Political Scientist Answers China Questions

WIRED

5 days ago

If Russian bots exist, do Chinese bots also exist?
I think first of all, you should look down at the comments
in this video and you'll probably get a taste
of whether there are any Chinese bots.
I'm Michael Beckley. I study modern China.
Let's answer your questions from the internet.
This is China Support.
[upbeat music]
S-Sheepherder wants to know,
What do westerners get wrong about China?
Well, China's really big.
There's 19 countries around China,
and so that big military
that China has is spread quite thin
having to defend all of China's borders.
Or the big economy, you have to feed one
of the largest populations on the planet.
You have to maintain control over those people.
That all drains resources from the country
and means just that it's much more complicated
to analyze China.
You have both a lot of assets,
but also a lot of liabilities.
@snoowlions wants to know, When did modern China start?
Let's answer that with a timeline.
Let's start in 1911 with the collapse of the Qing dynasty
that ends thousands of years off and on of imperial rule.
China then collapses into the warlord era,
which is every bit as bad as it sounds.
Then the Japanese in the 1930s
really step up their aggression in China,
conquering big parts of it,
and basically starting World War II in East Asia.
The Japanese are defeated in 1945,
but at that point, the Chinese Civil War comes roaring back
between the Communists and the Nationalists.
The Communists win that Civil War in 1949.
They found the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong.
China initially sides with the Soviet Union in the Cold War,
but about halfway through,
they realize that the Soviets are actually their main enemy.
That paves the way for in the US President Richard Nixon
to go to Beijing.
And at that point, China and the United States
basically become allies in the rest of the Cold War.
The Soviet Union collapses in 1991
and that sets the stage for the US and China
to become major trading and investment partners.
That culminates in 2001
with China's entry into the World Trade Organization.
But especially after the 2008 financial crisis,
you start to see the United States
and China looking at each other more like rivals
feeling like their economies are under strain
and that the trade relationship
is not working out as well as they had hoped.
And that really paves the way
for the era that we're currently in,
which is one of tremendous hostility
between the United States and China.
hecubiss asks, Why would China even want to invade Taiwan?
So first of all, Taiwan is the seat
of a rival Chinese government that is democratic,
essentially tied security wise to the United States.
And so if you're the Chinese Communist Party
and you insist that this is all your territory,
you can't have this renegade regime
going in a different direction.
Taiwan is where the nationalists fled to
when they lost the Chinese Civil War.
So they want to finish that job.
It's smack-dab at the epicenter of the East China Sea
and the South China Sea
where about half of world trade flows through.
So this is probably, pound for pound,
the most strategic important waterway on the planet.
And Taiwan itself is, you can see,
the center cork of what the Chinese call
the first island chain in East Asia
that runs from Korea and the Japanese islands
down through the Philippines.
These are all American allies.
They host American troops.
China has no California, it has no west coast.
Its only coast is completely hemmed in by rival powers
that are allied with the United States.
Smashing Taiwan and taking it over
would give China an unsinkable aircraft carrier
in the most important waterways,
and blast a hole, not just geographically,
in the US alliance system in East Asia,
but really in the credibility of US alliances
'cause no one would trust the United States
if the US just let Taiwan go down.
Every single Chinese leader has said,
It's only a question of time.
We're gonna take Taiwan one of these days.
Xi Jinping has said that it's a situation
that cannot be passed down generation to generation,
which some analysts worry means
he intends to do this on his watch.
BW asks, Is there something America can learn from China?
Is there something that they're doing right?
China is really good
at mobilizing resources for national missions.
For example, China has installed more solar and wind power
than any other country.
China is the world's largest trade power in the world
and has forged trade relationships
with the majority of the world's countries.
And China has built infrastructure faster
and on greater scale than any country in human history,
then just the miraculous development
of bringing hundreds of millions of people
from living on less than $2 a day
to average disposable incomes of 5,000 to $10,000 a year.
That is a tremendous, almost miraculous undertaking
that China has been able to pull off.
And I think that only comes
from having a sense of national unity
and a willingness to pool resources for national purposes.
The United States,
it's a dynamic, open, decentralized system,
but the downside is it also generally does not mobilize
its resources on a national scale and unify
unless it's really confronted with a crisis
like a global war or a depression.
So there are areas of the United States
that are neglected in terms of infrastructure.
There are neighborhoods that could be built up.
There are education systems that are failing.
And so that type of rallying resources and coming together
is something that the US I think could look to to China.
But obviously you don't want to go too far
because part of what allows China to do that
is just a lack of civil and political rights
for the Chinese people.
@greatshistorian asks, Who is winning
the current trade war between America and China?
China is very much an investment and export-driven economy.
This trade war is really bad
for a lot of those major export industries.
There's been lots of closures, especially in eastern China.
There's been mass layoffs even just in the short time
that this trade war has been going on.
Now on the American side, the consumer market
is roughly three times the size of China's.
So consumers are the ones
who are being hurt by this trade war
because they're gonna have to pay higher prices for goods
that were manufactured in China.
Xi Jinping cares a lot less about GDP growth.
He cares about power
and about developing self-reliant, strong industries.
And if this trade war enables China to decouple
and reduce its dependence on the West,
I think he counts that as a win,
even if it crimps economic growth in the short term.
And for the United States under the Trump administration,
they similarly want to decouple from China
because they view it as a national security threat.
I see these two countries as having a distinct interest
in trying to get away from each other economically.
These dependencies, they both seem
to want to push those away.
ChaseTheTaco.
Serious question. Is China truly a Communist country?
I know it seems crazy
if you look at the Shanghai skyline,
you fly in through the Beijing airport.
That is the gilded veneer
on the outside that's been built up.
But if you look at the super-structure of the economy,
what's actually the driving force behind it?
It's a very strong state presence.
All of the land in the country
is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
The energy industry, the banking sector is state-owned,
90%+ of the financial assets flowing around the country,
so these are all what Lenin called
the commanding heights of the economy.
And it can produce incredible output.
It can produce shiny high-speed rail,
it can produce gleaming skyscrapers.
But this is sort of like a new modern form
of a communist system
where you still have the party running the show economically
insisting on a one-party state
and a dictator ruling over it all.
Take Jack Ma, the former head of Alibaba,
has a major company in China,
and he gave a speech a few years back criticizing the way
that the government was running the economy.
He had his wings totally clipped.
He was sent out to Tokyo,
he had his empire completely dismantled
and now has basically had to come crawling back.
You've had many other billionaires simply just disappear.
And so at the end of the day,
even the high-flying titans of China's economy know
that their livelihoods depend very much
on their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party,
which is why you see many of the top titans of industry
in China in the National People's Hall
during these major conclaves sitting next to Xi Jinping
because they're effectively part
of the same-party system that he operates.
DizzyMajor5 wants to know,
What do the Chinese people think of Mao Zedong?
Is he considered good or bad?
The standard answer taught in Chinese schools
is that he was 70% right, but 30% wrong.
Here's Mao as a young revolutionary.
He was a journalist for a long time.
He actually wrote a whole pamphlet in 1940
about democracy and freedom in China.
Of course, once he becomes Chairman Mao,
a lot of that stuff goes away.
The 70% right was he unified the country
which had been ripped apart by decades of civil war.
He instituted a mass education campaign
'cause he wanted to lift China up.
So that led to widespread literacy.
He wanted women to be active participants
in the labor force.
Now, in terms of the bad, his so-called Great Leap Forward,
which was this scheme
to turn China into a superpower in just a few years,
took millions of peasants off of their farms,
put them in communes,
had them melt down their pots and pans.
As a result, the food supply ran out
and 45 million people starved to death
or were beaten or shot along the way.
And then in order to insulate and protect himself,
he then launched the Cultural Revolution
where he basically turned
the Chinese people on the Communist Party
to purge many of his rivals.
That probably killed another million to 2 million people.
So ruthless, brutal, but effective
in terms of bringing China together,
which for much of Chinese history has not been the case.
@SuperCoach137 asks, How did the one-child policy
work out for China?
It resulted in several hundred million abortions
when people, starting in the late 1970s,
weren't allowed to have more than one child.
You'd be subject to massive fines,
equivalent in some cases to a year or more of your income
if you had a second child.
In the '50s and '60s, China had a massive baby boom
because Mao Zedong wanted to turn China into a superpower.
So he encouraged Chinese families to have lots of children.
So then when China did a 180
and implemented the one-child policy in the late 1970s,
you had this baby boom generation
coming into the prime of their working lives
and they had relatively few children to take care of
'cause they weren't allowed to have them
and they had relatively few elderly parents to care for
because so many of them end up dying
in the famines and the Cultural Revolution.
So in the '90s and 2000s,
you had anywhere between 10 to 15 working-age adults
available to support every elderly retiree
in China's population.
That's two to three times the global average.
It's five times what the United States currently has.
And so as a result, China's population
was primed for economic productivity
and demographers think that alone explains
about 25% of China's rapid economic growth
over the last 30 to 40 years.
The problem for China is now the situation is flipping
where that huge baby boom generation
are retiring and falling onto the backs
of this tiny one-child generation.
That 10:15 ratio is gonna collapse to 2:1.
In the 2030s, China's gonna lose somewhere
like 70 million working-age adults in the next 10 years
and gain 130 million senior citizens.
That's gonna be catastrophic for China's fiscal balance,
for its economic productivity.
@RightSideofMB says, Siri, what are Chinese ghost cities?
Ghost cities refer to entire apartment complexes, airports,
shopping malls that are either mostly or entirely empty.
And it's a result of China's economic model,
which is very much about collecting the resources
of the Chinese people under the state
and then plowing them into certain industries,
including into the real estate sector.
It works really well for an authoritarian government
'cause it's easy to pay off cronies who own the companies
that are doing all of the building.
The problem is it runs amuck.
These companies, they're getting paid
whether the apartments are occupied or not.
So they build a bunch of stuff
but then people aren't moving into them
and now that China's population is declining,
there is going to be ever-lowering demand
for a lot of this base infrastructure.
MehmetTopal wants to know,
How much power does Xi Jinping hold personally?
Is he an absolutist like Louis XIV or like Stalin?
I'm gonna reserve a certain category
for divine-right monarchs like Louis XIV
and distinguish that from Xi Jinping.
So Xi Jinping is probably
the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.
He's made himself president of everything for life,
but at the end of the day, he's one guy.
And so his ability to pay attention
to everything that's going on in his vast sprawling country
is inherently limited.
So the real estate crisis that's going on,
he's demanded that people be more frugal
and not speculate on real estate,
but the market is kind of doing what it's going to do.
And as a result, you still have that ongoing crisis.
Zero COVID.
You know, he locked down Chinese people
in their apartments for months on end.
At a certain point the Chinese people had it
and you saw protests emerging
that seemed to have encouraged Xi
to back down and undo that policy.
And he also has to worry about rivals in the party,
which is why he's embarked on
this massive anti-corruption campaign, purging more than
a million senior CCP officials along the way.
We do know a bit about his backstory.
His father was a high-ranking official
serving under Mao Zedong, but he was purged,
and in fact, Xi himself and his family were purged
during the Cultural Revolution.
Xi was sent out to the countryside
to basically dig a bunch of holes.
His father was humiliated,
Xi himself was denounced by his own mother,
and his half sister died during the Cultural Revolution.
It's all speculation, but people think this may have had
a big effect on him and that's what he thinks of
when he thinks of rule by the people,
which may explain partially why he seems so committed
to centralizing all power under himself
and basically installing himself
to the point that he's literally written himself
into the constitution
and obligates other people in China
to read what he calls Xi Jinping Thought,
which is his own sort of philosophy
about how to guide the country.
@nic_moneypenny wants to know,
What was China's ultimate role in the COVID-19 pandemic?
We don't know for sure
because China, the government,
has gone to extraordinary lengths
to cover up how COVID emerged
and details about the virus.
We know that in late 2019, they basically got rid
of a lot of their virus samples
that were related to coronaviruses.
They floated conspiracy theories
that a virus actually came to China from frozen food
that was imported from outside of the country
and they didn't really allow international inspectors
until very late.
And even then, when the WHO came
to try to figure out where the virus came from,
it was a highly scripted,
almost sort of like North Korean tour around the facilities.
And as a result, we just don't know where it came from.
The two major theories are that it either emerged
from this wet market in Wuhan
because of the animals
that were being eaten and slaughtered there.
The other major theory is that it emerged
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
which is China's premier place for studying coronaviruses.
And we know the virus itself has certain features
that you really only see
if it's been modified in a lab rather than naturally.
The bottom line is, we don't know,
but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence
that it was done in this lab,
which is a center of not just Chinese research,
but of a multinational research attempt
to analyze coronaviruses.
@JerryDunleavy asks, Whatever happened to Tank Man?
And how many people did the Chinese Communist Party murder
at Tiananmen Square?
So what Jerry is referring to is that famous image
of a man standing in front of several tanks
that are rolling into Tiananmen Square
to run over demonstrators, mainly students,
that were protesting there in 1989.
We have no idea what happened to Tank Man,
he has never been heard of since.
It wasn't just a crackdown in Beijing and Tiananmen Square,
there were massive protests
in basically every provincial capital around China.
More than 80 cities had mass demonstrations
that were then forcibly put down.
According to the party,
roughly 200 to 300 people were killed.
But most Western estimates suggest
it was 10 times that amount.
The way that the Tiananmen Square protests
are often portrayed is as a pro-democracy demonstration
by the Chinese people.
And certainly there were elements of that.
A lot of the students in Tiananmen Square
were calling for more democratic governance.
They built a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty
in the middle of Tiananmen Square.
But really the crisis starts
and the reason why
it spreads across the country was economic.
There was massive inflation.
This led to massive demonstrations.
A lot of people weren't being paid
for jobs that they were employed to do by the state.
And also keep in mind that communist regimes
were starting to crumble, especially across Eastern Europe.
So the tail end of the Cold War
and this belief that the legitimacy,
the functioning of a communist system is under question
and led to mass demonstrations
and even a split among the elites
in the Chinese Communist Party.
Since then, now the Communist Party is very much,
We have to stay together.
We either stay together or we hang separately.
I think that informs a lot of the emphasis
on repression put on in China today.
MiltonMerloXD wants to know,
How does censorship work in China?
So there's an actual Propaganda Department,
that's what it's called in China.
They set guidelines about what is allowed to be said
and what is not allowed to be said.
It's all pretty predictable.
You know, criticizing the Chinese Communist Party,
promoting democracy, Western liberal methods
are all kind of looked down upon and and squelched.
What the regime then does
is they have this vast great firewall
to control the internet
where they use a combination of artificial intelligence
and then hundreds of thousands of people
that are actually working to monitor China's internet,
which is partially sealed off.
What the censors really go after
is not so much people going off
and mouthing criticism about the leader,
but much more about trying to organize politically,
whether it's a house church, or student group
or anything where you get people together who can then talk
and then rally and potentially grow their numbers,
that looks too much like the start
of an alternative political party.
And the Chinese Communist Party says, No.
We have a monopoly on power.
We're the only political party
that's allowed to be had in this system.
And that seems to be what the censorship regime
is primarily dedicated to squelching out.
@mbateman says, Wait, China's domestic surveillance system
is actually called Skynet?
I know, it's kind of on the nose.
It is called Skynet.
The idea is that there's hundreds of millions
of surveillance cameras
that have been set up around the country
as if it's a net coming from the sky.
China has pioneered methods to take all of the images
that are being absorbed by these cameras
and then use artificial intelligence
and speech and facial recognition technology,
even gait recognition,
so how you walk can be identified.
And at this point they're starting
to export elements of this system to more than 80 countries.
Cuba, Pakistan, Cambodia
have all imported aspects of this system.
And so some scholars think this is the emergence
of a new type of authoritarian system
that seems to have a lot of advantages
in terms of population control.
@Spencemo_c asks, How does China's
social credit system work?
So in addition to video cameras
and speech and facial recognition technology,
the Communist Party has access to your financial statements,
to your police record, your education,
any kind of disciplinary action.
And so what they've done is basically created
a dossier on every single citizen.
And so what they can then do
is instantly punish Chinese citizens
by saying, Oh you, you jaywalked.
That's a point.
And so now you're gonna have to pay more if you want a loan
or you may not be able to travel as freely
or it may take longer to get your passport
when you go to a government office.
There essentially is like a score
and sometimes they'll actually post names
of people who have been blacklisted
because they've committed certain crimes
or they've been infraction of certain regulations
encouraging people to report on each other.
ItsAllOver_Again wants to know,
Why is China so God-like in the world of manufacturing?
Well, it's so God-like,
because it's designed to be God-like.
You have an authoritarian system
that essentially obligates the Chinese people
to put their life savings in a state-owned bank.
That means the government has tons of money,
a war chest that they can then deploy
at what they call strategic industries.
So they've spent hundreds of billions of dollars
every single year for more than a decade.
That's 10 times what other rich countries
in the OECD or the United States spend
as a share of their GDPs.
So in for example, the electric vehicle sector,
China has spent about $230 billion.
Semiconductors, biotechnology,
all of these key strategic industries.
And at the same time, many foreign companies
have sent over lots of investment and training.
So Apple, for example,
has spent about $275 billion in investment in China.
That's more than the Marshall Plan
that the United States used
to help Europe recover from World War II.
Apple also trained millions of Chinese workers, 28 million,
which is more than the labor force of California.
And also a lot of this is determined by their geography.
China has a long coastline right in the heart of East Asia,
which is the most economically dynamic region in the world.
So many of the world's supply chains
flow through these waters.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, you had China setting up
what they called Special Economic Zones,
especially in the Southeast and places like Shenzhen
as well as in Fujian province.
In some industries,
whether it's electric vehicles or in rare earths,
China currently produces anywhere between 60 to 90%
of the global market.
And now China has ports lining up and down its coastline
that serve as export platforms essentially
for the rest of the world.
In addition, China has extremely low labor costs
because several hundred million people
from the poor provinces in the west,
they move to the richer east coast provinces
to work in factories for very low wages.
But that provides essentially a bottomless source
of cheap-but-effective labor
for China's manufacturing juggernaut.
Roxi USA asks, What percentage of pharmaceuticals
does the US import in from China?
In terms of antibiotics, basic antibiotics,
it's upwards of 90% that include
at least some ingredients that are made in China.
And so this has become another national security threat
where the United States worries
that China could potentially cut the United States off
from basic pharmaceuticals
if there's some kind of crisis over Taiwan.
Whether China would actually do that remains to be seen.
@toxiccowboy1 asks, Are we headed to war with China?
It's not completely out of the question.
In addition to the conflict over Taiwan,
there's also the risk of a war around the Philippines.
That conflict really stems
over who controls the South China Sea
where a lot of trade passes through
where most of China's oil imports pass through.
Under international law,
the Philippines gets 12 miles out from their coastline
that is their territory,
and then another 200 miles out from their coastline
that is their exclusive economic zone.
China says, No.
That is all, that's just all Chinese territory.
And they've been building artificial islands there.
They've been turning them into military bases
and they formed what they call a maritime militia.
So thousands of fishing boats, coast guard vessels
and naval ships that are basically shoving other countries
out of their exclusive economic zone
and confining them
to narrow bands along their own coastlines.
The Philippines took China to court in 2016,
the World Court, which ruled that China's historical claims
to the South China Sea are null and void.
And in recent years China's really been turning
the screw on the Philippines,
one, I think to invalidate that ruling
and shatter its credibility,
but second, 'cause the Philippines
has started opening up new military bases
for the United States
'cause they say, We need some protection from China
so that we can have access to our territorial waters
in our exclusive economic zone.
The Chinese have a saying,
You should kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.
Meaning you should make a bloody example
out of a relatively weak adversary
to send a message to the more powerful ones.
The Philippines have very little
offensive air or naval capability.
So you just have to worry that Chinese would look at them
as a very juicy target; weak but symbolically important.
@adamncheck asks, Is TikTok just a China app
to make Americans do dumb stuff to get likes and views
and keep us distracted while they take over?
The Chinese version of TikTok,
you're only allowed to use it for 15 minutes
to an hour or so depending on your age and status.
And they also try to insert educational wholesome content
in addition to all the fun cat videos
and everything else that people are watching.
So I think the Chinese know
that this system is maybe not the best thing
that kids should be spending all day on.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company.
Under Chinese law, ByteDance is required
to hand over data to Beijing whenever
and in however much it wants it.
It's like putting a Chinese spy balloon in your cell phone
with your biometric data,
everything you've liked and disliked.
There's been studies done suggesting
that the algorithm in TikTok in the American version
was promoting certain views
like after the October 7th massacre in Israel,
more pro-Hamas views were being amplified
or pro-Russian views on the Ukraine conflict.
@NOYK1847 asks, If Russian bots exist,
do Chinese bots also exist?
I think first of all,
you should look down at the comments in this video
and you'll probably get a taste
of whether there are any Chinese bots.
China, it's been well documented,
it uses both bots
as well as what is called a 50-Cent Army
basically has a bunch of mainly kids and young adults
who are paid 50 Chinese cents
per internet post that they make
to destroy, undermine the credibility of messages
that maybe cut against the Chinese Communist Party.
It's reported there's probably
several hundred thousand people
that are essentially employed as internet trolls
by the Chinese Communist Party, in addition
to obviously using artificial intelligence and bots.
@Psalm_Sixtynine asks, Why would China want Tibet?
I think it becomes very clear
when you look at a map of China
and you can see that most of it
is the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas,
and a lot of it is also desert.
And so most of China's population is packed in here
and they're desperate for water as well as strategic space
to defend themselves against enemies.
And so Tibet, which is in this area here,
is highly strategic.
For one, a lot of the glaciers up in the Himalayas
are where the major rivers of Asia start,
both flowing down into China
as well as flowing down into Southeast Asia and into India.
So if China can control that territory,
it controls the source of vital water supplies.
At the same time, China and India,
which is now the most populous country on the planet,
have a longstanding rivalry,
and Tibet is the high ground
literally looking down onto India.
In addition, the Chinese Communist Party
essentially inherited the borders
of the previous Qing dynasty empire,
which included Tibet led by the Dalai Lama.
And so when China took over Tibet and conquered it in 1951,
the Dalai Lama fled to India
and has been running a government in exile
in India ever since.
This next question is from TapestryGirl.
Mom says China could take over the United States
because they own our debt.
China does own some US debt. It's in the 3 to 4% range.
It topped out at about 7% about a decade ago,
generally in the form of treasury bills.
And a lot of this emerges
just from the economic relationship
between the United States and China
where China is exporting a lot of goods
to the United States.
And the United States will often pay for that,
essentially with a piece of paper that says
IOU in the form of a treasury bill.
Analysts have looked at whether
they could use this as a course of weapon
and basically concluded
they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.
The value of that asset would suddenly plummet.
Japan owns more US debt than China does.
So I don't think that this is a unique China thing
or that they could use it as some type of weapon
to coerce the United States.
Let's take a question from Quora.
Is modern China more influenced
by Confucianism or Marxism?
I would say both because they lead in similar directions.
Marxism-Leninism stresses the idea
of public or communal ownership of the means of production
to produce wealth.
That is owned by the state in China.
It's led by what Lenin would call the vanguard party
staffed by a top leader that is making decisions
on behalf of the people.
And that's consistent with certain elements of Confucianism.
Confucianism obviously has a long lineage,
thousands of years in China.
Confucius, a philosopher who emphasized a natural harmony,
people knowing their place in society,
that everyone has a certain role to perform in that society,
and that you have to have a benevolent leader
that leads on behalf of the people.
That obviously appeals very much
to Chinese dynasties over the millennia.
You have Xi Jinping today grafting that on
to a Marxist-Leninist structure of the party.
@Gus_802 asked, What happened
with the Chinese spy balloon hysteria?
In January, 2023, the United States detected
a balloon floating over areas
including a nuclear missile silo in Montana.
What it was carrying
was all this advanced surveillance equipment
that was about the size of a regional jet airliner.
So we're talking about
a major piece of hardware floating around.
China's done this in more than 40 countries,
in Japan, over Taiwan,
they've been floating balloons
even over potentially over American bases in Europe.
And there's a fear that China is testing out
this alternative surveillance system.
Because balloons emit almost no radar signature,
they're really hard to detect.
They hover around 60,000 feet, which is higher
than a commercial airliner but below satellites
in this area where people really aren't looking.
It gives China eyes and ears over sensitive US sites
that otherwise they wouldn't have.
The US sent a fighter jet up eventually to shoot it down
and then the US grabbed all of the technology that was there
and observed the balloon's flight.
That might have actually helped US intelligence
more than Chinese intelligence.
@all4stops asks, Who is winning the tech war
between China and the United States?
I think they are each dominating
different types of technologies.
The United States is still doing quite well
in high-value areas.
So advanced computer chips, aerospace,
the complicated jet engines
that you need to fly a jumbo jet or a fighter.
China on the other hand dominates scale
taking existing technologies from other countries
and then mass producing highly effective,
cost-efficient electric vehicles,
run-of-the-mill computer chips,
rare earths, pharmaceuticals, medical PPE.
There's so many areas where China
can just flood the market with sheer scales.
Both of those types of technologies
are really important for a modern economy.
They're also very important for military power.
So each in their own way is sort of winning in some ways
but also has major vulnerabilities.
@JoeBart85120716 asked, Does China own American farmland?
Yes, China does own American farmland.
It's like 0.05% of American farmland.
But some of this farmland is near American military bases,
especially Air Force bases
including some of those where American strategic forces,
nuclear forces could be taking off.
And so there is a fear that if China has this land,
they can put things on it, explosives, missiles,
that could potentially attack American bases
if there is some kind of major war
and destroy US aircraft on the ground
before they even get up into the air.
We don't know the details on that.
You'd have to get classified information,
but the amount of farmland is small,
the location is a little bit scary and questionable.
cakeba asks, Can someone explain Hong Kong to me?
So Hong Kong was a British colony
after the first Opium War in 1839
all the way up until 1997
where Britain agreed to hand back Hong Kong to China
and in exchange, China pledged to grant Hong Kong a, quote,
High degree of autonomy.
'Cause within Hong Kong there was a different rule of law.
There was an independent judiciary.
So you saw massive protests there
over the last five or six years when China
was basically trying to erode a lot of those freedoms,
crack down on the press,
crack down on the free flow of investment,
and also on the way
that the Hong Kong government is selected
and the Chinese government passed national security laws
that made it possible for them to remove protestors,
take them to mainland China.
So at this point it seems like Hong Kong
has basically become another large cosmopolitan,
but ultimately Chinese city
run by the Chinese Communist Party.
IronLover64 asks, How does the quality of life
for the low class in China compare
to that of the United States, let's say in a red state.
So why don't we compare the poorest of the poor in China
to say average wages in Mississippi,
which is the poorest state.
For China, roughly half the country
is living on something like $5 to $10 a day.
In Mississippi, that's gonna be three
to four times that amount.
There's a lot more obesity in a place like Mississippi
than there is in China.
On the other hand, in rural China
you have a severe problem of malnourishment
and rudimentary healthcare.
Researchers at Stanford went out
and they found that roughly a third of rural children,
their IQs are around 90, which is really low,
because of malnutrition from a young age,
a lack of education.
The average education level is about an eighth grade
or seventh grade level in rural China
'cause high school costs money.
And so a lot of Chinese families,
their kids will just drop out of school.
And the other issue is that your citizenship in China
is tied to your locality.
And so if Mom and Dad go
to an eastern rich coastal province to work in a factory,
they can't bring their kids with them
'cause they won't be allowed to go to school.
So they're just sending money back
and maybe only seeing their kids
a few times or maybe only once a year.
So just in terms of the basic healthcare and education level
and then just in terms of the amount of wealth
that someone in Mississippi might have
versus someone in poor rural China,
it's a very stark difference.
@Captaintrips333 asks, What's going on
with the Uyghur Muslim population in China?
So there's about 10 to 12 million Uyghur Muslims.
They live mainly in a province called Xinjiang,
which is in the western part of China.
Basically since 2017,
China set up what they call reeducation centers
or vocational education centers,
what people in the West have called concentration camps,
and what the US government deems an attempt at genocide
and basically put in a million
to a million and a half Uyghur Muslims,
so a substantial part of the population, in these centers.
We've heard from people that have come out of them
that there's a lot of indoctrination, that they are enforced
to renounce their heritage and to learn Mandarin
and basically to assimilate with Chinese society.
A big part of what the Chinese Communist Party is about
is making sure a Soviet-style collapse
never occurs in China.
And one of their theories
about why the Soviet Union broke apart
was that the Soviet Union
was like one of those Hershey chocolate bars
that's divided into little squares that you can break apart.
It was these disparate republics
that all went their own way when they suddenly could.
So there was a fear that a minority region like Xinjiang
where these Uyghurs were living
was going to try to separate from the mainland
or was gonna become a base of terrorism directed at China.
So unfortunately the Uyghur Muslims
are experiencing severe repression right now
under the Chinese Communist Party.
loefferrafael asks, Does China support
or promote communism around the world?
I don't think China's promoting communism anymore
the way that the Soviet Union
used to bankroll revolutionary movements.
They have engaged in this Belt and Road Initiative
where they've loaned out more than a trillion dollars
to more than a hundred different countries,
mainly so that those countries can employ Chinese companies
to build infrastructure on their territory.
So whether that's building ports or roads or soccer stadiums
or what the Chinese call smart city systems.
There's a port in Greece for example,
that is highly profitable,
it's an important, valuable piece of infrastructure
that China helped fund and build.
One out of every three infrastructure projects
in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last 20 years
has been built partially
or entirely by Chinese companies.
So you see a massive spread of infrastructure
and part of the reason really stems
from the 2008 Financial Crisis
and the resulting trade protectionism
that was emerging, backlash against Chinese products.
The Chinese decided, We need to open up new markets.
We can also get these countries more hooked
on our ecosystem of technology standards,
5G networks, smart city systems,
and that way we'll have dominant market share
in a lot of these areas
that are gonna be really the growth of demand
in terms of consumption going forwards.
They also bring that surveillance system
that allows would-be dictators
to keep easier tabs on their populations.
@ostenati asks, What happens when Xi dies?
Who's next in line? And will they be good for China?
I think chaos could potentially ensue
because he has not designated a successor.
He's written himself into the constitution.
He's basically treated like a demigod
in terms of Chinese propaganda.
And if you look at the history
of the Chinese Communist Party,
there has only been one completely orderly
and peaceful transition of power.
And that's when Xi himself came to power.
All of the previous leaders,
it was a vicious power struggle
and there were split authorities.
So for example, Deng Xiaoping is purged
and then eventually comes back to power
and has to put down his enemies and imprison them
in order to take the helm.
Then Jiang Zemin comes to power
after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989,
basically 'cause the Party realizes
it needs to unify behind a candidate
or they're just gonna disintegrate.
Then when Hu Jintao comes to power,
Jiang Zemin is not willing to give up a lot of his power
and he keeps himself as commander in chief
even after Hu Jintao becomes president
and general secretary of the country.
It'd be like as if Joe Biden was still head of the Pentagon
and the military and commander in chief,
even though Donald Trump
is now president here in the United States.
In other words, in Chinese politics
it's very rough-and-tumble,
even though it happens behind closed doors.
Chaos is entirely possible.
And if you just look at the broad sweep of Chinese history,
vicious power struggles tend to ensue.
Some people hope that you'll get
a Chinese Mikhail Gorbachev,
you know, the Soviet leader who made nice with the West
and liberalized a bit at home.
I think you might actually get a Chinese Vladimir Putin.
It seems like the one thing
that everyone in the Chinese Communist Party can agree on
is that the Chinese Communist Party
should continue to rule China in perpetuity.
So those are all the questions for today.
Thanks for watching China Support.
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