 Russia, it's like such a disruptor, a lot more brazen in many ways than Beijing. So looking at how China's reaction to the war has been very muted, definitely not supporting the invasion, kind of isn't surprising to me because I kind of understand how that's not exactly the way a Beijing would like to operate to get more influence. They kind of want to work within institutions as well as to use this economic clout to get that power. This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I am with an extraordinary journalist and author today whose book I find just what you might call different in a beautiful way. China Unbound, A New World Disorder by Joanna Chu, who works as a journalist with the Toronto Star and has an awful lot of what you might call personal history related to China residing in Canada, observing all over the world. And I was really spellbound as I looked at this book and given all of the fragileness in global political economy and geopolitics, I've tried to make, how would I say, an effort to illuminate this, but it's sometimes hard to find a very bright light, but today I think we have one. Joanna, thanks for joining me. Well, thank you so much, Rob, and that introduction was, like, you know, so flattering and you know, it makes me feel, you know, to get this invitation from you in itself, like made me feel like a sense of relief. I was worried about how the book would go over with American audiences because it is very critical of the West. It's critical of U.S. leadership on foreign policymaking and rhetoric around China, and my book doesn't provide very simple answers. It's, you know, hard to sum up in talking points. So, you know, really honored and glad that you enjoyed it. Well, what I would say is tough love is still love, and sometimes cowardice is not love. So I think you're bringing some very constructive things to the table. And before we really delve into the bits and pieces, let's talk a little bit about your background with an eye towards what inspired you to write this book. And so what is your, what you call generative experiences in life that brought you to this beachhead where you felt compelled to create this offering? Yeah, I felt, you know, growing up in Canada. I was born in Hong Kong, but my parents were one of the, you know, a large waves of people who left Hong Kong basically fled the city after the Tiananmen 89 massacre of pro reform demonstrators in Beijing. That really spooked obviously a lot of Hong Kongers who were set to return to Chinese sovereignty in 97. So I think it was a kind of a case of reverse psychology where my parents made the sacrifice of leaving their hometowns of Hong Kong and settling in Vancouver. So that, you know, me and my brother would have kind of enjoyed this kind of life in a free society. But, you know, as soon as I was old enough to read about what was happening in China, Chinese society, I just felt this huge pull to learn more, to live in China, to understand, you know, what led to that point. This kind of Western fascination that's always been there about China. I wanted to be on the ground and see what, what, what extent things were accurate and true and to kind of also use my, you know, interest and passion in writing and reporting to bridge some of the understanding gaps between people in the west, people in China. So, you know, I went to school and journalism in New York. I got my first job at a self-China morning post in Hong Kong, which was great because it is a Hong Kong based newspaper that's in English. So I was able to start my career writing for a mix of both local, Hong Konger, Chinese and international audiences, which is the space I've always wanted to be in. I think people who know China best are the people who live there, who are Chinese. And it was great to start my career engaging with these people and in the sense writing for locals as well. And then I ended up in Beijing from 2014 to late 2018 and returned to Canada. Like I said before when we're chatting, thinking the China story was behind me because I had spent, you know, seven years reporting on the ground for, you know, major European American outlets. But as soon as I returned to Canada, I realized the China story was global. The stories I did, especially in the latter parts of my time, that were very sobering with human rights. I met with so many human rights lawyers, advocates, professors, people who weren't actually political at all who ended up in jail being seen as dissidents in Xi Jinping's China becoming more and more authoritarian. That was part of the reason I think my mental health just couldn't keep up with how tough it was. Sources I knew, so many just ending up in jail or silence in some way. So, but back in Canada, December 2018, the Huawei executive, Wang Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver Airport. And weeks later, Beijing took really obviously as hostages to Canadian men, Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat on leave, and Michael Spavor, a businessman, hostage because they were so angry and wanted Canada to release Meng. So that really shattered my illusion that China's story could be contained in China. It was definitely a global story, not just a global story involving clashes with the U.S. as a superpower, but involving tensions and confrontations increasingly with all sorts of countries. So the book uses that on-the-ground flavor, drawing from my reporting in China to try to help people understand China's political system and kind of growing authoritarianism from the inside, again using those authentic Chinese voices, and also reporting from several Western countries I use as case studies across Europe, North America, and Australia, places like Turkey and Russia as well, to give those cross-country on-the-ground experiences and comparisons so people can get an understanding of where we are right now and how we got here, how we got to this point where it seems like people have woken up overnight to the realization that things with China could be headed in a pretty tense direction. And people, ordinary people like those two Canadians, the two men who were taken hostage, because of these tensions, could be affected. Before when I was writing about China for everyday reporting on the biggest news in China, a lot of the stories wouldn't be front-page. I worked for major newswires like AFP, where any publication, New York Times, LA Times could grab it and promote it and print it. But China's stories often weren't always front of the newspaper, front of the website, especially when it came to issues like how Chinese citizens were suffering. But in the last couple of years, last few years, I got so many questions from just ordinary people who suddenly felt that the China story was relevant to them. Things like worried moms with sons teaching English in China saying, oh, should he be worried, should my son leave China? So I wanted to write this book for anyone who really wanted to get a grasp of how things got to the point of these tensions and to form their own informed opinions, because the flip side is that I've seen a lot of dangerous misinformation coming from the West, coming from U.S. senior politicians, coming from Trump. That isn't probably the most productive trend to emerge from this increased public interest in China. I know I've seen, being in New York City, some acts of violence and then around the subways against Asian people since these tensions have risen. And there's a great deal of, I guess what I'll call, you have people in America, the famous economists Ann Case and Angus Steaton, talk about the diseases of despair. And when Donald Trump came into town, ran for president, he kept talking about how the system was rigged. And a whole lot of people, particularly people who work with their hands more than in mental activity, had been displaced. And they, in essence, didn't blame the American government for not making what I'll call transformation assistance with globalization and automation. They demonized the Chinese as though they were the cause. And Donald Trump fed that quite actively. And I saw a great deal of hostility. It reminded me of books I had read about the times, say, during World War II, where Asian people were put essentially in what I'll call country club prisons. And I don't mean they had golf courses. I mean, they were just taken out of society for fear that they were spying. There's a paranoia. There's an anxiety. I mean, we experienced a lot of the distress related to racism in this country between black and white or black, white, Hispanic. But the Asian population really has come under pressure. I wonder if you're being in Canada and so forth after these two people were apprehended. Did you experience any hostility or episodes on the street, anything yourself? Yeah. So I was afraid of both for myself and my older parents even taking public transit, walking down the street. Myself. I was such a hermit, partly both fear of catching COVID and being a victim of hate crimes that I personally didn't experience it in the last few years. But it's been brewing. I've been harassed, really threatened on the street both and online for years before COVID hit. It's more that the tensions with the Chinese government, plus the outbreak of the disease coming from Wuhan in China, kind of put some of these deep strands of racism and xenophobia all over the West to just like more obvious proportions. People felt more kind of empowered to say things, to even physically assault people. I did speak with people who were physically assaulted, who were punched in the face. You know, I reported on an elderly gentleman in Vancouver, 93 years old with dementia being pushed to the ground by someone who was huge, like a middle-aged man saying, you're too blame for COVID basically. And a lot of this, I think, it was heading in that direction already. I feel, you know, living in China and knowing the people I knew, including who are in positions of privilege of people like lawyers, people like professors who were struggling to try to give even the mildest criticism to their government feedback, working on things like trying to reduce corruption in the system. There's a lot of complexity there. There's people who want to, you know, improve things, who see how the system is broken there. But a lot of the times when people think of China, it's as if Chinese people are also in a way blamed for what their government is doing, even though that's not very sensical because China is not a democracy. The leaders aren't being elected. In fact, people who do try to provide that feedback, try to work with the government to make some changes, people like feminists who are trying to work on things that are not political, trying to spread distribute stickers against sexual harassment on public transport. You know, there are the kind of people who have been arrested, who have been targeted, who are kind of forced to flee the country. But in the public discourse around the world, people don't know those stories. People just see kind of a blank, almost like this army of robots, automatons, people who support the Chinese government, people who work in factories producing cheap goods as if they're to blame for China's economic power. So a lot of lack of sympathy for the human condition of what it is like to be living in China, all the complexity, and not even taking into, of course, not even taking into consideration how the Chinese government is also not a monolith. It's very clear that a lot of people in the government that I know and have spoken with feel worried about speaking out and kind of standing out because President Xi, since he came to power, has really taken so many political purges. It's an environment of just a lot of so much self-censorship and fear in China right now. And that is made worse by the public's around the world responding not with sympathy and curiosity about what is happening, but lashing out, really simplifying and equating Chinese people with the Chinese government and Chinese leadership. And it's not, you know, the average Joe Wenjing, it's people like, you know, officials. Trump encouraging this. I've kind of tracked how this plays out. You know, it really kind of becomes more prominent during election campaigns, both. And it hasn't gotten away under Biden. Biden's administration also came in trying to almost out-talk Trump on China. Biden has continued this really simplistic rhetoric of how America is fighting kind of this ideological battle as a leader of democratic nations against authoritarian nations, you know, naming China. It's this clash between democracy and autocracy. And, you know, as a result, it's hard to make really nuanced policymaking in this environment. And when it kind of gets mixed up when this rhetoric is very popular in many cases with the domestic public, I think a lot of the point of saying things like that is really not to engage with Chinese leaders, but to send a message of strength and kind of solidarity with domestic audiences. Yeah, I think I recently had a conversation with a gentleman from Singapore, Kishore Mabubani, and he writes a column for the Straits Times. He just issued a book called 21st Century Asia. One of the chapters called Democracy or Plutocracy. And what he was talking about was what's the comparative model between the U.S. and China and what do other countries have the opportunity to, you know, be inspired by or emulate. And he talked about the scale of prison incarceration as a percentage of total population in the United States and other things that essentially, and I think this was the last phrase. I read your book last weekend. But I think in your chapter on the United States, you finished with the phrase, you've got to practice what you preach. And I think that that's an old Barry White song. But I do think you really hit the nail on the head that us polarizing, us being aggressive, us, which I might call demonizing China, probably frightens people within China and makes them more susceptible to, we might call succumbing to authoritarian leadership. And so I just see what I might call an unhealthy dynamic on both sides escalating. And I would be very, you know, how would I say people will take sides or whatever who might watch or listen to this podcast. You were fiercely critical of both the government in China and in the United States. This isn't like you're involved in a team sport as a propagandist. You're truly trying to illuminate a very unhealthy dynamic and all of its feedback loops. Yeah. And I think that comes from being a Canadian and also being an immigrant to Canada where I kind of occupy a space where honestly I'm not really patriotic to any country. I kind of have a sense of where I'm kind of on the outside of wherever I'm living. When I lived in Hong Kong, even though I was born there, people kind of heard my kind of outsider accent when I tried to speak Cantonese. When I was in China, you know, speaking Mandarin again, an outsider in Canada facing that racism and xenophobia because two Canadians, the mainstream white Canadians, I look Chinese. I look like not a Canadian. So I think that kind of position is actually healthy. And a lot of people are like myself where, you know, we are critical of all parties involved and, you know, try to provide constructive criticism. Instead, I think of when, especially in the US and increasingly in Canada and Australia when, you know, there's a talk of kind of an outside threat, which is, you know, a lot of times China these days, you know, before the war in Ukraine started, a lot of these places, the main foe for them was a rising China. And it's complicated because you mentioned does this push people in China away from engaging with the West and makes them more likely to support their government. It's an interesting question because along with that, when there are people like, I spoke with the intelligence officer Amy Chang for an essay updating on, you know, arguing that these problems haven't gone away under Biden, she said that her security clearance took a while because they suspected, you know, the loyalties of her parents. She had to provide so much documentation. And when she was on job working as a, you know, US intelligence officer, she's fielded constant jokes that she was a communist, that she was a Chinese spy. And, you know, she's one of the lucky ones because I spoke with many other people who weren't able to work for the US government or, you know, US intelligence services because of their ethnicity or because their parents or their grandparents had immigrated originally from China. So the people who have, you know, this kind of insider outsider perspective, who understand China deeply, who may have spent time there, who speak the language fluently, they're not being able to really easily rise to positions of influence in the public in the West and in policymaking. And instead, you know, we have people like Newt Gingrich writing books, Steve Bannon talking about China, you know, starting these organizations that have just so, it's just riddled with misinformation about China. Some things are just made up. In Bannon's case, I was very critical. He actually made a movie where he used a character based on myself. And it included all sorts of falsehoods. So I think it is so dysfunctional that in the West where we do have the freedom of press, we have freedom of information that we use these freedoms badly by not really elevating the people who understand China instead shunning them, treating them with suspicion and elevating often the people who have just really compelling but in many cases false statements on China to, you know, elevating them in public discourse. It is dysfunctional because I do, you know, I have checked in with friends in China and it's not as if they're so easily swayed like, okay, now I'm going to support the CCP or before I was trying to stay neutral because, you know, the West hates us and blames us. Instead it's more of a subtle kind of disillusionment and kind of feeling of sadness among many Chinese in China who want to do things like study abroad. The U.S. has canceled many student visas out of suspicion starting in the Trump administration, especially that all Chinese students were spies. You know, thousands of people, hundreds of lost their access. Trump also canceled the Fulbright Scholarship where Chinese and American scholars and professionals would go back and forth and try to understand each other. So it's, we do, I think what would be functional and healthy is to see anyone who is Chinese as an individual not to kind of cast anyone with any sort of suspicion. And I think I was less pessimistic once the book was out, but since then, you know, there's been conversations I've had, there's been little things like the U.S. Justice Department basically canceling their China initiative, which over the last several years investigated scholars who were suspected of breaching national security, who may have aided China in economic espionage. And a lot of studies have shown a lot of surveys and analysis has shown that there may be bias in these prosecutions from the Justice Department where over 90% of its targets were Chinese Americans. And a lot of these cases ended up being thrown out because they weren't valid. So, you know, the department did basically terminate this initiative. So I think we're at a crossroads now where there is a chance to be a bit more thoughtful and careful about how we do talk about China and make policy in China to not just direct that at kind of an increasingly nationalistic, patriotic public, but to with the aims of actually achieving aims, like achieving, trying to make some sort of difference in what's happening in China, which has the crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang where about a million or more have been interned in camps, reeducation camps. You know, having those human stories at the top of mind when we're talking about these things instead of kind of letting kind of hubris and arrogance be at the forefront where the primary slight that China's posing is that it wants to depose U.S. as a world superpower. And thinking about the people, thinking about people in Hong Kong now who, if I had stayed there, I'd be living in basically another Chinese city after the imposition of the National Security Law, which makes so many things criminal that, you know, any sort of vague criticism of the Chinese government is criminalized. So my book contains, you know, I don't really try to, like doing a podcast is just kind of my words, but the book really is this kind of collection of many people's stories. A lot of people with direct experience of being targeted by the Chinese state, also being shunned and harassed overseas. So, you know, I really want to tell their stories. I use the techniques from narrative journalism where I try to make their stories come alive, like their characters come alive so people can have greater empathy for the complexity of, you know, all of these people's experiences because it is ordinary people, I think, who suffer in both cases with when governments are getting more strident and paranoid and insecure. And I will tell you that without being a master craftsman of the type of techniques, you did touch this heart. So congratulations. Thank you. As a matter of fact, I ran a panel a few months ago with Orville Schell and Patrick Lawrence and Yong Yong Nan from the University of Michigan and some others. And Orville brought up a publication called China Heritage. And a gentleman, I think his name was like Jeremy Barmouth. And there was a tribute that Orville directed me to at the time. And when I was reading your book, I actually went back and read it. And it was, you know, various different things in quoting old Leonard Cohen songs. You're up in Canada. That's from Leonard's from Montreal. But various things. But there was a piece that he said at the outset, which I pulled up as I was reading your book. It was called The Invisible Republic of the Spirit. And it was a quote from a man named Stefan Zweig, who was writing a biography of a man named Roman Roland, who was talking about turmoil in Europe. But he was applying it and saying, essentially, we have to become members of the Invisible Republic of the Spirit. And this is what Zweig wrote. The Invisible Republic of the Spirit, the universal fatherhood, has been established among the races and among the nations. And you and I might change the gender words, but this is something written years ago. Motherhood and fatherhood, brotherhood and sisterhood. Its frontiers are open to all who wish to dwell therein. Its only law is that of brotherhood. Its only enemies are hatred and arrogance between nations. Whoever makes his home within this invisible realm becomes a citizen of the world. He is the heir. Not of one people, but of all people. Henceforth, he is an indweller in all tongues and in all countries in the universal past and the universal future. When I read your book, I would have nominated you for being his vice chairman of the Invisible Republic of the Spirit. I think that it just fit exactly with its own in the spirit that I was leaning from those pages. Because what I noticed was from every vantage point, you were very critical of evil as it harmed humans. And you were very much an advocate for humans, whatever their nationality, whatever their birth origins or what have you. I think there's something, how would I say, there's been a lot of ways in which people criticize globalization. Because they act like everybody can, with electronics and fast money or whatever, nanoseconds, escape the state. And then the state doesn't have the resources to protect people. But there may be a unity from breaking down nations that the Invisible Republic of the Spirit can be a prelude to. And I do think we're seeing some team activity. This is where I want to move toward here. Your discussion of Russia and China, where they have what looks like a surface formal collaboration between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. But underneath, historically, from philosophical, which you might call underpinnings in history, and some conflict. It's not quite so obvious that there is a deep cultural affiliation between the two countries. Yeah, before we move on to the Russia and China discussion, I just want to kind of riff off what you said about, you know, less, you know, thinking about a world without borders. I think there's a positive part of that, but then there's also the negative parts when it comes to what the Chinese state is doing. Because we are basically, whether we support that ideal or not living in a place where borders matter less. A lot of the research I found where people are critics of China who are being targeted by Chinese police, you know, Chinese security agents. They live all over the world and they're people who are citizens, you know, they have passports of all sorts of countries where their rights of free speech should be protected. They're Australian citizens, Canadian Americans, and actually they've told me that members of Chinese embassy, Chinese police have either called them or in some cases even shown up on their doorsteps around the world. Because they're unhappy with really small things like speaking out in solidarity with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong back in 2019. And I think that ties into what we were talking about earlier about this really like one-dimensional boogeyman kind of narratives on China. It's so distracting from what's actually happening because the stakes seem so high when you're talking about these really grand ideological battles. It obscures actual workings of Chinese state power where I try to explain in the book why they are so concerned and worried about the opinions of ordinary low level people where, you know, students are getting harassed by Chinese police incessantly when they have two Twitter followers and they, you know, they said something mildly critical or lower level politicians, people on the city council level all over the world. There are case studies where when, you know, carrots don't work, when things like page trips to China kind of being treated like a vaping doesn't work to kind of build that influence of low level politicians. And there's more kind of backhand ways where there's intimidation or photos of politicians who are unaware of these dynamics and risk are kind of twisted into propaganda serving the Chinese state or they're threatened. So by really looking at what's actually happening and acknowledging that, you know, borders don't really exist in some ways, we actually could actually understand what's actually happening with what Beijing is trying to do around the world. And is doing and how it is trying to harass and intimidate its critics around the world. I've spoken to many people who try to report what happened to them to local police in Canada U.S. and there's no structure around the world for how to deal with this because people don't expect that targets could be so lowly, could be students, could be people who aren't in major positions of power. So we're unprepared. So that's one of the dimensions where really lofty dramatic rhetoric can actually obscure research and actions taken to understand what China's, you know, their United Front Work Department, which I explained in the book is trying to do. And so, you know, nuance is not just because it's good, but it's because it's necessary because it's, we want to know what's actually happening and not what sounds the most kind of like sexy and scary and exciting. So talking about Russia and China now I found that really interesting. The book is actually in many ways collaboration between myself and local on the ground journalists, especially, especially in the case of the Russia chapter, I wasn't able to go to Russia as planned because of the pandemic. I worked with two really excellent Russian journalists who went all over, you know, in the middle of winter last year, talking to Russian stakeholders on the ground like Russian businessman, Russian who live in these places where there's a lot of economic partnerships and, you know, huge growth in tourism between Russia and China, such as in Siberia, where there's been things like protests against Chinese water bottling companies on the ground, you know, unbeknownst to many people who worry about that friendship between Putin and Xi Jinping. They say that they're almost like brothers, they share ice cream cones together, they're, you know, before the current tensions were seated side by side, like eating sandwiches, things like that, like almost wholesome, like this both of their states depiction of their relationship. It kind of belies the actual tensions, historical tension dimensions like the Sino-Soviet split, where because of diversions and how they wanted to apply ideas of socialism, they were basically estranged both countries. Russia kind of seeing itself as they should be the big brother in the relationship and China, you know, not taking that, the dynamics are very complicated to this day. And China's growing ambition on a world stage as a world leader, they're China's making kind of incursions into what Russia would consider its traditional sphere of influence in Central Asia, where China is, you know, promoting its Belt and Road project, investment project with many countries in Central Asia, kind of stopping short of military partnerships, which would wrinkle Russia. But there is, you know, speaking with Russian experts and people who understand what's happening there. There is a growing distrust, both on the local, on the ground level, that people like not happy with how partnership agreements with China are going in Russia, as well as on top levels where they worry that an increasingly powerful China, who is interested in the resources in Central Asia, will end up not being an ally. There's never been any serious developments of a Russia-China military alliance that doesn't exist. Some people argue that actually the most consistent force putting both countries together is what they have in common, which is their increasing tensions and conflict with Western powers, kind of pushing them together into this position where they should rely on each other economically, politically, because of their increasing dysfunctional relations with other major powers. Obviously the war has only cemented this, especially on Russia's side, where China is its only viable major trade partner. But it's kind of on shaky grounds, because both countries are so different, the way they had historically applied socialism, so different, and their goals right now are different. Russia wants to, it's definitely more expansionist, as we've seen. China, I analyzed state documents, speeches, and its vision for a different world order isn't exactly a dramatic change. China wants to adapt in existing international institutions to its benefit. Xi Jinping has talked many times about how at the United Nations, countries with different governance styles, he uses euphemisms, should be treated as equal. So regardless of your regime type, whether you have democracy or not, he wants these countries, you know, of course China being not a democracy to have equal weight and equal respect, and that if they basically crack down on the civil rights of their citizens, that shouldn't be a reason why they have less respect on the world stage. And China has actually been making a lot of efforts, it has a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council right now, making these kind of behind the scenes, not behind the scenes, but kind of not really showy efforts to have more influence at the UN, WHO. They want these institutions to continue to exist, they just want them to be more sympathetic and supportive of China's political system, whereas Russia is like such a disruptor, a lot more brazen in many ways than Beijing. So looking at how China's reaction to the war has been very muted, definitely not supporting the invasion, kind of isn't surprising to me because I kind of understand how that's not exactly the way of Beijing would like to operate to get more influence. It kind of wants to work within institutions as well as to use this economic clout to get that power. So their visions are quite different, and in a way perhaps China does have to ever hand because its economic strength is that much higher. So whereas militarily they're not very strong, so it's more subtle what Beijing is doing. Yeah, since there's what you might call what makes them perhaps kindred spirits in some respect, is you have what they call the century of humiliation from the opium wars to the Japanese invasion and the loss of dignity at the level of Chinese leadership. The collapse of the Soviet Union was quite a profound psychological scar. And so what you might call rebalancing, regaining their strength and their dignity in a system. If it meets with too much conformity imposed by the United States, it threatens that sense of renewed dignity. But I don't think they are kindred spirits across the spectrum. I think they have a similarity in one respect and a lot of differences. And as you mentioned, just the differences in the strategy of building the economy, perhaps with regard to the role of fossil fuels, they would be very different in this next phase with Russia being one of the largest owners of carbon producing energy. And China working very hard on renewables and understanding the scope and scale of what's required for humankind to live. Let me ask you, in that context of climate change, U.S. collaboration with China seems like a necessary condition for that to succeed. Yeah, so it's interesting because when one of the anecdotes in the book, one of the chapters talked about how China hosted a meeting of the G20 in Hangzhou and Xi Jinping really tried to take the stance where he was, I was watching him like addressing these world leaders standing up, kind of almost smacking the podium saying like we can't just be a talk shop and need to take action on climate change. And I think it's kind of a mix of strategy where climate is one of these issues where China can legitimately position and buy for leadership. And it's something that the world logically would want to encourage because China is where a lot of world manufacturing happens. China's commitment to fighting climate change can make a big difference. China and the U.S. being the top carbon emitters. The U.S. kind of sometimes tries to say, oh, there's more in China, but that's not very upfront about how a lot of that manufacturing in China is for American international companies. So, you know, people say like there's all these things going on where you see this wolf warrior diplomacy going on from China's foreign ministry where the diplomats who used to, you know, act diplomatic are now using platforms like Twitter to, you know, utter all sorts of kind of threats and really just kind of almost mirroring some of that really almost juvenile nationalism against that they see in the States. So, but, you know, in all of this, Chinese counterparts are showing up to meetings, especially on things like climate, for the most part. She didn't show up for the latest. Let me look at this up actually before I say. So what makes people worried, you know, up until to this point, you know, Chinese diplomats officials have showed up to all sorts of international summits, particularly, you know, seeming to take a general role in wanting to talk about how countries work together to fight climate change. But there was a point, you know, last year in November when she did not show up to the COP 26 climate conference, instead of in attending in person, you know, giving a pre recorded video address. So there was discussion there like even for climate has have tensions reached a point where, you know, China is not showing up. That is a, you know, one of the reasons why the idea that the US and others could kind of fight China by isolating it. It's just not really realistic. You know, for something so existential like trying to prevent the worsening of the climate crisis, there has to be cooperation internationally with China. There's kind of no way around it, you know, so, you know, she not showing up to climate summit, it was kind of a bastard by Biden and others. She has not made any major climate pledges. So that's something to continue to monitor whether the growing tensions around China and other countries will continue to end up possibly affecting its pretty relatively friendly discussions so far on some issues like climate. Part one of the themes of my book is that I've noticed that a lot of countries felt that they could have kind of more kind of tricky relations with China on some tracks, such as discussions on human rights for an interference, but then continue to have kind of friendly relations on other tracks like on economics on trade on climate. Canada found that when at the height of anger about what happened with Huawei, Meng Wanzhou's arrest, you know, that stalled like China put tariffs on Canadian goods like pork and canola that kind of separate tracks, thinking kind of ended up, you know, cracking. So that was a shock to many people. So we'll have to see how what do you think as an economist, like, can economic relations be and conversations on things aren't political, like climate change on the most part, be shielded from these increasing political tensions? I guess I would say if the political tensions weren't there, it would be easier. But I think perhaps knowing that the end game could be the extermination of humankind creates a compelling force in the other direction. But let's take an area that's not considered, which I might call fatal, the development of Africa. We can see China putting a lot of energy into building roads and engaging their Americans being quite concerned. Technological platforms. I guess to start with the African continent by the projections of the International Office of Migration will house 5 billion people by 2075 with climate change and being an equatorial region subsistence farming will not be as available. You have 5 billion people. The world as I'm sure you're sensitive to has been quite difficult about what I call digesting large scale migration. East Asian development model. Manufacturing, learning by doing a little bit of tariffs and then export is harder to do with global supply chains and automation. So people are very concerned about an African development strategy that coheres. But the Chinese appear to be what you might call reaching out to build platforms and build structures, ports, highways, various facilities that contribute to that. It reminds me a little bit of your chapter on Greece where with the resources they come and you'll collaborate because they're contributing to a better life. I net did a conference in 2018 at Beta Beijing University with Justin Lin and many African leading economists and thinkers from Ethiopia from many, many different places attended enthusiastically. They were very curious. So I guess I'm asking because people from India, people from the United States and some people from Europe seem very skeptical. How do you see what's happening with China and Africa? What some would say cynically is it's just an attempt to grab natural resources. Yeah. So the Belt and Road is a major focus in my book because like I mentioned, China has a lot of, you know, tools as disposal to increase its international influence that aren't militaristic. They have, you know, they're, you know, relatively strong economy. They have the funds to invest all over the world. And it's, I think what's missed is that a lot of this funding for investment and trade infrastructure isn't just kind of like a play for influence. It's not, we will help build roads and ports and in exchange we get support at the UN. We get people like Grace after China's state-owned company did take over its major port in Athens. Grace did use its votes in the UN to start with Beijing 2016 and 2017, you know, vetoing high-profile criticisms of human rights in China. But it's not the, you know, the story that China is doing this primarily and completely just for this kind of political support and influence. China's state-owned industries are struggling because they're so huge and so inefficient. They need more markets. They need more projects for them to work on. And China needs to have, you know, robust trade routes. It wants to open up trade all around the world, especially with tensions with major Western powers. It wants to increase it and improve the trade infrastructure of smaller, you know, more economically weaker countries because then they can trade with China. Or China's shipping companies have that security of having those trade routes open, like in the Mediterranean. So it's not just they're doing this to just for, purely for political power. And this is actually, you know, their investments in Africa have predated this idea of the Belt and Road Project, which is so important. It's now, it's been written into China's constitution. You know, some say what happened in Africa should kind of, you know, tell the future of how these newer investments in different places will pan out. In some parts of Africa, there's people who have been angry about how some of these projects worked out, where there were promises of, or expectations that, you know, African labor would be utilized. But in fact, many of these Chinese state companies brought in Chinese workers. So a lot of the benefits that criticism went didn't really apply to local African economies. More criticisms is that in exchange for building, improving an airport or highway that will disintegrate and, you know, need repairs. And in the future, China getting in exchange access to natural resources, like things like rare minerals, farmland, you know, those are finite resources in Africa that they're giving up. But it is really complicated because it's, I wouldn't characterize it, and I do reject the idea that this is colonialism, because there's a lot of proactiveness on different sides of all of these different partnerships under China's kind of international investment umbrella. It's more, I think in many cases, including with the idea of foreign interference, where China's, you know, police forces are intimidating local people or trying to co-op local politicians in the world. A lot of the missing puzzle piece is what you can do to be smarter about this is to have that understanding of other countries' experiences, what China's motivations are, how it benefits from different deals. So that you're going into these negotiations with more information rather than, you know, in my research, places that have kind of are in a position where they're more desperate, where they may have been burned by some of the austerity measures that the EU, you know, World Bank might impose in exchange for loans, like in Greece, Greece's case, where they turn to China and, you know, local media and politicians kind of put China on the platform where they're almost a savior. In Italy, I kind of traced Xi Jinping's 2019 tour of the country, where in the wake of his tour, Italian media would just point to random projects like this factory that's going under, this port all over Italy, all these ports, they could be, you know, taken over by Chinese investment, and that was a positive thing because Italy's, you know, debt was soaring. But a lot, I spoke to the mayor of Palermo, he said, there's no, there's nothing about, they've actually had no conversations with China about, you know, turning over its port. It was a lot of hot air. So I think it's important for, to point out when there's a reverse when China is not kind of this bogeyman, but China is almost this very, very positive savior of struggling economies. I mean, that's not healthy either. In the, I guess since we're coming down the home stretch here, you're seeing a lot of things you've called out, a lot of untruths. I want to start with inside China. A lot of people show you statistics of significant improvement. You would think the need for authoritarian control would be diminished because people would be celebrating the success of economic development. I saw a movie recently by a woman named Jessica Kingdon called Ascension. It was nominated as a documentary in the Oscars this year. And it characterized a slightly different sense of there, that there is, if you will, a plutocracy forming inside China. And a large part of the population is employed in servitude. I didn't know if this was, how would I say, anecdotally she can produce some elements of that. But whether that's a vivid portrait of a hierarchical society that's very controlled vertically or whether it's an exception where the broader base prosperity is much, much greater. But what do you see, what do you think people are worried about real estate overhangs and so forth? What do you see as the next few years inside China and is the well-being, material well-being, psychological well-being on a constructive course or is it in jeopardy? I think China partly to explain how insecure it behaves on the political world stage. A lot of it can be explained by the pressures it faces internally. Things that are really basic like its population crisis where it's had its one-child policy and then a two-child policy to try to control births. As a result, they have a rapidly aging population and a few births. Even after Chinese lawmakers relaxed the one-child policy, people didn't want to have more than one child because life was so hard for parents. Even just raising one child. It's really ironic because if you visited, lived in a place like Beijing or Shanghai or Hong Kong, it seems like you wouldn't guess it's a socialist country. It seems like it's capitalism on steroids. All of this pursuit of wealth and just real estate just going through the roof with no seemingly very little control. When I lived in Beijing, I had to move almost every year, sometimes less than every year because my rent kept getting hiked. It's not like in Canada where you can only raise a rent by 2%. It would go up by a lot and very expensive. It's hard for someone to have more than one child because it's such a competitive society. There's only so many universities trying to just provide for that child to possibly succeed and get that university spot. Parents have to go back breaking days in whatever fields they're doing to try to do that. China is really facing increasing difficulties because it's become a place that's so unequal. There are shrinking opportunities for people to feel like they can climb up the ladder, improve their family situations. An idea you refer to is that in exchange for economic prosperity and stability, the Chinese people generally support the status quo. There's still throughout the year dozens of labor protests all over China, factory workers, disgruntled workers, people looking for their pensions that happen that don't really get a lot of media coverage. So there's these tensions kind of shaking Chinese society and I think things like basic mental health have gotten a lot worse under the COVID-zero policies of China where basically their borders have been closed pretty strictly. That of course has impacted businesses that rely on international exchanges. A lot of world multinational companies have left China or their employees have left. So it's kind of in a place where I think these COVID has only exacerbated some of the internal tensions and pressures and made people all the more starting to be more and more critical of how their government has been handling things. So unfortunately, any time there's kind of pushback, Xi Jinping, China's current leadership, instead of kind of having that space for more public feedback and government response, there's been more crackdowns, there's been new laws. More people are arrested, more journalists are arrested. I have friends like Sophia Huang, a journalist in southern China who was on her way to study in the UK. I guess her crime was to be quite supportive of women who suffered from sexual harassment. She's been arrested since September. So I think it's not a very kind of positive trajectory where there's more and more reason for some internal dissatisfaction. But again, there's increasing kind of crackdowns as a result. Definitely COVID has added to those tensions. On the most part, I think it is a place where a lot of people aren't really daring to speak up. So it's hard to get a sense of how far they might be willing to go to kind of express their dissatisfaction. I think for the most part, people who are pragmatic, even people who have been outspoken in the past as activists or intellectuals, they're kind of staying quiet, they're electing to stay quiet. It's unsure if there could be some sort of breaking point where some of these kind of voices that have fallen silent might be more active again. It's, you know, I think the near-term future, I find, like, there's a lot of nervousness. There's nervousness from within China about what will happen. Also, China's relation with other countries, whether it will, you know, be increasingly aggressive towards its claims on Taiwan and South China Sea. Right now it's like a time of tensions and uncertainty and worry that some sort of sparking incident will make things worse, might lead to war, might lead to, you know, some sort of tragedy that people don't want to see. So, but, you know, to end on a more positive note, when all of the younger people I've met in China, they're so, on the most part, so not ideologically driven. They don't have those kind of historical traumas that I think the current crop of Chinese leaders have experienced, such as during the Cultural Revolution, you know, anger at the West for the century of humiliation by colonial powers. You know, young people today, they don't have that kind of trauma, I think. I try to provide that historical snapshot of what China was like in the 60s and 70s, because I think it does inform just overreactions that we see from the Chinese states. But young people, they haven't had those direct experiences of feeling so aggrieved and so worried about any kind of turmoil or, you know, disagreement in their own society. So I think eventually they will be the Chinese next leaders. So I do feel optimistic and perhaps like the 20-year mark into the future. But people worry about what might happen until then. Last thought for today. If I called you tomorrow and we had an invitation to visit the White House, what five things would you tell President Biden he should do to make the world a better place in light of your writing and the tensions that we see in the world now? I think, you know, I have had the opportunity to, you know, provide feedback to different government bodies since the book was out. And, you know, something I say is that just make use of your intellectual capital, your knowledge capital in that you already have to address, you know, these gaps in your understanding. You know, American experts of Chinese descent should be seen as Americans and not stereotyped according to their ethnic background and pushed out of these, you know, policy making circles. There should be an infusion of federal funding to support Chinese language and China Studies programs in your universities. So you foster this kind of knowledge gathering of the future policymakers. You should bring back the Fulbright program of educational exchanges between American and Chinese students, professionals and researchers and reinstate visas so that you can, you know, make use of the Chinese expertise. And treating them as individuals and not as some sort of just counterpart of the Chinese state is important because, you know, the more inclusive American and other institutions become where we're addressing our kind of deep seated racism and xenophobia. And that's where we can get people with their life experiences and expertise in China into the rooms to make better policies to actually explain what is happening. Instead of having these very almost cartoonishly hawkish views dominate, more people will be empowered to challenge them with nuance and with their real understanding. Well, Joanna, you're an extraordinary beacon. I want to emphasize to my young scholars that not only do you have imagination and insight, ability to express things, but you have an extraordinary endowment of courage. To live as an Asian woman between the U.S. and China reporting on all these things so vividly, so courageously is extraordinary.