific recommendations and it lists 12 specific recommendations for macro policy for the united states and china to undertake to preclude this worst case situation as you know graham allison's book uh thucydides trap uh portends that the future will almost certainly with the top two with the two largest countries in the world result in conflict and uh better man wins and that is the path we could likely take as we see the various things going on between the us and china today now i would just tell you that i watched this with the soviet union i'm the only one probably on this zoom cast that was old enough to be around while the cold war was being generated but in the united states and in the soviet union there were lots of words about strength and how bad the other side was and how uh how the russians were 10 feet tall and it was the time of the military-industrial complex president eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex which as he described it was all of the congressmen who want to keep a strong military budget because they result in more jobs in their states and it makes them seem more powerful it's the defense companies lockheed boeing northrop raytheon uh all wanting more money and having a huge lobby on k street in washington and it's the admirals and generals who are all fighting for more money that's how i got to be senior i fought for more money effectively and i became the senior guy in the u.s navy i look back on that and i say is that really the way we want to go that's going on in washington right now with being strong with the congressman and the politics the defense contractors and the admirals and generals who are saying all the words writing all the threats and the same thing then starts to happen in china and so we're seeing a lot of the similar words from china and this will uh if it is like any anything like the cold war will continue down that pathway until something happens and then we're into something that involves us country to country and so i believe there are lots of ways to avoid that i have spent a lot of time with the chinese military i do understand them fairly well although no one could understand them completely i do not salute the dictatorship elements of president xi jinping the chinese people are a different thing and we need to remember that the americans and the chinese were great allies in world war ii and for those of you who have not been out to chengdu or chongqing where uh claire chennault general claire chanel's flying tigers and stillwell existed side by side with the chinese to take on the japanese it's um it's it's a memory we all should have of how close we could be if we tried hard to make that happen and there are many monuments out there the party secretary out in the province will take you to many memorials uh in honor of the americans who are there um proudly showing you that partnership and i believe that that partnership could exist again i've um i would mention to you something that i did when i was in hong kong i set up something called the sonya initiative it was something that i i got tongue chihuahua to help and he did a lot with i put in money he put in money hank greenberg put in money and we started something that brought five retired chinese generals and five retired american generals all the most senior ones the four stars on both sides together twice a year and we spent four days talking about china u.s getting to know each other i came to know their their grandchildren they came to know mine we did it in china one year the u.s the next year and we talked seriously about what was going on and we always concluded with a meeting with the senior active duty generals and admirals in china the central military command and in the united states with the joint chiefs that was widely accepted by secretary hillary clinton and it has been generally widely accepted by the senior members of the joint chiefs of staff in the united states as you can imagine it's not widely accepted right now and those on the far right at least would take great exception to the fact that this should ever go on with these kinds of meetings especially well i'm not gonna go there into the politics but uh there are many who would object to this both in the senate and in the congress and in the media and so i believe it's especially important that some of us who feel very strongly about this take a very strong stand and try to do something about this most serious of issues if we care about our children at all and i believe this is the time that we have to start down that pathway so that book is published not so i can make a lot of money or become a famous author if you want one let me know and i'll send you one but it was it was put on the market at six dollars so it could sell a lot of copies to try to get the message out that there is another way to think about china us this is not in line with any of the books that i've seen published in the united states it's the other side of the equation and i thought with my background in the military it might have more impact that way i would just say one final thing in response to your question jody and that is uh that um in the united states uh we do not think long term at all i don't know of anyone in washington i spent many years in washington who thinks beyond the next two or three years so the long-term vision is simply not there we don't do it well we don't implement it well people say that's our democratic system you can't do it but i choose to believe there are ways and there are examples of things you can do for the long term the marshall plan was one of those for example uh and so you can do some long-term planning and some thinking about the world in a long-term way the chinese as you all know do this extremely well they can look 20 years in the future and people say well they've got a system so that they can do that the one-party system and they can make that happen i believe that it's very important that we think long term and so that book was meant to say this is how bad it could be in 2039 and we need to do something to preclude that from happening and it gives some recommendations about that future well thank you for that we actually have a question along those lines of what we were talking about in the different kind of planning systems that has come in uh and how can the u.s which changes its presidential leadership every four to eight years how can they on policy issues address china whose foreign policy goals are set for decades isn't that a mismatch from the start and how do you reconcile that well i think it takes enormous leadership and personally i don't think we've seen it in the us i don't think we've seen it on either side of the aisle we tend to want to tell the story about how great america can be and how great i am because i support power for america we don't talk about how we could work together democrats and republicans to make a real difference that happened of course during the marshall plan it happened for bretton woods the establishment of the united nations and nato and there was a lot of cross the aisle work done to form a future for our country that that was the basis of our prosperity today i think we have to search for those great leaders there are a few around uh who might be able to lead that kind of a togetherness because i hate this i hope all of you do as well this by this this partisan bickering in the in the congress and in in many other areas of our our life and we need some great uniters at all levels uh i go back to my home state of north dakota and i find a lot of people who like me have not ever been out of that immediate geographical area not ever so how are they going to be prepared to plan for the long term uh in a in a way that reaches across the aisle it's a real challenge we need to have a few people step up to this and god help us i hope we can find some of those people to put some real plans in place that really move the needle and as that book tries to say there are some things you can do big things that you can do that make a huge difference i would tell you that i don't think the south china sea for example is the same level of seriousness as taiwan is and so if that's true and i believe it is then maybe we need to focus a lot on what's going on with taiwan and the book makes some recommendations about taiwan because i believe it's the senior this the most significant single thing that goes on between the u.s and china that if was if it was resolved somehow would result in a degree of cooperation between our countries and i think we should stop name-calling on the u.s side and on the chinese side and we should genuinely engage in diplomacy behind the scenes not tweets but diplomacy where we're really working on big picture things not little picture things but big picture things that matter and the book is a few recommendations about some of those things so yes i think there are some things that could be done where you might find over the next 10 years or 20 years you might find policies that you could put in place that would matter if we realized how important this issue is to our children and i think we owe it to them um you mentioned the south china sea and taiwan and um you know as a former member of the joint chiefs of staff are you concerned about politic uh possible military action um i was going to ask in the south china sea but it seems like you think that um that is less likely to happen but we have heard you know president trump and the whole october surprise before an election theory that he might uh you know resort to some kind of military action and then of course uh sitting here in hong kong there's always the speculation um as and as you note that taiwan um is a particular uh issue you know concern right now that there might be uh some uh action there and obviously the uh us sending over the health and human services secretary to taiwan um just a few weeks ago certainly was not something that china was pleased about so tell us you know from your military background is this something you're you're worried about well of course we should all be worried about what might happen in the south china sea a skirmish of some kind can turn into something that is much more serious but again in terms of the sheer seriousness of the way the government in beijing takes the issue of taiwan versus the issue of the south china sea i think they view taiwan as much more important than the south china sea and i do believe there are solutions to the south china sea we can talk about that more but i think that that one is not nearly the important issue like taiwan is and if we were able to have a meeting right now with the central military command and with uh with president xi my guess is you'd walk away knowing if it was a sincere discussion that it's all about taiwan it's about what happens in taiwan it's not about the size of our militaries it's not about the south china sea it's not about north korea it's not about trade and tariffs it's about taiwan and i think we need to take it very seriously and address it in meaningful ways and again i tried to make some recommendations about what one would do in taiwan that would be in my view and the view of other senior people who are working on this with me the best interests of the taiwanese people and the chinese and so it's it's contentious i don't think anyone is going to immediately stand and cheer but standing and cheering about a solution to taiwan is going to be very difficult no matter what the solution is and there are some pathways forward that might make a big difference well i'd love to hear you talk about those pathways and and in particular what you would do if you were you know in your old job or a a job like that um and also perhaps giving the president advice on what to do on taiwan but also what talk to us a little bit about in your view why taiwan is the central issue there's so many other issues uh you know on the table with the u.s and china and you're saying this is you know this is key so why is this so key to china and and if you could um you know make some changes there if you could bring try to uh bring some resolution to this what would you do from the u.s side well taiwan is really viewed as an integral part of greater china of course you would say well the south china sea is as well i don't think it is in the same category as taiwan the nationalists uh do uh uh stand for democracy we all salute that i think that's great they stand for a degree of uh of everything we feel in democratic countries and we should all salute that and that's great and um they uh have much more democracy than i think we've ever had in hong kong and we see that happening with the dpp and with the kmt parties as they do their political skirmishing in the battle for who wins the presidency of taiwan the chinese have said in many many ways publicly and otherwise if there is a a declaration of independence in taiwan we will take military action to preclude that from happening those are serious words you don't hear those kind of words about north korea you don't hear them about the south china sea you don't hear those words about any of the border skirmishes they have you do hear it about taiwan they take it very seriously it's what they think is one of the reasons i think it's a serious matter and uh and they view the taiwanese people the nationalists uh as being people who are a part of greater china now i happen to think and this is bill owens thinking that if there was appropriate military if there was appropriate diplomacy between the united states and china behind the scenes that there are solutions to be had um the chinese are grieved that we continue to sell military arms to taiwan it's a huge issue for them here we are at the end of world war ii we agreed that there would be a peaceful solution that we would foster between china and taiwan we agreed to that we've said it many times and at the same time we've said that we would stand with the taiwanese in the event it was not a peaceful solution that the chinese came and took it back forcefully so one china by force is not something we as a nation have stood uh for in the united states um the that lines us up on the opposite sides of a battlefield and what happens i mean the chinese if you've been watching in the taiwan straits the chinese have been doing a number of exercises there america sends freedom of navigation test ships through the taiwan straits frequently and we have reconnaissance flights over the area and we are definitely focused on that area and i have to say the military industrial complex likes very much standing strong for taiwan in the congress selling military arms to taiwan that's billions of dollars that go in the into the uh pockets of large defense companies and the generals and admirals who may not quite of absorbed in every case the grave importance of taiwan continue to talk about how we will be there to uh defend now i would just tell you that this has changed a lot since world war ii and so today the ability of the west to stand by taiwan and defend the island against an onslaught from china is very very remote in its possibility of success uh if the chinese want to do this and have made up their mind they'll do it and our world will never be the same uh it is the one thing the chinese have told us they will do it's the one thing that we know will happen and i believe it's the one thing that's more important than anything else so i think there are solutions that are good for everyone they're not popular among all circles but i think they are the kinds of things we need to talk about if it's true that that is the number one threat to peace between the united states and china i think friends that if we had a solution if we had a way forward i think that we would find a wholly different relationship in every other area of cooperation with the chinese and the americans and it would set a pathway for a much more safe and sane world just to solve that one problem for the benefit of the taiwanese people the americans and the chinese and so i didn't understand that this is that's my uh siri phone over here talking to me oh seriously that's great so uh i think that you know we need to look at these issues like this in the united states what is the most important issue maybe bill owens is wrong maybe it's not taiwan well i'm glad to debate but i don't even hear it mentioned in the context of this kind of a discussion and about the future of the relationship and precluding uh armed warfare of some kind with the united states and china which would be a disaster for everyone i think okay well moving around the region to where we sit here in hong kong we've heard recently including from some recent fcc uh zoom speakers like noam chomsky and gary kasparov that hong kong has become kind of collateral damage in the fisticuffs between uh the u.s and china and i'd like to hear your views on that we have a question on this uh from angel quan a reporter with apple daily uh that if it is a cold war new cold war between the u.s and china how is hong kong affected and is hong kong the you know the two elephants uh uh you know uh are out there and hong kong's a grasshopper that gets uh that gets crushed and also um i'd like to hear your view too on the new national security law in hong kong and whether this could threaten hong kong standing as an international business center well you have many in your office jody who are much more able to talk about this than i but i'm happy to certainly give you my thoughts on this i think hong kong has always needed a form of a national security law like some of the things that are in the national security law that was forced on the on hong kong by the chinese it's too bad it had to happen that way and i think from the west standpoint that i would i would pray that a year from now we will not see as many violations of we will not see as many issues of china interfering in hong kong as much of the western press would have us believe that it is in china's best interest to have a hong kong that is very much like it was before i think hong kong pardoned me for talking about another place when i'm an american here in seattle washington but i believe hong kong is a wonderful place for a mixing pot for a hub of asia for a hub of the world the chinese certainly know this some very smart chinese minister liu who did the negotiations with washington and with president trump certainly understands the great importance of hong kong in the international trade and monetary systems and i couldn't imagine that they would want to do anything that looks anything like a tiananmen square or a uh an involvement that seems too much and i think western businessmen really need and want to be there it's a great place but it's a great place also because of commerce because of the hong kong stock exchange because of the safety and security there and uh and i think american companies have tended to stay and i noticed that the hang seng is not doing too badly just like the new york stock exchange so you know there is apparently an optimism in the business community i i also have a feeling that maybe some of the issues of hong kong are other issues that we don't talk about it's not about extradition it's not about an extradition treaty maybe it's something like rich versus poor uh maybe it's less democracy and and some other form of let's let's fix some of these issues that have caused people to not be able to buy homes or a variety of other issues but i have a feeling that a year from now china is going to want it to be uh pretty much the way it was before i would hope that they won't interfere that much and i would hope that the people of hong kong are safe and secure in that feeling and that the west is starting to feel again friendly to hong kong and the way the government is operating as it did for many many years so maybe that's wishful thinking jody but my view is that 12 months from now when i hope you invite me back we'll be able to say look how smart he was 12 months ago well that would be i i would very much enjoy having you here a year from now but i do wonder isn't some of this international business community standing which of course um you know hong kong has had uh isn't some of that at risk if freedom's basic freedoms like freedom of the press uh freedom of expression um some of the independent judiciary um you know having an independent judiciary here uh if uh if some of that is at risk uh doesn't the you know isn't the whole uh ability of the international uh of hong kong to be an international business center someone at risk yeah i mean i think i think it is to some extent that is absolutely true and it's obvious that as americans we would like every degree of freedom that's possible for hong kong uh we all know the terms under which hong kong was turned over from the brits to the chinese and that did not include a lot of democracy in it but it did include a freedom of the press the justice systems the kinds of things that make hong kong really work and uh you know it's not singapore it's a better place than singapore in my view and i think the chinese want it to stay that way and i can't believe that the chinese are going to do something that's going to [Music] upset that great situation they have in a hong kong that seems to be thriving even now well uh well managed in terms of the day-to-day safety and medical care of citizens and i can't imagine that the chinese want to do anything that's going to upset that balance i'm sure many of you have different views and again i'm not i'm not bent on how kind the chinese administration is but i do think that from a standpoint of practicality we i hope we'll see a degree of normalcy like we had a year ago in hong kong um i'd like to move back to the u.s a little bit um here's a question uh from christopher page and it works with a question i have about um whether depending on the outcome of the u.s election let's say that joe biden does win in november uh will the direction of china-u.s relations remain the same this kind of um you know tough rhetoric calling out china uh on a number of issues including uh things like um national security threats with the u.s claiming national security threats with technology uh other issues uh involving human rights those kinds of things do you think that is something that the biden administer biden administration would uh continue uh as the trump administration has have we kind of gone down that decoupling route um a bit or would they uh readjust uh uh or do we wait until 2024. what what is your view on you know have things changed uh in a significant way so that really we will not be back to what we would have been what we had in previous administrations including you know the one you closely worked with the clinton administration yeah well i mean it is uh who knows i guess is the answer to that but uh i think more important than who is the vice president uh is the fact of who is the cabinet and i think we really need to look at who's the secretary of state who is the secretary of defense who is the national security adviser and and who are those senior people who are going to be setting the policy i think in the united states today it's very difficult right now to do a radical withdrawal from the fact that you know you you all know the the the lines china has stolen our intellectual property they've taken our jobs they've charged us exorbitant tariffs and and and we just stand by and wait um the the united states is a wonderful country filled with exactly the right kind of resources to see through this and and i think that the people of america in addition to seeing a lot of cross the aisle cooperation i i think that's what we want more than anything else in the us is we want democrats and republicans to cross the aisle and do the best things for our country and for international relations i think there are two issues there one is china u.s and the other is the huge deficit and the collapse of the dollar possibly if we continue down this pathway so i hope that across the aisle we can find genuine discussion about these kinds of things we've seen it in the past we've seen it in the past even after times when we were terribly partisan and we've come together and i would hope that in the united states there will be some of those i see some senators and congressmen who have that in them and so just as we had great people in the past sam nunn uh uh dick luber uh dick gephardt i mean these these people crossed the aisle and they did wonderful things for our country and i hope that we can find a way to do that under uh i'd love it in either administration but i think if there is as you ask the question if there is a biden administration i would hope that cabinet would look to real diplomacy not uh not in the open let's make a few social media statements uh and and and shut off the doors for real diplomacy to take place and then back to the cabinet who are the diplomats going to be who go to do the kinds of bidding that we need to have to put in place the right kind of policies and i would suggest some of those policies i've tried to put in chapter four of that book and and i think that it's possible uh but it's going to take a while it's not going to happen in the first months after a biden election and i'm not saying i'm cheering here for biden i mean president trump has done a number of good things but but in general world is not as global as it was and i feel like that's one of the failings of the trump administration is to is to isolate itself from nato from europe from uh from our our partners around the world and from uh engagement with china and india to do all we can for the people of the world that's who we are in america we want that to happen and sometimes it takes a while for free trade to have its impact so that we can see it's really good for our pockets also but if there's a vision there across the aisle i think we can make something happen and i and i i know a number of people who are working hard to do exactly that republicans and democrats in the event of a change in leadership in the country i wanted to ask another question about the election since we're discussing that there has been some growing concern and speculation in washington that uh and based on on comments president trump has made about the uh upcoming election that if he that even if president trump was to leave lose the election especially if the outcome was contested like in uh 2000 that he could simply refuse to leave office uh given your military background and you know your your service with the joint chiefs what would be the role of the military in such such a situation uh could you see a situation in which um someone there could be having to maybe made a decision to actually remove the president by from office perhaps by force from the white house well one of the nice things about being out of the military is that you can even talk about that right exactly but as you you heard from uh general milley the other day who made a public statement on that very topic saying uh to the united states military is not a a partisan organization and it's not i'm sure the joint chiefs all feel that way that it is there to serve the nation it's not uh a trump military it's not a biden military it's a u.s military and that it will be very difficult to get them to do anything that is viewed as political so i pray that what you suggest doesn't happen if it does i think we have to react in the courts in the in the electoral college in the various uh fora of the congress to try to resolve whatever the issues are and if president trump or president biden said i simply don't accept the results then i guess that would require an early meeting of the of the supreme court to say uh this is the result and uh and so uh i don't know uh we've never faced this but i will say that many of us in the united states are painfully aware of how fragile uh the constitution and our democracy is when you think about some of the things that might happen and which might require this kind of activity of course the counting of the ballots in the in the gore bush election were you know was handled well and i think al gore stepped aside uh with gracefully to let the system get on with itself after a ruling by the court and i would hope that something like that's going to happen there would be huge pressure placed on whoever was on the side of resisting coming out of office and i don't believe that will be from the u.s military who will assist whoever that is leaving the office or coming into office so i i can't imagine that happening in the united states um but uh we'll we'll have to wait and see and most importantly i'm involved in a little activity in the united states to foster on behalf of republican and democratic congressmen a series of important business people and a number of us retired military uh who are standing for a safe and fair election and that has all kinds of meanings we can talk about but uh there is a paper that all of us have uh undertaken to look at and approve and it's bipartisan it's across the aisle it's military business and political uh to uh to push the states uh to do all we can to have a safe and fair democratic process so uh i think this is another one maybe we have another meeting in december and then we can talk about what happened how great will that be yeah well i hope i i certainly uh hope that you're right that it does not come to the military who of course are you know they're they swear to uphold the constitution as well um so i want to change topics a little bit uh as we have our last few minutes uh of this chat um you worked quite closely with huawei during your time at amerilink the consultancy you founded um that partnered with huawei to bid for the contract to uh upgrade sprint's mobile network did you ever get the impression that huawei was somehow controlled or owned by the chinese government which is the claim the u.s makes and president trump has made um and that the trump administration has used to try to bar huawei from the u.s and pressure other countries is that something you saw or is that is that uh just heated rhetoric given this uh these tensions that have increased well remember where i came from after the military i was the ceo of a couple of companies one of them was nortel fortune 100 company much larger than huawei nortel provided the telecoms networks for china in many parts of china and the world and so nortel was truly the the size not in total billions of dollars but in influence in the world of telecoms networks 4g at the time uh high bandwidth fiber you want me to talk a little technology i can talk technology but i'm not going to do that and uh and nortel was in that position uh there was a time when when renjing faye and i were quite close and uh i believed and uh it's an another contentious topic that if we somehow had a coming together of nortel and huawei as a partnership of some kind that we would be able to come to grips with the challenges of intellectual property theft of cyber attacks together because cyber attacks are something we don't have time to talk about i'm sure here today but it's very very possible uh in a new world and if huawei and nortel had had some relationship like that we could have done something profound we on the nortel side worked with the us government to talk about this and i'm not going to talk about that more but uh it was a an attempt to try to do something that recognized huawei's importance in china i never saw on the huawei side a significant chinese government influence i never saw it uh there is not at least what huawei will tell us there is not government ownership on the other hand jody these kind of companies uh nortel huawei boeing lockheed you can be sure that the governments are going to care a lot about what you do and they do care a lot about what you do and so i have no doubt that the government of china has a significant amount of influence over huawei just like the u.s government has control over not control but certainly a lot of influence over many of the strategic very large companies in the united states so um how do we find a meeting point that's good and secures our interests in the united states it was to try to find a way to do something together and uh and when it was not possible to do that and in later years i have no relationship with huawei but at the time the uh effort was meant to be in the best interests of the world and the united states in finding ways to work with understand and know what was going on there and of course they would learn something about what was going on with us as well but again uh americans are very strong we're very uh innovative and uh we i thought could handle that well and so did many other people in the united states and huawei as you know sold many many products into the united states for years especially rural telecoms companies uh a lot of networks were sold into the united states and that was a time we seemed to have forgotten now but it was very real that the huawei was doing a lot of that so it's another one of those topics where you can talk for the next two hours about this but uh this was an effort on my part to do the best i could for the united states uh and for for generally the relationship between china and the us and of course today today it's simply none of that is happening right a quick follow-up on that from my colleague uh dan here um uh dance trump with the wall street journal who asked um if you who do you think is winning the 5g race u.s or china obviously there's been a lot of talk if you know by us blocking uh huawei that it will um you know what will hurt the uh development of 5g but who do you think is winning at this point if you had to say well i i'll i'll come back to that in a second um but i think a better question dan is who's winning the wi-fi race no one seems to care about wi-fi and yet wi-fi around the world accounts for trillions of dollars of revenue much more access to the internet than 5g or 4g or 3g and no one seems to want to talk about that and yet wi-fi is exploding in its significance in the world and some people think i tend to be one of them the wi-fi and the internet is like water we need it for all kinds of reasons uh just like we need water and food and so getting the internet out to people for telemedicine for distance learning for better lives is a very important element and yet no one seems to talk about y55 wi-fi six wi-fi six e wi-fi seven how boring we'd rather talk about 5g so you want to talk about 5g uh when i was ceo of nortel we used to be the king of 4g and i would say you know let's see if we can make 2g work better around the world for the good of everyone in the world rather than this focus on 4g and many of you in the united states if you try your cell phone on the streets of new york city or san francisco you do not get a 4g signal it's not there it's there's not enough bandwidth so here we are talking about 5g and att and verizon and t-mobile have put tens of billions of dollars into licensing and antennas and infrastructure and i'll bet for this audience i'll bet 10 years from now you won't get 5g on the streets of my little suburb of seattle kirkland uh in 10 years so i didn't understand that siri has something to say about that siri disagrees anyway dan uh you know who's going to win the 5g race i think huawei is very strong they're not going to sell into the united states at least anytime soon the united states as you know we don't have any companies that do 5g there isn't anybody here not cisco not qualcomm who does 5g ericsson and nokia and so where is their equipment made a lot of it's made in china so we buy 5g systems from ericsson and nokia in the united states those are the providers of 5g in the united states and i think that they do have some advances i think it's it's it's good it's probably as good as huawei's 5g if that's what you mean by winning uh but uh i think that you know this this topic is deserving of a couple of hours of discussion so i think it's a tie if that's what you want and and then we should talk about things that really matter like how do we get wi-fi to the masses for real and it's possible it's just that we don't try very hard to do that and yet it's it's an explosion of the internet in the world for the good of families around the world well thank you and we and we don't have we probably could talk for hours but i'm we we are at the end here but i did want to ask one final question which we're asking of um all our zoom guests this summer what are you reading what is your summer book recommendation um beside your own which we i'll show again here it is what else would you recommend i just read that over and over you know i read bob zuck's book uh he just published a book on international relations i think that's uh that's extremely good and uh you know i i tend to look for the uh the media that tells me the real stories and so i like the south china morning post a lot i read it every morning in the app i i read al jazeera and um and so and i read a lot of business books about innovation there's one favorite one i have which is it's not when you're starting a business it's not the what it's the who it's the people uh the few people who have the imagination and are gonna make it happen and yet we tend to think it's well i'm going to start this product x and i have i'm going to go out and hire a bunch of people and then i'm going to make it and sell it uh no it's the it's the vision and the imagination of the whos are involved so we so i do a lot of reading of management books great well thank you so much it's been a pleasure and we would like to invite you to join us at the fcc we hope in person uh in the future when we can all travel again so uh consider that an open invitation and we thank you for your time it's it's very nice to be with you all i wish i was uh back in hong kong if you let americans come in with our virus problems uh but it's it's nice being online with all of you and thank you very much for this nice invitation to talk to you thank you thank you and thank you all for watching and uh this will be on uh youtube and on the fcc website very soon thank you

Channel: undefined

Views: 21,698

Rating: 4.6546764 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: cN6S1KOtmOM

Length: 64min 31sec (3871 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020