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Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Alrighty, folks. Today we're going to talk about how the United States and China ended up in the situation that we currently find ourselves, where China is supposedly a rising power with this burgeoning global economy and how they went from a backwater into the chief geopolitical enemy of the United States. So if you go back a couple of decades, we were told this comforting fairy tale about China. We were told that if we welcomed China into the global economy and if we invested in their factories and handed them our technology and opened our university and gave them capital and access to our intellectual property. And if they, you know, integrated into that rules based international order, that China would eventually become more like us, it would become more democratic, more free, it would follow the Soviet path, it would open up economically and then it would open up politically. Some people were calling this approach constructive engagement. Others were calling it democratic peace. Again, the idea was sort of that if a McDonald's was in a country, then it would turn somehow non authoritarian, that prosperity would bring moderation and that wealth would eventually bring about peace. Well, not so much, not so much. The reality is the Chinese Communist Party never accepted the idea of American hegemony. They viewed America as an enemy. In fact, they viewed and view American might as a symbol of Chinese surrender and a form of national embarrassment. America, creating what the economic historian Niall Ferguson has called Chimerica, was not actually welcomed by China in the name of peace or democracy or liberalism. It was an opportunity that China could exploit. China used its increased wealth to build the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history, expand military power, terrorize their own population, ingest populations like Hong Kong, and unleash a novel coronavirus that shut down the world and killed several million people. As we all saw during President Trump's latest visit to Beijing. The history of that relationship is still being written today, but we should go back in time and figure out exactly how he got here. So to answer that question, we have to go back about a century before Mao, before Nixon, before the Cold War, to a China that was weak and fractured and humiliated. So before World War II, China was extremely impoverished, very unstable, definitely not a sort of unitary country. And it was reeling from a century of what the CCP now calls an era of humiliation. Dominant European powers that had carved up some territory, Japan had invaded, taken over Manchuria, warlords fighting for control. And there was a gigantic conflict in the middle of China that was basically between Shanghai Shek, who was the leader of the Nationalist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. So Mao Zedong was a Western educated elite who came back to China as a communist and decided he was going to impose communism top down by force. Now, During World War II, Shanghai Shek and Mao Zedong, they were supposed to get together and form a unified front against the Japanese. They didn't do that. Basically, Mao Zedong ran off into the wilderness with his buddies and Shanghai Shek fought off the Japanese. And Mao Zedong watched all of that happen. He had already been largely defeated by Shanghai Shek. So he was out in the hinterlands. And then after World War II, the West decided that Mao had to be treated with care by Shanghai Shek. And the United States backed Chiang during the fight against the Japanese. But as conflict began to rise between Chiang and the Maoist Communists, the United States and the west basically backed off and decided that Chiang couldn't win. So Mao's Communists eventually seized control of mainland China in 1949. It was at this point, by the way, the Shanghai Shek was went over to Taiwan and the Taiwanese island became an independent government. The United States basically accepted that. This was called the loss of China by critics of Harry Truman. The suggestion was that there should have been a harder push for Chiang and against Mao under Truman's tutelage, which is probably true. It's probably true, especially because China then proceeded to fund the Communist takeover of North Korea and the invasion of South Korea. China ended up obviously supporting the Viet Cong. China was a nefarious Communist force in the region for decades, and they continue to be a nefarious authoritarian force in the region today. Meanwhile, inside China, Mao Zedong, having taken total control of the Chinese territory, decided it was time to kill several tens of millions of people. See, here's the thing. Mao is not just another authoritarian ruler. He wasn't like Ceausescu in Romania or something. He was one of the greatest mass murderers in all of human history, maybe the greatest mass murderer in all of human history. It is astonishing that Mao is not treated with significantly more disdain than he has been treated. It is still considered totally okay to carry around Mao's Little Red Book, which truly should be treated like Mein Kampf. In the public mind, Mao is responsible for the death of legitimately somewhere between 30 and 60 million people after the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949. Following that Chinese civil war, Mao transformed China into a full blown Marxist dictatorship that was modeled largely on the Soviet Union. There were sort of Chinese characteristics that would later lead to conflict with the Soviet Union. Private property was abolished, Industry was nationalized. Political dissent was totally crushed. Religion was persecuted. The press became totally state propaganda. Millions of people were swallowed up by the machinery of Communist terror. That was just at the beginning. And then about 10 years in, Mao decided it was time to modernize. Just as Lenin and Stalin decided in the Soviet Union that this meant heavy industry, Mao decided the same. The problem, of course, is that China was a largely agrarian country. And so Mao decided that it was time to centralize all property and it was time for everyone to be Forced into the future. And when we say forced, I mean at point of gun, at point of starvation. Mao told people that because they had raw quotas of things like steel production, they should take their household implements and melt them down into lumps of useless iron. The result was that between 1958 and 1962, Mao's regime was responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 30 and 45 million people. That is not a typo. Tens of millions of people starved to death because of communist central planning. One of the worst catastrophes in all of human history. A man made famine. Designed by the Maoist government. It was a centrally planned economic campaign so catastrophically stupid that it triggered one of the deadliest famines in recorded human history. Not because of the climate, not because there were problems with agriculture, but because of the collectivization. Because he forced peasants at point of gun into giant communes and then again demanded absurd steel production quotas in farms that turned entire villages into useless backyard smelting operations. Literally, people were taking their plows and melting them down to make lumps of ore. We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, have you ever had to buy a product online that comes with like one of those giant waiver forms? You know, the one that you scroll all the way to the bottom? Just hit click right, because are you kidding? You're never going to read any of that, ever, ever, ever, ever. But the problem is that something goes wrong and you're now bound by that contract. Well, this is one of the reasons I like what super sure does. So say you're the owner or CFO or HR manager of a company with more than 25 employees. But you're probably not spending a lot of time to decipher the pages and pages and reams of insurance language every time you have a question. Super sure is a super agency built specifically for growing businesses. They're licensed in every single state for both business insurance and employee benefits. They provide year round support for you and your team at no additional cost. One feature I particularly like is their fine print fax tool. It translates your current policy into plain English so you can actually understand what's covered, what's not covered, and where there may be gaps. They also offer a business value calculator to help estimate what your business is worth. Because it's hard to protect something if you don't understand what you've built. Head on over to Super Sure.com Shapiro. That's Super Sure.com one super agency, one powerful platform. All your policies in just one place. Again, that's Super Sure.com Shapiro paid for by Super Short Insurance Agency LLC, a licensed insurance agency. But Mao wasn't done. In 1966 he launched the so called Cultural Revolution. Again he was a devotee of the idea of perpetual revolution, that the communist revolution could never cease. The Cultural Revolution was a decade long campaign of ideological fanaticism and political terrorism designed to purge China of supposedly impure influences. If you watch the beginning of the Three Body Problem, there are a couple of scenes that are happening. During the Cultural Revolution, students formed what were called Red Guard mobs in which teachers were humiliated, beaten, sometimes killed in public. Historical artifacts were destroyed. Families were incentivized to turn on one another. Intellectuals were sent to labor camps. The CCP was not a normal government that liked communism. It was an ideologically revolutionary regime that was built on murder and censorship and nationalism and total state control. And that has not changed. The thing that changed was that American elites convinced themselves that China had changed. So let's try to figure out why that happened. Well, well, Mao was running roughshod over China. During this period the United States was busy securing freedom of the seas, rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan and stationing troops across the rest of Asia to prevent the communists from taking over. By the 1960s America had basically underwritten the entire security architecture of the free world. Because the United States was so economically and militarily dominant, our foreign policy establishment came to believe that hostile countries could gradually be folded into this rules based international world order through diplomacy and trade and cooperation. I solemnly declare on behalf of the United States that we are prepared to submit to any international inspection, provided only that it is effective and truly reciprocal. And then in the post world war order the idea was that the United States could bring China along. But the, the first sort of move toward the Chinese, the first real move toward the Chinese, who were considered correctly our enemies in Korea, in Vietnam. The first move toward the Chinese came because Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State was trying to split the Chinese from, from the Soviets. So over time Mao had his own model of communism, the Soviets had their model of communism and they started to hate one another. Mao was jealous of the Soviet system. The Soviets wanted Mao to be less insane. And so they started creating conflict between themselves. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger decided this was a great time to undercut one of the pillars of the Eastern support for the Soviet Union. So again, the logic wasn't nuts. Nixon believed that if the United States could pry China away from the Soviet orbit, that that would weaken Moscow and strengthen America on the global stage. This is why famously Nixon went to China. Henry Kissinger in particular the Secretary of State, viewed this through the lens of real politik. The idea was that the United States could stabilize the international system by creating new powers to balance one another out. Kissinger was a believer in a sort of global balance of power. And so instead of directly confronting every single communist regime simultaneously, you use China to counterbalance the Soviet Union. Now this was successful. It separated off Mao from the Soviet Union and that undercut a pillar of economic and military support for the Soviet Union. And eventually of course the Soviet Union would fall. But this also planted the seed of a stupid idea which is that maybe communist China would moderate and become part of the rules based international order. By the late 60s, the Nixon administration was pursuing what became known as the open door policy. As I have pointed out on a number of occasions over the past three years, there can be no stable and enduring peace without the participation of the People's Republic of China and its 750 million people. That is why I have undertaken initiatives in several areas to open the door for more normal relations between our two countries. Again, the idea here was not that Richard Nixon was besties with Mao Tse Tung. In fact Nixon despised him. But if the United States could seize on that Sino Soviet split and isolate Moscow, it would strengthen its own position in the process. So in 1972 Nixon goes to Beijing. Images of Nixon shaking hands would now stun the world. To many Americans it felt like a new opening. And for a while it was kind of working. Throughout the 70s and the 80s, the US and China maintained a cautious alignment against Moscow. And it seemed like it was going to get even better. After Mao Tai Tang's death, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping opened China's economy even further. Now Deng did not liberalize China politically, but he welcomed foreign investment. And that of course turned China into a manufacturing powerhouse. And it appeared that maybe Deng was even going to allow some liberalization of politics. Of course all of that ended in 1989 when there was an actual student uprising against the Chinese regime. And that is when tanks literally just ran students over in Tiananmen Square. Still, the United States was hopeful. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the U.S. s regard for China shifted as well. Slowly that original Nixonian opening had been transformed into something really, really different. A bipartisan stupid belief that communist China could be permanently folded into a US led world order. Foreign policy experts on all sides, multinational corporations who were looking for profit centers. Businessmen, manufacturers, academia, the media. They all bought the same fantasy that if China became wealthier, China would become freer. That was the central lie of that post Cold War globalization. No president accelerated that lie more than President Bill Clinton. And American officials basically ignored that massacre of pro democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square and continued to push for economic engagement. And throughout the 1990s, as a result, China exploded. They were engaging in essentially mercantilism. State organized economic structures directed at foreign trade. American corporations, meanwhile, realized that they could move their manufacturing overseas for cheaper. That did lower prices. It also moved manufacturing jobs outside the United States. National security implications, however dire, were basically ignored. And then came the biggest moment, China entering the World trade organization in 2001. I believe the choice between economic rights and human rights, between economic security and national security, is a false one. Now Bill Clinton aggressively pushed for this in again, the theory was integrating China into global markets would liberalize the country politically. It did not work out that way. Nonetheless, it opened the United States to Chinese intervention. American universities deepened their partnerships with China. We started taking in huge numbers of foreign exchange students. Our IP was stolen at a rapid rate. American consumers became deeply dependent on Chinese supply chains. Meanwhile, over in China, they were taking all of those gains, all those economic wins, and they were stacking those up behind an authoritarian regime. The regime built the most sophisticated surveillance state in all of human history. It expanded its military pressure throughout the South China Sea against states ranging from Taiwan to the Philippines. It accelerated its cyber warfare and industrial scale intellectual property theft. Some estimates suggest that Chinese IP theft costs the United States as much as $600 billion every single year. Because again, internally, it is not that China has embraced free markets, not much. They're basically an economically fascist system. So that means they don't tend to innovate as well as the United States, but they are very good at stealing things and then reverse engineering them. America was pleased. Again, this was the fundamental asymmetry. We believed that economics would eventually override ideology. Beijing never did. They just took the money and they stacked it in their coffers. And then they used it to crack down on everybody else and victimize America's allies. Over time, American national security hawks, particularly on the right, began warning the United States was not simply trading with China anymore. We were actually building a geopolitical competitor. Part and parcel of this, by the way, is China buying up enormous amounts of American debt. Truly astonishing, mind boggling amounts of American debt. It was very convenient for America's politicians to continue to run up our debt when the Chinese were just buying it all up. And stocking it and making us more dependent on them. Nonetheless, conservatives began to argue that the CCP viewed economic interdependence as not as a pathway to cooperation, but as leverage to be used later against the United States. Again, the Chinese understood something that the west forgot. Economic power is geopolitical power. And the Chinese state then used globalization to expand its influence abroad. Again, the Chinese Communist Party at no point abandoned their foundational hostility toward the West. They never stopped viewing the US as their chief enemy. They never liberalized, they never democratized. They never became our friend. Instead, they began using the money to spread their tentacles outward through things like the Belt and Road Initiative by offering to kindly build ports all over the world under Chinese control. Eventually, under Xi Jinping, China became more dramatically centralized, nationalistic, and openly adversarial toward the United States. So it appeared before Xi that maybe, just maybe, there might be a little bit of liberalization, and Xi just shut that door tight. Xi rose through the Communist Party apparatus as a committed nationalist and true believer in centralized control. He was not the pragmatic reformer of Deng Xiaoping, who famously suggested that basically, if you could get the job done, how you got it done didn't matter. Xi instead moved almost immediately to consolidate authority around himself personally. He purged his rivals. He tightened censorship. He interned and killed Uyghur Muslims in Zhongjiang. He expanded state control over the economy even further. And as mentioned, he spread China's supposed values all over the world. In 2013, China launched the so called Belt and Road Initiative, which was basically a gigantic offer to build a lot of stuff in Asia, Africa, the Middle east and Latin America and finance it with debt. Foreign governments would be indebted to Beijing, and then China would use that debt as a way to hold them accountable geopolitically. While Barack Obama was particularly useful to the Chinese, his China policy was an apologetic continuation of that post Cold War internationalist consensus. The belief that if we just talked nicely to the Chinese, then magically they would moderate a cooperative relationship based on mutual interest and mutual respect is not only in the interests of the United States and China, but is also in the interests of the region and in the interests of the United States. In the interests of the world. Unsurprisingly, China took advantage and they accelerated many of those trends that American hawks had been warning about for years. Because it turns out, China never stopped. Everything intensified. Confucius Institutes, which were Chinese propaganda institutes, popped up across America. Intellectual espionage heightened as Silicon Valley innovation exploded, militarized artificial islands in the south. China Sea were being built. Despite diplomatic assurances otherwise. Pro democracy protests in Hong Kong were crushed. Hong Kong was just eaten wholesale. Anti American dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea all made common cause under the banner of a new axis of global resistance. In contrast, Barack Obama continued to push this elitist confidence in globalization and multilateralism and managed declined. Xi Jinping consolidated more power than any Chinese leader since Mao. Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher have argued that China began positioning itself not merely as an economic competitor, but a strategic challenger to the West. Eventually, people wised up, particularly Donald Trump. Now, whatever else you think about President Trump, he totally upset the apple cart in a wonderful and necessary way here. He was the first president in decades to fundamentally challenge that Nixonian, Clintonian assumption toward American policy on China. Trump argued that we'd sold out to China, that basically prior administrations had been dumb, underestimated the strategic risks posed by the ccp, and had allowed the United States to become overly dependent on Chinese manufacturing and supply chains. So he imposed tariffs on Chinese goods. He restricted Chinese access to sensitive tech. He targeted companies like Huawei, which is their 5G network, which again is rife with surveillance apparatus. He pressured American allies to reconsider reliance on Chinese telecom. And he pushed for broader economic decoupling in strategically important sectors. And more broadly, Trump reframed China not as a future partner, but as a geopolitical rival. Because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country. And that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world. Now, his critics suggested that everything would have been hunky dory if not for Trump. But his supporters correctly argue that all of these policies were were a long overdue recognition of geopolitical reality. Increasingly, Trump won. Democrats and Republicans understood that China was in fact our opponent, if not our enemy. One of the big shift moments was the COVID 19 pandemic, when a novel coronavirus emerged pretty obviously from a Wuhan lab and then killed millions of people worldwide, devastating the global economy and shutting down daily life for the entire planet. The modern world realized it couldn't depend on China. Even after that outbreak. The CCP was lying. They were punishing whistleblowers inside China while simultaneously sowing enormous social and political discord inside the United States. With TikTok's algorithmically engineered cultural brain rot, increasingly large segments of the American left, people like Hassan Piker or Zoran Mandani, began to openly romanticize anti Western authoritarianism altogether. Piker went to China and talked about how Wonderful. It was Chinese nationals from all around this wonderful country. It's very, very exciting. And you can. You can sense it. You can feel it in the air. Mamdani treats the CCP as a decent country. At the same time, China is building the largest military expansion since World War II. They threaten Taiwan on a near daily basis. They use slave labor, concentration camps, censorship, surveillance, fentanyl trafficking, cyberwarfare and economic coercion as instruments of statecraft. So, no, China was never our friend. It wasn't and it still isn't. The problem was that for 50 years, everyone refused to recognize that China was in fact, our enemy. Are they going to win? Well, here's the thing. China does suffer from some pretty serious structural vulnerabilities. So their demographics are in serious trouble. Their debt burden is enormous, over 300% of GDP by some estimates. Their economy is heavily dependent on exports and also state intervention, which means loans. And those loans are coming from local and state actors. So basically, they're just pillaging their people. Its real estate sector is massively unstable because essentially they just had their citizens. They forced them to buy ghost apartments. China increasingly resembles a declining power trying to stave off the darkness through IP theft and regional intimidation and a military buildup. Historically, rising insecurity inside authoritarian regimes can make them more aggressive abroad. And that brings us to Taiwan. So Taiwan is not merely a regional territorial dispute. As you recall, Taiwan was a part of China before Shanghai. Shek ended up there and founded the modern nation state of Taiwan. Now, Taiwan's history is long and complex. At times it was independent. At times it was occupied for literally decades by the Japanese. The reason it is geopolitically important is because Taiwan sits at the center of the global semiconductor economy. Roughly 90% of advanced semiconductor manufacturing comes from Taiwan. If China successfully seized Taiwan, the geopolitical consequences would be disastrous. American allies would question our credibility. And more importantly, if they got a hold of those chips, suddenly the balance of power in the entire Indo Pacific would shift toward China. This is why deterrence matters. And this is why American leadership, peace through strength continues to matter. Bottom line is weakness invites aggression. It always has strength deters it. And for a regime, it censors speech and operates mass surveillance systems and threaten its democratic neighbors and steals technology and supports hostile authoritarian governments all over the world and facilitates fentanyl precursor flows into the Western Hemisphere and openly seeks America's destruction. That is not just another trading partner. It is a strategic enemy. We should treat it as such. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal, so there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent to taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms.