Episode 16: China – How We Got It Wrong

China is on a mission to expand its global power in the 21st century. Newt and guest Dr. Jonathan Ward discuss the challenges the United States is facing.

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Episode Transcript

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First Well this episode of Newsworld. I recently wrote a
cover story for Newsweek about China, entitled What I and

(01:07):
everyone else got wrong about China and Why we need
to fix it Now. I wrote the article because I'm
in the process of writing a book about China, and
I'm deep into the research and writing phase. As I've
been researching the past and the present. I realized how
remarkably I got China wrong. Like many Western scholars and policymakers,

(01:30):
I bought into this idea that open global markets and
information sharing would bring China out of its communists to
toutitarian past and into some kind of democratic or at
least open future. I don't think I could have gotten
it more wrong. China has always had its own agenda,

(01:51):
and that was, and very much still is, China first,
China at the center of the world, China above all
other interests. What I've learned is how concerted they are
in their efforts to undermine the United States and other
democratic Western countries with a very general direction for global domination,

(02:12):
both technologically and economically. And in that context, I think
we can better understand the tariff war we are facing now.
My guest is doctor Jonathan Ward, next generation National security
fellow at Center for a New American Security and author
of China's vision of victory. You know, it's become more

(02:48):
and more obvious there are strategies for dealing with China
have not worked and will not work. For years, we
watch America's manufacturing sector gradually migrate towards Asia. Right now,
we're watching China, through the giant telecom company Hahwei, work
to dominate the entire worldwide deployment of five G technology.

(03:10):
Pretty soon, we could be operating a world in which
the Internet as we know it is maintained and controlled
by its atolitary and communist country, a dramatic change from
the American based, open and free Internet that we're used to.
I think our strategies are failing because they're not based
on reality. They're based on two key myths. Decades ago,

(03:35):
we and I include myself in this, sold ourselves a
fantasy version of China. The real China is a lot
more formidable and dangerous than we wanted to believe, or frankly,
than we want to believe right now. Part of our misreading,
I think, was based on our own arrogance and our
own wishful thinking, in part on a deliberate Chinese strategy

(03:58):
of deception, a policy of showing us a face that
looked pleasant, reasonable, and non threatening. My favorite example is
in nineteen seventy nine, Dong Chalupegho, at that time was
the dominant political figure in China, comes to the US.
He's a very short person, doesn't look personally very aggressive,

(04:21):
or very much like somebody who's going to dominate you.
He goes to a rodeo in Texas and he puts
on a cowboy head. He looks so friendly, so interesting,
and willing to be like Americans. I think that picture
softened his image across the entire West, and it basically
muted warnings by dozens of scholars and intelligent analysts about

(04:43):
his real intentions. People kind of looked at and said, oh,
he can't be a real threat. It helped obscure the
fact he spent a year studying Leninism in Moscow. Well,
he was a genuine Leninist, a person who believes in
a centralized dictatorship, and he devoted his entire lifetime to create, implement,
and then govern that dictatorship. So we looked at him

(05:05):
and thought, oh, he's okay. Well he was okay for
a guy who wants a total dictatorship. As for our
own hubris, our own sense of how big we were,
how powerful we were, I think the collapse of the
Soviet Union led us to a great overstatement. We had
helped win World War One, we had won World War Two,

(05:25):
we had won the Cold War, and so some American
politicians and some scholars started talking about a new world order,
that everything was going to resemble the American model. And
in that context, we looked at China. We thought, well,
you know, they're immature, they're economically underdeveloped. Inevitably, they're gonna

(05:46):
have to learn to be like us, because after all,
that's how they'll ultimately be successful. We thought that the
world was going to become much more focused, you know.
We thought democracy was coming to the Middle East. We
thought that China would evolve into a democracy, and it
turned out that both of those were clearly overreached Historically.
Dung in nineteen ninety two goes to South China and

(06:09):
what's called the Southern Tour, and he is a series
of speeches that are decisive in the development of modern China.
He basically says, we have to become prosperous or the
Chinese people are going to throw out our government. So
for the Chinese Communist government to survive, it had to
favor economics that would lead to prosperity. Dung understands that

(06:32):
if you don't have open markets and competition, and if
you don't focus on economic results over ideology, the whole
system is going to come to a grinding halt. The
Chinese people are going to rebel, and the dictatorship is
going to be gone. So he calls for a system
that's a radical change from mousy Dung. He says, I
don't care if a cat is black or a cat

(06:52):
is white. I care whether or not it can catch
a mouse. And what he was saying was, don't tell
me about theoretical theology. Tell me if it's going to work.
Is they're going to produce goods or people are going
to be more prosperous. Well, that was an amazing break.
And lots of us said, you know, once they go
to free markets, they're going to go to free thinking,

(07:13):
they're going to open up, they're going to become different.
Well we didn't realize, and frankly, until I really began
investigating Dung's own biography, I didn't fully appreciate he was
calling for open markets in order to have enough prosperity
to sustain the communist dictatorship, the opposite of what we
thought he was doing. And so his goal was relentless

(07:37):
and ruthless to make sure that the Communist Party stayed
in charge. And that's why they needed prosperity. Now, as
an economic strategy, it was brilliant. Three hundred million Chinese
are now middle class, basically the size of the entire
American population. One of the great economic achievements in history. Now,
we went on from believing that free markets would lead

(07:59):
to freedom to believing that if we could get tens
of thousands of Chinese students to come to American colleges
and universities, that would infect them with a passion for liberty.
When a speaker hosted Janjie Men, who at that time
was the head of China, his daughter was at a
university in Michigan, and I had the sense of boy,
this is great, she's going to learn about freedom. Well, no,

(08:20):
actually what they learned about was that America is a
kind of weird place with strange politics a weird culture.
And then they went back home to be Chinese. But
they went back home knowing math, engineering, science, which they
had learned from us. We then thought, all right, we're
going to admit China to the World Trade Organization because

(08:41):
it's a rules based system that really reflects the entire
model of the Western world that people have to obey
the rules. And we thought if we let them in
the World Trade Organization, they would learn to obey the
rules and that would make them more like us. The
Chinese thought this was terrific. They got to pretend to
obey the rules while cheating. So, for example, the People's

(09:02):
Liberation Army runs entire units, thousands of people whose only
job is to hack into American systems and steal our
intellectual property. This is clearly the official policy of the
Chinese government, and the estimate by the Director of National
Intelligence under Obama was they were stealing about four hundred
and sixty billion dollars a year as a deliberate strategy.

(09:24):
So today, I'd have to say, and many of my
friends who were with me and encouraging China's entry into
the World Trade Tranization, it was just a mistake. And
they're now inside, and frankly, they don't obey the rules
and they cheat whatever they can. At the same time,
a lot of our so called experts understood that if
they were negative about China, they weren't going to get

(09:45):
to go to China, and they weren't going to get subsidized,
and they weren't going to be able to publish. There
are a number of team experts who are basically sycophantic
about China because they know that that way they get
to go back to Beijing and they Shanghai might get
a year of teaching at one of the Chinese universities.
There's a whole block of people who, no matter what

(10:06):
China does, they are in fact going to always explain
it in the most pro Chinese way possible, and that
made it harder for us to get to the truth.
The first big myth that we all wanted to believe
was that the Chinese wanted to change. Now I have
to say this in retrospect is almost laughable. Here's a

(10:30):
five thousand year old civilization. Here is a communist party
with a deep ideological commitment to a way of governing.
The easiest way to think of this is you and
I read every day about Jijunping, the President of the
People's Republic of China, and that makes him sound normal.
He's the head of a government, but in fact that's

(10:52):
not what he is. Jijunping is first of all the
General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, second Amen of
the Military Commission, and third President of the People's Republic
of China. In that order. If the news media always
referred to him as General Secretary Jisi and Ping, we'd

(11:12):
have a much better sense of the fact that we're
dealing with a Chinese Communist Party rather than dealing with
a traditional Western government. And in fact, in Jiji and
Ping's case, it's important to remember the Military Commission exists
because in the Chinese system, the People's Liberation Army does
not owe its loyalty to the government. It owes its

(11:34):
loyalty to the Communist Party, and that is Ji's primary
power base. The Chinese Communist Party has ninety million members.
That means that the Chinese Communist Party has more members
than the combined populations of California, Florida, and Texas. That's
just the membership, so the members are everywhere. Every major

(11:55):
company has to have a member on its board of governors,
every community. His party members involved in decision making, and
the General Secretary, as the leader of the party, sits
at the top of the system, and that is the
real base of his power, not the government. Furthermore, the
Chinese Commist Party is really interesting because we tend to
look at the collapse of the Soviet system and assume

(12:18):
that that's the inevitable outcome for a communist party. But
since nineteen twenty one, when Dung Chopin and others founded it,
it has been a Leninist party. Lenin stood for central
control from the top, and he really understood a way
of power that was remarkable. If you go back and
look at Lenon taking over in nineteen seventeen, the degree

(12:41):
of control they built in the way they organized things
was astonishing, and people like Dun Chapin were learning how
Lennon operated, how he thought, how he put it together
in that setting. And this is what I think is
very very hard for Westerners to appreciate. Leninism is at
the core of the Chinese Communist Party. So they have

(13:04):
a Chinese Communist party founded on centralized control from the top,
which is then wrapped in Chinese culture and civilization, which
is five thousand years old, and Chinese culture and civilization
is very authoritarian, and in five thousand years, there may
be a total of thirty or forty years out of
five thousand where there was a brief period of thinking

(13:27):
that democracy would be cool. All the rest is based
in some kind of authoritarian leader, an imperial system, a
structure of bureaucracy, an order of obedience. So what you
now have is a party which is absolutely committed to
one thing, and this is I think one of these
is so hard for us to understand. It's committed to
the survival of itself. Ninety million Communist actually believe that

(13:51):
they ought to be in charge and they have very
little interest in sharing that. So we are negotiating always
not with a government, but with a political party which
owns a government, not a government which owns a political party.
And as a result, you have to think about what
is a Leninist state like, what has centralized control from

(14:14):
the top down. It has an absolute total willingness to
lie to outsiders. In fact, that doesn't even think it's
lying because you simply tell outsiders whatever you need to
tell them. Purging itself of dissenters and having a constant
sort of turmoil, and every time a senior Chinese leader
tries to advocate opening the system up, he's either put

(14:35):
in prison or he's given house arrest. One of their
top leaders spent the last twenty years of his life
and house arrest. And they do it in a calm,
methodical way. It's the world they have adjusted to The
first real breakpoint, which again people tended to including me,
tended to not fully appreciate, was in nineteen eighty nine

(14:55):
when there were popular demonstrations in Tenement Square. Hundreds of
thousands of people came out. There were actually demonstrations all
across China, and faced with that, people who were in charge,
starting with Dung Cha Peg, looked around, tha wait a second,
the Russians are falling apart Gorbachau's idea of glass noosed
and perastroika opening up. The system isn't working. They're going

(15:18):
to collapse. Why would we want to follow them? And
being stupid? In fact, watching the decay of the Soviet
Union increased the toughness of the Chinese leadership, and the
thirtieth anniversary of the massacre Attenament Square on June fourth
is a useful time to remember. When they were faced
with a real effort towards freedom, they crushed it militarily,

(15:41):
they crushed it ruthlessly, and they felt that they had
no choice. And they have since spent the last thirty
years wiping it out from the memory of the Chinese people.
It's not in the history textbooks, it's not something you
can go back and look at you can't find it
on their internet. From their standpoint, this is a perfect
example of what George Orwell wrote in his novel called

(16:03):
nineteen eighty four. They just created a memory hole. They
erased it. It didn't fit their vision of the world.
I think when I look back on that, I realized
that our interpretation are shock was almost silly. Once you
understood that this was a ruthless Leninist centralized party operating

(16:23):
within a Chinese tradition of authoritarian centralism, why wouldn't you
think they're going to crush descent? And I think that's
something we've got to recognize today that the number of
people in China who are actively trying to become free
is almost certainly smaller than the number of people who
are descending on the Soviet Union at any point in

(16:45):
the Soviet period. So when I look at all that,
I really began to think about we need to reflect
on the fact that first of all, this whole notion
that China wants to change as a mess. China wants
to win, China wants to develop economically, China wants to
have the most modern technology. But there's zero evidence that

(17:09):
the people that matter in China have any interest in
dramatically changing I think that the second mythic that really
hit me is this notion that China is inherently peaceful,
the Chinese don't have any great habits of warfare, etc. Now,
my father fought in Korea in nineteen fifty three. The
Chinese and Korea were very very effective, and when they

(17:31):
launched their surprise attack in the winter of nineteen fifty
they had moved two hundred and fifty thousand Chinese into Korea,
and despite all of our advantages, we did not know it.
They surprised us one hundred percent. They fought very effectively.
Only the sheer scale of American capabilities enabled us to

(17:51):
stop them. And they've been fighting for a long time.
Remember that the Chinese Communist Party is fighting both the
Japanese and the Chinese nationalists called the Kuomen Dung for decades.
They survived the war with Japan. They then won the
civil war with the Kuomen Dung or the nationalist drove
them to Taiwan and they occupied the country. That's in

(18:14):
the immediate past. So to think that these guys are soft,
They've since fought a short war with India. They fought
a short war with Vietnam, they fought a brief skirmish
with Russia. They're not automatically peaceful. But it goes deeper
than that, and this is why as a historian I
always try to get people to think about history. China
actually emerged out of a two hundred and fifty year

(18:36):
period called the Warring States. It was a time of
constant warfare which only ended when the Qing dynasty unified
China by conquering the last free state in two twenty
one BC. And in fact, the founder of modern China
called himself emperor, was the first person to call himself emperor,
and it became China. It was really named after the

(18:58):
Qin dynasty, which was the unifying system before that. Three
hundred years earlier, Sunsu wrote The Art of War, which
you can find in a library. Remarkable of book, very short,
and it's fascinating because Sunsu doesn't write the Art of
War for generals. What he says is that war is
a matter of survival for the state and therefore has

(19:21):
to be studied by statesmen. And Sunsu is writing a
very subtle approach to warfare, and he's doing so based
on hundreds of years of warfare. So this notion that
somehow though these nice, peaceful people and they don't ever
threaten anybody else requires you to know nothing about Chinese history.
And in fact, what's sobering is when you study Sunsu,

(19:44):
you really understand Jijinping so much better because Jijinping thoroughly
understands Sunsu and thoroughly understands the Chinese model of war.
Sunsu basically says, the greatest of all generals win bloodless victories.
It's a very subt sophisticated concept, totally opposite of the
Western way of war. The greatest of all generals when

(20:07):
bloodless victories. Now, what does that mean? It means you
use bribery, you use spies, you use psychological warfare, You
figure out methods of building so much power around your
opponent that they collapse without fighting. That actually, in his mind,
Sansu he believed that fighting was a sign of failure.

(20:29):
It's a sign of weakness. It meant you hadn't done
your job right. He says at one point, and I'm
quoting from Sansu, to subdue the enemy while fighting is
the acme of skill. This is dramatically more subtle and
more difficult than the Western way of war. Sansu is saying,
why would you get into a fight like that? If

(20:50):
you're clever, the enemy will never fight you because you'll
surround them and you will break them. So when you
look at it, there are long periods in Chinese history
when there's a great deal of conflict, and in fact
you have dynasty after dynasty replaced by a follow on dynasty.
The last great imperial dynasty, the Great Qing, was created

(21:11):
by the Manchu who came out of Manchuria and they
conquered the rest of China. They then dramatically expanded China
to the west. It's the Manchu who create the modern
borders of China, and they do it because they are
very aggressive conquerors and they were very expansionist, and they

(21:31):
frankly from sixteen thirty six when they started taking over China,
they stay on offense until about eighteen hundred, and some
of the most difficult problems in China and Tibet and
further west with the Weakers who are muslims Axi grew
out of conquest by the Qing during the period of
power only after eighteen hundred, as the Western nations begin

(21:53):
to pull away from China and military power to you
begin to see the empire on defense. Thing about this
Chinese sisters arought five thousand years long, and they have
a couple occasions and the Mongols and the Manshu come
in and sweep over the country as outsiders, and on
every occasion they just absorbed them because they have a

(22:14):
high civilization. They're very sophisticated, they're very wealthy, they're very
well educated, and in order to run a country the
size of China, you can't run it with Mongolian models.
So the Mongols, as soon as they conquer it, immediately
absorbed Chinese mandarins to help them run the country. It's
impossible to run without the Chinese. The same thing happens
with the Manshu. Once they take over the country, they

(22:37):
need the Chinese to run it. So the Chinese have
no particular experience of actually being consistently humiliated by foreigners.
They've been conquered twice, but the conquest was rapidly absorbed
into China. Then, starting in the eighteen forties, they're faced
with real humiliation. They are faced with foreign powers who

(22:57):
are so militarily superior that they cannot fight against them. Ironically,
given our own current problems with opioids and with fentanyl.
The first real break is the Opium War in eighteen
forty two, fought by the British to force the Chinese
to buy opium. And I think all of us in
the West should have some sense of caution when we
look at China and realize it they didn't want to

(23:20):
accept the opium. They fought against it, and only by
military defeat where they forced to accept it as a
trade process. So, from a Chinese perspective, after being the
Middle Kingdom, the center of the Earth, the richest nation
in the world, certainly up to about eighteen hundred, without
any question, they were the wealthiest country in the world,
all of a sudden they're being humiliated by these foreigners.

(23:43):
And from eighteen forty two to the defeat of the
Japanese in nineteen forty five, there's this continuous series of
foreigners who do things the Chinese that make them feel humiliated,
that make them feel their entire civilization is under threat.
And if you watch what the Chinese are doing, they
have a very deep sense that the modern rise, first

(24:07):
of the nationalists under Chang Kai Shek the Kuomen Dung
and then the Communist under the leadership of Mazi Dung.
They're both trying to re establish Chinese nationalism. They're both
trying to erase this humiliation at the hands of foreigners.
Their policies are very very nationalists in the sense that
they want China to take its rightful place in the world.

(24:29):
Mao launches in the late nineteen fifties a great leap
forward in which millions starved to death because he was
so desperate to catch up with the West that he
forced people to do things and just plane didn't work.
And then he was so worried about losing power to
rational moderates that he launched a cultural revolution in the
sixties in which he aroused basically teenagers to go out

(24:53):
and terrorize the rest of the country, created huge amounts
of turmoil and suffering. In fact, if you look at
somebody liked Jean Peng, he actually was sent to the
countryside as part of His father was sent to the countryside.
Even somebody as powerful as Dung Chaoupeng was both sent
to the countryside where he worked in a tractor factory,
and his son was thrown out of the Third floor

(25:14):
of a university dormitory and was crippled for life. So
the Cultural Revolution was a terrible moment, and the modern
leadership came out of that. They decided once Mao died
in the late seventies, they said, you know, we got
to find a way to govern ourselves that is not
constantly moved by this kind of craziness, and we have

(25:36):
to find a way to economically and technologically catch up
with the West and then surpass it. It is one
of the most amazing forty years of continuous progress of
any country in the world. It is really a remarkable achievement.
But it's an achievement of a dictatorship. It's an achievement
of a system dedicated to maintaining its own dictatorship. I

(26:00):
think the time has come where we have no choice
except to really start thinking about a realistic China policy.
And to do that, I think the first step has
to be really thinking about the nature of China. I
think we have to accept that the Chinese really want
to be Chinese. They don't want to be Western. They
don't particularly think that our model of politics is useful.

(26:21):
They think it's destructive, chaotic, involves way too much infighting,
has no sense of long term reform. They think their system,
for all of its weaknesses, is actually working for them.
We're now going to be living next to a billion,
four hundred million people with an advanced society, enormous economic capability,

(26:42):
thousands and thousands of scientists, many of them trained at
MIT and Harvard and Stanford and Caltech, and they're going
to be a major force in the world. So they're
going to be a worldwide power. Furthermore, if you get
a billion four a million people and they start really developing,
and you have a middle class coming online, they want

(27:02):
better food. They want more protein, they want a lot
more beef, they want more chicken. They also want more
minerals just to do what they want to do in technology.
The amount of copper they're going to use will make
them the largest users of copper and history. And so
they're looking all over the world for oil for every
possible kind of requirement. And that makes them again a

(27:24):
worldwide trading partner, going everywhere to invest. Their investments in
Africa are amazing, and the Belt and Road initiative gives
them an explanation that sounds great, but if you actually
look at the details it's not a belt and Road plan.
It's really the framework under which they go everywhere in
the world and say you're now part of our Belton

(27:46):
Road initiative. And they recently had a meeting in Beijing
talking about getting investments from China, getting support from China,
being involved in trade with China. So inevitably, China is
going to be a worldwide or. In fact, I would argue,
because the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia by itself is
just too small, that China is the only other worldwide

(28:10):
power other than the United States, and that that is
a reality we have to deal with. Furthermore, it's going
to be a very aggressive worldwide power. If you look
at what they're doing in the South China Sea, they
are beginning to build artificial islands for a practical reason.
Their goal ultimately is to define most of the South
China Sea as Chinese, which would dramatically expand the size

(28:32):
of the country. And again it fits the Sun Sue model.
They're not going to fight anybody. They're not out there
with a navy trying to conquer anybody. They're just building islands.
Why are you mad at them for building islands? The
islands are sort of peaceful, except we just put air
fields on them. We just built a port, we just
brought in anti aircraft missiles. But we're really being very
defensive and we're really not trying to do anything aggressive.

(28:54):
I also think we have to recognize that the five
G competition with Wawa is really potentially a decisive defeat
for the West. The fact is five G technology is
an enormous breakthrough. As you know, we've already done several
podcasts about it. This is one of the most important
breakthroughs in creating the next generation Internet and the next

(29:16):
generation communications. The fact is, if we don't find a
way to meet the Chinese challenge, and we allow the
Chinese to dominate the next generation Internet and the next
generation communication, we've taken a huge step towards living in
a Chinese defined world. And then we'll realize how truly
big the differences are in our two civilizations, and we'll

(29:38):
have to ask ourselves the question, how comfortable are you
going to be if American civilization is redefined to fit
Chinese characteristics. When we come back, I'll be joined by
doctor Jonathan Ward, the author of China's Vision of Victory.
America has to understand that this could be a very
tough contest, so we've got to be ready. I'd like

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(32:15):
I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with us,
and I hope that this podcast, along with the book
that we're going to do this fall, will have some
impact one increasing Americans awareness the importance of China. But
I would like to start with your own background. How
did you get interested in China? My first year out
of school, decided to backpack around China. I got a motorcycle,

(32:37):
roded around Shinjang out in the northwest deserts, went through Tibet,
you know, hit chiking with truck drivers and hiding from
the Chinese Army checkposts, and got a bicycle, roted across
south southern China, eventually got on Indonesian cargo ships and
went across the South of China Sea. So a lot
of my experience was going out and staying in villages,
living with people, you know, eating with people, and traveling

(33:01):
with them. And I got to know China through its people,
which was a wonderful experience. And all of that led
me to the question of where is this country really going?
And eventually I wound up at Oxford doing a PhD
on China India relations and that allowed me this much
deeper investigation into the natured country. What was the focus
of your studies at Oxford? China is a big topic.

(33:24):
So my PhD topic basically the question of why did
India and China go to war? Because they fought a
war in nineteen sixty two, the two largest nations in Asia.
Then they decided that they're going to be friends, and
then within a decade after irrespective independence and national founding,
they were at war in the Himalayas, so I had
access to all these Communist Party archives that helped explain this.

(33:47):
Looking at these archives and at the sort of thinking
of China's leaders and diplomats and such gave me a
sense of China's idea of national destiny, this idea they
were a nation that had been humiliated that they had
to resurrect themselves, and they were willing to take on
other major countries. So in the Cold War, they of
course fought the United States, in Korea, they split with

(34:09):
the USSR, they fought India. They were really willing to
take on just about everybody in order to pursue this
path of restoration. First of all, you've talked about archives.
How did you get into the Chinese archives? They were
open for a while. I mean there was a sort
of time when they were opening up a little bit
under Hu Jintao, and I was actually there when Shijin
Pin closed them down. So for a month or more

(34:30):
I was in there just reading everything, and then I
went in one day and they were all shut and
I thought I was going to change my plane ticket
and you know, wait from them to open up. But
they've been shut ever since and that was about five
years ago. So Shi Jinping decided to close down all
kinds of things. So you have some kind of a
story knew of how China has been evolving over the

(34:50):
last fifteen years. How would you say it's different now?
It changed a lot ten years ago, the national conversation,
it was all about how China was lagging behind it
had to modernize and had to catch up with the
world and sort of build its economy. Then the last
year that I was in China, the last full year
in twenty fourteen, which was under shi Jinping, the new president.

(35:13):
Well he's not new now, but it was everybody wanted
to talk to me about going to war with Japan.
Going to war with other neighbors is very militaristic, and
that was a giant change I found. Do you think
that's a reflection or why we're having that transition. I
think it's something we've got to keep an eye on
as a country. I mean, one of the biggest things
we need to understand is how China sort of in

(35:35):
Chinese language with the discussion, really is. But I think
it also has much deeper roots. I mean, you know,
Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China
was a very violent individual. I mean he ranks with
Stalin and Hitler as one of the most bloody dictators
in human history. So there's a lot of violent discourse.
And I think the Communist Party, you know, even under

(35:58):
Dung Shaoping brought back rather post on chopping, brought this
sort of anti Western, anti Japanese narrative into the schools
and China into the media in order to sort of
consolidate everybody after the massacres at Tenament Square. I think
Shi Jinping is, you know, his major project is taking
China global, not only economically, but building a military that

(36:21):
can go beyond China's region. And I think his sense
of military prowess powers, you know, finding its way into
into the public discourse. But it's also something that has
much deeper roots. Well, when when you talk about national conversation,
I mean part of what has been trying to communicate

(36:43):
is what he talks about as a China Dream. How
real is that and how much do you think that
reflects goals of the Chinese people. Sign Up for the
China Dream is actually just one new chapter in a
very old idea. I mean this goes back even before
Maze Dong. It was back a hundred years at least
to some yet sound and it is this idea of

(37:03):
China being humiliated and China is going to resurrect itself.
Today people call it the Great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Mao Zedong called it the New China. The old China
was a suffering place that had been humiliated by the world,
and now there's new China and the Chinese people have
stood up. And Hijinping calls it the China Dream, and
this is something he applies to everything. There's a China

(37:24):
dream to build a powerful military, There's a China dream
to go to space. There's all sorts of superpower aspirations,
and I think this is something that we're going to
have to stay incredibly observant about as a country. The
goals of the Communist Party under Shi Jinping are very clear.
It's to become essentially the world's dominant superpower. It's to

(37:44):
fulfill this vision of national resurrection, this idea that by
the year twenty forty nine, which is one hundred years
from the founding of the People's Republic of China. At
that point, the Great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will
be fulfilled and China will become the world's dominant power.
And what we're looking at is a country that doesn't
see itself necessarily as a rising country. It sees itself

(38:06):
as a returning country. Chinese civilization is thousands of years old.
They dominated their region for essentially all of their known history,
and then suddenly they had this moments where they were
humiliated at the hands of European imperial powers in Japan
and everybody, and now they're going to return to their
former glory and essentially become the world's dominant power again.

(38:29):
So it's very ideological, it's a very deep sense of
national destiny. I think it's one of the deepest senses
of national destiny that exists in the world today. And
it includes a very thorough and carefully planned vision of
the future that goes out thirty years and you look
at all the strategies that go into this, and I
think on your podcast you've talked about the Belton Road,

(38:50):
which is a project of integrating basically all of the
continents around the world. I mean not only Asian and Europe,
but Africa and Latin America, all back to China, so
that China becomes the economic center of the world. It's
this plan of building a military that can take on
the United States that will be as good, if not
better than the US. It's a plan called Made in

(39:11):
China twenty twenty five. It's meant to dominate to a
chief mastery of ten different strategic industries. I mean, all
of these things are very very well thought out. So
we're dealing with something that unlike most countries or organizations
that we've ever dealt with as the United States, this
is a very deep thinking, careful planning, effectively executing organizations.

(39:33):
So is ideological as it is, we can't underestimate what
they are able to do. It struck me though, that
there's a certain grand irony in that we have a
leader who talks about making America great again, and they
have a leader who talks about the China Dream. You
have these two competing visionary senses of the future. I

(39:54):
think America has found itself in a position where we've
been just taking care of a world. That's all They
sort of been built by American power. I mean what
some people call the packs American I mean our global
network of alliances I mean our very powerful economy. I mean,
all of these things have been readily built. We just
had the American century. We won the Cold War, we
won the world wars. We're very successful. And then I

(40:17):
think we lacked a post Cold War vision. And you know,
we decided to let all the authoritarian dictatorships into the
American order, to trade with them, to engage with them economically,
to send our companies out to go and do business
in China and such, and hoping that this would change
them and sort of bring them into this world order

(40:38):
as our friend. And what we found instead was that
they basically brought on all the all of our technology
and capabilities and they're using those to fulfill their own idea,
which is this great rejuvenation of the Chinese nations. So
I think once again we have to start thinking big.
We have to get ready to compete with a superpower.
It's an economic superpower. I think we have an economic competition.

(41:00):
We have got to win because it would be very,
very bad for the United States if China did in
fact become the world's dominant power. As Hijinping put it,
they say that they have the invincible force of one
point three billion people and an infinite stage for their
era and the ideas. They have plans on how to
get there. But once they reach this point, it's really

(41:22):
about assuming power, and then the question is what would
they like to do with it. I mean, I think
even they don't know what that would look like. But
the path now is really about gaining power and becoming
this dominant country. But why should the average American care?
I mean, so the Chinese dominate the world, why will
that affect our lives? This comes down to a question

(41:43):
of what our country really is meant to be and
what it represents. The values of America where a system
that's built on rights and freedom. Think about the path
of the United States, the American Revolution, the Civil War,
the world wars. We've worked so hard to carve out
this place in the world where rights and freedom are
the way of life. And in China this is just

(42:04):
not the case. You're talking about a place where freedom
of the press, freedom of assembly, these things don't exist.
Dissidents are imprisoned and executed. People are now being put
in concentration camps in Shinjang, which is this northwest part
of China. You're talking about the world's most powerful dictatorship,
and the idea that we were going to change them
by engaging economically has clearly failed. And the idea that

(42:27):
they're going to become friendlier to the US or to
our values only because they now gain power in addition
to economic strength is I think it's been more dangerous.
So it's always about who's holding power. We really have
to ask ourselves if an organization such as the Chinese
Communist Party, which in fact has one of the highest

(42:47):
death counts in human history, and some people estimated it
up to forty to sixty million people under Mao Zedong
and other Communist Party leaders, I mean, do we really
want them to be running the world. I've been trying
to explain the centrality of the Chinese Communist Party. The
number one goal of Jijianping has to be to keep

(43:11):
the Chinese Communist Party in power, and everything comes from that.
But how would you interpret it? I think that is important.
Look more broadly at human history, whether it's democracies or dictatorships,
or feudalist kingdoms or empires. I mean, there's something that's

(43:32):
about holding onto power, and then there's the other side
is what you're doing with it. I mean I think
she has a very clear imperial vision in the Belton
Road and the military modernization plan, the building of a
massive military, the desire to master emerging technologies where there's
artificial intelligence or five G, or their ambitions in space
in the deep sea. This is much more than holding

(43:54):
onto power. This is an incredibly ambitious regime. It's a
regime who believe, I think on one level, for whatever
its insecurities may be, the discourse of this country is
about our time has come, they said in their official
news agency. By twenty fifty two, centuries after the Opium
Wars which plunge the Middle Kingdom into a period of
hurt and shame, China's set to regain its might and

(44:17):
reascend to the top of the world. They're out there
conducting very successful diplomacy with even some of our closest allies.
I mean, you look at right now at the Battle
for five G in Britain. This idea that Huaweia, Chinese
company founded by a former People's Liberation Army officer, is
going to build pieces of the infrastructure of our traditionally

(44:38):
best allies in the world. I mean, they're succeeding so
much of this. China today is a global power, it's
not just a regional power. I try to describe part
of the difference is the General Secretary of the Communist Party,
the chairman of the Military Commission, and the President of

(45:00):
the People's Republic of China in that order. And if
our news media actually referred to him as general secretary,
you'd have a totally different sense of who he is
and what motivates him, Whereas by referring to him as
president we normalize him into a Western political model. What's

(45:24):
your reaction to that hierarchy. I think he's elevated the
importance of military power. I mean, in the end, we
have to remember that the Chinese military is the party's military.
I remember when I used to travel around and I'd see,
you know, just happen upon Chinese basis and such. And
there's this thing about ting Dong Jihue, which has listened
to the party's command, the PLA. I think, I think

(45:45):
it'd be very useful to the American public to have
a sense of what, you know, training manuals and ideological
indoctrination looks like, I mean, that's probably obtainable. It's meant
to instill an absolute loyalty to the party. She has
consolidated power in a way that some say has not
happened since Mao Zedong. I suppose that's accurate. And in
the end, it's about the hierarchy there. I mean, it's

(46:07):
the party, the military, and then really the rest of it.
We've done everything we possibly can to normalize China, essentially
in our own minds, and I think that's led to
some pretty poor strategy and bad thinking on what the
situation really is. So we trade with them because they're
growing rich and technologically advanced. In all of this, we've
decided that that it's not really communism, but we forget

(46:31):
that it's Leninism, which is essentially a one party dictatorship,
and that's never change, and I think we wrote that
out of the narrative for our own convenience. So given
the importance you place on the military role, would you
put the military commission ahead of being the general secretary

(46:51):
or is the general secretary still because of the power
of the party. In the end, the dominant system, the
party in the military go hand in hand essentially, so
he has to make control certainly of both, but he's
probably had to work hardest to consolidate his power over
the military, and that's obviously very important to him right now,
shi Jinping. I mean, we think about this, after seventy

(47:14):
years of relative peace in the Pacific, he's saying, on
a regular basis, we must prepare to fight and win wars.
So what's he talking about. I mean, he's building a
military that's designed to deter the United States or to
take on the United States on some level if there
were to be a conflict, and he's talking about being
prepared to fight and win wars. So I think it's

(47:34):
clearly important to him personally, and that's very dangerous for
the rest of us. If you could talk personally to
every American, what are the things you wish they know
about China. We have to understand that this is our
greatest challenge. Very few people alive today have had to
deal with a foreign policy challenge of this scale. I mean,

(47:55):
we haven't seen this since I think the early Cold War.
The last time that the world order was you know,
had this kind of stress being put on. It was
really the opening decades of the Cold War. We have
to be ready to think broadly about the world again.
There has to be American leadership. It's our destiny to
be engaged with the world, and American leadership is critical
to whether or not we come out of this all right,

(48:17):
America has to understood that this could be a very
tough contest. We've got to be ready. We have a
lot of great expertise on China in this country and
around the world, but what we really have to get
ready for is what to do about this new challenge. One.
We've got to win this economic competition. We're a twenty
trillion dollar economy where the richest and most powerful country

(48:39):
in human history, and we have not lost this thing yet,
we have not even started to contend with it. We've
got to start thinking about how to win the economic competition,
and that includes empower in our companies to do well
in a global world, but a world that's contested and
not just open markets. We've got to have a great

(49:00):
robust diplomacy with all our true friends and allies. And
then we've got to hold the military balance. You can't
let a leader like Shi Jinping ever have a good
day to pick a fight. Don't let it get easy
for Putin nor Shi Jinping to actually try and challenge
us militarily. And this is what we saw in the
last five years. I was living in China when the

(49:22):
South China Sea was getting started, and when Putin took Crimea,
and I remember on Chinese television there was in Chinese
language there as these reports on just essentially very supportive
of Russian and the two were working together to start
pushing at the edges of American power. We've got to
be prepared to win on the China front. And what

(49:43):
it really means is economic competition if we want to
avoid worse outcomes. Have you looked at much at Huawei
and five G as sort of an area of Chinese
strategic development. This is very important because right now Huawei,
which is they say that it's privately held company. I
don't think anyone's done the right investigative work to figure

(50:04):
out what it really is. It's very dangerous. We can't
have a company that's beholden to the Chinese state out
there building next generation telecommunications architecture all around the world,
including some of our allies. If you have any doubts
about why a company like Bluawe should not be operating
in the US or in democratic allies, I mean, here's

(50:25):
the Chinese National Intelligence law says any organization and citizen shall,
in accordance with the law, support, provide assistance, and cooperate
in national intelligence work, and guard the secrecy of any
national intelligence work that they are aware of. The State
shall protect individuals and organizations that support, cooperate with, and

(50:45):
collaborate national intelligence work. And then Ren Jung Fund himself,
the founder of Huali, who was a PLA officer, I
think the world needs to get to know him a
lot better because what we'll find, I think is not
so nice. I'm going to give you example here where
he says he's studying Western companies and he basically says

(51:06):
we have to only by learning from them can we
defeat them one day. And this is a man who
not only being a PLA officer, I mean he wrote
an ode to the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.
He tells military stories to his organization. He even uses
Mao's strategies to describe how they operate as a business.
So I think there's just so much information there that

(51:27):
could help us end be much more successful in our
diplomacy to counter it. Let me ask from the opposite direction,
if Americans just can't get their act together, and we
can't change. What do you think will happen. I think
we see the end of an American led world. It's
really the next decade is what matters. We've got to
start thinking longer term and realizing that this is about

(51:51):
how power works in the twenty first century. It's all
the emergent technologies. It's a global system's you don't want
somebody else build in, particularly if the system, the political
system that they run, is designed to crush heights and freedoms.
I think every fifty years we get dictatorships and democracies,
and it happened in the first half of the twentieth century,
it happened in the Cold War, and it's happening again.

(52:12):
And the difference here is that they've feasted on our
technological advancements and industrial investments, and on the generosity of
the United States and inviting China into the world. Even
under the leadership of this dictatorship, which you know, you
think about, even in the time in which we were
beginning to open to them, there was the massacre at

(52:32):
Tianeman Square, and the thirtieth anniversary of that massacre is
coming up. Happened in nineteen eighty nine. What happens is
you have all these young people, you know, just students
and everything, that are out there in Tianement Square, and
they're carrying basically a statue of liberty, and then Dung
Shao Ping sends in tanks to kill these people, to
just kill them all. A few years later, we gave

(52:55):
them most Favored Nation status. It is amazing. Listen, let
me thank you. This has been extraordinarily helpful. Thank you
for your time. And I think it's so important for
all of us who share this mission of awakening the
United States to this challenge on preparing us to succeed
in this great competition. Next, I'll discuss how the United

(53:18):
States must stand up against China's global dominance. Doctor Jonathan

(53:39):
Ward points out with his book China's Vision of Victory,
that we really have a competitor who intends to win,
who has a particular model of how to achieve that victory,
and who in many ways has done remarkably well. I
think we have to recognize the scale of the challenge

(53:59):
we're with. The Chinese government has a whole series of
parallel strategies, all of them designed to expand Chinese power.
You have to see the South China Sea as a
piece of a larger story. You have to see the
Belt and Road initiative as a piece of the larger story.
You have to see their investment in Hahwei and five

(54:21):
G technology as a piece of the whole story. And
you have to see their investments in space, their modernization
of their military. Day after day you find things where
they are methodically on moving and in some places it's
very impressive. Go out sometime and ride Amtrak and then
realize that the Chinese over over eleven thousand miles of

(54:46):
high speed rail and they're going to have over twenty
thousand in the next decade. Now, how come they can
build high speed rail and we can't. And that's the
kind of thing you're seeing again and again. And if
you are Chinese and you land at Kennedy or LaGuardia
and you looked at the mess and you looked at
the lack of infrastructure, and you looked at the decay

(55:09):
of the subways, would you particularly be afraid of the
American future or would you look at what you've been
doing in your country and say, you know, we've got
a real chance to win. We're up against an opponent
who has a very real chance to win, who could
well dominate, and we've got to decide how we're going
to deal with it. And I think part of what

(55:30):
makes the whole issue of tariffs so important is the
tariffs are simply a tool. President Trump has figured out
that the Chinese routinely cheat on trade at every level.
They seal off their own country, so if they don't
want high technology competitors, they don't let them in period.
They require people to have Communists on their board of

(55:52):
directors for their Chinese subsidiaries. They create environments in which
their side wins. They have an entire part of the
People's Liberation Army dedicated to stealing our intellectual secrets. And
so what you have going on right now is a
very serious effort by the United States to begin to
change Chinese behavior, to get them to agree that there

(56:14):
are things they won't do anymore. And that's why, for example,
the Chinese government has been so adamant that it doesn't
want to cave in on things like intellectual property rights
in a way which would stop it from stealing. And
I think that this is going to continue for a while.
My guess is that the things we need the Chinese

(56:35):
to do to be acceptable will be unacceptable to the
Chinese dictatorship, and that they will prefer, at least for
the short run, to have an economic war with us
rather than to agree to any kind of binding agreement. Now,
the political and the psychological pressure may be such that
we accept a relatively bad deal. If that happens, my

(56:57):
prediction is within four or five years will right back
at the same place, because they will relentlessly do everything
they can to cheat, and we currently don't have the
mechanisms to stop them. So I think what we're living
through is really the beginning of a very long competition.
Based on everything I've read and studied and thought about,

(57:18):
and thinking back to my own experiences in the Cold War,
I believe either the Chinese are going to win quickly
and within thirty or forty years will be the dominant
force on the planet, or we will have mobilized and
structured in such a way that we will have a
competition with them that lasts several hundred years until their

(57:38):
system finally does in fact begin to change. Just because
in the long run, freedom is actually better than tyranny
and openness actually is better than a closed police state.
The victory for US is a very long way off.
The danger to US is starting with Huawei and five
G and the chance of the Chinese to define the

(57:59):
Internet and define communications and the work they're doing all
over the world to create relationships that would have been
unthinkable ten years ago. There's a very grave danger that
the Chinese will have won this competition, certainly within the
next thirty to forty years. We're just at the beginning
of this conversation as a country, and that's why I

(58:20):
think it's so really, really important that we come to
groups what China really is and what we have to
do in order to deal with the real China now,
with the China that we wish existed. And this is
something I'll come back to again and again because I
think it is probably the central challenge for our children
and grandchildren and the kind of world they're going to

(58:41):
live in and the kind of civilization they're going to inherit.
Thank you to my guest doctor Jonathan Ward. You can
read more about China and the Road Ahead, including a
link to my Newsweek cover story and to doctor Ward's book,
on our showpage at Newtsworld dot com. News World is

(59:03):
produced by Westwood One. The executive producers Debbie Myers. Our
producer is Garnsey Sloan. Our editor is Robert Borowski. Our
researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was
created by Steve Penley. The music was composed by Joey Salvia.
Special thanks the team at Gingwish three sixty and Westwood

(59:25):
One's Tim Sabian and Robert Mathers. Please email me with
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On the next episode of Newtsworld. The Congressional Medal of

(59:47):
Honor is the highest award for bravery in combat. From
Memorial Day, we'll honor those who served, fought, and died
for our country. He was just burned over his whole
body and he survived this heaven whos house, but he
survived it, and his act was so extraordinary. There's pictures
of him lying on a gurney and they rushed his

(01:00:09):
Metal of Honor through the system and they presented it
to him because they were afraid he was going to
die and they wanted him to receive it while he
was still alive. I'm Nut king Ridge. This is News World,
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