What Does China Want? The Authors of a New Paper Challenge the DC Consensus

Summary

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Sinica Podcast – "What Does China Want? The Authors of a New Paper Challenge the DC Consensus"

Host: Kaiser Kuo
Guests: David Kang, Jackie Wong, Zenobia Chan
Air date: September 2, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode examines a new academic paper – published in International Security (Summer 2025 issue) – that fundamentally challenges the prevailing Washington consensus on Chinese ambitions. Where U.S. policymakers and many analysts argue China is bent on global hegemony and revisionism, the paper’s three authors use both qualitative and advanced computational text analysis to argue that China is, for the most part, a status quo power primarily preoccupied with regime stability and domestic issues, not territorial expansion or the spread of its political model.

Kaiser Kuo gathers the paper's authors—David Kang (USC), Jackie Wong (American University of Sharjah), and Zenobia Chan (Georgetown)—for a rich discussion spanning the origins of their collaboration, their methodological innovations, critiques of the DC consensus, empirical findings, and implications for US policy and regional alliances.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins and Collaboration

(07:10–13:52)

• The project grew organically from each author's longstanding interest in Chinese rhetoric, foreign policy, and computational analysis; initial collaborations arose from existing professional and academic relationships.
• David Kang emphasizes that "Our argument in the region is far less controversial than it is in the United States, which is telling." (10:10)
• Jackie Wong and Zenobia Chan collected vast corpora of official Chinese media and leadership speeches to ground their analysis not in cherry-picked statements but systematic, universe-level data.

2. Challenging the ‘Revisionist China’ Narrative

(13:52–18:56)

• Kang critiques the tendency of American IR (international relations) theory to project European historical models—assuming rising powers always seek external expansion—onto Asia and China.
• He asserts, "If you look at most of the dynasties in Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, internal threats are way more consequential than external invasions for the rise and decline of these things." (16:43)

3. Methodological Innovations

(18:56–22:47)

• The authors employ both hand-coded and computational methods (Latent Dirichlet Allocation, co-occurrence networks) across 12,000 People's Daily articles, 4,000+ Xi Jinping speeches, and other sources, allowing identification of recurring themes over time.
• Jackie Wong: "My gut feeling is that China is very, very direct and kind of transparent about its intention. If it wants to escalate, it will say it." (11:08)
• Their analysis reveals that Chinese official rhetoric focuses far more on domestic issues (governance, corruption, healthcare) than on foreign expansion.

4. Addressing Criticisms: Is Official Rhetoric Reliable?

(22:47–30:01)

• Critics allege Chinese official discourse is merely propaganda or strategic misdirection.
• Zenobia Chan: "These are part of the national education curriculum...we do believe there is an intention to instill these concepts into the people." (26:33)
• The authors bolster their confidence in rhetoric as a policy signal via comparison of rhetoric with subsequent government action, and by analyzing repetition and persistence across platforms, audiences, and time spans.

5. Linguistic and Cultural Nuance

(31:34–36:22)

• The phrase "hegemony" (霸权 bāquán) in Chinese is inherently negative, associated not with leadership but bullying—the linguistic difference underpins misunderstandings.
• Jackie Wong: "In Chinese idiom, hegemony is always coming to use of force...negative connotation. It’s about the imbalance relationship." (33:46)

6. Ideology, Influence, and the Belt and Road

(36:22–40:08, 63:48–67:56)

• Chinese ideology is described as "socialism with Chinese characteristics," which the authors argue is not an export project, but a justification for domestic governance.
• On the BRI, Zenobia Chan suggests it originated as a way to solve China's own excess capacity crisis rather than from any grand design for global dominance; its actual geopolitical payoffs have been modest and inconsistent.

7. Territorial Claims and Historical Legacy

(41:43–49:06)

• Kang highlights the deep historical roots of Chinese claims to Taiwan and other territories; the focus transcends communist ideology and predates modern military capacities.
• "China would care about Taiwan if it was completely useless...because of the historical way in which Taiwan as an island has interacted with China over literally centuries." (43:51)

8. Regional Perspectives vs. Washington Consensus

(56:37–61:08)

• East Asian states reaffirmed their One China policies after Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit, evidencing widespread regional reluctance to join alliance-based strategies against China.
• Kang: "The general American consensus that allies in the region and other countries all fear China the way the Americans do...is breathtakingly out of touch." (57:11)

9. Media and Perception Biases

(52:22–53:26)

• The authors’ data show that U.S. and UK journalists rely on sources like the Global Times rather than more authoritative Chinese outlets, exacerbating Western misperceptions.

10. Security Dilemma and Policy Implications

(74:35–77:35)

• U.S. policy may be worsening the very problem it fears, increasing the risk of a security dilemma spiral.
• Kang: "The arguments that we make in our article...they're not radical. These are mainstream arguments, certainly in the region." (75:53)

11. Indicators of Genuine Chinese Revisionism

(77:35–79:24)

• The authors would expect to see significant changes in Chinese rhetorical patterns (e.g., more struggle rhetoric, expansion of territorial claims) as indicators of true revisionist intent—but so far, such shifts have not occurred.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The view in Asia about China is much more tracking with...a relatively status quo China... There are things they don’t like, but there’s a fundamentally less sense of impending doom than in the United States."
  — David Kang (10:10)

• "If you know China, it’s 'struggle'（斗争）, right? Whenever the top official in China talks about struggle, it means it’s the most critical issue they need to deal with at that moment."
  — Jackie Wong (18:56)

• "We want to understand systematically what different leaders in China are thinking. Our goal is not to cherry-pick quotes but to get a full picture."
  — Zenobia Chan (12:49)

• "If you look at most dynasties in Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, internal threats are way more consequential than external invasions."
  — David Kang (16:43)

• "China, often, gets criticized for simply doing business...not exporting its values like the Americans do... And that show of willingness to see fault at anything that China does."
  — David Kang (37:43)

• "If we really look into the [Belt and Road] projects...a lot are really just projects run by for-profit companies...I would argue not quite [as development]. At least not the influence the Chinese government wanted to buy."
  — Zenobia Chan (65:49–67:56)

• "Every Vietnamese leader has to be able to push back on China, and every Vietnamese leader has to be able to get along with China."
  — Vietnamese military official, via Kang (63:05)

• "The rhetorical stability across time that you talk about—very, very interesting."
  — Kaiser Kuo (79:24)

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Important Timestamps

• 07:10: Collaboration and priors – How the authors’ perspectives converged
• 18:56: New methods for analyzing Chinese rhetoric and intent
• 26:33: Official rhetoric as genuine policy signal
• 31:34: Meaning of "hegemony" and translation effects
• 41:43: Taiwan and the historical depth of claims
• 52:22: Media ecosystem and misperceptions in the West
• 56:37: East Asian regional consensus post-Pelosi Taiwan visit
• 61:08: Vietnam: historical contest, current cooperation
• 63:48: Belt and Road’s real drivers and limits
• 68:33: Compellence vs. deterrence in Beijing’s Taiwan messaging
• 74:35: Security dilemma: Is US policy making China more assertive?
• 77:35: What would constitute evidence of real revisionist ambitions?

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Tone and Language

• The conversation is non-dogmatic, measured, and often gently irreverent, with Kaiser and guests poking fun at D.C. conventional wisdom while rigorously presenting data-driven arguments. There’s a strong emphasis on regional nuance, historical context, and empirical over theoretical claims.
• The tone is collegial, forthright, sometimes wry—academic but accessible.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• The consensus that China seeks global hegemony is largely unsupported by systematic evidence from both rhetoric and behavior; the PRC’s priority remains regime security and domestic governance.
• Most Asian governments, in contrast with U.S. policymakers, view China as a complicated but ultimately status quo power, and do not read Taiwan or other disputes as precursors to wider expansionism.
• Public and policymaker perceptions in the U.S. and Europe are shaped not only by selective use of sources but also by foundational conceptual frames that may not fit the Asian historical experience.
• The unintended effects of U.S. containment and decoupling (technological self-sufficiency, exclusion from regional trade) may ultimately be counterproductive.
• Researchers and policymakers should rely on methodical, universe-level data and knowledge of regional context—rather than cherry-picked quotes and Western analogies—when crafting strategy on China.

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Recommendations & “Paying It Forward” (80:03–86:19)

Each guest names rising scholars and media to watch—highlighting the importance of fresh perspectives and rigorous empirical work in the evolving debate on China.

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Listen to this episode for a thoughtful, data-driven challenge to prevailing assumptions about China's global ambitions—and a vital window into the “status quo” view that’s mainstream across much of Asia but still deeply contested in D.C.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics and society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light on and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Goa, coming to you this week from my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sinica is supported this year by the center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Seneca Podcast will remain free, but if you work for an organization that believes in what I am doing with the show and the newsletter, please consider lending your support. I am in the market for new institutional support. Because of the Trump cuts to the Department of Education Title VI grants cut, the center in Wisconsin is no longer going to be able to support me. So please look for new support. Listeners can support my work by becoming a paying [e-mail] you will enjoy, in addition to the podcast, the complete transcript of the show each week, essays from me, as well as writings and podcasts from some of your favorite columnists and commentators who focus on China and the knowledge, of course, that you're helping me do what I still really believe is important work. So do check out the page to see all that's on offer, and when you do, you will no doubt consider helping me out. One of the more consequential and frequently asked questions when it comes to China is what does China actually want? On this program, I have interviewed numerous guests who addressed just that question and provided their answers off the top of my head. I mean, there was of course, Jessica Chen Weiss, who joined me several years ago to talk about her very influential piece in Foreign affairs, provocatively titled Making the World Safe for Autocracy, in which I mean, just to summarize, Xi argued that domestic political imperatives primarily drive China's foreign policy to ensure the party's survival, rather than some deliberate effort to export autocracy globally. Xi sees mainly defensive actions by Beijing aimed at making the world, as she says, more accommodating for its own autocratic political system. Ali Wine, who's now at the Eurasia Group, he talked about a paper when he was at Rand that he worked on that challenged the portrayal of China as a revisionist power that was hell bent on global dominion, describing it instead as pretty selectively revisionist. I've had Carrie Brown on the show Talking about one of his recent books, the guy is crazily prolific. There's been at least two since. He argued that what we really need to do is invert the question and ask what do we want from China? And to really interrogate our own expectations and our own desires. Just, just now, just before we jumped on, I was reading an interview in the SNP from Dawei at Tsinghua University at the center for International Security and Strategy who has been on the program before. And he said, let me just quote from him here, I don't think China has a very strong appetite to fill that vacuum. The vacuum he's talking about is the vacuum left by, by Trump globally in leadership. And also, he goes on, I don't think China has the capability to fill that vacuum. The US has been kind of a hegemon for decades, if not a century. I don't think China is in that position. At the same time, I don't think China is so eager to replace the US to be the leading country in the world. Anyway. The question of what China really wants, which no one will be surprised to hear, I actually have pretty strong opinions about. And you know, I think nobody would be surprised that my, the positions of my previous guests that I've just outlined all line up pretty well with my own thinking. I mean, nobody who's been listening to this program is going to wonder where I stand on that question. And I think it's important that I say that up front. It has seemed to me for a very long time that America's China hawks, if you will, they project on a China from their own experience and not just at the level of strategic intention, of grand strategy. Still, I think this question of what China wants, what its ultimate ambitions are, is very much a live debate. And I would argue that it's actually one of the defining disagreements that fundamentally divides the so called China watchers of the world. It's one of the, probably the best litmus test indeed, if you want to get a sense of one's overall posture toward China. But you know, with both Democratic and Republican administrations in succession embracing increasingly confrontational strategies toward Beijing, I mean, maybe not so much just in recent months with Trump, but still, it's an incredibly important question. So I was very glad to see a new academic paper published in International Security just this issue, Summer of 2025, simply titled what Does China Want? It challenges the central assumptions driving U.S. strategy. The prevailing narrative, which I think it's fair to say assumes that China seeks global hegemony, it seeks territorial expansion it seeks to displace American leadership in the world. This belief fuels policies of military deterrence, alliance building for containment, and economic decoupling. But what if this consensus is based on misperceptions? Misperceptions that risk unnecessary conflict while obscuring opportunities for cooperation on all sorts of critical global challenges? So joining us today are the three authors of what Does China Want? Who argue that a close systematic reading of Chinese official rhetoric, historical patterns of territorial claims, and quantitative analysis of leadership statements suggests a very different reality, one in which China is primarily a status quo power, not exclusively, but primarily a status quo power focused on regime stability rather than external expansion. Their research, which integrates computational text analysis, authoritative party media, and a broader historical lens, takes aim at the assumptions that undergird massive military spending and defines how the world's greatest power treats its most consequential strategic competitor. The paper has engendered, not surprisingly, quite a bit of pushback from people who hold to the China as revisionist and hegemonic power perspective. And we're going to get into that criticism in due course. But first let me introduce and welcome the co authors. First, David Kong is Maria Crutch, professor of International Relations, Business and East Asian Languages and Culture at the University of Southern California. Dave, welcome to Seneca.

[B]

Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Great to finally have you on. It's long overdue, long overdue. Jackie Wong is Assistant professor at American University of Sharjah, formerly a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton. Great that you could join us, Jackie.

[D]

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.

[A]

And finally, last but not least, Zenobia Chan is Assistant professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University and until recently was prized research Fellow at Oxford University's Nuffield College.

[C]

Welcome Zenobia.

[A]

And thanks to all three of you for making the time.

[E]

Thanks for helping us all so great.

[A]

Over the next hour we're going to really dig into, well, your methods, your findings and the broader implications for the US Regional dynamics, the global order, all that stuff. Before we get into the substance of the paper though, maybe you could just tell us how this collaboration came together. Disparate universities, different backgrounds. What drew you into this joint project and how did your priors, your pre existing hunches about China's strategic intentions line up or diverge when you first started talking about collaborating on this?

[B]

I'll start. All of us have been working on this in different areas, so in some ways it came together organically, but we also know each other a lot better. It's not sort of a random type of thing. Jackie was my PhD advisee at USC.

[C]

Ah, okay.

[B]

And so I know him quite well. And then Jackie and Zenobia are very good friends. And I think you guys can say how you guys know each other. And so we'd all been working on it, and then just a little bit more of the background is. I started with a paper to is. And then it became very obvious that adding in their research would add a level of sort of systematic rigor and bring things that I couldn't do. Because we saw this paper as really a chance to make a sort of primer or an overall approach to how we should think about understanding China. So we didn't want to just make it narrow. We wanted to try and provide an overall framework. And so adding them in made. Made perfect sense.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think I saw an early iteration of the paper. I think he said it to me ages and ages ago. And I realized, looking at our email correspondence, that I never got back to you, as I promised. So sorry about that.

[B]

That's okay.

[C]

Yeah, I don't think my input would have done much, but thanks. It's great. Tell me how the two of you do know each other, and then I do want you guys to talk about your prior assumptions going into this. So, Zenobia, how do you guys. You and Jackie know each other?

[E]

It was probably in the summer of 2021. We went to a conference organized by UC San Diego under their UC San Diego IGCC, the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation. And so we met Jackie there because we both thought our surname looked quite Cantonese. And that's how we started talking to each other. And then later, my colleague Noel Foster, who's now at the US Naval War College, we got a grant from the Department of Defense. And then Jackie became our first pre dog. Doctoral fellow and later postdoctoral fellow. And so is how this project kind of come together.

[C]

Oh, great, great, great. Dave, you want to kick us off.

[A]

And talk a little bit about priors.

[C]

And then maybe, Jackie, you can follow up. Did you have an idea, an answer to the question already in mind? What does China want? Were you already sort of, you know, like. Like me, you know, believing that China had quite limited actual ambitions and intentions.

[B]

Or in a lot of ways, yeah. I mean, having grown up with Korean family and being there, the view in Asia and that I sort of consistently said this for almost 30 years now, is. I think the view in Asia about China is much more tracking with the authors and the scholars that you've mentioned about a, a relatively status quo China that everybody has to deal with. And there are things that they don't like, but there's a fundamentally less sense of impending doom than there is in the United States. And so I've written about that for, for years and years and then about China itself. And so we came to, I came to this project with an attempt to try and make help on sort of the Western, particularly the D.C. audience, understand that perspective in the region. Our argument in the region is far less controversial than it is in the United States, which, which is telling.

[C]

Yeah, absolutely. What about you, Jackie? Where did you come at this from?

[D]

Yeah, so basically I also got some kind of perception because I grew up in Hong Kong and I read like Chinese news media or even you can put it as propaganda on a daily basis. And when I came to us to study since 2011, I have seen a lot of Washington D.C. policy analysts making some claim about China, but at the time I didn't realize the claim they make is based on the assessment on Chinese rhetoric. And I kind of figure out, hey, why I read something so differently from you guys have read. And then my dissertation, my own project is basically trying to find out what kind of Chinese rhetoric is most predictive of this action. Military escalation, economic coercion, sanctions. Right. So what my, my gut feeling is that China is very, very direct and kind of transparent about the intention. If it wants to escalate, it will say it. If it wants to do something, it will justify it. Right. So, and Professor Kang or Dave basically find us for collaboration because Sanobia and I have collect a lot of data already beforehand about what does China want and what China does not want, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a good collaboration.

[C]

Okay, Zenobia. I mean, it's always fascinating to learn how co authored pieces actually take shape. It sounds like, you know, I mean, I gotten a little preview here of some of what you brought to it. But how did you guys divide up.

[A]

The labor on this project?

[C]

Whether in data gathering, I guess you and Jackie already had quite a bit text as data analysis. The historical framing, the theoretical arguments. What were each of your specific contributions to the paper?

[E]

That's a great question. So basically, I think Dave, Jackie and I, we kind of independently were interested in this topic and started our own papers. And so in particular when Jackie and I were working together under the grant we had at Princeton University back then, we collected a lot of the data from official Chinese media outlets such as People's daily qiushi the PLA's daily and other newspapers. And then I think our goal, like Jackie and David all just mentioned, we want to understand systematically what different leaders in China are thinking. And I think for us, our goal is not to cherry pick one quote or a few quotes, but to get a full picture. And so we thought having, like a full universe of speeches and articles from all the different authoritative sources will be helpful. So I think, like Dave mentioned, he originally had his paper, and then we have our data, which form a lot of the analyses presented in this final article that was published.

[C]

So in the end, it was sort of a blending of your disciplinary strengths. So, Dave, you note that the dominant narrative in Washington, Duh, is that China is inherently expansionist, it's inherently revisionist. When you began this project, what did you feel was missing in the existing literature or commentary that challenged that view? I mean, were there particular books or articles that you thought maybe gestured in the right direction but didn't go far enough, or maybe places where you felt like this critique of the conventional wisdom, like my own, wasn't really grounded rigorously in data? Is that what you thought you would bring to this?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, this is the latest of a series of articles and books that I've written over a long time that basically my value added in general as a scholar is not coming up with new theories. It's in knowing the region really well and then applying that to the theories that we've got and showing how they fit or they don't fit. So knowing each age and saying our theories don't fit the rub or the disc or the disconnect is often in mainstream academia and in Washington, the theories drive the data. So people are very wedded to their theories about how the world works. And you hear these phrases all the time, like history teaches us, but that history is almost always European history. Right. Or we know that states always expand, you know, these abstract models about how the world works, and then they apply. Well, if China's like everyone else, it's going to act that way. And that was the basis of a number of. Of things that I've done. And over the years, for example, more specifically, you started to see a number of books about China that say, if China's like everyone else, it's going to. As it gets bigger, it's going to have expanding ambitions and it's going to invade everybody. And so there was a. There's a natural way. And that just meets. That is mother's milk. That's the air we breathe in Washington. And so it totally fits, right?

[C]

Yeah, no, I mean, I run against that same frustration and I think I alluded to that. This idea that they, you know, there's this projection and it's really kind of built into the so called, you know, IR realist theory. There's this, this idea that, you know, states are naturally self aggrandizing, that they want to expand it. Yeah. And yeah, I think that's, that's the basis of the complaint. But I mean, that's not a feature of a lot of this literature that's taken on the conventional wisdom. This is not something that informs, you know, like the perspectives of Jessica Chen Weiss, for example. So that was what was missing though what I'm getting is like, I know it's wrong with the theory. What I'm saying is like, what did you think was not there already in the literature that was already attacking that conventional wisdom?

[B]

Well, I think there's, there's, there's two things that sort I've been working on and one, one I did with another former, my grad student who's now at Stanford, Shinroo Ma, where we decided to ask what East Asian history would look like. What are the lessons of East Asian history? Because we all know the lessons of, of European history, which is Peloponnesian War and rising, Germany cause war and everything else. And so what we found is, is that if you look at most of the dynasties in Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, internal threats are way more consequential than our external invasions for the rise and decline of these things. It's a very different view of the world and your place in the world if you're more concerned internally than you are externally. And those are the kinds of theories that are missing for helping us realize that the world is wider than simply what we had in the European experience.

[C]

Got it, got it.

[B]

And the second thing that I would say is simply a real attention to the empirical reality of what's going on. There's an awful lot of analysis of China that, as Zenobia hinted at, either cherry picks quotes from, you know, from, from, from a leader or cherry picks tiny little bits of evidence about what Japan is doing or China is doing or Vietnam's doing, and then says, aha. And so I would really urge people to more pay attention to what's going on in the region itself.

[C]

I mean, and part of that, of course, is, as you say, you want to bring the data to it. So let's dig into the research, design the methodology bit, and let me ask Jackie first and then turn to Zenobia as well. But your paper uses computational tools like something I'd never really heard of, called latent Dirichlet allocation. Is that my even pronouncing it Dirichlet? Oh, lda, lda, latent Deiro, collect allocation and co occurrence networks. So these are methods that go way beyond the traditional qualitative close reading of party speeches. Can you walk us through why you felt standard approaches were insufficient for understanding Chinese intentions? And how your methodology allows you to identify bigger patterns, enduring patterns, rather than, as we say, cherry picking examples?

[D]

Yeah. So starting from the data collection process, Zenobia may add more if she has even thought about it. So we have the universe already, right? So we have all the data, right? So that omit us from selecting the statement that we want to select. So that solves the first biggest problem, right? Like which kind of data should we select? We just do all. The second step is how to analyze the data. So if you like what you have just said, right, you have read the paper closely, we select some very key variables. 1, 11 key terms that we really think is very important. And if you know China is struggle, right? In Mandarin. Yeah. So if you pay attention to Chinese rhetoric, right? Whenever times the top official in China talk about struggle, it means it's the most critical issue they need to deal with at that moment, right? No matter what, they will deal with efforts, right? And you can see it, right? So from my tax analysis, the most important thing is always about COR healthcare doing better governance as well as different kind of economic issues inside China, right? So I won't say computational method is the only approach. We also incorporate our regional expertise into it. For example, we select the right phase, which is struggle, the rise of the east, the war of the west, as well as inmates of the US and going back to the methodological question, which is why lda, right? So LDA is kind of an October classification model. Basically ask the computer to classify the data itself, right? Instead of using our eyes. So basically data both with our hand coding results that you have seen the appendix. We also hand code every single keys article published in the last 10 years and collaborate with or cross reference with the computational method. All results are the same. China care about its domestic issues. China cares a lot about cooperation. The US do not want displace the US as well. Want to have some kind of reform domestically instead of focus too much abroad, especially targeting at the US Yeah, Zenobia can add more.

[C]

Yeah, Zenobia, you guys analyzed what 12,000 People's Daily articles and something like 4,000 Xi Jinping speeches. I'm sorry that you had to do that, but I'm glad you did the yeoman's work. How did you guard against the danger that your source selection itself could introduce bias? And what steps did you take to validate that party rhetoric is actually a reliable signal of genuine policy priorities, rather than, as some people, the critics have alleged, it could be strategic misdirection. It could be aimed specifically at foreign audiences just to lull them into a false sense of security. What did you think? What steps did you take to validate this?

[E]

So for a lot of people who've been observers of China, we would know that there are different levels of authoritativeness of different news sources or information sources from the plc. So in this article, we chose three main sources. First is the People's Daily, which represents the Central Committee of the ccp. And then we also have Qiu Shi, which is like the magazine that publicized the Communist Party's latest policy directions, as well as speeches by Xi Jinping, which, well, we assume represents Xi Jinping's own views. So we think these sources that could represent the latest news and policy directions and decisions of both the party state of China, basically. And by selecting the entire universe of these articles and features, we avoid the problem of cherry picking just quotes that we like or would play to our priors. And then by using these authoritative sources, we think it could give us a better picture of how senior leaders in China view the world and what they would like to do and pursue.

[C]

I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. Let me go back to Jackie really quickly. I mean, just let me say, I feel like that doesn't even need to be defended. But nevertheless, it's something that is very much out there in the criticism over the paper. So I thought I'd bring it up. But Jackie, in your struggle corpus, you did something interesting. At Victor Shi's suggestion, you guys mentioned that this sort of had early research roots in San Diego, and I assume Victor might have played a role in there. You excluded Covid related texts. You viewed them as sort of transitory that they didn't really have to do. I mean, so how did you distinguish between temporary crises and enduring themes more broadly? I mean, what criteria guided your decisions about what actually constitutes structural, long term priorities in Chinese discourse versus something that's just the response to an event of the day?

[D]

Yeah, yeah, basically you hit the nail. And this is the reason that we removed the topic about healthcare issue, which is COVID 19, because we want to focus on the long term strategic goal of China want to pursue. So in our replication, the first step of our research, basically we have the healthcare thing. So it pick up a large portion of the word struggle in the topic, right? So whatever times we talk about COVID 19, they have a lot of struggle mentioning because they do not define COVID 19 as a virus or pandemic.

[C]

People's war.

[D]

Yeah, it's basically talking about war, right? So if you think about war, they need to have struggle. It's a master's term that they always use to uphold the principle. This is the first one we need to tackle and put away all other side projects that we need to do later. So we remove that and I think after removing the topic, it go back to the long term goal. What is the most important thing that China needs to achieve the next five years? And as you know, China a lot because I've heard your podcast, basically it's a five year plan, right? So the five year plan basically put up the roadmap of what China need to achieve in the next five years. And from the struggle terms we can see that consistently it's about governance, right? Of corrupted officials, how to get rid of them. And right now, if you pay attention to recent news, it's not just about corruption, but putting more precisely to even to military affairs, right? So you can see a lot of purge right now in the military apparatus. And it's offic. I mean it's objective facts, right? They kind of seen that corruption may kind of spread to different areas, not just the areas of 10 years ago they targeted like financial sector or banking sector, or even some kind of cadre promotion things, but also to military, police system, judicial system, etc.

[C]

Etc.

[D]

So I guess the short answer to your question how to decide is temporary thing or long term strategic thing. I believe what we are kind of capturing in our data or profits is basically long term, at least five years terms. And you see a time trend, right? We are not doing one year yet, but like 10 years starting from 2012. So you can see even short term if they consistently mention that it's a long term thing. That's what we believe.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess Zenobia, this next question kind of gets at the heart of a lot of the criticism. You've defended your use of official rhetoric basically by arguing that sure, it's potentially sure strategic. It does though reflect genuine priorities when consistently repeated, especially across multiple platforms and when it gets incorporated into education. Can you spell that out? How does that repetition and the fact that it's actually drilled into young students. How does that signal genuine commitment to the idea that in this case, China won't seek hegemony?

[E]

So, like you mentioned, and like we also mentioned in the article, a lot of these concepts of peaceful coexistence and that China will never seek hegemony, which is a quote from a lot of these official documents. They are part of the national education curriculum in China, so pupils from primary school and secondary school will learn about these materials. And we do believe that if the government didn't want people to believe in these concepts, there's no point for them to add it to the curriculum. So we believe there is an intention to instill these concepts into the people. And in a related project that Noel Foster and Jackie and I are working on, we also found that the rhetoric in these authoritative news outlets, such as People's Daily and Qiu Shi, they do predict subsequent actual action by the Chinese government. So putting all these different pieces together, we do believe that although many might claim these are for publicity or for propaganda, we do believe that the Chinese government put some emphasis on these concepts and these. Representative of what they're thinking.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't seem that hard to accept to me that that would be the case. And yet this has been one of the main lines of attack. I guess it's the wily Oriental stereotype. Right. They always.

[B]

The inscrutable Oriental. Can I jump in briefly on that?

[C]

Absolutely, sure.

[B]

Yeah. Because I think the larger frame that we would say, and at some point we might respond, I find it sort of interesting when people are saying, oh, well, you're just using official rhetoric that doesn't mean anything. First of all, that's a social science statement. We can test that. And that's exactly what Zenobia, and that's Jackie's dissertation. Is what China says cheap talk or does it say what it means? Right. So, yes, we can do that. And I encourage you all to read what Jackie and Zenobia and Noel have been writing about, because they've got really interesting data on that.

[C]

Yeah, I look forward to reading that paper.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, you can explore this as a social science question. But even beyond that, what's interesting is that many of the people who are doing this, either we ignore it all or we take it seriously. And much of the debate about China, one of the interesting things, and, you know, none of the three of us has responded onto the Twitters or whatever, but people were saying, literally, you know what? There were people there who took one quote from one general in 2016 and put it on and said, you guys are wrong. We're like, that's why we're doing what we're doing.

[C]

Exactly right.

[B]

You know, you take it seriously or it's all to be ignored. But many people who critique China are the ones who say, well, Xi Jinping made it clear in 2016, or they say they never say it, but we know anyway.

[C]

Right? Right, right. There's a lot of that cherry picking that's happened. I mean, a lot of this stuff, I mean, I won't name names, but there are whole sort of major arguments that have had a lot of impact in the Biden administration.

[B]

And that's one reason why adding, you know, because when I was reading this stuff with my broken pigeon Chinese, I can sort of say, I'm sure Xi Jinping didn't say that. But these guys who are doing the systematic analysis is how, you know, let's look seriously, let's take it seriously. How many times did they say this? When do they say this, who do they say it with? Right. That's the value of actual sort of systematic study of these.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, so, you know, we usually see these arguments repeated online by the defenders of China's claims about its peaceful intentions. That, and it's like, hey, look at all many American military bases that are around the world, what, six or seven hundred of them, whatever. And the number of Chinese bases they got, the one in Djibouti, or the number of wars that China's fought since 79, since its so called punitive strike against Vietnam. Do those things hold water to you? I mean, you don't invoke these and I guess you don't need to. You deliberately sidestep this to sort of focus on the data. And I think that's a good strategy because those arguments, to me, I mean, you see a lot of these kind of ridiculous cases, right? This idea that China has never waged aggressive war or things like that, it's just very silly. I think they really undermine the case because they're just so ahistorical and just kind of bad. But let's talk about something that is sort of historical. Zenobia, I want to ask you about this. You know, you note that the Chinese term for hegemony in Mandarin is almost always pejorative. It connotes bullying rather than legitimate leadership. How significant is this linguistic distinction in shaping Chinese strategic culture? I mean, maybe, of course you're not going to see them use a pejorative word to announce their policy intention. So is it more a Constraint on behavior, or is it more sort of like, you know, an artifact of this, this avoidance of it rhetorically because it.

[A]

Has these negative connotations?

[E]

That's a good question for us to unpack. I think first of all, I think more in general, when people look, when scholars and policymakers look at Chinese foreign policy, there are a lot that is lost in translation, basically. For example, like the example you just gave Baxian, which is very meth with lots of negative connotations in Chinese. And what we constantly saw in the articles in the speeches that we studied in this paper is China says it never wants to be the hegemon. And we think that since you're asking about whether it's constraining, I do think that it can have a constraining factor because I guess one way we can look at it is kind of like our friends and colleagues, Alex Lin, who is now at ubc, he argued that hegemony is always mentioned in US Official documents as somewhat unusual term. Like, for example, how to maintain US Hegemonic position. And in the academic literature, like in international relations, which Jackie, Dave and I are all in this term, one term we always hear is that the United States is a liberal hegemon. But when we think about the Chinese translation of the word, it actually means more like you mentioned bullying in the context of Chinese. And so I think that related to our paper is we try to read things in both languages to make sure we interpret it accurately. And the other thing is like what Jackie talked about different computational techniques to somewhat overcome the translation issue, to come up with a more accurate depiction of China's official discourse about the U.S. that's how we think about that.

[C]

Jackie, did you want to add anything about that?

[D]

No, no, no. It's perfect. Basically, I just want to mention my senior colleague Alex Lin, because he did wonderful job on this kind of translation issue. When he thinks about why China always think that, oh, the U.S. should when the U.S. mentioned had Germany. Right. Like the U.S. also talk about primacy all the time in the official dogliness, why China responds so aggressively to that.

[C]

Right?

[D]

Because it's kind of a neutral term. Right. If you read academic articles like realists talk about hegemony all the time. But why did Chinese pay particular attention to this word? Because in the translation, they do not just translate the English meaning of it, they add some kind of Chinese thinking into the translation, which is bullying. Right. Because in Chinese idiom, hegemony is always coming to use of force. Right. Is about negative connotation. It's about the imbalance relationship. It's not about respect, it's not about equality, but about imbalanced relationship. So I guess this is the thing that. Well, I think it's a signaling problem, like send them receiver gag. The US used this kind of term to justify their foreign policy and then the Chinese perceive it and then get into another round of misperception about the other side of kind of intentional. And I think this is basically what the realist is calling it as security dilemma. But I guess they kind of ignore this very fundamental problem which is the nuance of translation. And I think we are working on that to have some new project as well.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. You know, Dave, I guess what I was sort of getting at is, I mean, and this isn't one of the terms that you code for that you look for, but you know, if it were, it shouldn't be surprising that the Chinese rhetoric would not use it in describing their intentions ever. Right, So I can see how a bit. But that's not one of the three phrases that you look for. I just wanted to raise that. But one phrase that you do talk about is this phrase socialism with Chinese characteristics. Again, it's not one that you search for, but it's kind of central to your argument that ideology is China's ideology is not something that it seeks to export. It's also something I've pointed out an awful lot. You actually quote something I wrote about the difference between Chinese and American forms of exceptionalism in the paper. Thanks for that. But some critics argue that this is just branding that masks China's ability to project influence through infrastructure, finance, through standard setting in big UN bodies, political elites who are trained in China, these capacity building things, they're actually pushing this out, but always hiding behind this. Oh no, no, no. Chinese characteristics. You see, we're not actually exporting ideology. So how do you distinguish genuine ideological constraint from the kind of strategic flexibility that some would say is really at work?

[B]

I'm going to pass it to Zenobia soon because I think it's interesting about Chinese influence. Right. But the first thing I would point out to finish up on, or to add a little coda to the discussion of hegemony is you started out by asking, does it affect Chinese behavior? And I would say absolutely. The words we use and the concepts we give, we need people, do countries, we need to understand how the world works. And these words have meaning and they give valence to what's going on. So that's why when Xi Jinping will say things like, we'll always be willing to learn from others, et cetera, et cetera. They might, you know, China has a very proud view of itself, but virtue and power and domination are viewed differently in China than they are in the United States, I would say. And I would, I wouldn't back down on that. And so they do view these things differently. And the Chinese characteristics is a good example of that. Because, interesting enough, China often gets criticized for simply doing business overseas and not exporting its values like the Americans do. Like, we have a whole millennium project about forcing African countries to accept our values if they want to do business with us. And we think that's a good thing because our values are universal. And China gets criticized for doing business with just anyone.

[C]

Right. Value neutral diplomacy suddenly is both bad.

[B]

And good until they don't do it or until they do do it, you know, and that show of willingness to see fault at anything that China does.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

One more step below that is that in terms of Chinese characteristics, I think that this is a, you know, this is a very deeply held idea of we're working on our own issues here and we have our own unique solution to things. And sure, you can come and study if you want, but this isn't something where we're going to try and tell you you got to. You got to act the way that we do. What's interesting about Zenobia's actual research in her book project is a question. I would put it this way, and Zenobia correct me if I'm wrong. Her book asks, can China buy influence from other countries through the Belt and Road initiative? But it's not influence in those other countries. It's support for China at home and a sort of willingness to support or to ignore human rights abuses or to support China's political stances and things like that that matter to China. Am I characterizing that right, Zenobia?

[E]

Yes.

[C]

Good.

[B]

Which is a different form of, you know, so again, correct me if I'm wrong, but her, her book asks, you know, can China with its business things get support for Taiwan. Right. From other countries? It's not about can China export other countries to do, oh, I don't know, you know, communism in Malaysia or something like that. It's can we get.

[C]

Right. Right.

[B]

Brunei or whatever to support or to support, which is a very different use of influence than Americans who are like, you need our values, you need our institution.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, singing from the same hymn book here, Zenobi, I do have questions for you about Belt and Road stuff, but I Want to ask you, for instance, we're still on methodology. So you found that rise of the east, decline of the West. This is One of the three phrases that you code for. Appeared 32 times in the People's Daily since 2012, usually in context of modernization and justification of policy. Yet Western analysts often see this and seize on it as proof of China's hegemonic intent. What does this gap between domestic usage and foreign interpretation tell us about how Chinese messaging is being filtered and received abroad? I mean, it's also kind of frustrating to me that it kind of describes a reality right now. And is it such an offensive thing to say, my God.

[E]

What we also found is that after the rise of the east and the decline of the west, the usual sentence that follows is China has no intention to change the United States and China does not want to replace the United States. So it's almost like, like you mentioned, it's kind of describing what is going on in the world as the context and then say that, well, even with that context, China has no intention to change the U.S. or replace the U.S. right.

[C]

Interesting, interesting.

[B]

And that's where some systematic measuring the number of times they say it. How many times does this phrase go together points out, if you just take this one phrase in isolation, you can get it to say a very different meaning than if you actually look at it systematically. At what?

[C]

Even if you do take it in isolation, you know, this assertion, the west is declining, the east is rising. It does not by any sense prove that China seeks hegemony, unless you assume that rising simply means seeking global domination. Which gets us back to this projection thing. Anyway, Dave, I want to turn to you and ask you about, because you've done quite a bit of historical analysis. You situate China's territorial claims within a whole framework corpus that spans decades. This idea that there's a trans dynastic lineage that predates the communist era. Skeptics are going to argue that the claims are old, sure. But they argue that China's capacity to pursue them now is radically different. Now they've got numerically at least the biggest navy in the world.

[A]

They span the globe with trade networks.

[C]

How do you disentangle inherited historical commitments like the ones you describe from new.

[A]

Ambitions enabled by modern forms of power?

[B]

Yeah, no, I mean, it's a, it's a great question and it's one that's, you know, that is, that has come up a lot. And let me just start by, you know, reiterating the basic claims or the, the basic argument that I made, which is many of this. Much of the stuff that I've read about, for example, the Communist Party or Xi Jinping or whatever, are deeply ahistorical. And you read these books that speak with confidence about what the Communist Party wants, and there's no discussion. It's as if they literally started in, you know, the 1970s or something. It's not even from 1949. And where this, where they came from and why they care about these things. And then the rationale for China's claims, particularly over Taiwan, but over many other things, but over Taiwan again and again and again. The claim explicitly is that they want Taiwan as the springboard to more invasions because Taiwan has semiconductors, because it'll be an unsinkable area. Just all this instrumental stuff, which in many ways completely ignores that China would care about Taiwan if it was completely useless. I mean, there could be four people living on the island and they would still care. Right. Because of the historical way in which Taiwan as an island has, has interacted with China over literally centuries. And it was that frustration with the idea because, because if you think that you, that, that China cares about Taiwan now, as you said, because now it has the capacity, and now it could be even. I mean, you will read this thing again and again and again that now they have the capacity. Once they get Taiwan, then they could look at Philippines and then they can attack the second island chain and all, all this stuff as if Taiwan is a board piece on a game.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, the capacity thing really underscores this whole Davidson 2027 argument anyway. It's like, you know, there's this equation of capacity, capability with intent. Right.

[B]

Yeah. And yet the underlying reality is that I am absolutely sure that China would care about Taiwan if it was as useless as, again, like four people lived there. Or maybe put it differently, they probably care just as much about the, you know, other areas that are not military, Hong Kong or Macau, whatever. And the trans dynastic thing, I'm, I'm actually proud of that. But, but it's, but it's a way to think about how. And we, we had a quote that, that is. Wouldn't let us put an epigraph in, but I think we put it in the article. But you know, if you read the negotiations between Qing dynasty and Japan in the late 19th century, the, the Qing ambassadors are saying, look, you can't take Taiwan. Taiwan is Chinese. If this happens, it will be the source of problems for generations. And that's. The Qing dynasty didn't start with PRC no, and then it was. And it was inherited, you know, in the war there, then by the, by the Guomindang and the Republic of China, you know, and, and finally by the pla.

[C]

So these are quotes from the discussions in the Treaty of Shimona.

[B]

Yes, yes. Right. And you can read. It's fascinating stuff. Right. You can go back even farther than that to see how. One thing I point out is that the island never had a political organization that engaged in tribute relations. That was not. It was a frontier. And the contrast. And at some point I'm going to write this up, the contrast with the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa is stark because Okinawa or Yukyu had formal tribute relations with everybody. Japan conquered an actual existing political unit and incorporated in what, 1879. And they're never giving it back. And that is in many ways a more. You know, if you're going to talk about colonization, that's more than closing off a frontier area, which is how you.

[C]

Describe what the PRC wants to do.

[B]

Is close off a frontier area, if that is the case. Retrocession, as we talk about.

[D]

Right.

[B]

The, the, the claim. I'm not going to butcher Chinese, but, you know, the claim of sort of honorably retaking lost territory is very different, implies very different ambitions. And, and we'll get to it later. But I would, I would point out most countries in the region don't view Taiwan as a precursor towards anything else, that if they get Taiwan, then they're coming for us. Almost everybody I know around the region is like.

[C]

That seems to be.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

An exclusively American idea.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

I mean, you also point out the fact that both and the ROC maintain the same kind of maritime claims, including the infamous nine dash line. The ROC's continental claims actually are more expansive than the PRCs. If you go to Taipei and you buy a map of quote, unquote China, it includes most, maybe all of Outer Mongolia and large parts of what's now Soviet Russian Siberia, and has major claims in India as well, including South Tibet, including Arunachal Pradesh, as the Indians call it. So how does this convergence of ROC PRC claims complicate Western portrayals of these disputes as driven by communist expansionism, which is often how it's portrayed. And what does this actually suggest about the role of national identity versus, you know, political system based, quote unquote expansionism?

[B]

I think I don't want to keep talking too much, but, you know.

[C]

Oh, I won't let you go.

[D]

Yeah, good.

[B]

You're very good at making sure that they get to talk. Right.

[C]

Well, that's.

[B]

But just. I Just want to say a couple things because this has been, I've been writing about this for a long time. I think this gets again to how Americans or Westerners view the world. And it's okay that it's understandable where they come with a Eurocentric lens or a particular lens. But our task as scholars is to help. Okay, does that fit or not fit? And this lens of Westphalia, of nation states has become so pervasive that we cannot think beyond it. So every, every one, every state is the same, everyone is equal, et cetera, et cetera. We all know this. Everyone has a flag and a national anthem. And so we view Taiwan then with, through that lens. Taiwan then must be a certain thing. The problem with Taiwan is that we must figure out into Westphalia is it a nation state or is it not? Right? And if it is, then it has certain rights. And it's not blah, blah, blah. And we think that then that's then a precursor to other stuff, but that's not the way it was viewed. And a sort of maybe, a maybe answer, which we all have now, by the way, right now everybody agrees it's sort of maybe or sort quasi. Yeah, that answer is actually quite stable. You don't need to do it. But that answer implies very different things for how the world is going to work and what countries are going to care about. And that's a sort of national identity lens or a what is, what is China broadly defined is very different than we have a nation state with divided down to the centimeter.

[C]

Right, right, right, right. You know, I mean, there are other models on offer. I mean, we have commonwealths in the world. It's not, it's. Anyway, we won't get too, too much into the weeds here. I want to turn now to Zenobia and to Jackie, ask you about this because your paper directly challenges the so called bipartisan consensus in Washington. And you know, officials from Jake Sullivan to Rushdoshi to Elbridge Colby, China is this expansionist power requiring military containment. So if your reading is correct, why has this conventional wisdom proven so durable even among those with access to classified intelligence? I mean, I should note that there are plenty of officials Paul here comes to mind who had or have had access to classified intelligence in the very period that you cover, who come to completely opposite conclusions. I think Paul was involved in your project in some capacity, but that's always actually given me great comfort knowing that people like him who have seen presumably the worst that China can do, or Ryan Haas, who's seen the worst that China can do still come down on a different side than the Rush and the Elbridge Coldies of the world. Zenobia, why don't you start us off? What do you think is responsible for the endurance of this conventional wisdom?

[E]

Well, I'll just caveat what I'm going to say that I say that as an academic, I think as an academic scholars, we enjoy so much more freedom in just, you know, presenting the empirical observation we observed. But I think for policymakers it's always worse to be unprepared than to be over prepared.

[C]

Hmm, yeah, that's true.

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

So sort of they have to plan. Worst case scenario is that you're suggesting is that it's just the logic of the office that compels this sort of pessimism.

[E]

I think this is one of the major contributing factors to how people would perceive China in a sort of more, let's say, hawkish way.

[C]

Yeah, no, that's actually a good observation. What about you Jackie, do you agree with this?

[D]

I agree. Well, we are co author but I have two perspectives here I want to bring to the table. The first one is perhaps it's about condition, right. Like Paul's and Nickel always have the intention to think about the words, right. But basically what we have observed in this project, and we may extend to larger project later on is so the selection effect is not only about the selection of the sentence that they want to see to justify their foreign policy position like let's say balance against China, but they are also selecting on the wrong media sources like Sanobi and I have been working on for years. So we have a kind of data analysis on New York Times and Financial Times. So we scraped all the data for Financial Times and New York Times and see what kind of sources they are using to discern the intention of China. And then what we have found is they are not citing People's Daily, they are not citing Xi Jinping speeches, they.

[C]

Are not citing Global Times, right?

[D]

I think so. And you know, Global Times is not really representing the. Well, I think it's part of People's Daily, but you can't say it's official. Official. At some point they interview the most hawkish scholars or I don't think. Well, I think scholars and policymakers in their orbit to signal what the most hawkish Chinese scholars or policymakers think about particular issue, let's say South China Sea, the Fed dispute with South Korea, etc. Etc. So this kind of misperception is not only at the level of the policy making but also the mass media because the general public in the US generally consume information from mass media and even the journalists may sometimes play up this kind of exaggeration a little bit or a lot depends on the situation. And I think this is the thing that contribute to the security dilemma, misperception or a very aggressive kind of habit within Washington D.C. yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.

[C]

Absolutely. Zenobia, going back to you on economics, your paper criticizes the decoupling narrative. You note China's resilience alongside America's absence from trade pacts like CPTPP or rcep. How should US leaders balance the risks of integration, technology transfer for possible dual use technologies, military civil fusion and coercion with the risks of isolation? Especially when China is embedding itself more and more deeply in regional economic networks? I mean, are we in our efforts to contain China actually locking ourselves out of important regional economic networks?

[E]

I would say that what the United States has been doing is actually catalyzing technological development in China, because I do believe that. Well, let's put it this way. More than a decade ago I was working in Beijing for the United Nations Development Program. Back then, a lot of the Chinese officials I interacted with, they did see China as being integrators and learning from other countries. But when I think one thing that changed a lot of Chinese officials thinking was when Russia got sanctioned in 2014 after Crimea. I think that marks a time when a lot of Chinese officials started thinking, what if we get locked out of access to technologies that are critical to manufacturing and then to the economy of China? And that's also the time when China started thinking about how do we develop our own technology. And so I think by locking by, you know, excluding China from access to technology, it can actually make China more willing to invest in and to develop its own. And to your question of what US policymakers can do, I think the only way to out compete is to get better. Faster.

[C]

Yeah, run faster. Stop trying to trip the other guy. Right?

[E]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

No, you're good. Seeing again from the same. Yeah, exactly. Same hymn book. This has been a persistent theme on this show. I mean many, many, many guests I've had on have talked about it. Rather than using nice polite language like catalyzing China's self sufficiency drive, they usually say things like lighting a fire to the Chinese ass, which is maybe more colorful and maybe less accurate. Fantastic. I want to move now to regional perspectives and East Asian views. And Dave, this is something you've worked on an awful lot. Let's start with this after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's 2022 Taiwan visit, every East Asian government reaffirmed, if not Beijing's own One China principle, then at least their own version, their One China policy. What should Washington take away from this regional consensus and does it challenge the viability of alliance based strategies that assume that partners are going to come automatically and rally to Taiwan's defense in the event of Chinese action?

[B]

Absolutely. And in fact, I've been repeating that as much as possible and I find it sometimes bewildering that the general American consensus that allies in the region and other countries all fear China the way the Americans do. And an example I'll give you this, the last, like a couple issues go Foreign affairs, you know, the, the policy journal of record in the United States States had a sort of US China thing. And it was three or four articles in that May June issue or whatever it was.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

That were all talking about a pacific defense pact and how we need to have more alliances and we need to get Indonesia and Vietnam on board. And it was like breathtakingly out of touch, like, are you kidding me? Right. And the point is this, and I would say two things about that. Every country reaffirmed the One China policy, every single one of them within days. And I put this in the article because I was in the Blue House with one of the most right wing pro U.S. presidents in South Korea's history. Probably unique, right? I don't think we're getting anyone ever close to that in 10 years, 20 years. And I said to him, what about the One China policy? And his top security advisor in the presidential office said to me, we made our policy in 1992 and we normalized relations. We haven't changed it. We're not going to repeat it. His standing up to China was we're not going to repeat it every time they tell us to, like, okay, tough guy, right? But they clearly were, of course we're warned. China, the current president said when asked would he allow, you know, would he get Korea involved in a Taiwan war, said I'll think about that when aliens invade. No. And in fact this was not covered, this was not covered before EJ Myung's visit this, earlier this week. But on, on the plane ride over on his way over, when he was asked about it, he said it'll be very, very difficult for us to consider flexibility of US Bases, which is a very, he's a president, he's very diplomatic. Right. Because there's talk about can the, can the US Use Korean Bases. No, I do not imagine that being possible. And the point is this. There's two points. We tend to take it as, oh, well, whatever. They're just saying it. I think what this shows is not only a deep reluctance to get involved by other East Asian countries in any China, Taiwan view, but a more fundamental view that this is a one China thing. Like, they're not taking stance, like, I don't know, I'm Korean, I don't know, you guys sort it out. But I don't view it, whatever happens, Vietnam, Philippines, it doesn't view what happens with Taiwan as a precursor to what China wants to do to us. That's how I read every single country reading it. Right. This is not like Russia invading somebody. Okay, maybe that's clear that they want more. Whatever Germany in 1936. But I read every country in the region saying, I think this is different. We know. We know what this was. And that unwillingness of American policymakers to realize that a coalition is not there to contain China in the region, I think is harming US Policy.

[C]

Yeah, I'm not even sure the US Is going to show up at this point. I mean, given what we've seen happen since the recall vote with Lai unable to transit through the United States and the cancellation of the security summit, I mean, who knows whether the United States is even on board with what we've been conditioned to think of as the American position in any ways. Let's talk about Vietnam. And I'm not sure if, Dave, you might still be the right person to ask about this, but you highlight how China and Vietnam actually managed to resolve land and maritime disputes despite pretty bloody, very, very bloody history. It's less than 50 years ago that there was a big war. What explains that success and what lessons could be drawn for other disputes in the South China Sea? I mean, bilateral compromises have worked in some cases, but clearly not in others. And we read recently about Vietnam building artificial islands in the contested Spratly Islands. I don't know how this complicates things, but I'm curious what your take is on this very, very important piece of the regional puzzle.

[B]

We mentioned this briefly in the article.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And we didn't have enough time, but every country that's involved is reclaiming land and fortifying islands and pouring concrete. And, you know, Taiwan has actually the biggest island and it's 600 kilometers away. So, yes, China, because we tend to. It gets. Tends to get portrayed in the United States States that China is doing this and nobody else is, but everybody else Has. Has been busily pouring concrete and stuff. Japan is pouring concrete on their island. So. And, and the point being that there is. There are unresolved maritime claims. Almost no country views those maritime claims as precursor to anything else. And certainly the Vietnamese don't. And that was the point that we want to make. Yes, they have residual issues. Korea has residual issues over the west. The West Sea with China and maritime issues. The functionally important issues of land and the Gulf of Tonkin, where they had to figure it out for taxes and accidents and people living there. They managed to do it quite well. To the point that if you go to Langson, which is sort of. Right. Where the China Vietnam border is, and I've been there, you know, there's. There's policemen there, there's border guards.

[D]

Guards there.

[B]

But this is not a border.

[C]

A militarized order. Yeah.

[B]

No fortifying military. Because they're worried about China. Right, right. This is a deeply legitimate relationship between two countries where Vietnam has existed as a legitimate counterpart to China since probably Song Dynasty. So, you know, they're, They're. They're not necessarily going to get along on everything, but Vietnam is one of. When I was in Vietnam, I've spent. I've actually been there a bunch of times. But when I was there, I don't know, about 10 years ago, one of the Vietnamese military officials said to me, every Vietnamese leader has to be able to push back on China, and every Vietnamese leader has to be able to get along with China.

[C]

That's right.

[B]

And they have to do both of those at the same time.

[C]

I've heard many variations on that exact sentiment. I want to go back to Zenobia, and I promised I'd ask you something about the Belt and Road Initiative, which is something you've been working on. The most ambitious overseas development, development program ever launched by China. How do you see the BRI fitting into your argument about limited ambition? Because it's often held up as sort of Exhibit A by the people who insist that China has real global ambitions to stride the globe. Should we interpret it just as economic statecraft for regime stability, or as something maybe more expansive as a geopolitical tool?

[E]

That's a very interesting question. First, I want to discuss whether it's even a development initiative. So if we think now, back in the days, we're talking about 2013, 2014, I think a lot of what was driving Xi Jinping to announce the BLI at that time was the excess capacity issues in China, how China really needed to export certain outputs that happened to provide input for infrastructure construction.

[C]

So at that time, steel and concrete.

[E]

Yeah, yeah, steel, concrete, flat glass, as well as cement. These were the industries in China at that time that had the highest level of excess capacity. And the government was really looking for ways to make sure they didn't have to massively close down factories and cause unemployment and to really export these materials. And so first, I'm not sure if it was started for developmental purposes. I would just say that when the VLI was initially launched, I think in 2015, even the world Economic Forum was estimating that the world has over $1 trillion of infrastructure investment gap. So there was a real need for infrastructure investment in the world at that time. And if we do the math a little bit, it was shortly after the global financial crisis when a lot of the what we call traditional OECD donor countries were mostly focusing on their domestic economy and would invest less in this kind of project. So I think the BLI really started at a time when there is a real need for infrastructure and China happened to be able to fill part of that investment gap. And if we really look into the projects that are, you know, branded under the BLI first, my understanding and research have been so far suggesting that there is not an official definition in the Chinese government.

[C]

No, no.

[E]

What counts as a BLI infrastructure project and what doesn't count. And in fact, a lot of these projects are really just projects run by for profit companies. And so they're like purely investment business projects. I'm sure infrastructure on average in general would have a positive developmental impact. But I'm not sure if BRI is still started as, or it's run as a developmental initiative. And after this part, the other thing is, does it actually buy influence abroad? Which is a question I've been pondering during my PhD and I'm still pondering, I would argue not quite. At least not the influence the Chinese government wanted to buy. Because if we read all the Qiushi people's daily articles and speeches by Xi Jinping, there are several goals the Chinese government hopes to achieve through bli. Part of it is to resolve all the domestic economic problems like particularly related to excess capacity. The other is to get international acceptance of China's own governance models and get recognition on how the Chinese government deals with situations in Hong Kong and Xinjiang and Tibet. And these are very domestically focused goals. And if we really evaluate the impact of BLI projects vis a vis these goals that are explicitly stated by the Chinese government or by CCP official publications, they're not actually that useful. In getting the influence the Chinese government wanted to get. Because a lot of countries, if they are critical of China's human rights situations, they remain critical of China's human rights situation. And there are a lot of countries, particularly those in Africa, in Southeast Asia or in Latin America, they just wouldn't criticize other countries human rights situation, whether it's China or other countries. And so in terms of what the Chinese government wants to get out of BI infrastructure projects, I think the data that I'd get it so far suggests that it hasn't achieved the stated goals.

[C]

Interesting, interesting. All right, I want to go sort of and talk about contemporary Chinese foreign policy. And let's start with Jackie on Taiwan. You guys know that Beijing emphasizes a peaceful resolution, but also that it's done everything possible to make credible its threat of force. It just seems like this is a hard duality for people to quite come to terms with. Is it deterrence logic? Is it sort of an internal audience management issue? Is it just a plain old unresolvable contradiction? What do you think, Jackie?

[D]

I don't think it's deterrence logic. I think it's compellence. I think basically it's an action reaction kind of dynamics. And I've been in Taiwan doing interviews before the election in 2020. 2024. With Sanobia? Yeah, with Zenobia. And then we basically were there trying to visit our friend Roland Fu, who is also academics, academic, cynical. Well, we said we want to do research, but actually we want to enjoy dinner there. But we talked to a lot more. But basically there are different groups of Taiwanese. If you have seen the recall campaign in the last two months, it sounds like the Green Party is losing fatally in such campaign. And what I'm trying to say here is if you pay attention to the dynamics between after Taiyin Wen got into power in 2016. 16.

[C]

That's right. 16.

[D]

Yeah. And then you can see the response getting more and more aggressive from China. I'm not saying like which one is the one to blame? But basically I would say most of the actions after China have conducted certain kind of behavior, like sending flight across.

[C]

The median line and across the median.

[D]

Line to cream Taiwan. It will lay out a statement very clearly what they do not want to see in the future and then they may or may not stop. So basically they lay out the goal very clearly what they do not want to see in the future. So I don't think it's deterrence. Deterrence is something like what you have not done. I try to use the force to stop you from there. Compellence is basically opposite, right? What you have done already, like Taiwan is stepping closer to the US trying to get into WHO during the COVID 19 movement. And I think all of these kind of dynamics always start from. Well, not start from, but kind of a spiral that China want Taiwan to stop from certain kind of actions. That's what I think. And I still believe that peaceful reconciliation is the priority for China, not resorting to the use of force. And if you pay attention to the news media article or propaganda channels that when you mention Taiwan, peaceful unification is still the main theme, not the use of books.

[C]

Sure, sure, sure, sure. So Zenobia, your findings push back against these kind of IR theories, ideas associated with IR realism, like power transition theory and these realist expectations that a rising power inevitably is going to seek more. I've never been a fan of ideas that are associated with this, but what does this suggest about the limits of IR theories? I have a deep suspicion of the entire field. I know you're all in that field, but I feel like ideas that are associated with your standard IR realists, do they hold currency at all anymore? I wonder who still clings to this stuff. It's just bizarre to me it's everybody.

[B]

In D.C. yeah, apparently.

[C]

Zenobia, what's your thinking on this? I mean as somebody who's in the.

[E]

Discipline, I think different school of thought in IR in general are useful to the extent that it provides some framework with some assumptions for us to think about how the world might be working. And if we don't believe in those assumptions, then the model might not be as useful and I think for. For realism. I A lot of the scholars in this tradition would assume that states are not just security seeking but would want to be the hedgemon. But I think depends on how we think about what is security. Right. Because if we from the what we understand based on this paper about China, what is security to the Chinese government might involve domestic stability, regime stability and things are more domestic oriented rather than or foreign phasing and that sense, then it doesn't fully align with what realist scholars would assume. And then I think that's where the deviation is from.

[C]

Does it still sit within the body of IR theory though? Do your findings still sort of find a home within the discipline of IR at all?

[E]

Well, I think we are actually quite consistent with the more rationalist framework. Right. If China's utility, the Chinese government's utility is mostly from domestic stability, regime stability and things that are domestically facing, then I think what we found is still quite consistent. It's just more what their preferences are, what they focus on more.

[D]

I just want to compliment what Zenobia just said. I think our work is basically well situated still in the grand strategic debate. So basically I think right now in Washington D.C. is either fully engaged with regional partner, which is a deep engagement kind of hegemonic kind of position taken by the elites, or is kind of like offshore balancing. Right? Like which is average. Croby John Meere Scheimer is basically kind of talk about, I think our thing is basically more closer to restraint kind of camp. But the logic is different, right? This realist restraint is basically saying that the US is basically enjoying the unipolar kind of power supremacy. Right. We do not do anything regarding China. We can just enjoy our benefit focusing on domestic issue. We have geography, right. We have two C codes. Our argument is slightly different. Our argument is trying to say, look, even if that is the case, if you think about China, China have their own things, need to handle, right? Domestic issue, corruption, blah, blah, blah. I think our argument basically is not just the traditional restraint, but trying to incorporate regional perspective into that paradigm. And we thought kind of this project may enrich the discussion about the grand strategy of the US by taking regional perspective into a cut. That's what I think.

[C]

Okay, no, that's fair. That makes sense to me. You guys suggest though that US policy may be generating the classic security dilemma sense, generating the very kind of assertiveness that it fears. Right? In other words, the United States treats Chinese behavior as unduly bellicose, insertive. It reacts and it makes China behave sort of in an unduly bellicose way fashion. Right? How could Washington test this hypothesis? How could it experiment with less confrontational approaches without appearing to seem weak to either its allies or to critics in Congress or to constituencies domestically?

[B]

I mean, one of the interesting things about watching the debate over the last 20 years or so in D.C. has been where there was a genuine openness to China. Not everyone agreed there was a debate, there was a two sides, but a general feeling that okay, China is some, a country we, we should try and work with. And then everybody on left and right has rushed over to the China threat and we are now reinterpreting history saying, well, we tried to work with them. They, we all thought they'd be a democracy. Like who thought that?

[D]

Who's that?

[C]

That's, that's a ridiculous straw man, right?

[B]

I, I ridiculous, right. But we're all there now repeating this stuff. And so the, the Moving away from the blob or whatever is harder now than it was 10 years ago. And it's been fascinating to watch the closing of the, of the debate in D.C. because the arguments that, that we make in our article, they're not radical. These are pretty mainstream arguments, certainly in the region, in East Asia, probably mainstream. That China's more status quo than revisionist and more internally focused than external. Not always, but mostly right. This is not a radical argument we're making, but the reaction that we got was very surprising. So I think, you know, how can you test it now? In some ways, we are testing it right now with the actions that we're doing, which is pulling back so far from the region that we are. We are at the same time that the United States is pushing for containing China. We're doing everything we possibly can to undermine our ability to our relationships with our allies, even allies, not necessarily even neutral countries or whatever. So we're sort of testing it right now as to what will happen if we actually pull back.

[C]

India, for example, which I've been talking about a lot when I had a show with Evan. With Evan Feigenbaum. Yeah. Okay, so last question to you folks, looking forward, what concrete indicators should policymakers watch for, for that would actually signal a genuine shift in China's posture from the kind of limited status quo goals that you guys describe toward more genuinely revisionist ambitions? What for you, would constitute a real body of evidence for such a change? Would it show up in the rhetoric, for one thing?

[D]

Yeah, I think we stand with what we have kind of used. I think struggle is a good term. And if you pay attention to the Cold War narrative that China has been using, and there's a really famous phrase used by the Chinese government in every single conflict with foreign countries, including Sino Soviet War, Sino Indian War, and Sino Vietnam War is don't say I have not warned you. This is the most aggressive statement that China has used. But this is very tricky, right, because this is an implicit threat. Not many people believe that this threat is actually the ultimatum. They may think this is just a random terms. Right. So I guess this kind of very nuanced kind of terms need to take into account in Washington D.C. like what kind of signal is actually not just noise, but China is serious about it. And the biggest lesson, this is what Ellen Whiting, Ellen White or Whiting has said in the China Crossing the Yalu. Yeah, yeah.

[C]

You know, I studied under Whiting, right. At Arizona. He was my.

[B]

That's awesome.

[C]

My professor.

[D]

So. But basically he Found that. Right. Like, you just ignore what China has said in People's Daily, and China was serious, and then this is basically the tragedy happens, right? This misperception, discompilation, and then category will. That's my take.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Dave, you want to wrap up?

[B]

Yeah. No, I mean, thank you so much. It's great to have Jackie and Zenobia talking about all of the nuanced ways that we're trying to go with rhetoric. I think absolutely you would. You would see Chinese rhetoric change, first of all. All you would see claims that are greater than they are, and they have not changed. These claims have not gotten bigger as China's gotten richer. So we would see a lot of different behavior and rhetoric from China that we are not seeing. And that's one reason that we stick with our argument that China is basically more focused on internal than external and more status quo than revision.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. I think that one of the more impressive things is just the rhetorical stability across time that you talk about, and. Very, very interesting. All right, thank you guys so much for taking so much time to talk to me about this paper. And I know it's gotten quite a bit of pushback out there, not surprisingly, and keep a stiff upper lip, and I hope you all fight back. Well, let's move on to the section that I call Paying It Forward, where I'd like each of you to just sort of quickly name check one or two younger colleagues of yours, people who are doing work that you think is deserving of recognition in our field. So, Dave, why don't you start, and then we'll go to Zenobia, and then.

[B]

Jackie, I'm going to say two of my students who. I think one of the problems of making empirically grounded arguments, no matter how rigorous they are, is that if you go against a conventional wisdom, it's harder than going with it. And so we have a postdoc, young postdoc at UC San Diego, Yuji Itamoto, who's working on arms races in Asia, and deeply quantitative work, finds that there's no arms races. And he gets a lot of mansplaining about how he's wrong.

[C]

Wow. Wow.

[B]

But it's great work.

[D]

It's very rigorous.

[C]

Fantastic. Eugenie Moto. Thanks. What about you, Zenobia? Who do you have?

[E]

Can I just name Jackie?

[C]

No, you can't name Jackie. I know you'd be tempted to do that, but nope, you have to name somebody else.

[E]

Jackie, you go first.

[C]

Okay.

[D]

Well, basically, I have two names. First one is Alex Lin, who helped Me a lot and is my senior colleague back in the days when we were at usc. He is now assistant professor at University of British Columbia and his grade is fantastic. Basically trying to argue that status is not just about small power, challenge great power because there is a third party actors. Right. If you think about the South China Sea, it's not always about China and the U.S. right. It's always about the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia. Right, sure. So it's triangular dynamics there which kind of enrich a lot about what we have understood as status in international politics. Well, second one is Rome Fu, also my Shijiang or my senior in Taiwan who is doing fantastic work in political psychology. I really admire that.

[C]

Ah, a very interesting discipline, political psychology. Something I'm very interested in. In. Oh, fantastic. Great. So two excellent recommendations. Zenobia, are you ready with somebody?

[E]

Yes. So I will recommend the work of my co principal investigator in many projects, Dr. No Foster at the US Naval War College. So for folks who are interested in quote unquote, revisionist powers in the world, mostly Russia and China, I think his work is really meticulously done using a lot of original sources in both Russian and Chinese to really investigates the intentions of these two countries and how they're similar and different from each other and how they work with each other. And I think it's again like continuing the theme of today. A lot of it is quite counterintuitive, but I think it's really provocative and meticulously done work that would be of interest to people interested in these topics.

[C]

Fantastic. You know, my, my, my ulterior motive in having this segment, of course, is to refresh my list of potential guests. And you guys have just done a great job of giving me a whole bunch of them who I can reach out to. So thank you so much. And now on to recommendations, a regular feature of the show where I ask you to just tell me a book you've read recently or a movie you've seen, some music you've been listening to, something that you think our audience would be appreciative of. Again Dave, then Zenobia, then Jackie.

[B]

After much hectoring from my children, I watched K Pop Demon Hunters and it was pretty good.

[C]

K Pop Demon Hunters. I saw that it showed up in my Netflix or whatever Apple TV or whatever feed it was. What is it on?

[B]

And I will say as having grown up with a Korean family, it never occurred to me that this is even possible that it would be like this. And I don't even really care about the story, but the visuals were beautiful. And they're also really accurate, sort of, sort of Korean culture and things like that. And so I found it. I found it just awesome.

[C]

Okay, great.

[B]

I really enjoy it.

[D]

It was fun.

[C]

Oh, nice, nice. Good recommendation. Okay, Zenobia, what do you have for us?

[E]

Before I put up my recommendation, I would say that K Pop Demon was so popular that when I was doing field work in Eastern Finland over the summer, a lot of the children there was recommending to me.

[C]

Okay, I'm going to have to check it out. My daughter, who's like the biggest K Pop fan in the world, hasn't even recommended it to me, so I'm surprised. But we'll see.

[E]

I've recently finished reading a book called Cat's Land, Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World. So, as you might have guessed, I'm a cat person. And this book talks about the history of how cats became a very popular cat in the early 20th century through the story and history of the life of an English artist named Louis Wayne. So it's quite an interesting read.

[C]

Ah, wow. Okay. Something I've never really thought to explore, but I am curious why cat people exist. Being a. I don't know if you can see my dog sitting here behind me, but I'm definitely of the other camp and I will. Yeah, I'm keeping an open mind and explore why, why, why that phenomenon exists at all.

[D]

But.

[C]

All right, and then it's to you, Jackie. What do you have for us?

[D]

I don't, I, I, I just moved to uae so I was too busy to, to finish a book. But I just finished a show in Netflix called Better Late than Single is a love reality show for some people. I've never dates before. And then they all go to a camp and then try to signal whether they want to be in a couple, not in a couple situation. They, they kind of get into a relationship. I think this is a fantastic show because this is actually how we understand signaling. Right. How we signal our intention up to our partner. This is fantastic.

[C]

You found a way to relate it to international relations. Unbelievable. Great. I love it, I love it. So the weird intersection of reality dating shows and ir. I'm all about that. Perfect, Perfect. So I'm going to recommend an article by a young writer named Jasmine sun, or Sun. She was San Francisco based and she is quite a talented writer.

[A]

She used to work for Substack and.

[C]

Now she writes Substack. She wrote a piece about a recent trip that she took to China. She herself is of Indonesian Chinese descent. Her Grandmother's from Indonesia but went to China to help build the country after the revolution. She's an American born and hasn't spent a whole ton of time in China. Doesn't read Chinese, but she wrote a piece called America Against China Against America and the subtitle is Notes on Shenzhen, Shanghai and more. And it was unbelievably good. And I'm actually going to be interviewing her for the program in a couple of weeks, so look out for that because it was just such a thoughtful piece. She is somebody who's beautiful writer, but she's also steeped very much in the sort of culture of Silicon Valley. She's a recent Stanford graduate and so she writes quite a bit about sort of the technology scene in Shenzhen, but she's there with a group of people whose views she also sort of channels. And I find that it was, it resonated so much with what I've been thinking about in the sort of great reckoning that Americans have been making with, with China. You know, there's, there's a real sea change in the way that China is viewed, especially among younger Americans. It's a theme that I've been exploring quite a bit on the show and this was probably the best article in that genre that I've come across recently. So very excited to talk to her. I'm going to have a co host still to, to be confirmed, interviewing her along with me. Somebody who I am seriously considered considering handing over the show to once I've decided to hang it up. So look, look for that, you guys. What a, what a fantastic conversation. Congrats once again on this excellent, excellent paper. Fascinating paper and very brave of you to put out there in the current. You know it right out there into the thick of it again, you know, chin up and keep up the great work.

[B]

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

[E]

Thanks for having Lindsay.

[D]

We'll have you on a second. Thank you.

[C]

Great to meet you, Zenobia. Great to meet you. Jackie and Dave.

[A]

We'll be seeing you soon, I hope.

[B]

Absolutely.

[C]

You've been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited.

[A]

And mastered by me, Kaiser Guo.

[C]

Support the show through [e-mail] where there.

[A]

Is a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio. Or email [e-mail] if you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show.

[C]

Don't forget to leave a review on Apple podcasts.

[A]

And enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin Madison's center for East Asian Studies.

[C]

For supporting the show this year.

[A]

Huge thanks to my guests, Dave Kong.

[C]

Zenobia Chad and Jackie Wong.

[A]

Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.

[C]

Take care.

[D]

Sa.