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- [00:00]
Jordan Schneider
Julian Goertz, former Biden administration China official, now at Columbia, here to chat Xi Trump visit in all things US China. Welcome to China Talk. Welcome back to Chinatown.
- [00:14]
Julian Goertz
I was going to say welcome to China Talk. Welcome back to what was once known as China Econ Talk, which I think when I was last with you in 2017 is still what it, what it was called.
- [00:25]
Jordan Schneider
Oh, yeah, sure. No, you were one of the. We were in like, early 10, I think.
- [00:29]
Julian Goertz
Wow, an honor. An honor now to be here nine years later.
- [00:33]
Jordan Schneider
We are bearded, bearded, bearded.
- [00:36]
Julian Goertz
And I don't know, but much wiser,
- [00:40]
Jordan Schneider
older and wiser, older, older and wiser and more depressed about US China. I don't know. Just kind of. Yeah, it just came at us, man.
- [00:48]
Julian Goertz
Ups and downs, ups and downs.
- [00:49]
Jordan Schneider
No agency, just tides of history. All right, leverage between the two countries and the two leaders. What's the right way to think about this?
- [01:01]
Julian Goertz
So President Trump is going to China in just a few days. And I really think this question of leverage is at the center of everything for both sides. And what I mean by that is for the Americans, historically, we've thought that the United States has a lot of leverage over China, and we can exert that leverage, and that also shapes the strategic dynamic between the two countries. But over the last year and a half, you have seen to an unprecedented degree China exerting leverage that it has in the form of critical minerals, global export control regime, that they instituted other forms as well, and that that has had the effect of putting the United States on the back foot. Now, to me, we spend a lot of time kind of thinking about who has which choke points, what are the areas of leverage that could be used in the next stage of this standoff. And that's really setting the backdrop for this summit. But I keep returning to the fact that one of the lessons of the past year and a half, really, is that the political will and the staying power, those questions are as important as who has what choke points. Another way of putting it is you can have a choke point, but if you can't use it, if you can't find the political will to use it and to sustain it, then it's not worth very much. And we saw that with President Trump's tariffs. And of course, we're also potentially going to see it with his relaxation of some export controls on semiconductors. And I have gone back recently to one of the most famous passages from the collected works of Mao Zedong. And I think I went back to Mao because I think he's had such a shaping influence on Xi Jinping. But the famous passage is the one in which he describes the atom bomb as a paper tiger. And this is in an interview with a journalist. And he not only calls it a paper tiger, but he then explains why. And of course, he acknowledges that it's a very powerful weapon. But he says ultimately what determines the outcome of a war is not simply one or two weapons. It is the people, the political will and cohesion and staying power of the people. And this idea of people's war from Mao, which shapes his approach to the United States then, I think is also shaping Xi Jinping's approach to the United States today.
- [03:29]
Jordan Schneider
Is Mao right?
- [03:31]
Julian Goertz
Well, look, I think Mao, interestingly, is in a sense, literally wrong. He is wrong about the power of nuclear weapons. And in a sense, the dismissal is a posture that he strikes at a time when China is working intently to develop nuclear weapons and of course, ultimately does. And Mao is very proud of that once he does. And so this is something where it's a posture of a country in a relatively weaker position at that time. But he is right in a broader sense, particularly at the metaphorical level, where we have seen that in a sustained competition between two very powerful countries, that actually these questions of capability always have to be thought about alongside questions of the ability to actually deploy a particular asset, a particular choke point. One of the things I worry about most in the United States is, is because of our polarization, because of our political and social tensions, we have seen a real challenge with either party mounting the kind of sustained long term effort, mobilizing aspects of our economy that would need to be deployed to be effective over the long term against a quite formidable competitor in China.
- [04:55]
Jordan Schneider
Where do we want to go after this?
- [04:56]
Julian Goertz
Let me talk a little more about the summit specifically.
- [04:58]
Jordan Schneider
Okay, yeah. So with that sort of awkward beat or roundabout that Trump is in, what's the right way to think about what's actually going to happen over there over the next few days?
- [05:10]
Julian Goertz
So I do think the way that I've been thinking about it really is this is a summit that is taking place during a stalemate. And it's a stalemate, not an end to a protracted competition. And for each side there are somewhat different objectives. But from Beijing's perspective, this is a test of wills during a lull in a long and intense competition. So it's a stalemate summit, but we shouldn't be mistaken by the decrease in tensions to think that just because we're in a period of de escalation that at least from Beijing's perspective, they're not approaching this in a competitive mindset. They certainly are in terms of what we should expect.
- [05:55]
Jordan Schneider
Well, let's stay on that stalemate summit mindset because there have been plenty of stalemate summits that have made history over. I mean, I'm just thinking of the Cold War, but I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. Is it remarkable that they're taking the time to even meet in the first place?
- [06:15]
Julian Goertz
Well, I think for each of them, they understand that both President Trump and President Xi understand that the way in which their leader level diplomacy plays into the overall dynamic between the US And China is essentially that if they don't meet, if they don't put this dynamic of stalemate into practice through what comes out of their meetings, as we saw when they met in Busan last year, then things can go off the rails very easily. President Xi wants this period of stability in the US China relationship so that he can continue buying time, strengthening China's capabilities. He also is hoping to get some concessions from President Trump, and we can talk about that. But from President Trump's perspective, he has a very, very complicated situation around the war against Iran, which has certainly not gone as planned or perhaps as not quite planned. And basically, he also seems to want a period of stability in US China ties. We know that he's already teeing up, President Trump is already teeing up a message around this summit that it's going to be a huge win. He said the same thing when he and Xi Jinping met in South Korea last year, as I mentioned. And so for him, at a time when the international landscape is very low on good news for the United States, he's clearly hoping to trumpet this meeting with Xi as a win.
- [07:48]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah, well, it's weird. I mean, he's not going to go to a meeting and say, like, well, the way the White House is trying to frame this is interesting because on the one hand, they're just like, low expectations, no deals, nothing's actually going to happen. Like, it seems very, I mean, asking lots of CEOs, like, five days before.
- [08:06]
Julian Goertz
Well, I think some of those CEOs have been saving the date, you know, meaning. I think there is an interesting dynamic where we don't know who exactly will be on the business delegation. We know that President Trump loves a business delegation. His trip to Saudi had a massive one last year.
- [08:21]
Jordan Schneider
It's just like part of the traveling circus for him. Like, it's not a party unless you can, like, snap your fingers and have Tim Cook or Whoever new Tim Cook is show up.
- [08:31]
Julian Goertz
Yeah, I wonder actually who is going, if anyone from Apple. I'm not totally sure. But, you know, look, I think the basic point that I keep returning to is that President Trump has had for a very long time a view of US China rivalry as primarily an economic rivalry. You know, all the way back to 2000 when he ran for president or explored running for president, let's say, on a third party ticket. Back then, he was hammering the wto, he was hammering China for being unfair trading partner of the United States. These themes have been there always. He has always been less animated by the security concerns that for a lot of folks in Washington are the core of the China challenge for them, certainly less animated by the human rights concerns that have been core to the US Approach to China for a really long time. So when he goes to China, he is going not simply as a dealmaker in chief, as he likes to be called, but he's going through this paradigm of this is the world's other largest economy. They have over a billion people, they've got a ton of money to throw around. And all the business leaders he talks with care a lot about either access to that market or competition from that market. And so for him, that's. Those are the four sort of four corners of the square.
- [09:52]
Jordan Schneider
It's so funny. I'm just thinking, like, what, I mean, maybe a Harris administration, but like what another president over the past 30 years with a Dalai Lama that's 92 like, would be doing in the context of this trip, which, like.
- [10:07]
Julian Goertz
Well, I don't think you have to go too far to find that counterfactual. And, you know, essentially in thinking about how the Biden administration approached a lot of these issues, you, you have a pretty clear counterfactual meaning. I think a lot of the changes in US Policy toward China that we've seen over the past year and a half during this administration are not changes where there was a massive constituency pushing for a bigger set of purchasing commitments. That's always been there. Trump is going because he wants to approach the relationship this way himself, overriding the instincts, I think, of many of his advisors.
- [10:42]
Jordan Schneider
What would Biden have gone if there wasn't Covid?
- [10:45]
Julian Goertz
I don't know. It's an interesting question. You know, I was thinking in preparing for this conversation, I was thinking about the last president to go to China for a state visit was President Trump himself in 2017. And, you know, that was a very different time in the US China relationship. It's worth doing a beat on that, but because many of the themes were very similar. President Trump wanted a good relationship with Xi Jinping. He brought a bunch of CEOs. He wanted a big set of purchasing commitments and other economic deal making. That was before the real launch into escalation in the U.S. china trade war. And he was blown away by what he saw. He still talks about it. He talks about the pageantry, how much he loved the grand reception that Xi Jinping gave him. He has even talked about how all the soldiers who greeted him were exactly the same height and you could send a billiard ball down their hats, which is exactly the kind of thing that my brain could never generate. But, you know, here we are. So that is all the backdrop for this trip. And it used to be a much more standard issue thing for US Presidents to go to China. But one of the key things to remember is even in the Obama administration, the main reason that presidents went to China was because there would be a multilateral meeting, you know, meeting of APEC or something like that, the G20 in China, and that would anchor a president's trip. That's obviously not the case this time. It wasn't the case in 2017. And of course, we know Trump is much less interested in multilateralism than his predecessors and wants that bilateral context.
- [12:34]
Jordan Schneider
Okay, so Julian insisted that we do a tour of past delegations to China. Are we starting in the 1798? Where do you want to kick us off?
- [12:45]
Julian Goertz
Okay, so what I'll say is, as I've been thinking about this summit and why it is such a distinctive and interesting thing to have an American president go to China, why it's different than an American president going to France or Mexico or any of the many countries that presidents visit is partly because of this incredibly rich and fraught history of diplomacy with China by the United States and other outside powers. And as we think about Trump going and the visuals that Xi Jinping wants to construct, what's at stake for Xi Jinping as the host and. And what's at stake for the United States in the interactions that they're going to have. I have been thinking back to a few moments in history, and I think it's worth. I'm a historian by training and have written a couple books of history, and I think it's worth doing a B on some of these historical precedents because they really directly inform what we're going to see unfold next week. Sure. They really directly inform what. What we're going to see unfold. The first and jokes about the 1790s aside, the defining early mission to China is George McCartney, a British envoy who goes in 1793, and he's going with a set of economic, trade, and diplomatic objectives. He's going to meet with the Qianlong Emperor, the Qing Dynasty. This is obviously after the United Kingdom has lost its American colonies, but of course, it still has a global empire. And the delegation has a number of central, immediate problems. And it is remarkable to me how these themes in a very different, now obviously, post imperial context extend. First, McCartney is asked to perform the ritual bow, the kowtow to the emperor. And there is unbelievable negotiation and tension simply in the optic of how he, the representative of the British sovereign, will interact with the Chinese emperor. And there are cartoons, which maybe we can even throw up online along with this interview. There are cartoons in the British press sort of making fun of McCartney's willingness to be placed on a lower position. And, you know, he's not willing to perform the full bow, but he does certain other gestures like that. So these questions of status, visible status, and the performance of status almost as a matter of both high politics and ordinary protocol, are at the center from the very beginning. And we're going to see that again with Xi Jinping and Trump. The question of who's standing where when they shake hands, what are the visuals as they walk alongside each other? Ironically, President Trump is perhaps as sensitive to this as any world leader in history. He's thinking this way, too, but it's a. So that will be on display. The second is famously, the posture that the Qianlong Emperor takes is one of a very sort of haughty and superior rejection of the British offer. And there's this famous passage where the Qianlong Emperor writes to George III where he says, our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own, our own products. Now, Qianlong is posturing. Obviously, there are plenty of things that the British have at this point that China doesn't. But that posture, that theme of self sufficiency, self reliance, not wanting to be dependent on, not wanting to draw in, and increasingly, in this era, feeling that China can surpass the United States. Xi Jinping's not gonna say those words, of course. I mean, this was almost 250 years ago. But those themes are very much at play in a very interesting way. There's a great book on this by Henrietta Harrison called the Perils of Interpreting, also about the interpreters who were charged with running between these guys. And I will just end this particular historical vignette by saying one of the most interesting positions of anyone in the world today are the people who are going to interpret the conversations between President Trump and President Xi. Because there will be some of those conversations that happen in the big plenary room, but there will be others that happen as they take a walk or if they have a one on one dinner or sit down for tea or anything like that. And those people, the interpreters, are going to be conveying a remarkably important set of messages that could pertain to the future of Taiwan, of US technology, controls of trade, of each political system. And it's one of these sort of critical jobs in the context of a summit. I also want to talk about Nixon and Kissinger.
- [17:55]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah, we got a lot to cover, actually, so a few thoughts on that. First of all, the idea that like visuals matter even before you had photos, absolutely no tv, it's like no tv, no photos. But like the way the cartoon gets drawn back in London is like going to define the sort of image of it I find fascinating because like politics is so much about like, yeah, just like the visuals and sitting. But it did matter even 250 years ago. Let's talk about Taiwan because that, that sort of like give and take. I mean this was, this was, it wasn't ultimately like one on one leader conversations that brought you there. Right. It was more at the like Assistant Secretary or whatever level. But why don't you give, why don't you start with the context of like what people are thinking about with Xi and Trump for this trip in Taiwan. And then we'll, and then we'll go back to.
- [18:48]
Julian Goertz
Great. So there have been a lot of questions about whether Xi Jinping is planning to use this trip and the other upcoming diplomatic engagements this year, including potentially, by the way, a reciprocal, even state visit to the United States. We'll see to press on the question of US Support for Taiwan, both at the level of declaratory, meaning the statements that the United States makes about our views on, you know, Taiwan's political aspirations, independence, et cetera. The standard formulation, for instance, is that the United States does not support Taiwan independence. This has been the position of the United States for many, many years. The Chinese formulation is to oppose independence, a much stronger language. And there have been plenty of media reports that this is something that they are pushing on now. But critically also not just the declaratory language, but arms sales, the material support that the United States is obligated to provide Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act. We know that Beijing has been pressing, pressing the administration to curtail that. To their credit, they did move a significant arms sale at the end of last year. But one thing that we know Xi Jinping is going to raise is his concerns about Taiwan and US Support for Taiwan. And candidly, it is anyone's guess how President Trump is going to react to that. At various times, he has been, I think, more than any other president in a long time, very critical of Taiwan. And so there's some anxiety in a number of strategic circles in many countries around the world about how this kind of conversation could play out.
- [20:43]
Jordan Schneider
Can we role play the. Yeah, if you're, if you're the Chinese translator. Right. Like, you've been workshopping this. Like, hey, like, I got to tell you something about this. I mean, they must have gone through so many iterations of, of, of the, of the various like approaches, because they must be assuming that the US has some position and there'll be notes about it. And if you're at a table with, like, 10 people on one side and 10 people on the other side, like, the amount that you'll be able to get out of Trump is probably what he's already agreed to. And like, you know, everyone I'm sure on the flight over is like, okay, like, here's what we're going to do. Here's what we're not going to do. Here's we're going to do. Here's what we're not going to do. But, you know, if I was in their shoes, like, yes, the walks and the, the, the one on one stuff is the time where you'd want to see if you can push them a little further. Reframe it.
- [21:38]
Julian Goertz
Yeah, I mean, exactly. I think it's worth just sort of saying a little bit about what the kind of goals are here from Beijing's perspective. So I think that they are approaching this as gradual. It's unlikely in my mind that they would seek a dramatic overnight shift in the whole way in which the United States approaches this issue, not least because they know that Congress has very strong feelings about this, and they know that Congress has played a leading role on Taiwan issues for decades. But they are going to do what in the South China Sea, we called salami slicing, meaning push a little bit. A little bit, A little bit, and then over time, change the overall dynamic. I think that's their goal, but their audience, crucially, is really people on Taiwan. And one of the things that I've heard a number of American People in the foreign policy community say is, well, what does it matter so much if there's a little change in some of the language? Because at the end of the day, the United States has the policy that it has. This doesn't necessarily mean all that much. To which I would say that is a perfectly whatever position if you're an American. But if you live on Taiwan and you are very worried about this question and you know the intricacies of this because your future burns on it, that is not how you're going to see it. And China's effort right now to affect Taiwan's politics is. And to demoralize the Taiwan population is, is for them a big part of the overall effort. Taiwan has a presidential election in 2028. And so this is very much one of the audiences that they have in mind. And I just hope that the people who are briefing the President are able to somehow get through on this. I have my anxieties, but that is what it is.
- [23:40]
Jordan Schneider
Do you want to do some history?
- [23:42]
Julian Goertz
So, yeah, I think, yeah, we leaven the history with stuff that's relevant. I got it, I got it. Look. So the other really defining image for US China summitry is Nixon and Kissinger going to China. First Kissinger secret trips, then ultimately Nixon's trip in 1972, meeting with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. And of course, this is the real start of this shift in the United States approach to China. The policy of engagement develops out of this. But those images of an American president, an American national security advisor sitting in the big stuffed chairs, talking about world order, shifting the tectonic plates of history in real time with Chinese leaders, we just cannot understate how much that image animates successive generations of policymakers, some of whom come directly out of the Kissinger sort of lineage, others of whom are critics of Kissinger, but themselves still have this image in their minds. And so one of the really interesting dynamics I think that the Chinese side will be playing with here is they know that for the Americans, dealing with China is the terrain of so called grand strategy, that the stakes are high and they know that these images are in the minds at least some of the. Of the American side. But of course, Trump has been, unlike almost any president before him, less interested in that kind of conversation with the Chinese and more interested in deal making.
- [25:19]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah.
- [25:20]
Julian Goertz
So while on the one hand there are these inherited forms, on the other hand there are these questions about, well, what does US China diplomacy actually look like at the leader level, if what you're doing is a kind of relentless transactionalism in an environment of competition. And it's probably going to look different than those big stuffed chairs at the front of the room, side by side, that defined that earlier era of Nixon and Kissinger.
- [25:43]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah, the way that the Nixon, Kissinger stuff just hangs over all of this. I mean, everyone wants to be remembered in history for having shaped the world, whatever. Right. And what better way to do that than making peace between the US And China? And this is this kind of gets back to our stalemate thing is like, even if you really wanted to and were better briefed and more focused on it and didn't have a war in Iran going on, and this, that and the other thing, like, I don't know, what's your read on the sort of, like, to what extent, like, the structural tensions can be, you know, overcome in a, in a, like, a fundamental way, if you're a president who really wants to bend this stuff differently.
- [26:28]
Julian Goertz
To me, one of the ways that I think about that question goes back to something I said a moment ago, which is the idea of a stalemate only is coherent in the context of an ongoing conflict or competition. And so I think it's important that we not conflate a period of decreased tensions with a fundamental shift in the strategic dynamic between the United States and China, because certainly China still sees all of the same challenges emanating from the United States over the long term, even if in the short term they're buying time, decreasing tension. And candidly, I think even in the United States, President Trump may have his areas of focus, but the structural dynamics of competition are continuing. And China is continuing, for instance, to engage with Iran. And the U.S. treasury has sanctioned some new Chinese entities, and in response, China has deployed some new sort of legal instruments that essentially are telling those entities not to comply with U.S. sanctions. So all of this is still happening during this period of stalemate. And it's actually a part of how Mao historically talked about what a stalemate is in the context of a conflict where it's like fighting continues but the tensions are lessened. I would say, I think around the summit, I've noticed one line of commentary that is, you know, really building it up. That's saying, you know, I just read an op ed this morning, I won't name names, but somebody saying, you know, this is going to be potentially the most important meeting since 1972. And I think there is a chance that we see that kind of rhetoric coming out of the administration, you know,
- [28:13]
Jordan Schneider
President Trump, should that be the headline
- [28:15]
Julian Goertz
of this, of this, of this podcast, Jordan, if it's the headline, if you got.
- [28:19]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah, you made it, you made it half an hour. Ok, we already hooked you.
- [28:24]
Julian Goertz
Exactly. But let me just say there's that, and that obviously is boosterism and I think is highly unlikely. There's a downside scenario where the summit's very important, as I was just alluding to. But on the upside scenario, I don't really see it. But there is this other line of argument which I think is a bit of a trap also, which is that we should be somehow just intrinsically upset or unhappy that we're in a period of de escalation. And I guess what I would say to that is I am quite concerned for reasons I'll say. But it is not as if the metric of competition, the KPI, the key performance indicator of competition, is escalation. You don't get paid by the escalation if you're competing. It's a silly way to think about it. Escalation is a tool and sometimes a consequence of other policies you have to take for your own interest. But one of the things that's sort of interesting now is you could imagine a period of de escalation as being very much in the United States interest if we were using that time to shore up our strengths at home and abroad. And to me, the thing that is most concerning about this period of de escalation is precisely that the United States under President Trump has been using this period to weaken those sources of strength. We have been engaged in this war in Iran that has alienated partners around the world and spent down a tremendous amount of our stocks and made many countries around the world see us as, you know, acting irresponsibly and illegally. And we've also at home, been, you know, if one of our core strengths is going to be our lead in AI, you know, the administration, obviously we can't forget this, but, you know, last month had sort of a spectacular blow up with the AI company Anthropic that possesses the world's best models right now. So we have used this period of de escalation not to build up our own strengths, but actually to undermine them further. So it is the classic case of like, you know, this is win, win for China in the sense that China wins twice.
- [30:26]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah, well, it's okay, two points. One, the, the quote that some administration official gave to the Washington Post or something saying, like, we're in our, like, hide and bide era. I just, you know, amazing, hats off to whoever you are. Please DM me. But even focusing on the, on, on anthropic, right. Like from a KPI, from a NASH, if our KPIs are like national power, global influence, whatever. Right. I think even that one we can kind of put as a blip. And the, the sort of, you know, there have to be some, like the fact that, like, just work, like us two policy nerds sitting here. We are going to be like over indexing on like the decisions that governments and capitals make that are the ones that are sort of shaping.
- [31:21]
Julian Goertz
So, Jordan, I don't disagree with you about that. But the other really important thing to remember is that if that over indexing is true of us, I also think some of that over indexing is true in Beijing, in China's officials who watch the United States and the stories that they are telling themselves and that they are telling, briefing up their chain to the leadership. And so even if it's right, that that is a blip and that the US Lead is more important than this kind of infighting or destruction of sources of our strength or attacks on them. You know, one of the most revealing passages that I have seen come out of the Chinese leadership over the past year was at the end of last year, the Minister of State security in China, Chen Yixin, wrote a long essay on the sort of, you know, national security in China. And obviously, just to be clear, when Xi Jinping talks about national security, we often think of it as the sort of military apparatus, but actually the state security apparatus is the absolute heart of that. And Chen Yixin, and I'll just, you know, maybe I'll just read it. But he gives this assessment of the United States where he says its democracy is mutating, its economy decaying, its society fracturing at an accelerated pace, broad, its credibility is rapidly going bankrupt, its hegemony is crumbling, and its myth is collapsing. Now, this is propagandistic rhetoric. No doubt he is selling his book, but I also at some level worry that that is quite similar to what he would say in his briefing to Xi Jinping, who is only getting information through these kinds of sources. And so I do think we should take seriously the idea that there are multiple realities that can exist at once and that Beijing is seeing a version of reality that may be closer to some of the worries that we have because it fits a triumphalist narrative that several senior people in China already hold.
- [33:25]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah. And that's really scary.
- [33:27]
Julian Goertz
Yeah. And it's the kind of thing that this upcoming summit, not to harp on it, but is so important for because when I was in the Biden administration and we would prepare President Biden or National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan or the Secretary of State Tony Blinken for their meetings with the Chinese, one of the things we were always thinking about is they are getting information from these interactions. They're actually learning about the United States. They're learning about how we see issues. And we are approaching this in an environment of very low to almost no trust. But there is.
- [34:06]
Jordan Schneider
These are data points.
- [34:07]
Julian Goertz
Yeah, there are data points. And even if they're looking at them with a lot of suspicion, they're still looking at them. And I think they will certainly be approaching the meeting with President Trump that way. And so, for instance, I wonder what exactly they will make of some of the things that we know he has said in past meetings with the Chinese leadership. All kinds of things about his domestic political opponents. He has said all kinds of things about. There were reports in John Bolton's book, you know, that he sort of talked about Xinjiang and gave Xi Jinping go ahead to build the camps. I mean, there is a record here of people who've been in those meetings with President Trump coming out of it with a lot of concern about what went down. And so my mind that is all data that China is taking in, that Xi Jinping is personally taking in. And it's why this meeting is so high stakes and so potentially dangerous.
- [35:06]
Jordan Schneider
Well, yeah, so you mentioned Jake Sullivan, like Alaska, definitely one of the ways this could, like, totally fall off the rails. I sort of see two really crazy downside scenarios. One is the, the one you sort of alluded to where he just like starts giving the house away because he's like, in a good mood and they, you know, serve him the right kind of steak or whatever. The other one is, like, he's cranky. This war is pissing him off. He's jet lag halfway across the world and just decides like, I'm sick of these guys, I'm going to start a fight, which I think, to be clear, is like very low probability. But I don't know, how are you thinking about the sort of like, really surprise on the downside outcomes of.
- [35:52]
Julian Goertz
I worry more about the former scenario. You know, I worry about a scenario in which Beijing is able to extract concessions. And look, they, they clearly it's not his thing.
- [36:07]
Jordan Schneider
He picks fights with like Zelensky. Right. He's in person. Like, he's never done like an autocrat in person.
- [36:13]
Julian Goertz
He clearly does in some level. You know, I'm not in the business of the psychoanalysis of of Trump, which, you know, many, many people make a good living doing. That's not. That's not my business. But I do think it's pretty clear that he sees some leaders as peers and has admiration for them, and then he sees some other leaders as beneath him and treats them terribly. And Xi Jinping has clearly been in that first category. And even, you know, just over the past 24 hours, he's reiterated there, you know, what he describes as a friendship. And he says, you know, sure, it's going to be an amazing meeting. So he is very much in that mode. I think I would also just say we should talk about Iran a little bit, because it is key context here, and I also think will be a key subject in the discussions. But the reality, to my mind is that for President Trump, it seems like the primary way in which the war in Iran will affect his approach to this trip to China is that he wants a win. It's kind of, at some level, simpler than the detailed machinations. It's that President Trump wants a win. He wants numbers that he can trumpet, bringing home the bacon for Americans. And he wants to be able to say, I'm on the world stage with the most serious leaders who exist, these tough guys, and they take me seriously.
- [37:37]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah. It's so funny because that's like, for decades, that was the inverse. Right. It's like, oh, if an American president meets with you, that means doing something right. Or, like, you have that global gravitas. But now Trump is, like, seeking that, you know, he can't get that from, like, having a great G7. Right.
- [37:57]
Julian Goertz
Well, I would argue, by the way, I would argue he absolutely could. He's just clearly not wired that way.
- [38:03]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah. Oh. So, okay, so Iran, you had this gimmick of wanting to do the two briefs to Xi.
- [38:16]
Julian Goertz
I didn't want to do them, but I do often think this way.
- [38:18]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah. So we've got team A saying this around war is a disaster for China, Team B saying, this is the greatest thing since we told McCartney to fuck off.
- [38:31]
Julian Goertz
Okay. So for me, one of the things that I often do as a kind of thought experiment to pressure test some of my assumptions when thinking about how Beijing would assess something is to try to construct kind of. Yeah. The briefer who wants to go in. In Beijing and say, this is good for us, and the briefer who wants to go in and argue this is bad for us and just kind of construct what the data points would be.
- [38:54]
Jordan Schneider
This idea of like, a, a Team B, Team Iran is amazing. Iran is Iran Iran war is amazing. Iran war is the worst thing.
- [39:01]
Mao Zedong (historical reading)
So.
- [39:01]
Julian Goertz
Right. So one of the sort of exercises that I often do to pressure test some of my own assumptions and think about how Beijing's perspective on world events might differ from just mirror imaging American views is to kind of construct, okay, the person who has to go in and brief Xi Jinping that this is good for China, the war in Iran is good for China versus the person who has to go in and brief Xi Jinping the war in Iran is bad for China. So look, so I think the way that the briefing to Xi Jinping that it's good for China that the United States is engaging in this war in Iran would go would be something like, first, China is better prepared than almost any country to endure this conflict. Of course they want it to end. They dislike the disruption. But that kind of hypothetical Chinese official would praise Xi Jinping for making sure that China is ready for what he's been calling extreme circumstances and bottom line scenarios for a long time. Second, I think they would point to the benefits to China's clean energy sector and diplomatic reputation that have accrued from this conflict. So there would be a message, I think of in response to this US Action. The world is looking toward China. They're looking toward China as a source of more stable energy than the Middle east in the form of the renewable energy, the electric vehicles that China dominates the global market for. And they're looking toward China as a responsible player in contrast to an irresponsible United States. In this hypothetical briefing, I think they would acknowledge even in this scenario there are disruptions to the Chinese economy. That's real. But I think that then this person would say something to the effect of, but the whole world is experiencing those disruptions, so it's not likely to erode China's manufacturing position over the long term. And then I think they point to the United States moving strategic assets out of Asia into the Middle east and depleting our arsenal in a way that impacts U.S. readiness.
- [41:03]
Jordan Schneider
Can we do this in the first person?
- [41:04]
Julian Goertz
So I think the way it would go is something like this, President Xi, China is better prepared than almost any country in the world to endure this conflict. We, of course would like it to end. The disruption is negative brought on by these reckless other actions. But you, President Xi, hypothetical Chinese official, have prepared China to endure what you have called extreme circumstances and bottom line scenarios. So we are better prepared than any other country to endure this. There have also been significant benefits to our clean energy sector. The world is surging purchases because they believe that clean energy, the energy of the future from China, is more stable for their economies and their countries than the ways they've been getting their energy so far. And the world is also looking to China as a diplomatic source of stability and even as a mediator in this conflict. And these are profound indicators of how the world is seeing the relative balance between the United States and China and seeing China as a responsible great power. There have been concerning disruptions to the Chinese economy, but the whole world is experiencing those disruptions, and it's not likely to erode China's manufacturing position over the longer term. I think that'd be one part of the briefing. Then I think the next part would go something like this. The United States may be demonstrating military capabilities in abundance in the Middle east, but they have moved strategic assets out of Asia, including strategic assets like the terminal high altitude air defense system thaad that China has complained about for a very long time. And they are using enormous quantities of expensive munitions in this war that it will take them quite some time to restock as a reminder of the fact that their defense industrial base is much weakened even if they remain an impressive military. And then finally, I do think this hypothetical official would make a point, something to the effect of President Trump is coming in just a few days. And if the timing of the end of the war, which President Trump is talking about very actively right now, if the timing of the end of the war appears to be tied to his trip to China, it will provide a diplomatic windfall for China of a sort that can seem a little bit hard to predict, but that I think they would want China to be ready for. Because it will appear that the forcing function for the United States was that President Trump wanted to go have his meeting with you, Mr. President Xi. And it will also appear that the fact that China just hosted these Iranian diplomats in Beijing, you know, Wang Yi hosted them, that that was a facilitating factor as well. So I think that is a version of, of a good case for China,
- [44:15]
Jordan Schneider
you know, if I was Iran, like, you know how the reason they all met together was because they thought that they were still negotiating and so, like, it would be fine to like, meet up because they were safe. I don't know. Would it be so crazy if he, like, really kicked off another round of strikes while on the flight? China, I mean, who the fuck knows? But I, like, I wouldn't put it past him like it does. There are lots of things on the timeline, right? We got Memorial Day, we got the election coming up, we got this Trip wanting to, like, seem like everything's under control, but. All right, so what's official saying that this is actually terrible for China saying
- [45:00]
Julian Goertz
so this was a little bit harder. I'll give you a few points. It's a little bit harder to construct, a little bit harder to spin. But I think it would be something like China needs a stable global economy to continue to power its economic rise to keep everybody moving in the same direction. And this war has fundamentally disrupted the flow of global commerce. It has made inputs to Chinese industry more expensive, particularly those that are petroleum derived. And it has made the markets globally for China's exports go into a period of pulling back and belt tightening that will also limit the overseas expansion of Chinese industry. So that's one, I think. Second, this hypothetical official would have to acknowledge that China has not been able to protect its friends in Venezuela or Iran. Now, I don't think those countries thought that their relationships. Now this is me interjecting, but I don't think those countries thought that their relationships with China were mutual defense treaties. But, you know, we do have to acknowledge that it has shown the limitations of China as a partner. And then I think China finally, and perhaps most importantly, beyond the economic side, they'd have to acknowledge the impressive display of the US Military's capabilities, including NI enabled capabilities. We have actually seen the same Minister of State Security I mentioned a moment ago acknowledge this as the future of warfare. So they are like Ukraine watching closely, taking notes. And the untested PLA has to be feeling a bit of insecurity in relation to those capabilities. But I think when you side by side, the two cases, the one arguing for this being good for China, net net, despite some negatives, is pretty compelling.
- [47:08]
Jordan Schneider
So when Trump asked Xi for help to open the strait, pressure Iran, I mean, it's like we've had decades of this in a North Korea context, I think is maybe the closest analogy.
- [47:22]
Julian Goertz
Yeah. Though I do think, I mean, Xi Jinping has come out and said that he wants the strait reopen. I think the question is whether China's really prepared to do anything about it, do anything to get that outcome. And candidly, I think they have not been nearly as willing as the Trump administration hoped they would be. Which is a reminder of the fact that while China wants stability in the global economy, they want the straight open. They also don't want to put themselves in a position of heightened risk, heightened exposure, or candidly, even partnership with the United States to affect that outcome.
- [48:01]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah. And I also just think the leverage that this is the only thing that matters for the Iranian regime and whatever, whatever levers the Chinese could pull, I don't think would necessarily like, I mean, maybe a little bit on the margin, but it's a different dynamic with the dprk. All right, so I guess they're going to talk about AI now. Yeah.
- [48:23]
Julian Goertz
You know, both sides seem to have been backgrounding this is going to come up. And, you know, it's interesting. In the Biden administration, we pushed really hard to get this on the agenda when President Biden, President Xi met. And Beijing's initial response was basically cold shoulder. And then over time, I think they realized it can be on the agenda, that there's sort of, from their perspective, no major downside. But one of the really interesting things at this moment is, of course, the Trump administration came in not very concerned, to put it mildly, about AI safety. I mean, you actually had J.D. vance and other senior officials making fun of AI safety as a construction. And that, of course, meant that the idea of US China, AI safety dialogue was a non starter because the United States didn't even want it. And what we have seen shift in the Trump administration recently really is, I think, tied to the anthropic mythos moment, where this sense of extraordinary and potentially dangerous capabilities not being something that we are conjecturing about a few years down the line, but actually on the table in the real world here and now, has, I think, made the administration, by all accounts, start to take this a bit more seriously. So I think it's been really interesting to see both sides, both the Chinese and the Americans, backgrounding that they're expecting AI to come up and expecting potentially even some sort of AI safety related deliverables. Because in the Biden administration, we pushed very hard to get this topic on the agenda for the leaders. And initially the Chinese response was essentially a cold shoulder. They were not that interested in having the conversation. And I think they felt that it was happening in an environment where AI competition was heating up, they were unhappy with export controls and other steps we were taking. But we did actually, whether you want to say, wear them down or win them over on this topic, it came up. The leaders discussed it. It was also something that Jake Sullivan discussed with Wang Yi. And I basically think that Beijing shifted its approach because they realized this was an area where the world was looking at the two most powerful countries to show some leadership. This was an area where Beijing was looking at the two most powerful countries to show some leadership. And they also felt like, what's the downside from Beijing's perspective. Now, when the Trump administration came in, it was very interesting because their approach was essentially to say that AI safety is something that doesn't matter at all. You had J.D. vance, other senior officials making fun of AI safety, saying the administration was going to stop all of that nonsense and focus on just winning. But over the past month, really since Anthropic began briefing on this Mythos capability, you have seen, I think, the administration begin to take this more seriously, to realize that this isn't some conjecture a few years down the line, but actually capabilities in the here and now that have a profound vulnerability and danger that they open the United States up to. And so it's a very interesting and different sort of starting point to now go back into having conversations with the Chinese about AI safety. But I'll just make one more point, and then really, there's nobody better than Matt Sheehan to help us think this through. But, you know, to my mind, one of the lessons of Mythos so far is that for the United States and for China, there is no separating advances in capability with increases in vulnerability that basically, the more capable the United States models get, the more capable Chinese models get, the more risk, danger, potential bad act or misuse emerges. And so I think some people in both countries have had a fantasy that there was a point of such dominance and capability that some of the safety issues were not assailing it. But I think we are learning that the two, vulnerability and capability, are actually kind of interlinked. I don't know if you disagree with that, but I'm also just so interested to hear how you're thinking about this.
- [52:47]
Matt Sheehan
Yeah, that was a great rundown of it from the US Side and then how the Chinese side looks in that engagement. I think during this same period of time, I've essentially been following the Chinese domestic conversations on this very closely, and I'd say there's been a pretty big evolution partly in response to. Well, I'd say largely in response to the development of the technology, but then also in response to kind of different groups within China platforming these issues and then sort of seeing them get some level of traction with leadership. And I think maybe if we go back to at least pre Mythos, because this is so recent, at least pre Mythos, if you had to say, you know, how would you characterize, like, how the Chinese government thinks about AI safety writ large, whether it's misuse or control stuff, I'd say it has risen much higher on the agenda. They have essentially put it on the table as a topic that they need to think through, but they haven't made up their mind on what they think of it. So you saw this has been cropping up in different policy documents. One place was in the, they call the AI Safety and Governance Framework 2.0. So it's kind of these two organizations under the CAC, their sort of roadmap for like how are we thinking about AI risks, how are we thinking about mitigations especially as it relates to technical standards. And they had a version of this in 2024 that was just super high level and sort of very light on any what we would call AI safety related topics. And they updated it in 2025. You saw a bunch of changes between the two documents. One of them was like labor got much featured much more prominently and seriously in it, I think that meaning people
- [54:18]
Julian Goertz
losing their jobs because of AI, people
- [54:20]
Matt Sheehan
losing their jobs because of AI. So in the 2024 version it was some very hand wave of like yes, it'll restructure social relations and we should, you know, think about that. And in the most recent one, I'll miss the exact phrasing but it said something online like this will lead to a devaluation of labor relative to capital and social disruptions related, something like that. So kind of like between these two documents we saw labor rising a bunch and we saw safety in a few different forms like misuse and also some of the control, loss of control language featured more highly. And when I, you know, I asked some people involved about this and sort of what does this reflect or not reflect about the policy process over there? And I specifically asked about these safety issues and like it's on the agenda, like it's something that we're thinking about but we, we don't know what we think about it at this point in time. And this is, I guess we're going back to September, September of last year. You know, fast forward to now and obviously like the biggest change has been Mythos. You also have people within the Chinese system that are essentially like working to platform these issues. The area that I'm most focused on right now is the technical stand standards work. That's where they a couple months ago created sort of an AI Safety Security working group on technical standards. And it's led by Joe Bawen, who's the head of Shanghai AI Lab. That's one of the more like safety pilled organizations in China. And so we're seeing, okay like sort of below the line, underneath the surface. They're starting to like get their mind around these issues and then Mythos is like the, I don't know, the bomb or the thing that just like scrambles this equation. I don't think we yet know, like, how the party has actually like, taken Mythos on board. I've heard different things from different people who interact with different parts of the Chinese bureaucracy. Some who sort of downplayed and like, I think they, they feel like they've got it under control. It's just a new cyber thing and we've been doing cyber things forever. Other people have been like, no, they actually seem pretty shook about this and, you know, want to talk about it. But at least when this is getting tabled for this conversation, I. My read, not based on inside information, is that this is the US Side pushing this as a topic for discussion, not necessarily the Chinese side. I have pretty low expectations for anything in the way of like, tangible deliverables from these discussions. I think the idea that we're going to strike some type of grand bargain on AI and we're both just going to like, okay, if you don't do it, then I won't do it. You know, we're both going to be nice. We'll have a hotline and we'll just call each other right away as soon as something goes wrong. I have very low expectations for that. But I put, I think that the effort should go into trying to establish some working level, more technical conversations, specifically on sort of testing and evaluation for safety risks. This gets very tricky kind of with the capabilities, sort of the dynamic you were talking about with capabilities and threats. You also have a little bit of that same dynamic with when you learn how to test a model for certain capabilities that also might indirectly help you build those capabilities. Yeah, it gets very tricky and people in the kind of testing and evaluation world have somewhat different takes on this. But I think sort of my, my takeaway from many of those conversations that there is a path forward for sharing some relatively high level information about how we test for these risks. And that's, you know, there's a few, like, reasons to be doing that. One is like, currently the Chinese frontier labs, their testing for frontier risks is just nowhere near the level that it is in the US Labs. It's kind of a funny inverse where the, the Chinese labs face tons of regulatory compliance obligations from their government and therefore they're not like, tacking on all of this voluntary testing for, for frontier risks. The US Labs, at least historically, have faced like, very, very low regulatory burden from the government. And therefore they put a lot of energy into this type of Voluntary testing. But we, I don't know if you, if you take Chinese capabilities relatively seriously. Even if we're ahead, we're maybe going to get further ahead, but their capabilities matter. Then the type of testing that happens in China, sort of voluntarily, within the Chinese system, not jointly testing like the testing they do for their own national security reasons, really matters. And we should try to do what we can to make that testing better, to bolster that part of their system.
- [58:48]
Julian Goertz
Super interesting. And I do have to think when I hear you talk about this, I wonder what the version of this conversation that could possibly happen at the leader level is, because you don't have two leaders in this case who are going to be talking about that degree of specificity. So we have to imagine at some level the conversation will essentially be AI Matters. We both agree, and maybe some other people figure out what to do about it.
- [59:14]
Jordan Schneider
We were talking at lunch about the idea of, like, okay, even if you're nine months behind, that means a Chinese lab will have a mythos thing in nine months. And even taking away the sort of like, US China national security, like NSA versus MSS thing, there are still criminals in China or criminals around the world who maybe because maybe nine months from now the rest of the world will have patched everything and China will have the most vulnerabilities open to them to do ransomware on water treatment facilities or what have you. So the US Government or this administration, they were able to spend a year and a half pooh, poohing it, because it wasn't really all that precedent. But I think it's basically everyone's consensus view that, okay, maybe it's six months, maybe it's a year, maybe it's 18 months. But at some point in the not too distant future, there will be Chinese labs that are able to create very, extremely cheap, extremely potent cyberweapons from, from a domestically trained model. And sort of like when shit hits the fan in China from a domestic perspective, you got to think they're going to start to do more testing than just, are you saying anti party stuff?
- [60:37]
Julian Goertz
Yeah. It's so interesting to me on this score because if you go back to the history of the way of governing the Internet giants, there's a real similarity because initially it was, as long as you do censorship, you're okay. No images of Winnie the Pooh, no mention of Tiananmen, and we'll leave you alone. But then, of course, they began to realize that even with that set of technologies, there were systemic risks. And this is often shorthanded in the Jack Ma speech and the crackdown that followed on the Alipay IPO. But actually it was a regulatory storm, a complete 360 degree crackdown on the sector to rein in financial and social and political risks. That hasn't yet happened really with the AI sector in China. It has, as you were saying Jordan, largely been censorship and a few other sort of things. Partly because this is such an area of national competition. But that other shoe has to drop. I don't see a way around it.
- [61:34]
Jordan Schneider
That's my Matt question is like what is the tech lash of cyber, like crazy cyber hacks or actual real labor disruption end up manifesting is.
- [61:47]
Matt Sheehan
Yeah, the comparison to the Internet era is really interesting and I think they map pretty well onto each other. And my shorthand for their kind of playbook here is control harness. Govern. Control is first control. The speech implications, the censorship implications, the political implications of the technology harness is okay, we think we have that broadly under control. How can we use this to, you know, diffuse and upgrade our economy in a bunch of ways and then govern? Is this more sort of many cases sophisticated of like, oh actually there are a lot of knock on social effects that aren't just about party control. So like in the Internet era the control was, I mean the long term building of the firewall. But especially like I moved there in 2010 and there was like two years of pretty like wild stuff going on on the Internet. And then 2013, the crackdown on the big Vs where they, you know, arresting and like embarrassing sort of thought leaders who were saying, yeah, I remember you're
- [62:44]
Julian Goertz
reporting on this at the time.
- [62:46]
Matt Sheehan
Yeah, so they like, you know, and they, they did stuff like if you're, you know, if your Weibo gets like retweeted 500 times, you're legally liable for that, the contents of that. So it's like first it's this kind of usually like crackdown based but focused on controlling the speech and information implications. The Internet era, it's that kind of 2012-14 era. And in AI this is basically like 2021 through 2023. So they're first worried about recommendation algorithms because what do they do to like people's feeds? Deep fakes. And then they're worried about generative AI for the same reason. So first they like attack these information problems. Then they go, okay, like we kind of feel comfortable with that. We do need to harness this technology. We believe in it. So in the Internet era It was the Internet plus campaign, which I think starts in 2014 or 2015 they have the, what do they call it? Thousand. 10,000 entrepreneurs and 10,000 innovations. Da Zhong chuang xin wanzhong chuang. Yeah, like entrepreneurs and innovators everywhere. We suddenly like, we feel like we have the Internet under control. Now let's go out and do it. And this is like the huge explosion in mobile Internet services and really like fanning out across the economy. And then in the AI era, they actually just resuscitated the plus formulations was AI plus. And for people who don't know, the AI plus is like AI plus manufacturing, AI plus healthcare, same for Internet, Internet plus transportation. So that's the harness. Like, okay, now we've got it under control, we're excited about it, let's use it. And the governor is like, okay, politics, controlled economy, economic diffusion. Good. Or we're on the path now, how do we deal with the knock on effects? So in the Internet era it was the cybersecurity law, it was the personal information protection law, then it was the anti medical monopoly stuff and goes into the tech crackdown. And I think that's where we're at. We're kind of like at the dawn of that with AI stuff. So they had the regulation on anthropomorphic AI or like human, like AI. So worried about, this was finalized in April, you know, worried about like addiction and effect on minors and psychosis related to AI addictions. It's a very like social impacts focused like pieces of regulation. And then sort of the question for me is like, okay, what's sort of next on that list? And I think some of it will be this like hard security cyber stuff, but it'll also be just kind of like a broader sense of like, you know, the labor impacts, all this kind of stuff.
- [65:09]
Julian Goertz
I would also say, though we haven't talked that much and we are pushing the natural limits of a ChinaTalk podcast episode. I know, but I would just say I also think a difference is one of the main ways in which it appears that the Chinese Communist Party is governing the AI sector is through not allowing them to have the compute they want from abroad. Meaning we'll see how this all plays out when President Trump goes, particularly if it's been reported. Jensen Huang of Nvidia accompanies him on the trip. But the idea that there could be this fundamental tension between Chinese labs wanting to buy Nvidia and Chinese regulators forbidding them from proceeding with those transactions because of the geopolitical risks and leverage and all these other dynamics is an interesting version of your governance paradigm. But from A side that I don't think we had to see the Chinese government worry about in the Internet sector. And some of the same may be true with investment from abroad. And obviously, if you think about the Manus acquisition debate, which you and I, Matt, have discussed many times before, you know, that's one where clearly the interests of a, you know, of a company and the government are at odds.
- [66:25]
Matt Sheehan
I have one question for you guys. It's more like a half baked take that I'm trying to bounce off people. You're talking about the CBRN cyber criminal actors, you know, non state actors. And like this has been, like, this has been very central to a lot of US discussions of AI safety. When people want to make these safety risks real, they'll often refer to like, well, we don't want terrorists making bioweapons. Which I'm not dismissing that as like, not real. It could be, but it's something that we go to very quickly in the US and in China they've, they've been more skeptical of these risks for a while for a variety of reasons. But one, the half big take is I feel like China just doesn't feel itself to be like under siege from a world chock full of terrorists in the way that we do. Like in the United States. We just, I think we have a self conception which is based in reality that like we are often the victim of terrorism. Everyone kind of wants to get at us from abroad and therefore if these models are out there, like, we'll be kind of like first in line to get CBRN attacked in one way or another from non state actors. I think in China they, they say they're worried about terrorism. You know, terrorists in their mind are domestic and are from a specific ethnic group in their, in their conception of it. But I think they're less worried about foreign non state actors in the way that we are.
- [67:48]
Jordan Schneider
Dude, the Falun Gong bioweapon. Would you really put it past them, Matt? I don't know.
- [67:55]
Matt Sheehan
No comment.
- [67:55]
Julian Goertz
Okay.
- [67:58]
Jordan Schneider
Yeah, I think it's a bad take. I don't know.
- [68:00]
Julian Goertz
I think it's a bad take too, Matt. I'm sorry, I don't think. I guess I would say a few things First, I think the Chinese Communist Party perceives itself as profoundly under siege and has a paranoid mentality that is absolutely central.
- [68:16]
Jordan Schneider
I mean, you brought up Xinjiang, let's start with that. Like it was foreign infection of ideological whatever and like the, you know, terrorist gene coming from abroad, which kicked this all off in the, in the first place. I Think according to some kind of narrations of how the policy ended up changing. But I don't know what else is wrong with it.
- [68:39]
Julian Goertz
I guess to me there is no regime in the world I can think of that has more of a worst case scenario, catastrophic planning mentality than the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping. And to me, the relative lack of concern about sort of chemical and biological weapons and AI, I think has more to do with assumptions about how different AI is than existing capabilities. And those assumptions may be changing and less to do with a lack of concern about people being out to get China. Because I just see, I mean I really do see the Chinese Communist Party as particularly over the past decade becoming more than ever fixated on, you know, this idea that there are a lot of nefarious forces out to get them. But maybe we cut this part so we're not just all like beating up.
- [69:35]
Jordan Schneider
No, no, no.
- [69:36]
Matt Sheehan
I like, I like this. Yeah, I think to be clear, the under siege is from like non state terrorist groups. Like, I agree the paranoia is intense and the feeling of being under siege, but they're usually talking about like the United States of the America. And I think that is a different. Like, I think both governments should pretty much assume that the other one is going to do as much bad stuff at a state level as they can with. They're going to use AI in every possible way to gain an advantage at a state to state level. But I think the concern about non state actors is just different between the two places. I think maybe someone who focuses on like Southeast Asia and the Golden Triangle and like the scam factories there would see this very differently. But yeah, I think with the CBRN stuff there's a big distinction between state and non state actors and that their paranoia focuses on. Yeah, it focuses on the United States. They're also afraid of US NGOs.
- [70:31]
Julian Goertz
One comparative question I have though is like, again, I don't mean to beat up on a theory that you.
- [70:37]
Matt Sheehan
This is why I tabled.
- [70:38]
Julian Goertz
Oh, acknowledged, acknowledged. Maybe we have faked. But I wonder whether for instance, the Japanese where they map onto this concern because that's a case of a country that has actually experienced a sarin gas attack. Right. Meaning the United States has of course experienced horrifying terrorist attacks, but the idea of specifically a chemical or biological weapon. There are some societies that have experienced those kind of attacks. And so I wonder whether their degree of anxiety about this AI risk is heightened because of that or not. I say this also because if the answer is that it maps sort of linearly onto other countries about the same. Then I wonder whether the alternative hypothesis that this is mostly about a sense of AI capabilities rather than a sense of threat is where we'd go.
- [71:28]
Jordan Schneider
I'd also say, like talking in public about organized crime or terrorism is just like not is just like a. These are conversations that are like natan, but doing it in public to the mad she hands of the world or just broadly to like, you know, for like a WeChat or a Xiao Hongshu thing. You can't actually discuss this only in the context of, oh, here are all these people that we just arrested for doing this crime.
- [72:00]
Julian Goertz
Also, Matt, I have to say sorry now that we're really, as I think about it more, you know, there's no doubt that the AI safety community has talked a lot about chemical and biological weapons risks. But I guess when I see what's really driven, like actual concern about AI safety in broader society, it's effects on kids, deep fakes, that kind of thing. Also like use in warfare from a more national security establishment perspective. And then maybe most fundamentally this idea of just out of control systems, like a loss of human control over the system. So I wonder whether partly the community that has kind of held the candle for a long time about these risks centered partly on CBRN kind of risks, whether that's actually indicative even of American society at large and how most Americans think about the risk here. Because there is polling on this, we can look it up. But I wonder whether that's like a top three AI risk for Americans. I doubt it is.
- [73:10]
Matt Sheehan
Yeah, no, I totally agree that the average American, even maybe the average policy world person is not putting these top of mind. I think it's kind of within the community that has been pushing, hey, these systems are getting really dangerous really fast. Not in a diffuse social impacts because kind of way, but in a safety, safety kind of way.
- [73:30]
Jordan Schneider
Well, yeah, I mean, it comes down to like, is it, you know, the binary of is this an existential risk or not an existential risk? And like cyber attacks are not an existential risk. Like labor disruption is not an existential risk. So you don't necessarily have those funders and the people who are focused on that like clocking those sorts of issues as much as you would this and the whole existential risk framing I don't think has like bled into the Chinese discussion nearly as much as it has at Berkeley and beyond. All right, we call there.
- [74:06]
Julian Goertz
Thanks, Jordan. Thanks, Matt, for.
- [74:08]
Jordan Schneider
Okay, yeah, thanks. Thanks for showing up, showing up an hour late just to get Beat up on. We really appreciate it.
- [74:14]
Matt Sheehan
I appreciate the opportunity.
- [74:16]
Jordan Schneider
Okay.
- [74:33]
Mao Zedong (historical reading)
All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying. But in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long term point of view, it is not the reactionaries, but the people who are really powerful. The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the US Reactionaries used to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter. But the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapon. A weapon you cannot wield is no weapon at all. A choke point you cannot squeeze is no choke point. The question is never the bomb, never the blockade, never the bargaining chip on the table. The question is always the political will of the people who hold it. The cohesion, the stay in power, the willingness to endure. Was not Hitler a paper tiger? Was Hitler not overthrown? The Tsar of Russia, the Emperor of China, Japanese imperialism, all paper tigers, all overthrown. There is no Great Wall in the world that cannot be breached. Strategically, we despise our our enemies. But tactically, we take them all seriously. We are advocates of the abolition of war. We do not want war. But war can only be abolished through war. And in order to get rid of the gun, it is necessary to take up the gun. A revolution is not a dinner party. A revolution is not so refreshing. Refined soul, leisurely and gentle soul, temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A single spark can start a prairie fire. The east wind prevails over the west wind. Dare to struggle, dare to win. The people and the people alone are the motive force in the making of world history. I know time for Shi. The world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century. The east is rising and the west is declining. The Chinese nation has stood up, grown rich and is becoming strong. And no force on earth can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation from marching forward. The wheels of history roll on. The tides of the times are vast and mighty. Those who follow the trend will prosper. Those who go against it will perish. 250 years ago, an emperor told a foreign king, Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is no need to import the manufacturers of outside barbarians in exchange for our own. The words have changed. The spirit has not self reliance is the foundation on which the Chinese nation stands for. Among the peoples of the world, core technologies cannot be begged for, cannot be bought, cannot be bargained for. They must be earned through our own struggle, through our own hands, through our own minds. We must prepare for the great struggle with many new historical features. Stalemate is not the end of struggle. It is a lull within it, a contrast test of wills during a protracted standoff. The road ahead is long. The mountains are high. The rivers are wide. But a great rejuvenation cannot be achieved by drumming and gonging. Cannot be achieved. At ease. Dare to struggle. Dare to win. This is the powerful spiritual force by which our party overcomes every enemy and every difficulty. The river flow goes east, the sun rises in the east, and history is on our side.