I'm Dan Kurtzphalen and this is the Foreign Affairs interview. Our pathologies and our dysfunctions are making it harder for us to compete with China, whereas China's pathologies is actually, in some ways, facilitating their One of the big surprises of Donald Trump's second term has been the change in his approach to China. His first term marked the start of what seemed to be a hardline consensus in Washington.
But in the past year, the drivers of Trump's policy have been much harder to decipher, including for Chinese policymakers. Beijing was prepared to respond forcefully to tough US measures, as it has most prominently. getting its control over rare earths. Yet it has also seen new opportunities to gain ground in its bid for global leadership, as Trump's focus careens from Latin America to Middle East to Greenland.
John Zinn has spent his career decoding the power struggles and ideological debates inside the halls of power in Beijing. Now at the Brookings Institution, Zinn long served as a top China analyst. At the Central Intelligence Agency for becoming Director for China at the National Security Council. He sees Beijing's year of aggressive diplomacy.
As a success, with a lot of uncertainty about the months ahead. Xi Jinping faces a series of summits with Trump, even as he grapples with economic challenges at home. And the military that if recent purges or any indication is still not to his liking. I spoke with Zin about China's approach to Trump two point zero, what to make of the military purges and other developments in Beijing, and the enduring nature of US China rivalry, whatever the surprises in the short term.
John, thank you for joining me and for the slew of fantastic essays you've done for foreign affairs over the past. Thanks so much Dan, it's my pleasure to be here. You've spent probably as much time as anyone in the United States today trying to make sense of Chinese decision making and foreign policy, both in your time in the intelligence community and then on the National Security Council before you you left government a couple of years ago.
How as you watch Xi Jinping and C C B leadership more broadly at this moment, how do you think they understand American policy toward China, right? Yeah, I think right now I think they see a moment of real flux in our China policy and a moment of potential opportunity.
Right. I think that especially as you saw in the national security strategy and in the national defense strategy, there's much more muted rhetoric about China. This phraseology about being engaged in a strategic competition is is not at the forefront of either of those strategies.
And I think from the Chinese side, I think they've recognized that the there has been a paradigm shift in Beijing toward a more hawkish footing. Ironically, thanks very much in part to the first Trump administration, which really broke the seal on this pivot to a more competitive posture towards China. their assessment is likely that this is not gonna last. This is gonna prove to be ephemeral and there will be a snap back at some point either after the midterms or after Trump.
toward a more hawkish perspective. And some of that is just ideologically baked into their system, right? Like I think it can be easy sometimes to to go to Shanghai or some of these other cities in China and forget this is still a communist regime. Right. And they do view us, especially under She through that very traditional
Leninist prism where we are innately hostile to them. And I think that was true even before she was more subdued and muted, but I think that's at the forefront of their mind. And so I think now, especially in the next year or so, I think now they feel like they have an opportunity to do what they need to do to rectify some of the deficiencies that they still have.
And strengthen themselves for the next round of competition with the United States. I think the other thing that's going on, and I think this was very significant. in the realm to the meeting between the two presidents in Busan when China rolled out this expansive rare earth export control regime. This was last fall the meeting in this was last fall and just weeks before the two presidents were scheduled to meet in Busan for their first face to face engagement during Trump's second term.
That to me, as somebody who's watched she for a long time, that very much felt like she shifting from being reactive over much of the past year and really for much of the past decade in many ways, to taking the initiative and switching from being on defense.
to being on offense with the United States. And again This felt to me as somebody who's watched him for a long time, it felt a lot like Xi Jinping's first term, you know, where I and my colleagues, you know, we had many days ruined by uh Xi Jinping doing something we had not quite anticipated. and him making big muscle movements on the international stage. And this to me feels much more like that.
And I think the main way that it's manifested itself so far is not directly vis a vis the United States. I frankly have been a little surprised at how durable this rapprochement has been since the meeting between the two leaders. And I think that's intentional by China. I think they want to, like I said, strengthen themselves. But I think the way it's manifesting itself is how tough they've been on our allies and partners.
Right. And especially the Japanese, where they've been very tough on the new Prime Minister, Takaichi, and reimpose export controls, right, because of her statements on on Taiwan. So I think that presages, you know, a bumpy year potentially. I wanna pick up on lots of those points, but just to linger on on Trump for a moment, how do you understand what is going on with the Trump-China policy? I think if we'd gone back
A year I won't project this onto you, but certainly I and a lot of other people watching US China policy closely assumed that a tough line on China would be a centerpiece of the Trump two foreign policies. It was with Trump one. What's your read of what is happening? Yeah. I mean, I think what's happened over the long arc of this year is I think they did come in very much with that intention. And if you rewind to about a year ago.
It was quiet on that front, right? Like I was referring to this time last winter as the phony war, where there was skirmishing and subdiplomacy. We had done a couple of initial cuts of of tariffs, but the real engagement hadn't really gotten underway yet. And you didn't really have that until Liberation Day. And I think that the administration, and you saw this in their public statements, they smelled weakness on the Chinese side. And I think
Inappropriately so. And I I I've had this theory that whomever briefed Trump about China and its economy early on in the administration must have led with the fact that China's real estate sector was the locus of all their economic problems or many of them, right? There would have just been a certain vividness.
to that. And so they came in, I think, wanting to be quite tough with the Chinese. And then I think what happened after Liberation Day when China showed that it had the appetite to just ride this out and were willing to play hardball.
I think it surprised many people in the administration. And I think they had to do a pretty significant climb down from that. I mean, there was a there was a great line in the in the New Yorker profile of Marco Rubio where it said the president felt like he was checkmated because of the rare arsenal move.
Secretary Besson had talked about orchestrating some kind of coalition as we made trade deals with others' allies and partners that China would then be the focal point of all that pressure. And that
doesn't seem to have really materialized a full year later. Like a little bit here and there, to be fair to the administration, like Mexico announcing tariffs. But other countries like Canada, of course, are seem to be walking in the opposite direction right now. So I think the way I think about it is that
it there's kind of been a seesaw approach in our China policy. We came in wanting to clopper them and then we've gone totally in the opposite direction. I think after Liberation Day of really trying to mollify Beijing and I uh or even appease We made concessions on export controls. It seems like we're shifting from a policy of export control to one of export promotion now with China, where we're trying to persuade them to buy a Nvidia's chip.
And with some I think, you know, some concessions on Taiwan. I think Taiwan is probably where we have the most picture in light of the the ten billion dollar arm sale that was announced late last year. One of the other surprises of the second Trump foreign policy is the focus on the Western Hemisphere, though I will note that
Brian Winter wrote a great piece for Foreign Affairs in December of twenty twenty four, predicting that Latin America America would become a priority, though I think most of us were have been surprised by just how how true that has been. How have the Chinese interpreted and reacted to the focus on the Western hemisphere, both in the national security strategy and and national defense strategy and also in in our policy more broadly. Yeah. I think it's really Kind of a shoulder shrug.
from their perspective. And I think there's this theory that's floating around out there in some quarters that by focusing on the Western Hemisphere, this is actually the administration equipping itself to deal with China over the long term and to compete with China, right? And you see some people
framing the move against Venezuela in particular through that prism. But I think from the Chinese perspective, you know, they're very parochial and very disciplined about their own interests. This doesn't really affect their interests in a major way. It it might be at most an inconvenience, but I think for them, uh the main thrust so far and I think the the main hope on their side is that this just gives them more space
to focus on their own periphery, on the Indo-Pacific, right? I mean they've been able, like I said earlier, they've been able to push Takaichi pretty hard with a pretty muted response from the administration at this point. They conducted a pretty major military exercise around Taiwan at the end of last year, again, with a pretty muted response from the US side. So I think they feel like this focus on other parts of the world plays to their benefit.
Right and that's traditionally how they see these things. If we are distracted with other issues, whether it's the Middle East or with Latin America, that's fine. I mean, uh what they don't want, of course, is it to be inimical to their to their interests and their their commercial interests in the region. You see that playing out in the in the way they've tried to play hardball on things like the Panama Canal, right? And the Chinese company that's involved in that.
But again, there's it doesn't seem like there's a concerted effort underway from the administration to focus on economic development in Latin America or things that would really pose a challenge to a lot of the Chinese firms that are just doing business. in China and making that are really the centerpiece of their inroads into the region. On a previous episode of the podcast, Robert O'Brien, who was Trump's nationality advisor in the first term.
argue that what was driving the reproach month was a recognition on the part of the Trump administration that there are too many other problems in the world. There's too much else going on. And it made sense to calm things on the US China front. in order to give the US some space to deal with these other things. Do you think there's anything to that? Is there anything to that logic or is that an attempt by a former official to put lipstick on a pig if
Uh a little bit. I mean in fairness there is there is a lot going on in the world, but A lot of that, especially over the last month or so, is of the administration's own making, right? These are not exogenous shocks to the system. Greenland is not something that anybody had on their bingo card last year. Venezuela has been a longstanding and festering concern, but not kind of a top-tier geopolitical challenge for the United States. And so I think it's hard to make that argument.
You know, like when I was detailed to the National Security Council during the Biden administration, there was also a lot going on, right? You had Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you had the the attacks against Israel by Hamas, of course.
But there was still a focus on China. I think there was a sense that this was the long term challenge and that we needed to be disciplined and methodical and not lose sight of that over the long term.'Cause if that is the case, I think that very much plays into Chinese statecraft and diplomacy.
I get this question sometimes about when is the next crisis going to be with China? When are the guns going to start firing? And I think that gets the whole problem set wrong. Their approach is much more insidious. They wanna avoid a crisis. They wanna engage in these salami slicing tactics, pick your metaphor. So things don't come to a head and there is some kind of full blown crisis.
If we give them that space, that gives them space to do their own thing and again pursue their own interests pretty vigorously, I think. So I think it's a challenge. But if you give ourselves the space, you're also giving China the space. And I think that is just the reality of the trade off. And I don't think you can really walk away from that.
A line that jumped out to me in one of your recent pieces for Foreign Affairs was this notion that in Xi Jinping's mind time is really on China's side, that that some kind of calm on Beijing's terms in fact gives China the space to get stronger over time and that, you know, contrary to some of the kind of peak China discourse that has characterized the US China conversation, uh that they really do see their prospects improving over time.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I don't think it's just a tactical point because of this pause right now between the two sides. You saw that reflected in the documents coming out of the Chinese Communist Party plenum just a week before the two presidents met.
And it says very explicitly in those documents that the international scene is favorable to us and we can take the initiative, which is kind of remarkable for the Chinese side. They tend to be much more reactive and want the other side to make the first move. So that is she's guidance to the party state for the next five years.
that we can take the n initiative to shape the international environment. And I think it shows just how confident they're feeling at the end of this first year of the Trump administration where they're where they're really not isolated. You know, I wanted to dwell for a second too, if I may, on the point about peak China, because I feel like that was part of the zeitgeist that fed the Trump administration's mindset coming in, right? And why they thought there was weakness. Yes.
There was the weakness in the economy. And I think there will had been a lot of bearishness on Wall Street, which is where of course Secretary Besson came from about China's economy in the wake of the pandemic. And you also had this idea that China was peaking. I think the irony for me, as somebody who who follows the Chinese side very closely, is
They have an analogous theory about us, I would argue, right? They and I again it gets back to this ideological prism for viewing the United States. I mean, it could be Lenin from a hundred years ago. They view us as a declining, decadent, but still very dangerous power. And so I think from their perspective, that theory that Hal Brands and Mike Beckley had, you could turn it on in its head and represent that as the Chinese perspective, right? That
Time is not on the US side anymore, that we recognize that. And because we recognize time is not on our side, we are going to lash out in more violent and unpredictable ways. And I think they would point to things that the Trump administration has done over the past year, like the strikes against Iran.
like the raid against Maduro as exactly evidence of that. But these are the kind of flailing, desperate attempts of a declining power to establish something. Exactly. Exactly. So and again it gets to this other argument out there that's floating around in some quarters that
what we've done over the past year, these strikes demonstrate the vim and vigor of US foreign policy and how we've been reinvigorated under the Trump administration. But I think from the Chinese perspective, I see very little evidence. that this has really caused them to to recalculate or reassess their interpretation of Trump. And I think that's true for She in particular. I mean it's worth recalling that when they did their summit nearly a decade ago at Mar a Lago,
There was that famous scene, right, where Trump told Xi about the strikes on Syria over a beautiful piece of chocolate cake. So this predilection for unpredictable violence, I think that's already baked into Xi Jinping's calculations. It's not really going to send him scrambling.
I do have to think if I were sitting in I don't know, the PLA office watching just the the capabilities of the US military against sometimes against Chinese or Russian defense systems and then also watching um the Russian experience in Ukraine, uh they do have to have uh some degree of I don't know, reinforced respect for for US military capabilities in that scenario.
I think that's right. And again, it gets to their assessment of us. They do see us as declining over the longer term, but still incredibly dangerous. And especially the US military, the I mean the proficiency they've showed in that in the Maduro decapitation or what they did with Iran, I think that reinforces the assessment in Beijing. But I think the really interesting question from the US policy side then is what does that lead them to do?
They've already got the most dramatic military modernization since World War II underway. They've already gone back to the gym to bulk up. If they redouble their efforts, What is that going to mean for the United States over the longer term if they keep assessing that the the bar is quite high for them to achieve their modernization goals and they keep building more and more options? Do you think that Xi Jinping's sense of assurance, sense of confidence about the coming years is warranted?
I think he recognizes that it's going to be challenging, that it's not going to be smooth sailing. I do think some of it is warranted. And I think part of it is because I think he has a realistic appraisal of what's going on inside China. And part of it for Xi is generational. This is a guy whose professional career really started after 1978, after reform and opening up. So all he's known his entire Dell life is a China that's
recovering from the Mauiers and is on the rise and is on the move. And so I think that that sense of confidence about China's place in the world and the trajectory they're on. I think it's quite sincere.
Right. And to the extent that there are real problems in the economy, whether it's with involution or over capacity or the problems they were having in the real estate sector, I think they have demonstrated an ability to recognize those problems. And that's one of the things that's really disconcerting to me as an American is that They're able to say we have a problem and then we're going to marshal resources and focus on remedying.
Right. And I think she has done that reasonably effectively over the course of his tenure, even when it's been really painful and challenging for for the political and economic system. And I think there's this tendency sometimes to frame assessments in the United States as being binary. Either China's gonna surpass us. Or it's a pipe dream and they're never going to, or they could potentially even fall apart. I think the reality is that.
Even if they they get kind of a a gentleman's B on the the homework that she has assigned the party state over the next few years, they're still going to be a formidable competitor, right? I think it's time to stop talking about them as a rising superpower. They've arrived.
Right. And it's kind of like the United States. We can have a recession and still be a superpower. They haven't had a recession yet on the Chinese side, or not in quite bracketing the pandemic. They haven't had that. They have had a slowdown. that's still five percent economic growth. I think they can they can have a few quarters, even a few years of slower economic growth, and they're still going to be formidable as a power and still pose a multifaceted challenge to the United States.
So I think to just have that recency bias and just point to bad economic data over a few quarters or just point at the top line numbers for the challenges. It doesn't really capture what they're trying to do to fix that and what's going on under the hood and what this is going to mean over the long term, even if it is as bad or as worse as some people think it is, this is still going to be a formidable challenge to us. And uh it behooves us
not to underestimate them, right? We run a greater risk of underestimating China, and I think we have many times over the past few decades than than going in the other direction. If I wanted to argue the the pessimistic case, the case against that assurance Uh, one thing that has been really striking over the past year, even with speeches like Mark Carney's about, and Canada's of course, uh
economic reproachment with China in recent recent weeks, striking that China in some ways kind of never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity here. That even when the US is alienating allies China seems to not be able to restrain parts of its system from whether it's doing military exercises or, you know, dumping exports into markets.
uh that are suddenly more vulnerable because US tariffs that, you know, a moment when you can imagine them putting on a charm offensive and really bringing former US allies and partners closer to China, uh parts of the system and the domestic economic needs make that very, very hard.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and you're right. I mean, I think after Liberation Day in particular, I think a lot of analysts expected there to be some kind of charm offensive with US allies and partners since it it was an omnidirectional trade war and that never really materialized.
So my theory on this is that that is not by accident. This is not just the Chinese system tripping over itself. I think it's an intentional strategy over the past year. And it's not how we would do things in the United States where we would take an opening to then ingratiate ourselves.
I think what they are trying to do with the Europeans in particular, but I think also with our allies and partners along their periphery, is they are trying to intensify the conundrum of our allies and partners and show them they don't have good options. And if you want to have alternatives to the United States, you better come around to our perspective on a variety of issues.
So I asked a Chinese academic who's very well connected in Beijing about this a few months ago and his answer about this was really striking. He said, Aren't you guys worried about pushback from the Europeans or some kind of fallout given the way you've treated them over the past year? And his verbatim response was, so what? What are they going to do about it? They're going to complain to the Trump administration? Are they really going to help them?
And I think what what we s we're seeing now actually is that The Chinese player seems to be working. Carney has come around.
He's trying to make deals with the Chinese. And you're even getting inklings from from the Europeans that they want to come around. Macron was talking about welcoming more Chinese investment. Right. So it's not necessarily that they the you know, the case that they think Over the long term and over centuries and dynastic cycles, I think it's more about just being patient a year.
If we do days and weeks, they tend to do more months and years in their thinking. Right. And I think that does give them an advantage. And I think if you're in Beijing, you know, what happened at at Davos and and the the appetite among our allies for an alternative or to diversify away from the United States, I think it kind of demonstrates to them that their approach is working. There's one other point I want to make, Dan, just to to tie into your earlier question too, if I may.
I think one of the things that's going on that plays to China's favor too is that there is really deeply rooted dysfunction in the system, as I argue in one of the pieces. I think one of the things that's really striking to me n now in this moment.
is that the way China's dysfunction is playing out actually magnifies their international influence. This problem with involution and over capacity, yes, it's a reflection of a real problem, but the net result of it is that they have a one point two trillion dollar
surplus that doesn't really seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. And Chinese economists will say, as long as there's robust demand in the West, this dynamic is going to continue. You can create tariffs, but our companies are so competitive and push the chaos down so quickly that
This dynamic is going to continue even if it decelerates. And on the flip side, what they offer for a remedy in light of that dynamic is they say if you want to really rectify the numbers or reduce the trade imbalances, you should welcome more Chinese investors. Which also enhances their geopolitical heft too. And it's a really jarring contrast with the West, where, yes, we have our own dysfunctions and pathologies.
Clearly, right now, they are inhibiting our ability to compete with China to get back to the Robert and Bryan point. Our pathologies and our dysfunctions are making it. harder for us to compete with China, whereas China's pathologies is actually in some ways facilitating their presence on the global stage.
I w I was struck by another point in in a PC reference in November about the leverage that Trump gave up by publicly committing to doing three meetings or saying he was going to do three meetings with Xi Jinping in in twenty twenty six. Why are those presidential meetings so symbolically important to the Chinese leadership? And when you look ahead to what we assume will be the first of those meetings when Trump goes to to China in April, what does Xi Jinping want from that meeting?
Yeah, I mean they're consequential because I think what China recognizes is that for both systems it's going to inhibit uh, you know, on the US side, our appetite for taking competitive actions or doing things that could jeopardize those meetings.
And so they know it gives them leverage because they haven't confirmed it on their side. So if things start to get hot, they can always say, Well, maybe we won't we won't do the meeting. And somebody is going to have to tell the president that his meeting that he seems very attached to. Could potentially go sideways because of something that happened at the Commerce Department or elsewhere. And their theory seems to be vindicated by events, right? There was reporting saying that Stephen Miller.
was going to be the commissar enforcing discipline on the US side that there would be no major competitive actions towards China. And I think That is what she wants. Right. And I think this gets to a deeper imbalance in the relationship that that really spans administrations, which is that the US side often wants a laundry list of things from China, whether it's
help with Iran during the JCPOA process, help on the North Korea issue, help dealing with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And I from the Chinese side, I think they want us to get out of their way. And I think that is a win for sheet. There are other affirmative things that he wants. I think he would welcome greater access to to the US market. I think they know they still need US uh technology and know how.
And so you do see elements of that, but even with that, they're being very coy about it right now. You see how this is playing out with Nvidia, right? And there is a debate, is this just a negotiating tactic or is is this real? And it's probably a little bit a little bit of bulk. In all honesty. They're not they're not mutually exclusive. So I think I think that really gives China a lot of leverage. They want time.
The point there being they both seem to be signaling some desire for chips, but also then instructing companies to buy as few of them as possible. And that's the Exactly. I think the divergence here is that the companies really want the chips. 'Cause it makes sense for them from a business perspective. But I think there is some real hesitation among different parts of the of the apparatus, of the state apparatus, about should we welcome it.
And either way, it's proved to be an effective negotiating strategy, right? Cause it seems then like they're holding out for more and more advanced chips from the Chinese side. So it's just really interesting. So I think there's actually very little that they want from the administration at this point. We'll be back after a short break. And now back to my conversation with John Zinn.
If you'll let me um indulge in a flashback here, uh I'd love to go back a couple decades, I suppose, in your career when you were a CIA China analyst, I think watching Xi Jinping when there were not that many people doing so. This was before he had come to power, and you Again, we're one of the people watching most closely as the our understanding of who he was and what he would mean for China and the US China relationship changed.
I'm just really interested to hear how your understanding developed and when you started to see that this wouldn't be kind of continuation of what we'd come to expect from from Chinese leaders earlier and why it took so long for the rest of the American system to really prosper. Yeah, I mean I think there was a real expectation. There were kind of two
Big expectations about Shi, I think, kind of in the public domain during that period was when he was heir apparent. I think one baseline expectation was that. he might just be Fujintao two point oh. This is gonna be another wonky technocratic guy who seems like a cipher from the outside and we don't really know a lot about him and he's just going to continue to pursue the dung legacy.
And then I think because so little was known about him, there was also this other mode that you saw in some places where he became a vessel for some people's hope. that he would reinvigorate a reform agenda in China that had in many ways stalled under under Fujintao, his predecessor. Right. And you had people on the Chinese side throwing around this term that uh whose rule had been a a lost decade.
They were really, you know, living off a off of the fumes of the reform efforts from the previous era in the late nineties and early two thousands under Jong Zeman and Zhu Rongji. I think watching she closely though, I think there were clear indications early on that this guy was going to be different. They were muted and they were and they were subtle, but I think just the fact that he was a princeling.
Right, I think put him in a different position politically. I think he knew, had a better sense of of the political system and how it was really wired. in a way that, you know, neither Jong Zemin had when he was thrust into the top job in amid the Tiananmen crisis or Hu Jintao. really did. And I think if there was any doubt during the period when he was the heir apparent, I think we very quickly got a taste within Shi's first year of office of just how different he was going to be.
I think the the challenge for a lot of people was was just trying to keep up with him because he was breaking so many of the old rules of the game of Chinese politics by going after former Politburo, standing committee members and central military commission members. I mean, I think people kind of forget
We're kind of assumed that this is a police procedural where there's corruption and then you pursue the corruption case to its natural conclusion. But that's not how it works in China. This is like going after made men and living to tell about it, right? Especially in the security services and the military. These are the guys who control the guns. They're at the heart.
Of the party's control of the system. And I think when he started making those moves, I think that's when the ice started to break and people started to have this realization that. This guy is not the same as what we saw before. And I think you saw a similar appetite for risk on the international stage too, right? Where he was making big muscle movements.
like the Belt and Road Initiative, or I think the one that was really that really captured people's attention and imagination was what he did in the South China Sea. Right. I think that was when a lot of people in, you know, who are not part of the China watching community really had the realization, number one, that she is different. And number two, that when people say China is is a long term strategic challenge, this is what they mean.
Right. They have the capacity to make these big muscle movements that are inimical to to US interests. And I think that that was really when it became indisputable, right? In that kind of twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen period that we were dealing with a different animal.
I'm so interested in the kind of epistemology of this and realizing that when you were at CIA you had access to signals and human intelligence that made this job uh easier in many ways, although probably harder in some ways as well. uh how you w went about developing this picture and how much harder it's gotten now, not just because you're out of government, but because the the opacity of the system, the lack of kind of connectivity between the two societies.
How do we develop these theories and and what are the kind of pitfalls in in trying to paint that picture of someone where, you know, you don't get to spend a lot of time talking to them about their worldview? Yeah. I mean, uh honestly, I think the most important ingredient is just time.
Right. And just watching the sky for a long time. And I think the the key thing is in my mind, you know, there's there there's been kind of a cottage industry of people who are focused on she's utterances, which which is appropriate and part of the the Pekingology. But from my perspective, you've really got to watch what he he does more than what he says.
And watch him over the years, because I think there is kind of a certain logic and coherence to what he's doing. It's not just about the text, it's about the context. It's about what is he doing and why and what kind of system is he is he operating in. And so that is really one of the important ways to try to make sense of him.
You know, to go back to that moment right after Xi took power, just to make it a little bit more concrete, and when he started making these big moves in in the anti corruption campaign, going after what the Chinese call tigers in their system, my operating picture of Xi Jinping is that it's like when an electrician comes
to my house, right? He understands the wiring that's behind the wall and he knows which wires he can clip safely and which ones are gonna zap him, which I could not do, right? I would be zapped. And I think Xi as a princely, this is part of his heritage. That's intuitive. He understands those networks in the system in a way that Hu Jintao or Zhang Zemin wouldn't have. And this is why he's able to do it and do it safely.
And do it with impunity. Right. But you kind of build out this picture over time as you as you watch him do these things and succeed in doing them, or watching him recalibrate when he does hit some kind of roadblock. Right. So I think it's less about evaluating any piece of data in a vacuum and more about building a composite picture of this guy over time. Cause I think it's kind of a mistake to say, oh well, he's just a cipher or he's inscrutable.
This guy's been on the world stage for a long time. We actually know quite a bit about his background, his family history. And I think there there's a lot you can say about him based on. Did you have the chance to be in the room with him when you went from the Intel side to the the policymaking side in the Biden years?
Yeah, I I did. And unfortunately, you know, when I started at the NSC was still the throes of of COVID. So a lot of those interactions were either telephonic or the Zoom where it happens kind of moment. So the one time I was really able to see him in person was when President Biden and President Xi met on the margins of the G twenty in Bali in twenty twenty two.
Which was quite a moment for me as somebody who had spent, you know, my whole adult life studying this guy to actually see him in the flesh. What surprised you about about seeing him? Did it change your understanding of what he was like in any way?
Not really in all honesty. And I I don't wanna claim prescience, but he was very much what I thought he would be. Right. And especially in that moment, keep in mind too, we we did that meeting right after the party congress where she had really cleaned house in the leadership. evicted any rump remnant of his, you know, former rivals, uh, faction inside the system. And it was really his own guys at the top. So
He i just exuded confidence. This is just after he sh ho had Hu Jintao marched out of the Y Yeah, exactly. Hu Jintao is marched out, she looks on totally impassively, stone cold, and I think in that moment he was feeling very large and in charge. Right, and very good about himself and about his position. And so that confidence I think came through. And I think even in the way he comports himself and carries himself.
I mean, you know, I've I've seen a lot, you know, many hours of clips of him, how he comports himself in these central committee meetings where when he gives a speech, he speaks in this ver kind of very slow, deliberate manner. He doesn't feel hurried. He knows everybody is hanging on his every word, and that's very much how he is in person. That there's a certain confidence. I think what's striking about him too is that again
I'm very mindful of the princeling heritage, right? The fact that his father was was a big deal in their system. And he had these references that I think uh are kind of esoteric for most Western audiences about the Communist Party's history, very much fun to mind. Right. And I think he demonstrated a proclivity to frame things that way and to make analogies and say this is like this moment in our history and in C C P's history.
And so that was very unsurprising. So I think that sense of history and that sense of confidence, those were two important props in my understanding of Xi Jinping. And I think those were were in evidence in the in the opportunity I had to see him actually in action. And so he would be talking about C C P history and leaving I don't know, Joe Biden just kind of scratching his head with confusion, I imagine?
Well well, my job was to make sure the boss wasn't scratching his head, right? Uh so hopefully there was none of that. But yeah, but I think uh unless you were a specialist or somebody who who really focused on these things, I think there were some moments where these these are not offhand references for a Western audience.
You have a fantastic opening line in your fantastic essay in our November December issue called China Against China, where you write, thirteen years after Xi Jinping ascended to the top of China's leadership hierarchy, observers in Washington remain deeply confused about how to assess his rule.
If we're getting him wrong now, if you're getting him wrong, how do you think you you might be getting him wrong? What w if if if we're making a a fundamental error right now, what what would we be making? So I think There's a few different ways. I mean, if the problems are in the economy are much worse than we appreciate and there is some kind of really significant contraction in China's economy, that could be one way, right? Where it kind of knocks them out of the running. But even then,
I think there's probably a floor on it. I don't think there's going to be some kind of total collapse of the economy. I think they probably still will have the resources to number one. get through it and be a formidable rival to the United States over the longer term. They just have that, I think, at this point.
I mean, the one people always worry about, and I think especially in my line of work, is about this underlying stability of the system, which is hard to gauge from the outside. So it seems very robust. She has invested a lot in the security services, which people like Sheena Grightnans have done a wonderful job documenting over time and and Minchin Bay.
And so it seems very robust. And I think she has real confidence that he has a handle and a grip on on the society. But that is always, you know, kind of the trillion dollar question about is there more fragility built in than we're seeing from the outside? But Again, I...
I I think that they have a pretty good handle on things. And I think this is one of the ways in which we've gotten China more wrong than right over time. Right. I feel like people have been predicting the collapse of the CCP since I started doing this. And even if there is real decay in the system, right? Rome didn't fall into day. It takes time for these dynamics to play out. And I think she again, one of the virtues that he has as a ruler is that he is
not just focused on these problems in the system and their deficiencies. I think he is obsessed with them. They have studied closely what happened to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. And I think he is preoccupied from the first day of his administration. About not going that way. Same thing with the Arab Spring, which happened right after he took over the number two job in the military. I think that really spooked him. And I think that's why there's been such a focus.
unrooting out corruption in the PLA because I think a lot of these not just analysts, but I think a lot of rulers in the Middle East thought that they had a strong grip on the security services and they had what they needed in place. And then that all just melted in the away in the face of mass protest. So I think that has fed uh she's preoccupation with the security services and with the military over time, making sure that that does not happen.
You note this moment in the essay where she returns to Beijing to become Hu Jintao's uh number two to become the heir apparent. From remind me where he was, uh it was prior to 2007. He was He was in Shanghai. He was Shanghai at that point. Briefly. So he comes back and kind of sees.
a system that has succeeded in many ways, but where there's this kind of rot. There are problems of success. What just describe that moment and what as you understand it, he saw as these kind of vulnerabilities that had crept into the system over the the preceding years.
Yeah. I mean I think the two big obvious ones, especially in retrospect, are really the corruption and then the insularity of the military in particular and what had happened there. So the corruption is kind of the obvious one and the way
I think about it is that there was this notion floating around uh in the West for a long time that as China experienced this economic growth, surely there would be a rising bourgeoisie or middle class that would want a greater role in Chinese politics. The irony is that the Chinese also This, right? And the party appreciated this dynamic too, which is why under Jong Zemin, they had this very clunky ideological phrase, the three represents, where they basically co opted.
Those business elites. So they solved one problem and they solved it extremely effectively by bringing those people into the party and neutralizing that threat. The problem is, is then that now you had this marriage of wealth and power inside the CCP that didn't exist before. And yes, corruption had always been a problem in China, endemic, and it had been a problem in earlier phases of the reform era, but I think this really accelerated. And I think she knew that from being out in the provinces.
And he probably got an extra view into it when he was in Beijing because he would have just had kind of a stovepipe view of it, that it was bad here in Xiamen or it was bad in Fujian, but he would have had a bird's eye view once he got back to the top. And then I think with the military, there were obviously deeply rooted corruption issues within the military. But I think what may have been just as troubling, if not more so, for she is just
how insular it is, right? Especially for somebody who grew up as the son of Shijong Shun who had cross cutting ties of both across both the party and military elite because he had been a leader in in China's civil war.
that didn't really exist. And I think Hu Jintao throughout his tenure, he didn't have the network inside the PLA. He never really got his arms around it. And I think it's hard to appreciate from the outside, you know, the PLA even within China's Communist Party, is kind of the sprawling High tech. empire unto itself that's really impenetrable from the outside, right? There's no kind of oversight from Capitol Hill like we have in the United States. There's no
army of think tankers who are military analysts and specialists, uh, the the way that you have in Washington. There's not an office of the Secretary of Defense that's largely populated with civilians. There's nothing. There's really one node of civilian control and that runs through the chairman
And if there's an heir parent, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. And I think that was probably very troubling to She in a lot of ways. And I think because again, because of that princeling heritage, I think he had insight. into what was going on inside the PLA because of his network. Like there was a a really famous speech at the time that was given by one of his fellow princelings.
where he said, you know, we've built a lot of impressive capability over the last couple of decades inside the PLA, but we have a real issue with corruption. And we're at a point now where only our own corruption can defeat.
And the shift from this kind of consensual collective leadership to much more centralized control under one person was she is attempt to or a recognition that it it would take that kind of stronger figure, that kind of assertion of of dominance in order to break through these pathologies. Yeah, I think that's right. And there's this school of thought that there was a consensus that China needed a stronger late leader, right? Somebody who had their hand more firmly on the till.
But, you know, I don't think the people who ended on the opposing side of that, right, were necessarily part of that consensus. I think she had an opening. And I think what he really did was take a crowbar to it and pry it wide open, right? And give himself a lot of space. And I think for a system like this, this is endemic. And I I think I make the point in this piece. This is an observation that goes back to Aristotle about the way oligarchies function, right? That they tend to be
subject to both centripetal and centrifugal forces. So when things get too loose and you're too much in this collective leadership, things start to stall, the system starts to stagnate. And the natural reaction is not to move towards a more Western liberal system with checks and balances.
it's to go into the opposite direction, right? And to try to centralize power and clean house. So I think that impulse from Xi Jinping, I think it was there. And I think that there was a happy convergence in his mind of the party's interests. And of his own interests. This is good for me and it's also good for the party to concentrate this power in my own hand because having this loosey-goosey collective leadership approach is leading to rise.
And I think some of that is actually built in, right? If your theory is that we're gonna have this collective leadership model, we're gonna have a, you know, kind of a balance of power at the top, what does that mean? It means you're gonna have a more stovepiped approach. And the way you're going to have something resembling checks and balances on the top leader is that you're going to have this kind of factional infighting festering beneath the surface.
And I think it was it that's kind of what we learned. That's exactly what was going on underneath the hood during Ku Jintao's administration. So even that kind of collective leadership model is going to be inherently rickety in this kind of system. One of the really surprising but persuasive points in that essay is that the C C P especially under Xi Jinping has
uh and uh qu quoting you here, demonstrated itself to be an incredibly effective learning institution. How did that come about and how does that how does that learning work? It obviously doesn't have kind of democratic feedback, but it has found other ways to do that perhaps more effectively than than we have. Yeah. I mean I think a lot of it This is part and parcel of the reform era, right? Where you have this effort to systematically study and break down problems. And I I think this is
You know, where something like Joseph Terrigian's biography of She's father is really helpful, you really get this sense of these major figures in the 80s. They didn't have a game plan. What they were doing was unprecedented in many ways. I mean, they had a little bit of a model from some of the other economies in the region that had developed, but they were really groping through this.
I think it's really probably after the collapse of the Soviet Union, right? Where there's this preoccupation and obsession by the party about studying this moment. over and over again and revisiting it and debating it to make sure that that does not happen to the C C P kind of the last man standing, if not in an absolute sense, among communist powers in the world.
How do we prevent that from happening? And so they do have this whole apparatus, I think a lot of it located at the Central Party School, but also throughout these other government affiliated think tanks to think through these problems and to be deliberate about them and to study other systems and how they function and make sure that they are applying those lessons internally and kind of, you know, to use their clunky phrase geology, they're sinusizing them.
How do we take a little bit from here and there? And that's kind of been the story of their whole reform effort. How can we take what's worked on a Western factory floor and apply it here? How can we take a little bit of maybe what's worked in Singapore's political system and apply it here? And so they've been very methodical about doing that, and I think about institutionalizing a lot of that. After watching the failure of Putin's initial plan in Ukraine. And
coming to understand that he was surrounded by yes men who would, you know, kind of nod along when he declared his intentions and not tell him how much rot there was and how much harder it'd be than he thought. A lot of people assume that the same uh was true of Xi Jinping, that there was no one around him to tell him
uh that an invasion of Taiwan might not work that well or that the economy was suffering as much as as it was. Is it your sense that that he gets good information and that people around him can tell him the truth have been about policies going badly? What's your sense of that that dynamic to the extent we know?
So my sense of him uh again, I think this is as somebody who grew up in the system and took over the family business. I think he knows that he's gonna get yesmand, that when he looks around that room, everybody's gonna tell him what he wants here. So my again, my mental model from watching him over time, because we do see him recalibrate. and adjust policies over time is that he triangulates.
It's not necessarily that he's getting good information, but I think he gets people in some kind of setting where they can maybe speak more freely or or tell them what they think. And then he triangulates that.
you know, if I ask one guy what he thinks about the situation, I ask somebody else, that's going to give me some kind of picture of what's actually going on. Right. And you see this across uh you know, among all kinds of shrewd politicians. This is kind of how FDR ran the bureaucracy during the New Deal in World War Two, right? This kind of constant
Gamesmanship and triangulating. It's different in an authoritarian system, of course, right? And it's more intense. But I think that is part of how he operates. Right. And I think that's what he tries to get. And what I've wondered about, especially as she's been in his third term, is because he cleaned house and brought in a bunch of people to the Politburo standing committee who he's known not just for years, but for decades.
that, you know, this is more comfortable. If you're Xi Jinping and you walk into that conference room for a standing committee meeting, you're looking around and you're seeing guys who are all your former, you know, aides. at this point. And that's much more comfortable. You're not looking at Lee Kuchyang, who was the potential alternative to you as the heir apparent.
And I think from their perspective too, my theory about these guys is not that there's going to be some cinematic moment where they speak truth to power to the president in a closed door setting. But they know how to talk to the boss and tell him things that might be uncomfortable. Right. Like I always think of that BBC show from the late 70s, early 80s, Yes Minister.
Right. So I've been calling these guys the, you know, they're the yes buttmen. You know, yes, Prime Minister, this is a wonderful idea, but have you considered the following things that might delay us, or maybe the timing would be better if we waited six months to do something like this? So that has been kind of my mental model of how he operates because he knows that that is a real risk.
That everybody in the system is just going to tell you what you want to hear and that he wants to guard against that. And he's smart enough to want the right kind of people around him in some sense. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think for a normal person, this kind of constant improvisation and playing people off each other sounds exhausting.
But I think she is a political animal and I think he kind of relishes it, right? Would be my guess. You noted in the the China Against China essay how important the strike against the it's kind of insulated the military and reforming the military was central to this project as Xi Jinping saw it.
You also wrote a great piece with John Culver last year about the purges in the PLA. We saw another set of these just in the last few days. How significant are the latest ones and what's your theory of of what's driving that? I think they are quite significant and they're potentially a seismic shift in Chinese politics under under Xi's rule. And the reason for that is that. when this anti corruption campaign got underway
The focus was really on She's potential rivals, right? People who had been the incumbents of the system and allowed all this graft and corruption to fester, right? The people who had guarded the PLA for a long time from any kind of oversight from the party. And we've seen the shift. And again, this this gets to the point about how do you how do you do this kind of analysis? It's a lot of it is about contextualizing it and seeing it not just in a vacuum, but as part of a longer narrative art.
So that's how she starts his anti corruption campaign. And then he moves in his third term, I think somewhat surprisingly, given how much he cleaned house. to focusing on people who he appointed to this position. But I think a lot of times his connection to them was kind of tenuous. And I think from she's perspective, it's again, it's like a mob boss. I made them, I can break them. They were disposable. So if there's an issue or there's corruption,
he can get rid of them and just move on to the next person safely. This is w without it being a threat to his power or reflection that there's something deeper going on. Now with the removal of Jiang Yosia, we're really entering a different space. And I think I think it's almost Shakespearean what's happened because
Jianggyosia, I mean, they have a relationship that goes back to their fathers. They were comrades in arms in China's Northwest during China's Civil War. This is somebody that she has probably known for decades. And I think until recently, I mean, we didn't just have historical evidence, but more recent evidence that she really seemed to trust this guy.
at the last party Congress he made an unusual move to keep John around past the retirement age and and bump him up and make him the the top vice chairman on the Central Military Commission. I mean, I think that was kind of probably the greatest sign of trust. This makes him essentially the the top uniform. Yes, exactly. Exactly.
He had yeah, he had been kind of the second ranked vice chairman in the last go around. And so then he gets bumped up. So it's not just that she has him stick around. He gives him a bump up and makes him the top uniform member of the brass. Right. So a real sign of she's confidence in him.
And you know, my theory about how Xi Jinping was operating in his third term is that if you think of Chinese politics like a solar system where Xi Jinping is at the center of it and everybody else is in his orbit, my theory was there was an inner circle that was inside the asteroid belt.
And I would put almost all of the Politburo standing committee there and then John Gyosia and the military. And then for these other people who he had gotten rid of, like the defense minister, the foreign minister, these guys were kind of outside of the asteroid belt. Right. And he could safely get rid of them. But now she has gone after somebody inside that asteroid belt. Right. And so the question that's been on my mind that I am thinking through in all honesty, Dan, is that I think.
You know, there's two ways to interpret this. Either w I tend to think that there that she is just ruthless and rational in how he goes about things, right? That there's a certain method to what he's doing. It's not capricious. It's not arbitrary. It's kind of like the electri electrician metaphor I I used earlier, right? He's very
circumspect about how he goes about doing this. And this could in some ways, I think this is my inclination, this could be the ultimate illustration of Xi's Sain Foy, right? That nobody is safe. I will go after you even if we if the relationship goes back to our parents. But I think given what's going on gone on too, I do I do wonder a little bit in the back of my back of my mind, is this kind of a psychological shift? Are we seeing she shift more toward a a um paranoid autocrat mode?
Because he's going after people who are so close to him. And if he doesn't trust them, who is he going to trust inside the system? I'm hesitant to say that, but again, that's just kinda I I wanna be
you know, transparent about how I'm thinking how I digest something like this and how I think it through and try to assimilate it into into the mental model that I have of Xi Jinping over time. That that's fascinating because I mean in in the in the piece earlier, and I think in your your writing generally and speaking publicly generally, you've been
uh somewhat averse to the tendency among a lot of analysts here to interpret these purges as signs of kind of insecurity or or lack of trust in the military, but you see you see s in some ways it turning into some uh slightly warped version of that in this latest phase.
Yeah, I think that's right. I don't I don't think he's worried about his own personal grip necessarily. I mean, I think he's demonstrated that he's got a firm grasp of the military. I think the challenge for Shi is that I think he probably doesn't feel like he's getting what he wants from these guys. Right. And that's why he's had to to clean house so thoroughly. And I think that's one of the things that's really striking. It's not just that
you know, there's one uniformed officer left standing on a central military commission. It's that if you look one level down at the people who might replace them, who are one great level down in their bureaucracy, a lot of those people are gone too. You know, this makes the Roman decimation system look quaint. Does it affect in any way the risks of some kind of precipitous action on Taiwan in coming years?
I don't think so. I actually have been turning this question on its on its head. I actually think that she feels pretty good about the cross straight dynamic right now. And I don't think it's driving him to to clean house, but I think it makes him feel that he can do this with confidence without too much concern.
Because if you look at that dynamic in particular, the Trump administration doesn't seem to be overly focused on Taiwan. It doesn't even get a mention in the recent national defense strategy, right? And President Trump has made a number of comments about Taiwan that show a lack of firm commitment.
Uh, number two, President Lai Jingta in Taiwan is in political trouble, right? He had this recall campaign over the summer that failed. His party's in in tough shape. And number three, there's gonna be an election in twenty twenty eight, which is gonna be a year into Xi's fourth term. And the opposition KMT is making very favorable comments about Beijing. So if I'm looking at this from Xi Jinping's perspective, this feels like a relatively safe time.
to do what I need to do to renovate the high command and do something that's kind of complex and politically tricky to pull off internally. And I think it's because he has that sense of urgency he wants them to get there. And I think even just as impressive as the PLA modernization has been over the last couple of decades, he still feels like they're not. But that this is the moment where he will not need to order a cross state invasion.
in the next year because of developments in Taiwan or shifts in US policy, so we can afford to do it now. Yeah, and I think this is the real paradox of following the PLA in particular, is that yes, there's this real corruption, there is this real operatic drama at the top of the system, but yet
we don't see kind of a diminution of their modernization program from the outside. And even in their operational tempo, right? After they announced the, you know, finalized the purges of all these senior officers at the party plenum last fall. then they conducted a major exercise around Taiwan just in the closing weeks of twenty twenty five. So they're still able to pull off a massive exercise like that, even with all this churn at the top of the system.
I wanna go back to some of the tech issues that we talked about a bit earlier. This certainly the Biden administration, but I think also more broadly in the the US China dynamic, tech and AI especially has been uh really the kind of center of how we think about competition. How does China understand what that competition means and how do they when they do a kind of net assessment of where the two sides are, how do they see them?
I think they see the US side as still ahead in some key areas and I think they they recognize that. And again, I think they're they're they're probably frank about that internally and about figuring out Reverse engineering, literally. What is it that we need to do? Right. That's why they're making such a big push on semiconductors and these other areas where we have the lead.
But I think what's really striking when you look at the five-year plan documents that came out of the last plenum is that there's a real mismatch between the two sides and how we're handling the tech competition. I feel like here in the United States. There's kind of this AI myopia.
Right. And if you look at it even our own internal economic numbers from last year, I mean, there was this one stat Derek Thompson had that the build out of data centers contributed fifty percent of economic growth in the first half of twenty twenty five alone. What's striking when you look at the party's approach to these issues.
Is that they have more of a portfolio approach. It's diversified, right? So they are focused on AI, but again, they're not f they're focused on deployment of it as quickly as possible, getting it out onto the manufacturing floors. And it's kind of become a cliche now in China Watching Circles, whereas we're looking for God in a box.
And that's just on AI, right? Like they're focused on how do we apply this and how do we increase our productivity. And I think there's not just the same overriding focus on AI. There's also the focus on green technologies and green vehicles, which of course has gone away in the in this administration, and robotics as well. And you see a little bit of that in the United States, but I think there is this real intense focus on hard tech.
Right. And about manufacturing capacity. And that's that's very explicit. From the top of the Chinese system. And so this is something that that I worry about, bracketing the issue of the export controls that's gone on in this administration. But do we have the the right kind of approach to dealing with this issue wholesale? And are we looking at l at the right suite of technologies or are we just buying in effect the things we want rather than the things we need?
The export control shift does seem quite significant, as you've written about certainly, that we used to talk about export controls as this kind of sacrosanced space that we would never trade away for anything and the effective use of leverage over over critical mineral supply by China and the concessions by by the US in in response to it does seem like a a paradigm shift.
Yeah. I mean, I I feel like what we've done is we've shifted from a policy of export control to one of export promotion, right? Where we're beseeching China now to buy, you know, not our frontier technologies or our frontier chips, but the penultimate ones. And it's really flipped. And what's striking to me, just in terms of the tactics of negotiating with China, I mean, we've made these offers on Nvidia's H two hundred chips at the end of last year in exchange for nothing.
We didn't get some kind of concession that's detectable from the outside. So There's the problem first of number one, negotiating over things that we had long considered are na part of our national security. But number two, if you are going to open the negotiation, you better get something really good for it. And I'm not persuaded that we really have.
In the process. So I think it's really disconcerting. And the export controls, I mean, they're challenging. I mean, there's a lot of debate about them, but from my perspective, ultimately, it's not a question about whether or not they are the ideal tool or not. It's a question of what's the alternative. Right. And if you really accept the premise, which I think most people do at this point, that we are in some kind of long term strategic competition with China.
then why would you sell them your most advanced technologies? Like what is the real alternative to that? I mean, this theory that we're going to get them addicted somehow and that that's going to give us leverage, that that seems to carry greater risk than the risk of of equipping them with our our most advanced technologies.
This would be the kind of Jensen Wong and I think David Sachs in the White House would would probably say the same thing. Yeah. And this is what I worry about too, is that we're landing in the worst of all possible worlds. We've gone about doing these export controls. It stimulated the Chinese system. They already had pretty considerable efforts underway on this, but to really double down and reinvigorate or further invigorate those efforts.
And now they're not interested. And now we've explicitly said the quiet part out loud too that the goal is to try to get them addicted. So why would they go about doing this? And this is illustrative of my broader concern of where we're at now in terms of our China policy. I feel like we're
we've gone far enough down the path of competition with China that we can't really go back to the earlier era focused on commerce and comedy, right? But the things we need to do in order to compete with China effectively over the long term. I think there's a real hesitation to go there, both because of the leverage that China's accrued over time, but I think also the hard reality is that.
Great power competition is going to be expensive. I mean the global war on terror was expensive. This is an order of magnitude of a greater challenge and more multifaceted. And I I think that's hard and I think people haven't really come to grips with that. This is a question that I ask in I I think almost every episode at this point, but I'm still kind of flummoxed by it on the critical minerals front, on the rare earths front.
It it it is rather stunning to think that it's been fifteen years or so since people in the US national security world were focused on on the risk here and saw what China was doing to develop leverage and our own inability to develop our own supply, even though that's technically possible. How do you account for that failure and what's what's gonna change it? Do you have any sense that we have uh uh finally gotten serious about this?
Yeah. So two thoughts on this. One is that I think it's actually illustrative of the broader deficiencies in our China policy over the last 20 years or so, right? Where we've been slow to recognize the problem. And even when it's right there uh staring you in the face. We have not moved with alacrity to remedy the underlying problems. I think this is true on critical minerals, but it's also true.
I would argue on dealing with the PLA's military modernization. The last assessment from a bipartisan commission of the previous national defense strategy said for you know, we've been saying for years now that China is the pacing challenge for the US military. And it says they are out.
continuing to outpace us in a growing number of domains and negated many of our advantages in the Western Pacific. So it's not that people haven't realized it. It's that it's it's been very challenging for us to do what she has done so effectively. Say, here is a problem, here is a challenge to our interest. and then marshal the institutions to try to remedy. And I think on critical minerals, I think part of the conundrum is
It's challenging for our government to do this. We're not designed for industrial policy, right? It's not even it's not clear who is going to be the focal point of this, right? Are we going to have state owned enterprises do this? Well, we could do public-private partnerships. Who manages that? Right. It's a little bit easier in the defense space, which is I think why the administration went there.
Um, but we're kind of late to the game. And I'm worried that for this effort, I think the administration deserved credit for for focusing actual resources on this issue now at this point, but I do worry it's going to be too little too late. Even if you look at the case of Japan, where they have METI and they are equipped to to conduct industrial policy and they have been focused on this since 2010, I think they've gone from ninety percent reliance on China for rarer.
down to 70% after 15 years. And I think it just underscores this idea that the administration has. And I think some people think this, that yes, we have to hit the pause button now. We've been checkmated. So we can get our act together. remedy these d deficiencies that we have, this dependency that we have, and then we can refocus on competition.
I think it's going to be hard to do that. You know, this is not a this year problem or even this administration. This is going to be much more challenging. And this is just one area where China has this kind of chokehold on our supply chains. If you were going to suggest some lessons for the United States.
uh based on the Chinese experience and Xi Jinping's experience turning his own party into a learning organization, as you say in the essay, what would those lessons be? What what should we learn from Chinese success? I think what I'm really struck by is that I think in in the broader foreign policy community, I think there's a pretty decent consensus. on what we need to do, right? I think across administrations, there's been talk about refurbishing the defense industrial base.
Right. There are stacks of reports about the critical mineral problems and the rare earth problems. But what I'm really struck by and and frankly frustrated by. Is that there's a real disconnect. We all finally have kind of a shared diagnosis of the problem, or most people have a shared diagnosis of the problem. And we even have some pretty good prescriptions on the table about what to do about this, but there seems to be a disconnect.
about how do we move from point A to point B? How do we pivot to Asia? We've been talking about this for a long time. Some people are ready to put a toe tag on the effort. How do we refurbish our defense industrial base? How do we build up, you know, some of the power that we lost? Can we even do that at
Right. And again, these are thorny bureaucratic issues, but these are also, like I said before, expensive problems to deal with too. And I think that is part of the hesitation about how do we get there. It brings to mind the fantastic last line of that essay, China Against China.
You write misreading Xi Jinping is ultimately part of the failure to address the problems facing the United States itself, which I think is a really powerful closing point. So John, thank you uh so much for doing this, for this flu of pieces. I think we've got we've got more coming from you soon, so readers can look forward to that. Thanks so much, Dan. I really appreciate it.
Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show at foreign affairs.com. This episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Ben Metzner, Rachel Powell, and Kanish Klarur. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Arena Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it.
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