Xi Lied...and Here We Are. Josh Rogin Talks To A&G.

more imports of products made with forced labor. The President says China wants to become the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, promised that won't happen on his watch, and framed relations with China as a global competition between autocracy and democracy. That's what his state tune, we don't approved democracy works. I appreciated him saying it that fourth rightly. Uh, And I'm also excited that we're gonna have Josh Rogan on with us on the Armstrong and get A show.

Josh as a columnist for the Global Opinion section of The Washington Post, a political analyst with CNN, and also has this book that came out Chaos under Heaven. Trump. She and The Battle for the twenty one Century on sale now wherever books are sold. Josh, welcome to the Armstrong and gett a show. Great to be back. Thank you. I am a nut for this China stuff, like it's been my hobby for the last couple of years. Try.

I was unaware of your book, and I guarantee I will read it um because I just I just well, is it overstating it to say this is the story of the world for the next century or more? I don't think that. I think the China challenges up there with like climate change, is the two things that will shape the world as we know it, and the two things that we have to get right, because if we don't get those things right, nothing else really matters. And you know that wasn't the wide help position for a

long time. But to the COVID pandemic. During the COVID pandemic, it doesn't take much convincing because everyone in the world is affected by it, and everyone knows that. The reason that they're sitting in their basement and they haven't seen their grandma for a year. And in part due to the fact that the Chinese Communist Party UH actions now affect our lives and affect our public health and our security and our prosperity and our freedom. And that's just

the latest example. But that's not going to be the last example. So you know, what happens in Beijing doesn't stay in Beijing. So we all have an interest in figuring this thing out and then coming together and mounting a response. Well, I'm glad that everybody, you know, Republican and Democrats, seems to be on board with understanding that our bet was wrong for for forty years that you know, we let them, We let them grow enough and get rich enough in the you know, well, they'll come around

to capitalism and freedom in our way world. And uh, I don't think they had any intention of ever doing that. We now know that, and and everybody realizes, and Joe Biden's stating out loud, China is dead set on becoming the most powerful country in the world. We're not gonna let them. I'm happy to hear that, right. I think

you put it perfectly. You know, we didn't know whether or not China was gonna liberalize, and maybe they didn't know, but at least since when shij Pink came to power, it became increasingly obvious that they were going to go another way. And what what Jing Ping and the Chinese Communist Party want is they want to have all the

benefits of our system without any of the responsibilities. In other words, they want the parts of capitalism that allow their companies to succeed, but they don't want to live up to the basic norms of you know, fair trade and human rights and all those other things that make that system possible. And we didn't have any idea what to do about that. And you know, the Trump administration, crazy and chaotic as it was, they took a step at it at least and they changed the conversation in

a way that they can't that can't be undone. But because the Trump administration was so dysfunctional and messy, uh, they didn't do it all that, all all that at many points. And now that's what the find administration has a chance to fix that. We don't know how they're gonna fix because they don't know how they're gonna fix it,

but they're gonna they're trying to come up with that. Now, this battle between the United States and China has so many the similarities of the Cold War between US and the Soviet Union, but so many things that are completely different. For instance, Hollywood's biggest market was never the Soviet Union. You know, if you wanted to sell cigarettes or toys or whatever, or Nike shoes, you know that the Soviet

Union wasn't where you're gonna try to do it. I was looking at one of your tweets from I think not that long ago, where you tweeted out if you refuse to be complicit and mass slave labor, the CCP will kill your business in China, and it reminded me of the story I came across yesterday that I was going to talk about today. H and M and Nike

joined brands facing boycotts over statements on Xingjiang cotton. Is that the way you pronounced that that region probably not, probably not, but anyway, that's uh, you know, the particular kind of cotton there, and that's the region of China

where they got slave lay and everything else. And so now there's a boycott against Nike and others in um in China, and I just feel like that a time is coming swiftly where Hollywood is not gonna be able to do business, Nike's not gonna be able to do maybe Apple, It's just the time is going to be up soon, isn't it. It seems to be heading in that direction. And the way you said it is exactly right.

This is not the Cold War. It's there are some similarities, but that analogy gets overused and it's also used as a weapon to attack anyone who wants to rise to confront the Chinese government's bad behavior. They'll say, oh, what do you want another Cold war? What are you crazy? But you know, we forget about the term cold war. That's just a bumper stick. Or what we're facing is a systems battle, a competition, uh, that we have to engage in and hopefully win. And that's you know that

not uh leading towards a conflict. That's trying to avoid a conflict by addressing the problem before it becomes a conflict. Now, when the NBA got you punished for four hundred million dollars for one tweet from one guy about Hong Kong, a lot of people around the country were like, oh

my god, we got a problem here. It seems that the Chinese Communist Party at this point is putting its political interests and the party's interests above not only you know, free commerce, but even China's interests right, because you know that when they lash out of American companies, they hurt their ability to attract investment, and they hurt the American companies. They put everybody in a bad situation. And the only reason that they're doing it is because they're defending the

party's practice of genocide. Okay, And you know, for a long time Wall Street firms, H and M, and Nike, they looked the other way. Hollywood Disney made a film in Jinjang, and I just pronounced it incorrectly too, by the way, and the public I don't know how I pronounced. It's not the point. The point is they thanked the public security of Bureau in the credits. They thanked the

people who were manning the concentration camp walls. And all of a sudden, Americans are coming out this realization that, oh wait, I don't want to watch a movie that was made with the help of genocide perpetrators. Oh wait, I don't want to take the cotton that slaves picked and put it on my body, because that's not cool.

It's not good. So you know that Awakening has taken a long time to come to fruition, but just shows you how bad the atrocities have gotten and how, like you know, determine the Chinese Communist Party is to make sure that they punish anyone who dares to speak up about it. We're talking with Josh Rogan. He is a columnist for the Global Opinion section of the Washington Post Political Landlist with CNN. I'll mention the name of his book again towards the end, because I'm absolutely gonna read it.

Like I said, I've become a kind of a nut on this whole China thing. I'm really rooting for Nomad Land to win either Best Picture or Best Director at the Oscars because that woman, and I don't have her name at the tip of my tongue, who directed that, Chloe Jao. I believe, yeah, she's got some statements that

angered China. And if she goes up there and receives that award and doubles down on criticizing China, I think China will cut ties with Hollywood or say some really mass nasty things in that and Hollywood will have no option but to cut their ties with China. And I think that could be a really big moment, not just for you, know, Hollywood and movies. But for the world, I think that's really gonna draw a lot of attention. Yeah, no,

I listen. I think that the problem in Hollywood is that for fifteen twenty years they've been cow towing to the Chinese Communist party line, most of the big studios for a very understandable and obvious reason is that's where their money is, that's where their market is. That they but you know, again, at some point they have to balance that against the cost to their US business and their reputational costs and the human costs that they're contributing to.

And that balance is still on the Chinese side. And you know, you know, we can every every time we

stand against that is a good thing. But make no mistake, you know, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, they're still making the calculation that their their best bet is to go along, to get along with the these Communist party That hasn't changed and that will only change when regular Americans vote with their feet and vote with their pocket books and they say that these companies, hey, listen, uh, you know, if you're gonna make a movie with the

people who are manning the concentration camps, we're not gonna watch that movie. Or hey, Nike, if you're gonna have uh, you know, slave weaker, slave labors picked the cotton that goes into shoes, We're not gonna buy those shoes. And what's gonna happen with the Olympics or where you're just gonna go to the Olympics seems not And it's like going, yeah,

it seems crazy. It seems insane to me that there would be an Olympics and you'll have uh, US athletes walking around that track and there's Vice President Harris in the stands cheering on that that that just that can't happen. Kenneth, I think that's exactly what's about to happen now. You know,

we got some time between now and then. But but as as much as there is more discussion about China and more discussion about the CCP, and it's miss a bad actions than there ever was before, and again that's because of the pandemic, because every human in every country saw what it was like when you have the Chinese Communist Party lead order, when they had the most science and the most data and the most mass, and what

did they do with that power? They blackmailed the world to shut up about their hands me of the coronavirus, and they hit the data which made our responses. Where so then they lied to the President United States in the book they had this is the story about Shijing

thing lying to President Trump about the coronavirus thing. It would go away in warm weather, and it would go away when the and if you used herbal medicine, and they had it under control in all of these lives fed into the President's head and they came out in our policy and exacerbating the suffering of Americans, millions of people.

And so that's again a big step. But right now, I gotta tell you, if you if you just look at what's going on in the business ward and you look at what's going on in Congress, if they're not there yet, okay, and and and and that's what you're gonna see. You're gonna see a lot of Americans and a lot of American companies, you know, making that calculation of uh, you know, should I go to the epics or should I stand with the leakers. And they're going

to choose the form or not the ladder. You've seen how far the poll numbers of tank though in a pretty short period of time in terms of Americans opinions of China, whether they're a friend or an enemy, or where they rank. I mean, it's it's pretty dramatic, yes, and that is I think driving a lot of what the Bindant administration is doing, because they can read the

polls too. Now you know the that that doesn't mean that in Congress they're actually getting anything done, because the dysfunction in our system, and it's function in our Congress

and in our government has it's not actually fixed. So you know, it's it's it's it's common for people to look at those poll numbers and to say, oh, well, you know, you China hawks and the Trump administration guys, and you know, you're ramping up the Cold War through syditese trap blah blah blah, and now everyone's against China. But the truth of the matter is that people are reacting to the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party's actions,

and it's not really about the US versus China. It's about how China is acting around the world. And if you think about it that way, you really us well, okay, actually, the thing that we really have to do is to de politicize the China issue, and we have to get away from anything that gets anywhere near racist or hateful language. We have to make sure not to target Asians, indigion, Americans, because they are actually are allies of this fight, not

our enemy. And then if we can do that, and then we can fix our own government, then we could probably win this competition based because our system, which is based on the values of human rights and rule of law and freedom and freedom of religion, those are actually the way, if you know, people want to live, That's the way people ought to treat each other. That's what our basic society is built on the rights of individuals. Uh. That's a better model, but it's only a better model

if it works. The book and I absolutely I'm not just saying this, will read this because I'm I'm grabbing everything i can on China for the last couple of years. Chaos under heaving Trump, she and the Battle for the twenty one century. It's on sale as we speak. Josh Rogan. One final question, do you foresee in the next year, five years, it won't be a year, but five years, ten years where we have such a bipolar world, where these big companies. You you either do business in China

or the United States. You're you're a foreign country. You're either in part of China's orbit or the United States orbit. You really can't do both. Do you think that's where we're heading? Right? There's an essential interconnectedness between the United States and China that will never go away, nor should it, you know. And that's another big difference between this and the Cold War with the Soviet Union, is that they're gonna be the autonomy in the world. That's not going

to be something that we can stop. It's not something that we should try to stop. What we have to try to do is create a shape China's rise in a way that doesn't result in our us getting stick in us having sax choices in our security, and that we can still tweet about whatever we want. So the answer to your question is that's partially mainly up to

the Chinese government. But what we have to do is we have to clarify this choice for them, and that means raising the pressure on them, to put them to a decision to say that hey, listen, if you want to participate in the benefits of our half of the world, then you're gonna have to stop committing genocide and stop stealing your intellectual property and all and stop you know, punishing companies for things that people tweet, or if you go the other way, we're going to impose a cost

on you. So I think that's a call for addressing the problem before that happens, before we have some sort of conflict or some sort of bifurcated world, because that's not a good outcome. But it's gonna take the Chinese government and the Chinese kind of party changing its behavior also to avoid that outcome. Well, I took a lot of your time, I realized, but I appreciate it. It's a topic I'm super hot for and I will read your book and people will talk again. Josh Rogan, thanks

for your time today. Thank you. We gotta take a break. Text line four kftcre