- It's often said
there's only two kinds of people in the world,
those whose data has been hacked by China
and those who don't know
that their data hasn't hacked by China.
That statement is actually more true than you might think.
[upbeat music]
- Hi, I'm Michael Beckley.
I'm an associate Professor of political science
at Tufts University.
And I'm the author of Unrivaled.
Why America Will Remain The World's Sole Superpower.
Today I'll be debunking myths
about the future of international relations
between the United States and China.
[upbeat music]
United States and China are destined for war.
I think that's not true, but it's not totally false either.
What I would say
is that the United States and China
are destined for rivalry.
They are the two most powerful countries in the world
and have very different visions
about how the world should work.
So the United States is a democracy.
China is an autocracy
and certainly wants to promote that vision of governance.
The United States treats Taiwan
as an independent entity in everything but name.
China considers it a renegade province.
The United States wants one open global internet
and China wants every country to be able to
censor the internet as it sees fit.
Wired's February issue features excerpts from the book 2034
which imagines an all out war
between the United States and China
that starts in the South China Sea.
The South China Sea is an area of dispute
because that's one of the world's
major international waterways.
Is this the most likely scenario for US China war?
I think it's possible.
I don't think it's the most likely scenario.
China could very well beat the United States in a war.
And I think that's especially likely
if the war happens over Taiwan.
Taiwan is only 100 miles from the Chinese mainland.
So China could throw its entire military at the conflict.
The Chinese military could hit targets on Taiwan
without ever having to leave the Chinese mainland
in the first place.
The US military of course
is coming from thousands of miles away.
It would have to operate
mainly from two bases that are on Okinawa, Japan.
Those are the only two American military bases
within 500 miles of Taiwan.
And China actually now has missiles
that could wipe those bases out
in a sort of Pearl Harbor style surprise attack.
The United States would then have to fight from Guam
which is 1800 miles away from Taiwan.
And that's a huge problem
'cause American fighter aircraft
run out of gas after 500 miles.
These are the kind of nightmare scenarios
that keep American defense planners up at night
and frankly, for good reasons
[upbeat music]
China is surveilling US data.
That's definitely true.
Every country spies on every other country
but what distinguishes China's espionage and surveillance
it's just the sheer scale.
So if you just look at 2014 alone
it was revealed that China had hacked
into the office of personnel management.
They took the data, the deepest darkest secrets
from American government workers,
including CIA operatives.
During that same year, they hacked into Marriott
and stole the passport data and credit card information.
They also hacked into Anthem
and took 78 million people's healthcare information.
So China has a long history
of trying to gather up data on American citizens.
So it's no surprise that now there is this worry
that at once you allow
an app like Tik Tok onto someone's phone
it's only one update away from becoming spyware essentially.
So for all these reasons, there's a great worry.
And I think a great reason to worry.
[upbeat music]
The CIA is fueling anti-Chinese groups.
The CIA has done this in the past.
So during the cold war, China was conquering Tibet.
And at the time the CIA
actually funded Tibetan gorillas,
they of course lost their battle.
Since then, we just don't know what the CIA has been up to.
But the fact that
the United States also backs the government on Taiwan
is further an example that Chinese use
to say look, the United States is clearly meddling
in our internal affairs.
I think that's certainly true.
It just may not be through
some of the groups that people have surmised.
Some people think the CIA is funding the Falun Gong
which is this religious sect within China.
There's no hard evidence that that actually went through.
If the CIA is in fact funding, the Falun Gong
they're running some serious interference
because members of the Falun Gong
have gone on to found the Epic Times
which now is spreading disinformation
and conspiracy theories within the United States
that are basically causing Americans to turn on each other.
I don't know where to go with that
but [laughs] it doesn't make any sense.
[upbeat music]
The United States is the biggest threat to world peace.
I think that's true
but I also think the United States has the most potential
to be the biggest contributor to peace.
So just as the most powerful country in history
when the United States puts its weight behind something
the world gets remade, whether for better or for worse.
The United States has just in the last couple of decades,
toppled a number of regimes.
It of course has military bases
on pretty much every continent.
It's the only country that can fight major wars
far beyond its borders.
And the catastrophes are obvious.
You look at Iraq, Vietnam, the list goes on.
I think some of the successes though are less obvious
and one that I would highlight is this system
of US alliances that got extended after world war II.
So the United States has offered security guarantees
to dozens of nations
and that has helped create zones of peace around the world.
Countries that have an alliance with the United States
have pretty much never been invaded
or had to fight major wars.
So what these security guarantees have done
is essentially allowed countries
to not have to build big militaries,
to defend their own borders
to not have to fight for resources or market access
which was the norm for millennia prior to 1945.
So while I think it's certainly true
that the United States has the power to wreck the world
and wreck the world it has in various ways.
It also has the capability to really
make the world much more peaceful and prosperous.
[upbeat music]
The Chinese government is about to collapse.
I think that's very unlikely.
China has arguably the world's strongest
internal security force.
So take the American law enforcement system
now add on top of that 3 million additional security guards
2 million internet sensors, 600 million surveillance cameras
and something that China calls the People's Armed Police
which is actually essentially an army of 1.2 million troops
that is directed inward at China's own people.
So the bottom line is the Chinese Communist Party
is not gonna go down without a fight
and it can fight like hell.
Now, the only way you would actually
get a collapse of the Chinese Communist Party
is if there is a split at the elite level,
that's what happened prior to the Tiananmen Square Massacre,
where you had hardliners versus reformists
and the party almost collapsed.
But I think that China's leaders essentially
learn the lessons of Tiananmen.
They realized that they either stick together
or they're gonna hang separately
and no one has taken this lesson
further to heart than Xi Jinping
who has purged thousands of his political rivals.
He's stacked the highest decks of the Chinese government
with people loyal to him.
He's even written himself into the Chinese constitution.
So while Xi Jinping certainly has created many enemies
by crushing a lot of powerful Chinese families.
He has cult a personality and his iron grip on power
will make him extremely hard to dislodge anytime
in the foreseeable future
[upbeat music]
US-China relations have worsened
under the Trump administration.
I think that's basically true.
Donald Trump is the first US president
to really wage full spectrum competition with China.
He presided over a huge boost in US military power
directed into East Asia.
He made the most aggressive use of tariffs
against China that we've seen
since really the World War II.
It's a very aggressive upfront policy.
At the same time though
I don't think Trump himself was the sole architect
of this shift in US-China relations.
I think part of it was actually reaction
to China's own rise in international aggression.
China's just become a much more active,
muscular and authoritarian country over the last decade.
So I actually think US-China relations
are gonna continue on the same trend
during the Biden administration.
The one thing that Democrats and Republicans
seem to be able to agree on
is that the United States needs to get tough with China.
The one major difference
is that Biden is all about multi-lateralism.
He's all about allies.
And so he's trying to build an Alliance of democracies.
So it's more of a difference of tactics
but the overarching strategy
of what the United States is doing with China
is largely gonna remain the same.
[upbeat music]
China is a superpower.
Not yet.
When analysts look at what makes countries powerful
and what has really driven the rise and fall of great powers
over the centuries.
It's a few basic components.
One of course is wealth.
You need just lots of money to buy various forms
of influence and invest in technological innovation.
You also need a big powerful military
in case things get tough
and you need to rectify the situation through force.
And you also need some kind of global narrative.
You need some kind of story to tell
or some kind of ideology that can help them win over allies
and partners to your cause.
So all these reasons China's an extremely important country
but it still lags pretty far behind the United States
which has three to four times China's wealth,
five to 10 times its military power projection capability
and nearly 70 allies
whereas China's only ally is North Korea.
The US dollar is the world's reserve currency.
It's used in 90% of international financial transactions.
China's currency is only used in about 2%.
And of course America's soft power,
its global appeal has taken a pretty big beating
over the last few years, but it still ranks above China.
So with gaps, this big in money and muscle
and allies and partners
you can't really consider China a superpower
in the same league as the United States.
At least not yet.
[upbeat music]
China's the world is the largest economy.
That's actually true.
China's rise has actually been quite steady over the years.
It's gone from a nation
that was mostly dominated by peasant farmers
to one where there is a burgeoning middle class today.
If you adjust for the fact that things like food and clothes
and haircuts are cheaper in China than in the United States
then China does in fact have the largest
gross domestic product or GDP.
Having a big GDP is not the same thing
as being really wealthy or having a strong economy.
GDP just measures spending. And it would be sort of like
measuring the wealth of a family
if you just looked at their credit card statement.
Obviously just because you spend a lot of money
it doesn't mean that you're necessarily rich.
China does have a lot of mouths to feed, 1.4 billion people
and no country has run up as much debt as China
over the past decade.
So while China certainly does have the largest economy
that's not the wealthiest country in the world.
The world is divided between two large economic blocks.
The US and Chinese economies are intertwined
in so many different ways.
The big debate is over whether these two countries
are starting to diverge,
whether there's this new cold war between the two countries
where each country will develop its own technology
and those technologies won't be compatible.
I actually think there is gonna be a fair amount
of what is called decoupling between the two economies.
It's gonna take decades most likely,
but I think there's been so much bad blood
stored up by the recent trade conflicts
that both countries now are looking for ways
to if not entirely disentangled at least try to walk back
some of their economic entanglements.
[upbeat music]
Will China become a superpower?
It's certainly possible,
but China will have to overcome two main hurdles.
The first is that its economic engine
is starting to slow down.
So China's economic growth rates have dropped by 50%
over the last decade.
And I think even worse productivity has declined by 10%.
So China's having to spend more and more
to produce less and less.
At the same time China's debt has ballooned eight fold
just over the last decade.
No country has racked up this much debt
this fast in peacetime.
The second obstacle is a geopolitical backlash.
So according to China's own government sources
anti-China sentiment around the globe
hasn't been this high
since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Some of this is COVID,
but frankly, a lot of it is a response
to China's aggressive so-called Wolf Warrior diplomacy.
The fear for China
is that it may be confronting a tightening geopolitical news
at the same time that its economy is slowing.
And if both of those trends continue
China's super power ambitions could be crushed.
[bright music]
The bottom line is that for the next decade at least
US-China competition is going to likely continue
across the full spectrum of areas of world politics.
The good news is that these two countries
do need each other at the end of the day,
they need each other
to solve big transnational problems like climate change
to regulate the global economy.
So with the hope is that cooler heads will prevail
and the two countries will in fact cooperate,
but it's certainly not guaranteed.
[bright music]