Episode 714: The New Administration and China, with Dean Cheng

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And here we are just a little more than a month into the Trump administration, and much of the attention from a diplomatic and a national security point of view in the first thirty days, and it's been a busy thirty days, has been focused on Europe in the Middle East, the two regions that always seem to divert our focus for America's greatest competitor in a global sense, and especially in the Pacific, and that's the People's Republic of China.

We often think of the challenge in terms of the most obvious area as just the Pacific, but it extends from the Arctic to Africa, Central and South America, and Europe in the Middle East. They are really putting forward a global challenge to what has been the post war normal. Is the America, with a little bit of a challenge from a thing called the Civic Union, pretty much was able to lead and set the international world order. But

it's gone even beyond that now. They are also challenging us in another area that we thought that we had the grip on, and that is space from near Earth orbit out to the Moon and beyond. China is not going to seede that to American primacy forever either and today we're going to have a returning guest coming on

board to discuss this and more, Dean Chang. He is currently the non Resident Fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Senior Advisor with the US Institute for Peace, and a non resident Fellow with the George Washington University Space Policy Institute. Dean, welcome back.

moving on the chessboard. What have you seen that has kind of perked your ears up?

we don't want Beijing invading the island. Now we're saying we've dropped the line saying we oppose in events we

haven't command, and said we support it. But Beijing, not surprisingly has strongly protested this because from Beijing's perspective, what they really want is a formal US statement saying we oppose Taiwan independence under all circum we will never support it because in the Chinese view, if we would do that, it would cut the legs out from Taipei and basically say, you know what, you guys really need to negotiate a

deal which ultimately we'll see reunification. So from Beijing's perspective, this is a huge, huge.

gonna have to move the data out of China. You can't so that you guys can't just go rifling through it as you already have. If the Chinese turned down this sale, which they have said they are going to, then it pretty clearly casts the Chinese and a negative light. It basically is saying we're willing to work with you. You're the ones who are insisting you need access to this

data and why is that? And then the last part, and this just came out in the last few days, is the apparent view of mister Musk, who is obviously key advisory Donald Trump to bypass the Moon and go

directly to Mars. And why this is striking to me is, on the one hand, I certainly understand mister Musk's interest and focus on Mars, but I think that position potentially raises the question about cis lunar governance and who is going to manage that enormous amount of space that you have to transit through on your way out to Mars. Because China has made very clear it's very interested in having an outsize role in the volume of space between the Earth and the Moon.

look at everything, probably naturally from the Chinese perspective. What gives us the most leverage and makes us look like we're the reasonable people in the room, just reading reading the law the way it should be read according to us.

a rules based international order. Also, the big question here is whose rules, Who writes the rules? And one of the things to think about particular for cis lunar space, much as with the world's oceans, is whose rules should apply, And with regards to cis lunar space, where the Chinese are saying we are going to go to the Moon, we are going to land there, but more importantly, we

are thinking about establishing a long term presence there. If you fly from Barcelona to Bangkok, two countries where English is not the native land, from takeoff to landing, in the cockpit cross international air traffic control, the language is English. It doesn't matter what airline you fly, it doesn't matter what nationality the pilots are. Everyone speaks English. And I

think what the Chinese are hoping to achieve by dominating cis lunar space here to the Moon and having a majority of flights, by setting up a long term presence on the Moon, by setting up traffic and therefore space traffic management. They want the language of space traffic to be Chinese. And that has political implications, that has power implications.

That's a huge messaging issue. And I don't know whether we're not us going to Mars, huge achievement, major epic of human achievement, is necessarily going to be enough to say yeah, and therefore the language of space travel will necessarily be in.

see with shoals into islands and bases. We were here, We'll do what we want to, I dare you, et cetera, et cetera. They have this mindset, they have this precedence. People think that if they go to the Moon, they'll have their little base and that'll be it. They can

create their own precedence in their own reality. And it keeps popping into the back of my head that if the Chinese were able to establish as the primary full time presence on the Moon, that international order they talk about on planet Earth that they didn't have a say in developing, they show up on the Moon. You know, what is their motivation to want to stick to a lunar policy that the United States and a defunct empire

called the Soviet Union established in the previous century. That really, if you're looking at what do things look like in twenty one hundred twenty one fifty, and that to me is a blinking red light.

One of the things that's really striking was a few years back that one of the heads of sorry, the head of one of China's state owned oil enterprises, came out and said that oil drilling rigs are pieces of mobile national territory. Now nobody else makes that argument, but the implication was that wherever we stick this thing, potentially it should have some interesting claims. Now with the Moon, with other space bodies, you're not supposed to have sovereignty.

You can't claim the Moon as a piece of the United States for China, and that is part of the Outer Space Treaty, but there are health and safety regulations that could be invoked that. For example, because lunar dust has somewhat different properties than earth dust gets everywhere, is

very very abrasive, et cetera. The Chinese could recently say, look, wherever it is that we're going to set up a base, we want to keep out zone of let's say ten or twenty miles because the dust that will be kicked up by landing craft but interfere with the health and

safety of the operations. Now, if I put a Chinese lunar base at one of the key craters at the south pole of the Moon, where we think there is water, you could, in theory start creating de facto sovereignty by saying, hey, this area you need to keep out because of health

and safety reasons. Would the Chinese do that? We're watching them do something with a far better established set of laws, because there's been maritime law long before the Unconvention of the Law of the Sea, and the Chinese are clearly violating those. So this is this is not without precedent, and the Chinese have an entire set of doctrinal political warfare that talks about using legal means, public opinion means, et cetera, to shape and influence the international situation.

within X number of miles feet whatever. You know, that allow would allow a party to claim big chunks of space, particularly interesting areas of of off Earth where we need to have we have the various h stable places where satellite can can sit without having to in between the gravitational fields of the Moon and the and the Earth and other things. Talk about that a little bit.

satellites jeopardized it. Now what was interesting about this was they didn't file an immediate claim, and they filed it through the United Nations, whereas our Space Forces and Space Command will literally pick up the phone and we'll call people and we'll email people and say, hey, we believe that satellite one and satellite two, your satellite too, are potentially going to have what's termed a conjunction event, aka a collision. You need to do you both need to

do something about this. So the Chinese, what is the point of their action? It was to set the stage for criticizing Startling, which they really hate for a variety of reasons, having to do with how it's influential it's been in Ukraine, and how a private company can have strategic effects. But what they essentially said was you are posing a threat to the health and safety of our space station, and your constellation is the problem. It is an interesting question to your initial laydown.

extra satellite. At most you might have one with the Chinese. Because there are space companies, many of them are not looking to make a profit, they can afford to do things that we would consider inefficient because that means they've got redundancies, they've got resilience, and they've got the ability to therefore fairly quickly deploy additional satellites in peace time that could be to make up for failures in wartime. That's a war reserve, and that's part of actually how

they write about military space activities. One of the things they talk about is the need to be able to rapidly deploy additional capabilities, if only for the reason of making the adversaries calculations go out the window. If you had been projecting eight radar observation satellites and all of a sudden the Chinese feel twelve, your targeting and your

prioritizations kind of gets screwed up. So there's all sorts of things that the Chinese are thinking about in terms of seriously, how would I achieve space dominance in time of crisis and in time of war.

tightly held a lot of the evolutionary developments in the PRC rocket program has been. They don't celebrate that kind of creative destruction, so to speak, because they seem to have a very orderly, cautious, and steady program. You outlined in your paper on China that will I think we

can link to it in the show notes. I'll try to about how their program began in nineteen fifty eight with a US trained scientist, and they have iteratively developed and developed, and I think people don't have in their mind the twenty twenty five reality of what China's capabilities are in space because a lot of people and I'd be guilty of this myself, build default back to oh yeah, the Chinese rocket program back in the nineties with the

Coffee Clatch era where they Laurel Aerospace taught them how to do multiple satellites on a launch. They have not sat on their heels. They have advanced bit by bit, steady by steady. Definitely not in a SpaceX way. But where would you what's a good way to describe to people that haven't been tracking on Chinese progress where they are relative to that International Space Station snapshot that everybody's used to from the American point of view.

the way, at least in the open source. Their satellite constellations, some of them are fully populated, a bunch of them have sort of eroded. But the Chinese I mean weather, position and timing, communications, earth observation, anti satellite systems. They have the full portfolio and of course the ability to put their own astronauts in orbit on something to think

about here. As of twenty team, every shot we have of Mars from Mars has been American, but in I believe it was twenty twenty one the Chinese successfully on their first try, landed a lander on the Martian surface and beam back photographs. So they have done on their first try something nobody did, including us, which is to successfully land on Mars and evade Martian air defense. But second of all, they have done something that Europe, Russia, Japan, India have.

they're going to do on the Moon. In addition to the they see financial and business opportunities up there too, which I find fascinating. What I mean, other than grabbing an asteroid that's made out of solid gold, what do you think is their economic scheme for the space.

interesting resource issues, and the most interesting is helium three. Now, what you often hear about is while we'll want helium three, an isotope of helium, because that'll power our fusion reactors. The problem I have with that is, please show me

the working fusion reactor not out there yet. People who are doing a lot of the more advanced quantum computing, and for looking at the computing demands associated with artificial intelligence, especially once you start getting into like smart cities and thousands and thousands of smart cars and all that. You've got to fool that. You've got to cool a lot of computer cores. Part of that's going to be electricity, but part of that is going to be how do

you keep stuff super cool? And part of the argument there is the use of helium like nitrogen liquid. Nitrogen liquid helium could be one of the things that you would use to cool down all these massive computer arrays. That's an interesting thought in terms of why you might want lunar regolith. One of the other things to keep in mind here is that for the longest time in the United States had the largest reserve of helium in

the world. But I believe that we fairly recently, like about two years ago, auctioned off those holdings, So that puts US potentially behind the eight ball.

times from rather messy anti satellite capability, and of course I'm furly believed that that deep hidden inside some compartmentalized program, all the space going nations has some really interesting things

up there. But as everybody looks at a possible conflict with the People's Republic of China if things go high order that vulnerability that we have, how much of the Chinese way of war, at least how they're thinking is reliant on those assets in or a bit compared to how the US and Western militaries are used to having access.

my enemy. That is the shinshi chant that's a Chinese term for it.

in China's favor. Whether it's Taiwan, where the South China Sea, these are battlefield potential battlefields that are very close to China. China doesn't need space to know what is going on around Taiwan. It doesn't really need space to know what's going on around the sprat leaves or the Paracels. It can rely on UAVs, it can rely on aircraft. It can rely on land based radars. It can rely on high altitude balloons. It can rely on the world's largest

fishing fleet. It can rely on the world's largest merchant fleet. It can rely on human spies. It can rely on radio direction finding. It's got massive, multiple overlapping methods of common since in surveillance all along its shores and extending out to Taiwan.

China has done some cyberwork. People may have heard about this, but all of that is aimed at making sure that the information isn't there for the commanders that the carrier group commander, the commander Air group, the commanders of the submarines.

They are in an ideal Chinese world. Going to basically not have access to space based information doesn't mean they can't do military operations, but they're going to be at a huge disadvantage against the Chinese military that will have multiple overlapping channels of comms, connaissance means, surveillance means, and the ability to target certainly within Yao one hundred and fifty miles of the Chinese shore without having to rely once.

and Australia and New Zealand. Can you talk about that aspect of what China is up to.

claim that they're international waters. Fine, we'll send our task forces into international waters that happened to be in the middle of your allies areas, and we'll conduct live fire exercises just like you say you have the right to do. And if that interferes with air traffic and things, and if Canberra basically says, hey, you know airliners, this is

a dangerous area, well how you like them apples. They're doing it to the Australians and the New Zealanders in part because the idea here is what turn up the pressure on smaller powers too. Ideally, get those powers to them and either complain to the Americans or if they're going to complain to China, China basically say, hey, the

Americans are doing this, and honest see you complaining. So this is a very interesting, longer term strategic plan of trying to detach Australians in our two of our key

allies in the Pacific away from us. Let's pull that camera out a little further and we look at the Cook Islands, we look at Chinese deals with the Solomons, we look at Chinese efforts to establish a greater presence in Papua New Guinea, and the audience for this program in particular, is going to remember places like Wattle Canal and to Loggie and Bougainville and Port Moresby and the Buna campaign. And what we are seeing is a Chinese effort to establish footholds in places that would have been

very familiar to Admiral Yamamota. Why because the geography hasn't changed. Because the strategic connections between the United States and Australia nineteen forty five are the same as those in twenty twenty five. Sure you've got bigger ships and you've got jet airliners, but at the end of the day, the

sea lanes of communication continue to be vital. The Chinese are achieving a presence that in nineteen forty two would have been considered strategically threatening, and was considered strategically threatening, which is why you had Operation Washtower in the Guatdal Canal campaign. And I think that we are also seeing the Chinese try to establish closer ties in the Central Pacific with the Federated States of Magnesia and other small island states out there, again for the same reasons, because

they are part of the stepping stones across Pacific. Because if the Chinese can keep them out of our They don't have to join China, they just have to be kept out of closed American orbit. Then it is going to be more difficult for us to operate in the Western Pacific.

English language. But you know, you have to have some way to translate things and if concepts, and because there's also cultural differences American culture in German culture is a lot closer than American culture and Chinese culture and reference points and way of seeing things, and so party was going, Okay, maybe there's a different Chinese concept to it, but I think the words are useful because a lot of people's mind you can almost see engagement and cooperation in that

then diagram or ninety percent overlap. But the Chinese see something very different on engagement versus cooperation. That when you when you understand how they look at it differently, a lot of what they're doing makes a lot more sense. Talk a little bit about how the Chinese view engagement versus cooperation.

Every time you had a single country threatened to take over Europe Napoleonic France, Wilhelmy Germany, Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, you wound up with a group of countries that came together as allies to cooperate, share forces, share information, share command and control, to counter that single dominant hedgeble so Europe and the United States, as the inheritor of European diplomatic history, is used to thinking in terms of alliances, cooperation,

balance of power. Asia, five thousand years of history easily has no history of alliances. Asia is marked by a single dominant country, China, and peripheral states states on its periphery that were often tributary states. They didn't join each

other to counter China. They each cut separate deeds, and so you had Young j then the Chinese Foreign Ministry, I believe what was State Counselor on Foreign Affairs in two thousand and three say there are big countries and there are small countries, and that is just the way of the world. And it was very clear what he was saying is, don't expect me to somehow treat small countries as equal. I will engage with them, I will work with them sometimes, I will pro by aid as

we see in the Belt Road initiative and investment. But you're not my equal, and you shouldn't think that you are. That's a very different kind of worldview. It's also important to recognize Asia pretty much has accepted this throughout most of its history because they didn't allie with each other against China. So you have an entire comment, not just China, who comes out of fundamentally different diplomatic history, and that shapes sort of the groove that is created by thousands

of years literally of experience. This is one of the key things, is that the Chinese that'll work with other

people or is quote unquote win win. But at the end of the day, actual cooperation, the way we have with Britain, the special relationship, the way we have with NATO where there are parts of NATO where US forces are under somebody else's command, US South Korea, US Japan, Australia and New Zealand, our alliance relationships are far more cooperation actually working together than we have ever seen with the Chinese in terms of quote unquote in coordination. It's it's engagement.

economic benefod intellectual property. It's not an accident that often the Chinese are able to bring products to market ahead of the people who are doing the original R and D because they swoop in and scoop up a lot of that R and D. And this is where the Chinese the side has subsequent advantage, are able to more promptly put it into production. What is more concerning of late are things like volta typhoon that apparently the Chinese.

We think somebody has been planting malware into critical infrastructure, and what that suggests is that in time of crisis or conflict, these unknown somebodies could literally flip switches and start affecting our water supply, our communications systems, our energy supply. Imagine if you blacked out the East Coast. Imagine if water systems across the country stopped working, would you be

able to ship three divisions overseas? Probably not, because you're going to have a whole lot of civil unrest inside the United States. And there's a psychological aspect to this. Knowing that somebody is running around in your infrastructure, knowing that your data may be corrupted. How confident are you that your force deployment schedule, that your military orders, that your spare parts chain is going to work. Have you

practiced using physically printed out orders? Have you practiced communicating by voice rather than data link? At one point, the Navy stopped training people to shoot the sun because well.

inside of a niche field. But news started to break into open source I don't know, maybe eighteen months ago about There has been a rash of construction and additional moves in this nuclear strategic deterrence field that hadn't moved much for decades inside of China, and it's kind of opened up a new field. We're trying to understand how

China views nuclear deterrence relative to the US. What is important for people to keep in mind, who maybe are just locked up with the US versus Russia nuclear map, that might be different with the Chinese.

And at that time, the Chinese had maybe a dozen or so ICBMs and a full slew of medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles enough to hurt the superpowers by vaporizing two, three, four five major cities, but nothing on

the scale of the US and Soviet Union. Through the various arms control treaties, we are both down to, I believe, around twelve hundred and fifteen hundred launchers and around that number of warheads, and the Chinese for the longest time didn't really seem to be interested, as you noted, until about two years ago people started looking at satellite photographs. And this is one of the fascinating things about commercial satellite photography is now anyone can buy pictures of just

about anywhere on the planet. And what we found is that the Chinese are building missile silo fields in western China. At least three have been identified so far, each with one hundred to one hundred and fifty silos, so we're talking about three hundred to four hundred missiles out there, and the Chinese have the ability to deploy multiple independent re entry vehicles, so pretty much the Chinese are potentially fielding numbers of ICBM warheads comparable to that of the

US and Russia. On top of that, the Chinese have also unveiled plans to build the H twenty strategic bomber. This is the first strategic bomber outside the United States since the old Soviet era Blackjacks the TU one sixties. And the Chinese are working on fielding a fleet of five to six ballistic missile submarines, which give them a ballistic missile submarine force comparable to that of Britain or France.

But the British and the French don't have ICBMs, so we are looking at a Chinese the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force is going to have nuclear capabilities comparable to that of Strategic Command here on the Russian strategic Rocket Forces. We haven't really thought about how to deter too independent nuclear forces just about ever, because the Chinese never developed a huge force of their own. Now, to be fair,

the Chinese have had to think about this. They were worried about deterring the United States pretty much from nineteen forty nine until the Nixon Vision.

powers independent of each other. Let's not forget the Chinese also have to worry about India, which has its own nuclear capabilities and again separate from the Russians and the Americans.

problem that is rapidly snowballing. There simply aren't enough younger Chinese, and that's going to create all sorts of interesting problems for them with regards to everything from manning their military to you have social structure where there are fewer and fewer working age people supporting more and more elderly retired people.

And I will tell you that Yeah, in the United States, seventy year olds, even eighty year olds are out there playing tennis and going touring around the world and driving across the country and RVs and all that. A lot of Chinese elderly are nowhere near as healthy, so there's

going to be some interesting problems for them. Another aspect is the economy, and one of the things that yeah, look, I don't know whether your listeners love Donald Trump or hate Donald Trump, but one of the things to think about here is the fact that mister Trump has put an end to the EV mandate, the electric vehicle mandate, so we are not going to hopefully become an all electric vehicle nationwide fleet of cars and trucks by twenty

thirty or twenty thirty five, wherever you may stand on this. This is a u impact on our relations with China want because China is the source of a lot of the rare earths that go into making electric vehicles, including batteries, and they also have established engagement, including trade deals with a lot of other countries that also have things like

lithium for batteries. If we actually tried to become a fifty percent EV country by say twenty thirty, we would need China enormously because we're not going to make all those batteries, certainly not without importing a lot of material from China, even if the factories in the United States, by ending the ev mandate the Chinese, our need for Chinese rare earths went from tons to pounds because you still need them for cell phones, you need them for radars,

you need them for a variety of other things. That is a fundamental chain in the potential economic relationship between the United States and the PRC. The other thing that's striking is that if you're the Chinese, you have I've seen Donald Trump one point zero, Joe Biden and Trump

two point zero, and the tariff situation hasn't changed. If you're the Chinese, you see that as at least as threatening as the Seventh Fleet in the eighty second air because the United States is making it pretty clear that we are going to continue our economic pressure on Beijing,

and it doesn't matter who's president. Those are I think some aspects to sort of keep in mind is the economy of the economic relationship, which goes to supply chains and things like our Earth's and how our domestic decisions actually do have an impact on this, and the unchanging aspect of demographics, because it's a lot like the Titanic.

and forth about priorities. And what's really been interesting is some of the objection to the China primists, those who say we need to continue to not let the Middle East and Europe get fifty one percent of the attention. We need to focus on the real global challenge to us, which is the PRC. And Bridge Colby is one of those people that kind of has been in the front before the election. Even he's been very steady and very direct and very open and in the public space about that.

And there's been a really big pushback about the desire by the Trump administration to bring him into a policy decision. And you know, we're both old enough that we remember, again going back to the nineteen nineties, the China, doves were absolutely positively dominant. You could not step your one foot forward with a question about the long term challenge of the PRC and they just be all over you.

How do you see the state of that focus? Not necessarily bridge coal, we've been in a larger sense for those people that are starting to slot in to policy positions inside the new administration.

of the day, Russia is one bad actor. No one should be under any impression other than these are the bad guys. But they are, as a good friend of mine puts it, a mafia owned gas station with nuclear wepins in the basement. They don't have any economy or a technology base that really is competitive, unlike China, Asia is where technology and innovation come together. I challenge to your listeners, how many of you have a European PIEC,

how many of you operate a European operating system? How many of you run a European computer program on your computers? Whereas Asia is where your cell phones come from, your computers come from, deathly where your chips come from. So this isn't to say that we should ignore Europe. I'm not saying that at all, but we should recognize that if we are going to be strategic, we have to make choices strategy. A strategy that says be strong everywhere is not a strategy, and it's a recipe for failure.

So where do you prioritize what is most important going forward into the second quarter of the twenty first century. Where are the technology centers, Where are the technology innovators? Where are things going to be produced that we must have, everything from drugs to batteries to cell phones and computers and the software that runs them. You know, there's an interesting chart that came out that said that there is not a single European tech company that is in the

same neighborhood as the Magnificent Seven. That home depot is bigger than all of the European startups of the last twenty thirty years. Again, does that mean we should turn our backs on Europe. Absolutely not. But we need to recognize that the long term threat to the United States is at least as much engaging, and by the way,

also a little bit from North Korea, and we need to recognize that as a result, we do need to prioritize because we can't be strong if we simply can't afford it. So it's up to our leadership to make the case and to explain why we you know, what those choices need to be.

isation and the Chinese. We tend to associate artificial intelligence with Donald Twutzenega cyberdying systems, Model one one dominatus, and the Chinese are much more pedestrian, but at the end of the day, they're also much more systematic. It's about the Internet of things. It's about the ability to wade through terabytes of information and using artificial intelligence to find the nuggets and to help humans make that ultimate final decision.

Those are two recent pubs, and working on a paper on why we should keep the Wolf Amendment, which is the piece of legislation that limits NASA from engaging in open cooperation with China in space.