 I want to welcome everybody again and Marty Farrell was born in Winona, Minnesota and graduated from Winona Senior High School. He earned his BA in Political Science from DePaul University in Green Castle, Indiana and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago in International Relations and Political Science respectively. He is a veteran of 45 years of college and university teaching the last 41 at Ripon College. The author of over 50 peer-reviewed works, he led student and alumni study abroad experiences eight times and has studied and done research in 45 countries on five continents. He has served as a fellow of the East West Center of the University of Hawaii, president of the North Central College of Latin Americanists and executive director of the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, which named him peace educator of the year in 2015. Also a veteran of public service, Marty recently retired after 28 years as a Fond du Lac County Board Supervisor the last 16 years as Board Chair. So thank you and let's all welcome. Thank you very much, Judy and thank you to the library of course, Jeanie and her staff who help arrange this, American Association of University Women for sponsoring. Appreciate all of that and thank you for coming tonight. I'm pleased that you're interested in current affairs and we'll try to have a good session here. On a personal note it's always a pleasure to come to Sheboygan, such a wonderful community. We come here just for fun. I don't just come here when I'm being paid. No, wonderful museums, restaurants, what you've done with the lakefront and I don't even golf either, imagine that. Tremendous golf as we also know but thank you for welcoming me to your wonderful community here. So our topic tonight is China and the Quad and the Quad is not exactly a household name perhaps, not to the same extent that for instance NATO would be, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Quad is a more recent arrangement. It doesn't have the status of a full-fledged treaty organization but it is something that is getting more attention and has been revived. That's probably the most important thing from its earlier beginnings back almost 20 years ago. So let's see if I can operate this. So we can kind of see on the left here Quad 1.0, the creation traced back to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which as you know was the greatest natural disaster we've had in many, many years with hundreds of thousands of people being killed. At that time Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan proposed that there be a grouping of like-minded countries of the Asia Pacific region to try to bring relief to the tsunami area. And so this was the beginning of the Quad alliance although again it's not technically an alliance but US, Japan, Australia and India. Now the red lines indicate formal treaties pre-existing. So US and Japan, US and Australia. But the others blue arrows did not have previous treaty obligations or agreements. The first informal meeting was in 2007. There were military exercises already in that year as well. But about that time interest started to wane. There was a change of government in Australia. There were other changes in government. Mr. Abe resigned as Japanese Prime Minister although he was later to come back between 2012 and 2017. And as many of you I'm sure are aware, Mr. Abe was actually assassinated this past summer in Nara by an assassin who had a grudge based on apparently some ties with the Unification Church which the assassin thought had cheated his mother out of family money. But Shinzo Abe was always a great advocate for the Quad and for renewing their activities. And so the proposal to revive the Quad began in 2017 and then in 2020 Australia joined the trilateral naval exercise known as Malabar exercises. Quad meters met virtually in 2021 and then in September, the first in person meeting and then this year. They also met in May of this year in person. So there has been a revival of interest in the Quad. Now part of the increased interest from the point of view of India is the fact that in 2020 there were violent border clashes between India and China. And you can see on this map, these are several disputed areas in the border between China and India and somewhere around 40 soldiers on each side were killed during these clashes which was the first actual violent clashes that they had had in several decades. Now this is extremely remote area. This is Kashmir. So also Pakistan and India have differences over where the line should be drawn here as well. But so do China and India. Also down here in Assam, this is also controlled by India but claimed by China. So this is what gave impetus to India to renew its interest in possibly making some arrangements with these other countries with interest in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans to possibly counter Chinese interest there. Now China focusing here has settled several border disputes. China is very well situated in terms of geography. Robert Kaplan feels it has the best geographic position of any country in the world but on the other hand it does have 14 neighboring countries on its borders and they don't get along with many of them. And they had a large number of border disputes. Those are all the blue countries. The green countries are the ones that are still remaining. For purposes of our interest tonight, which is China's ability to project power into the Pacific toward Taiwan, toward Japan, toward the South China Sea. This will be our main emphasis. But it's very important to realize that these difficult border areas require China to devote military resources to these areas that they then do not have available for the naval projection that they're also interested in. So there are up to 400,000 troops that China has committed to go to the Indian border dispute areas. They can transport as many as almost half a million troops there through the mechanisms that they've established. And interestingly, they also, China here on the north Korea has about 180,000 troops stationed right there. That's, you know, that's a lot. Why? North Korea isn't hostile. It's one of the few countries that, China is one of the few countries that can get along with North Korea at all. Why does China have 180,000 troops there? Because in case the regime collapses, they are there to prevent a mass introduction of North Koreans fleeing a failed state or a war with South Korea or whatever else might happen. It's there to keep North Koreans out. That's what they're there for. But again, that's a big commitment of troops. So China is not able to focus everything down in this area, but that is the main area of concern to the Quad, although India obviously is very interested in these areas. So here we see the Quad kind of set up as a rectangle. Now again, South Korea is not part of it, but there's always talk about possibly expanding the Quad. South Korea would be a very logical one to add into these discussions. But it is not an alliance, it does not have a secretariat, it does not have a real organization. It certainly does not have its own military forces, but it's an organization for discussion and comparing interests. It's also considered by themselves that they are stakeholders for a free, open, prosperous, rule-based, and inclusive Indo-Pacific. So those are the positive things that they stand for. They want to maintain navigation. And again, as I'm sure you're aware, these waters here carry a tremendously high percentage of the world's trade. Look at all the manufacturing powers that are sending goods out and bringing raw materials in. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, China itself, increasingly Vietnam. In fact, Taiwan and South Korea alone manufacture over 40 percent of all the world's semi-conductors today. And I think we know how important those are in today's world, in every conceivable device practically. So these are, again, some of the other ideas or concepts that the Quad emphasizes in their discussions. But again, it's not all military, it's not all geopolitical. So disaster relief is important. Quality infrastructure, counterterrorism, prosperity, rule-based order, secure digital connectivity, something we still need more of here in Wisconsin. And those are, again, some of the positive things they're trying to emphasize. So we'll turn to China now for a few minutes. As I mentioned, Robert Kaplan believes that with its continental mass and huge population, its climatic variation, 9,000-mile coastline adjacent to the main shipping lanes of the Pacific, China occupies the world's most advantageous position. And so that's a huge advantage. And for most of its history, China was a dominant power, certainly in East Asia, based on those things. Its location, its huge population, its wealth, its military power, its governance under the emperors, at least in the case of many of the dynasties. Also they were a leader in technological innovation. And I'm not even going to read all of the items there, but those are just some of the things that the Chinese invented and developed that later came to be so important in the rest of the world. However, around 1800, in part using borrowed Chinese technology, Europe underwent an industrial revolution, ironically, without a counterpart in China. And as China fell behind the European powers, but also Japan later, it was successively victimized by these powers. So the United Kingdom and the Opium Wars of the 1830s and 40s, later the French, and later in the 19th century, as Japan was industrializing, they were able to inflict great losses on China. And then finally in 1931, actually Japan invaded China, occupied the eastern third of the country, committed atrocities such as the rape of Nanjing, and continued to occupy the eastern half of China till the end of World War II. Now at that time, as you probably know, the nationalist government in China under Zheng Kai-shek was challenged by the Communist Red Army led by Mao Tse-tung. By 1949, the communists came to power. In fact, it was October 1st, 1949, they just celebrated that in the People's Republic, while the Guomindang, that's the opposing political party of Zheng Kai-shek, retreated to Taiwan. And that is not the party that rules, but it is the regime established by that party that rules the island of Taiwan and several surrounding islands. Now if we look at the People's Republic of China again briefly, their foreign policy first aligned with the Soviet Union, but that broke up after a little over 10 years, and had a revolutionary foreign policy as articulated by Lin Biao. That's when they then underwent the Cultural Revolution. But in 1972, they sought a reconciliation with the United States, Henry Kissinger, who's still alive, and then later Richard Nixon visited China and sought a rapprochement with them in order to counter Soviet power in Asia, and that then culminated in full diplomatic recognition in 1979. Starting just before that, 1978, to the present, this is a reform era under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, during which China opened itself to the world, got rid of the old Soviet economic system, and became one of the preeminent trading and manufacturing nations joining the World Trade Organization in 2002. And their tremendous economic growth since then is what makes them a power to be reckoned with again for the first time in 200 years. So here we see on the left, I know this only goes up to 2004, but I like it because it shows the privatization of farmland here, the starting of the special economic zones where they allowed foreign investment, and then expanded those in the early 90s, and how these reforms just, you know, propelled this tremendous upward growth. And if we look here, bring it more up to the present day, we see that China since, if you can read the fine print, even since 1989, have increased their gross domestic product by over 14 times. You know, again, dwarfing the growth of any other major countries, either now or even really historically. This is what makes China, you know, dangerous. This is why they're now a power to be reckoned with. They now have more of a basis to reassert what they feel is their traditional role as a leading power, certainly in Asia, if not globally. But we have some quotes, Napoleon, even as early as 1817, said, let China sleep when she wakes, she will shake the world. In the Pentagon during the Cold War, there was a sign that if we ever faced a real enemy, we'd be in deep trouble. What they meant by that was the Soviet Union was actually not that impressive. Yes, they put a satellite in orbit, Sputnik, but by the 60s, their economy was stagnating. I could sit here for all the time we have left and tell you how inefficient the Soviet economy was. In other words, when you have the government ordering factories, which they own, to make glass, and you say, I say to you, your quota for glass for the years is, you know, 500,000 tons of glass, well, in order to make that quota, how are you going to make the glass? Are you going to make big, heavy, thick panes, or are you going to make small, thin panes? You're going to make big, heavy, thick panes, whether anybody can use them or not. So I made my quota. You've got 500,000 tons of useless, ultra-thick, heavy glass panes. Oh, now I'm a planner. I say, no, we'll do it by numbers of panes. Now I want 500 million panes. I don't care how much they weigh. Now what kind of pans are you going to get? Very thin, brittle ones that are going to break. What is the problem? There is no market there. There's no buyer. The government is just telling you, OK, our people knew this couldn't work. We just had to outlast them. But this is what Deng Xiaoping understood. He understood that the Soviet system could not work. And that is why he had visited Japan. He had visited France in his youth. He saw what other countries were doing and what actually worked. So he made this slogan, I don't care what color the cat is. I only care if the cat can catch mice. So I don't care if it's red or white or black, let it catch mice. That's what they did. And that's why they're a power to be reckoned with today. Henry Kissinger, again, went to visit China in 1971, said if anybody had shown me a picture of Beijing today, I would have said that's absolutely impossible. And I can echo that. I wasn't there in 1971, but I was there in 1981. And this is what Shanghai looked like at that time. This is called the Bund area. Some of you may have been there. Anyone been to Shanghai here? Yes? Yes? And this is the Pudong area, which was just rotting wharves and wasteland basically at that time. And that's what it is today. Pudong, major city, has its own airport. And that is what has been built up in just a matter of a few decades. So Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister of Australia, said that China's economic explosion is like the English Industrial Revolution, the global information revolution, combusting simultaneously and compressed not into 300 years, but 30. And Lee Kuan Yew, the late prime minister of Singapore for many years, says this is not possible to pretend this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world. So this is the turnaround that China has seen. And now, rightly or wrongly, they want to reassert what they think is their role. And here, again, I'm not going to go through all of this in detail, but is a peaceful rise of China possible? Or is it an existential threat to the West or even the rest of the world, depending on your viewpoint? Some would say, and this would be the Chinese themselves, that no, we want a peaceful rise. We do not seek hegemony over other countries. When China was dominant in Asia for all those centuries, when the Chinese state was strong, it was peaceful, usually. They weren't out trying to conquer other countries. They could have. They had a fleet in the Ming dynasty that was capable of sailing and did sail all the way to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. But they did not attempt to conquer any of those countries or the ones in between. And these were huge fleets. These made Columbus's fleet look like child's play. They had over 28,000 soldiers on these boats in the early 1400s. So the Chinese would say, some historians would say, they could have been conquerors, but they chose not to. And today, they are still also capable of a peaceful rise. But then you have realists such as John Meersheimer on the right-hand side who say, no, anytime you have a rising power like this, it is going to seek to maximize its self-interest and it will try to maximize its power. And if that's at the expense of others, then it will be at the expense of the others. So I think, again, we have a lot of detail here and I wanna leave plenty of time for questions, but these are just some of the initiatives China has taken using its newfound wealth and economic power to expand its influence and not just in Asia, but actually in Europe as well, Africa, even Latin America. So these are just some of the details. I put my email up and anybody who would like a copy of the PowerPoint, I'd be happy to send it to you. And I won't even require a quiz. Okay, that's just a schema of the Belt and Road Initiative. So these are just the outlines of new railroads, highways, pipelines, port facilities that China is cooperating with other countries to establish to really tie these areas all together and of course tie them to the Chinese economy. So going through Central Asia all the way into Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and even Latin America, not shown here. Now there are some problems, you know, again, investing money doesn't mean it's gonna pay off. So I can build a railroad, but if there aren't any passengers, I haven't really gained anything. And there are some problems with some of their projects. So I don't wanna leave the impression that everything is roses with the Belt and Road Initiative. Nevertheless, it is extremely ambitious. And again, some of you I'm sure are familiar with the Marshall Plan, which the United States committed in today's dollars, many billions of dollars to try to rebuild the European economy so that it wouldn't fall into the hands of the communists on the one hand, but would also be able to trade with the United States and that we could get materials from them and send ours to them as well. The Belt and Road Initiative, even at the very beginning, was 12 times as big as the Marshall Plan in terms of China's financial commitment. 12 Marshall Plans in inflation adjusted dollars. China's also been taking some initiatives to expand its influence into the Southwestern Pacific. So Wang Yi is the foreign minister of China. Last year, he went on a tour. Some of you are familiar or may have remembered that with the Solomon Islands here, he was able to get a new security agreement. They have been trying to establish them with some of these other island nations out here, including Papua New Guinea, Kurabadi. Now again, keep in mind, the US, we have several holdings out here too. Marshall Islands, Guam, a number of others, and so does France. France still has territories here that it controls. And China right now only has that one agreement. They've been turned down by some others. But the point is, they are reaching out. Even East Timor down here, they are trying to cultivate ties. Ultimately, a naval base, possibly, that's obviously one thing they would be interested in. And this is again, a way to project their power even well away from their own coastline. Australia is very dependent on China economically. There's one reason why Australia cooled on the Quad during the original version of it, Quad 1.0. Because if you see here, starting especially in the mid to late aught, the Australians began to sell even more and more and more goods to China. A lot of raw materials for China's rapid industrialization and economic growth. And so they didn't want to get on China's wrong side. And that was one reason for dropping out of the Quad by Australia back in around 2008. If you read the article in the book by Kevin Rudd, some people try to blame him for doing that but he tries to blame somebody else. So they're not taking credit for it. But I think the other thing that's very important here is that between then and now, Australia's dependence on China for selling goods to them hasn't gone down. It's almost over 40% of their exports right now. Just one country alone. But I think is what hasn't happened in China that is also affecting people and making them more willing to bandwagon against China to band together to say that Chinese influence is something that needs to be countered. And what are those things? Number one, with the economic growth, there was hope that China might liberalize or even democratize. And we did have precedents for that. Taiwan, for instance, that was a military dictatorship for decades after the Guomindang went there in 1949. They had 38 years of martial law. That's a record except I think Syria recently broke it unfortunately. But it had been a record length of time. But with the economic growth that they enjoyed, a middle class started to emerge and they started to demand individual freedoms and a demand that they be allowed to select their own leaders and not have them imposed on them. And the same in South Korea that went through military dictatorship for many years after the end of the Korean War. They too democratized gradually over time and there was a hope that China would do that. But it hasn't happened. In fact, China's gotten more repressive. And when we look at what China's done just last year to Hong Kong, China seems to have totally abrogated its solemn promise made in 1997 that they would allow Hong Kong to have its existing system for 50 years. Well, 50 years is a long way from up and they have for all intents and purposes ended the Hong Kong system and they are imposing their own system and repressing dissent, arresting people that publish newspapers they don't like, kidnapping bookstore owners that have books that they don't like. So China's credibility, which they also extended that same promise to Taiwan. Oh, just join us. Just rejoin sovereignty under our auspices and you can keep your system for 50 years. Well, you didn't honor that in Hong Kong. So why would you honor it with us? And that's just one example. Also what's going on in Xinjiang province with imprisoning up to a million Uyghurs, if not more, and harshly repressing their religion and their culture as well as the same similar measures taken in Tibet. So the idea that China would be able to become a more benign regime and gradually democratize in the way that others had, even in the same region, with very similar cultures and overlapping value systems, those are no longer seriously entertained. And now we're looking at Xi Jinping, who probably in the Communist Party meetings that are going on right now is going to be named ruler for life in effect, if not in word and document. And so that's another part of the equation here. It's not, it's in part China's growing strength, which realists will say will always somehow be translated into power potential, but it's also the fact that China hasn't mellowed. And if anything has become more repressive, that is also reviving interest in the Quad. And as we'll see, not just that. If it were just the Quad, then that would not be sufficient to bandwagon against everything I've said about China's growing power. But if we look at some of the, again, competing areas this would be in the East China Sea. This is mainly between Japan and China over the Senkaku Islands, which are here, which are currently administered by Japan, but claimed by China. So Japan is involved in disputed areas here. If we move to Taiwan, we could spend our entire evening just talking about this. But one thing I want to point out is that, again, China claims that Taiwan is a renegade province, not an independent country. And the United States has backed that idea of the one China policy since 1979. But I wanted to point out as well, Taiwan controls not only the main island, but islands is close to just a couple of miles off China's shores, here and here and here. And by the way, these are loaded with weapons. That's not a place to go to have a picnic. They're loaded with weapons because China is also loading up its coastline with weapons, service to air missiles, surface to surface cruise missiles. This is one of the most heavily armed areas in the whole world, and it's definitely a major flashpoint. This is where the next big war could start. And President Biden was taken to task the other day a few weeks ago for saying that when he was asked, will the United States come to Taiwan's aid militarily if China attacked? And he said, yes, yes, we would. And by official policy, we don't have, we have not made that ironclad commitment. It's not like NATO, we have agreements with Taiwan, but it is not an ironclad agreement to defend them if they are attacked. But it would not be easy for China to conquer Taiwan even if it did attack today. And I'll go into that a little bit later. But now down here, we have another area of dispute, and again, it looks kind of complicated, right? But the red line, that's a so-called nine-dash line. That's what China says they have the right to control in the South China Sea, all of that, that whole big thing, that whole big red thing there. What's that based on? Oh, history, the Ming Dynasty controlled that, the Qing Dynasty controlled that, so we should be able to control that. No, that's not how it works. And when they took it to the International Court of Justice in 2014, they unanimously lost. No, China, you're entitled to the same 200-mile exclusive economic zone that everybody else is, and that's all, only 200 miles off your coast. That's what all these other lines are. See the yellow, that's Malaysia, which owns Borneo, or the northern part here, as well as their own main peninsula. And Brunei gets their green part there, 200 miles out. So, but this is what China is claiming, and they're actually taking steps to try to, I don't know if conquer is the right word, but see they're building small installations on some of these tiny specks of islands, or they're even creating new islands, or they're bringing barge filled with sand and dump it on a few rocks and say, oh, now here's an island, and we claim it. But the thing to understand is, here's my main point, and this is one of the key points of the entire presentation. China's neighbors are not just taking this. So it's not just up to the Quad or the United States to resist them. All these neighboring nations are also resisting. So they're claiming their pieces of rocks. That's what these other colors are. So the red ones China has claimed, the others other countries have claimed. Now have they started fighting over them yet? Yes, sometimes they are firing on each other. Here, this shows you again, I'm sorry, I know it's hard to read down there, but this is again, just to show you that these are all those little reefs and shoals and rock piles and things in that area, but they're being claimed by all these different countries. China's not the only one. China's being contested. And so it's not just up to the Quad or the United States or Japan or any other single power. The neighboring powers have their own self-interest and they're willing to actively resist unreasonable demands being made by China. Okay, we just have a few more to go here, but I am gonna talk a little bit about military balances now in the slides, but here I just wanted to caution you that can be very misleading. It's very hard on paper to map out how a conflict is actually gonna work because if you look here, Ukraine versus Russia, Russia was ranked number two, Ukraine number 22, over four times as many soldiers, the defense budget 12 times more, aircraft 100 times more, tanks 12,000 to only 2,500. Okay, you go down the list. It's extremely imbalanced in favor of Russia. How's it working out? Doesn't appear it's working out that well. So why am I saying this? I'm saying I'm gonna show you some things on paper, but that's not necessarily how it's gonna work out in the real world. What else matters? Well, for one thing, I think we're in an era in which defense has an advantage. That hasn't always been the case. World War II, the new tanks and the very speedy mobile weaponry of World War II gave advantage to the offense. That's how Hitler and the German army were able to capture so much of Europe. So fast in a Blitzkrieg. But World War I was much more defense was in the ascendancy and what happened there? Nobody could advance on anybody and they slog it out in the trenches for several years. I'm not saying that was any more fun, but I'm just saying these are different weapons systems. And I think today we're in an era where defense has the advantage. So Russia had all those tanks. How many of them were disabled? By one shoulder-held weapon that the Ukrainians got from the United States or somebody else. How many of those tanks were disabled by drones? Any of you follow the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict of last year that was decided by drones? Azerbaijan bought drones from Turkey and were able to knock out all the Armenian tanks and artillery pieces or at least a large number of them and prevail. So that's one thing. And also Ukraine is defending its own territory. Now that affects motivation and willingness to fight, which is also very important. Now I can't prove this and I'm not asking for this to be tested. I would rather not be tested because war is tremendously destructive. Look at the millions and billions of dollars of damage Russia has done to Ukraine. Lobbying missiles and bombs, just blowing up cities and all kinds of things. Just tremendous, it's easy to do damage. It's so much harder to rebuild. So I would, preventing the outbreak of war, it would be my number one priority, but that obviously cannot include surrender or anything near. So we have to figure out a way to stand up for our interests and the interests of our allies and friends, but try to minimize the likelihood that war actually breaks out. Now again, if you take the total quad economy, it's much bigger than China's despite their growth, defense spending. And again, in total, the quad has more. So the quad alone has some advantages over China when it comes to these forces and the economy behind them. But we have the tyranny of distance, so we're a long way away. So that, can we project, could we project our power at the right time and place? That's another question. But China has its own problems with distance, but again, we don't have time to go into all of this, but part of what China wants to do is called A2AD. That's a new phrase that we use now sometimes, means anti-access area denial. So China's first objective is to deny an adversary access within this first island chain. So they want to be able to keep anybody else out. Now that does include Taiwan, so that's an issue. But then the second island chain, this is Guam. By the way, the North Korean missile was tested today, it was shot over Japan, but it had a range capable of hitting Guam. That was the point of it. That was threatening US base in the area. That was saying we can hit this if we want to. So I'm not, again, I'm not happy about that, but that was the reality of it. Okay, so there's a lot of detail there, but essentially, but this is how the United States could counter these capabilities and platforms of China. So we have ways of countering these, at least within the outer island chain. Okay, this is kind of a scorecard. It's a few years old, but the majority of the green color shows that even when it comes to an invasion of Taiwan or a Spratly Islands conflict, US forces are green. We still have advantages over China. On the other hand, I've heard of war games, exercises that we have done in this area regarding a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which the Taiwanese defense minister recently said could happen as early as 2025. And the war games that I have as they have been portrayed by our own Department of Defense in the war games, trying to counter an invasion by China of Taiwan, we lost 18 and we won zero. But obviously this analysis is a little bit different. These things are hard to say. Okay, right now military projections look favorable to China. But again, the problem here is it's only looking at the US alone. These are just the forward stationed US forces. What about all the other countries? The Quad countries, the Southeast Asian countries, Japan. Japan's new prime minister has said he wants to double the Japanese defense budget. Now at one time, we didn't really want that. We didn't want to remilitarize Japan. But with everything I've just said about China and not behaving themselves on top of everything else, now I don't think we're gonna be opposed to Japan doubling its military budget. But here's the key one for the whole thing and a little more hopeful note. Yes, China's been increasing their military spending, but so have all of their neighbors. See, they're not just sitting back and doing nothing. Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, all increasing their budgets even faster than China. So it is not just the US alone standing there. It is not just the Quad nations alone standing there. What we have to do is work with all the other nations that also have an interest in not letting China totally dominate this whole region, which they don't have a right to do. And the world court has told them they don't have that right. And again, you can see China's neighbors are responding by building submarines, surface ships, in some cases, exceeding. So again, here's again, there's a lot of detail here which we don't have time to go over. But again, yes, China has some big numbers here, but if you add these other ones together, you get some pretty big numbers also. Now, could they all cooperate and work together against China? Well, in some cases, yes, especially down here in the South China Sea. Also, China has its own problems of distance. These countries are much closer to these areas. Their navies can get there much more effectively. China is about 1,000 miles away. And so it's not all to their advantage by any means in some of these potential conflicts. Couple other points now on China's limitations, that unprecedented economic growth is definitely slowing down. Whoops, and as you can see, it has been really since 2007. And yes, we have COVID recovery, but now back down again. So their economy isn't growing as fast as it was for those earlier years and decades. Secondly, they've got a real demographic cliff that they're about to fall off because they had that one child policy in effect for over 30 years. That meant a relatively small number of children being born. And what does that mean now? Aging population. So as we look forward here, we see this is the age group over 65, greatly expanding, the workforce contracting, the youth not expanding. This is gonna be very expensive for China. And this is money that they are not gonna have for military purposes. Also, the fact that it's a dictatorship and has to repress so many different groups in both Xinjiang and Tibet, as I mentioned, but in other parts of the country, or repress dissent in general because they won't tolerate it. Their spending on police and internal security is now greater than the spending on their military by several tens of millions of dollars. And that's money also because they're ruling over people unwillingly without really their consent. They have to use a lot of force. That means a lot of police, a lot of security, huge expense. So finally then, the Quad has been revived. I gave you some of the reasons. Even the new Australian Prime Minister, Mr. Albanese, just was brought in office in May, but he already immediately had a meeting with the other Quad leaders, and he is on board with what the Quad is trying to do. The same for the Japanese Prime Minister, President Modi of India. Again, he's more enthusiastic than he was 10 years ago because of the border clashes with India and China actually killing Indian soldiers there. That has given him more incentive to bandwagon, join the bandwagon against China. So my conclusion is that the Quad is a valuable initiative and if it can serve as a building block in a multi-pronged military diplomatic and soft power strategy, it may rally sufficient support in the region and even globally to deter aggression and protect the vital interests of the United States and its allies. Thank you very much. There's some countries in those areas like you don't mention like New Zealand, Korea, South Korea, that would be strong partners and why haven't they joined the Quad? Well, up till now they haven't been asked but South Korea in particular is mentioned as one that just logically should be put in. But you have in all of these countries and it's come into play in some of them, the South Korean government has to get elected and if they are appearing to be courting a war with China they might not get elected. If they're being too belligerent toward China they might not get elected. So that is one reason that they are somewhat hesitating. That is the main reason. Now you mentioned New Zealand, we just don't feel that at this time that they have enough to really contribute militarily. Admittedly, Australia isn't huge either but I think New Zealand hasn't come in yet just because of its size and kind of remote location away again, see? Australia actually does butt right up to that South China Sea. And also when China is making initiatives in Papua New Guinea, Papua New Guinea is right next door to Australia. So Australia has more of a geo-strategic interest in those immediate areas. But what I'm looking for here in my notes is there is a new agreement between the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. And this is the deal which was struck last year which made France furious because Australia had a deal with France to buy diesel powered submarines. But last year with the revival of the Quad, and UK is not in the Quad Australia and US are, we convinced Australia that a better deal is to buy nuclear powered submarines from the United States. Now, as I said, France is furious, but that's an upgrade. That's now something that could counter Chinese naval forces more effectively. And so that's a logical next step that isn't strictly within the Quad but is furthering the same kinds of goals, deterring China in this region. Okay. Considering the situation in Europe which looks like a bigger powder keg than the South Pacific, if war breaks out there, what the United States do you feel have the capability to defend two fronts? Because if NATO attacks Russia, the United States has to follow with troops on the ground or, it's a de facto war already or with the United States, I think you'd agree. But would we have the capability then or would China just swoop in and take what they want in the South Pacific? Okay, that's a good one. That's a tough one. But you're certainly right in that if there's an expansion and this, I'm very fearful of this and I don't want this to happen. But if there's a significant escalation which starts to involve other countries that actually are NATO members, whether it be Poland or now Finland, which is right next to Russia, we are committed to an attack on one is an attack on all. That's our only defense treaty that actually says that. An attack on one is automatically an attack on all. And it's only been invoked once and that was after 9-11 when our NATO allies came to our support in Iraq and Afghanistan, Afghanistan initially, which was directed related to 9-11. But I guess the other part of it would be that now if that were true, could we also defend Taiwan, let's say, from a Chinese attack? Obviously that would be hard and that would require an all out commitment. We would have to divert spending that otherwise would go to other things into that and it would be bad. But it'd be terrible. But the one thing I would say, and I have in preparation for this, I read several articles which emphasized that Taiwan is not helpless by any means. Now some of what I read about Taiwan, I frankly, it was almost a little bit humorous, which I hate to even introduce it's a serious question like this. That they hold the world record for airport runway repairs. I didn't know there were contests for this, but apparently there are. So in other words, that China's trying to knock out their air force by cratering their airfields. They hold the world record of fixing those up and enabling their planes to take off again. Plus those islands off right off the very near coast of China, those could easily be used to blast Chinese missile platforms that might be directed at Taiwan. And thirdly, an amphibious invasion by China of Taiwan would be very, very difficult because the most they could get in their boats even onto the coast of Taiwan would be maybe 10 to 15,000 at a time. And Taiwan has hundreds of thousands of soldiers waiting for that. And this would not be an easy win by any means. Now, it would be tremendously destructive. But you know what? It also would destroy vital interests of not only Taiwan, but China itself. China and Taiwan, despite the political hostility, are economically integrated like this. Again, I have the figures here. Oops, sorry. Since 1991, over 45,000 Taiwanese companies have built plants and offices in China. 45,000, China and Hong Kong today by 42% of Taiwan's exports almost half. That's, so now I'm going to go to war with my best customer. By the way, the US only buys 15% of Taiwan's exports. And Taiwan gets 22% of its imports from China. So there's actually tremendous economic incentive to not get into something like this. Which as I said earlier, is so appalling about war. Look at all of what has been built up for decades turning into rubble and dust. Now, that's not to say it can't happen. It's happening in agreement. And it could spread, you're right. But you know, I want to try to do something to make cooler heads prevail. You don't need to do that. You're doing just fine. Now, if Taiwan could just hold off and say we're not going to declare independence. In fact, the facto, they are independent. They do what they want. They elect their own leaders. They have a free press and they have a thriving economy. Just don't say you're independent. Because if China, if you say you're an independent, China then maybe going to feel obligated. They have to do something. And that could be a disaster. Okay, I hope that helps. Does Taiwan have universal military training? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Are there civilian population? I'm pretty sure they do. I haven't checked that recently, but yeah, they have a draft. They have, again, in there somewhere, I have the numbers. They have a very large active force. It's not as big as China, of course, because they have a fraction of the population. But to carry out an amphibious invasion in the face of hundreds of thousands of extremely well-trained, well-equipped, modern, up-to-date forces waiting there to pick you off, I'm not volunteering for that myself. When Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan and the reaction was, I don't know, were we surprised? How sensitive are we to our relationship or how they feel about what we might do? Well, look, I understand, you know, why she did that and I understand why President Biden said what he said about Taiwan. She's trying to show solidarity with democracy against an authoritarian dictatorship that's making a worse name for itself every day. And that's China, and I know that. But I personally would not have done that because, A, it didn't change China. It didn't make them more democratic. It didn't make them ease up on the Uyghurs or the Tibetans. So it didn't have any effect on them. It also, now it may have bolstered the Taiwanese to a degree, which that I would say is good, but at the cost of provoking China. And fortunately, they have made some statements very recently that are not as hawkish as the ones they made right after that visit. But I mean, it's not in my power to tell somebody else what to do, but you have to weigh things. Making a statement, standing for democracy, standing for human rights, I'm all in favor of that. But if in doing that, you're actually increasing the chance of a catastrophic war, you have to weigh that. And I don't think that's worth it, in that particular case. So that's why I didn't agree with that visit. Well, let's say I have somebody else who'll come back. I guess we don't have a lot of time, but. We're another 12 minutes. Okay. Given that it appears China is currently spending upwards of $214 billion a year on their military and all the neighboring countries are less than 10 billion each, I'm wondering if you can speak more, I guess specifically to the potential future of conflict over tensions in Hong Kong and how that particularly might affect things. Well, I guess I see a couple of parts there, but one on the relative military spending with the others on Hong Kong. Hong Kong is effectively under the control of China. And unless somebody thinks they could pry that away, that's gonna be a feta comp. Yes, they like. Yes, they went back on their word. And it's not a minor thing. It's a big thing. I was there in 97. Now again, realistically, the British gave up their control because they knew if it came down to it, China could take it easily. China actually has a land border with the new territories of Hong Kong, the biggest land part of it. And they could send hundreds of thousands of soldiers, they could defeat the British there and they, Margaret Thatcher knew that. And so that is ultimately why they made the agreement. They thought they got the best agreement that they could. But China hasn't followed through. They did for a while, but then gradually, they've been now more precipitously, they have taken away what they promised they would. But I don't see anybody prying that away. I think on the other side of it, the military spending, we could go back and read, look at the figures, I don't know what you said is true, but China is still more, even than most of the neighbors add in. But then again, we have a presence there. Even France has a presence in the South Pacific there. And the Quad as well. But there's some other weaknesses of the Chinese economy right now that are maybe gonna also limit what they really can do. For instance, the figure we always use is gross domestic product. But that's what a lot of people are pointing out. The gross part of that is important. And that it's not net, it's gross. It's just how much did you spend? It doesn't matter whether you spent it wisely or not. Now I live in Ripon. Any of you have been to Ripon? You know where it is? About 8,000, maybe? Could I build a 40-story high-rise office tower in downtown Ripon, if I wanted to? Could I? Yeah! Why don't I? Other than I don't have 50 million lying around. But no, why doesn't anybody? It couldn't make money. But would that count toward GDP? Oh yeah, that's the workers that were working, the people who made the concrete, the people who made the rebar, the people who made everything that went into it. Ching, Ching, Ching, Ching, Ching goes into the GDP. Well, China has built 50 ghost cities, not ghost towers, whole cities. They've built whole airports where there's nobody flying in or out. And how have they done this? By the way, I have been saying all this, I want to move scene, how far they have come since 1981. When I went there, believe me, they had nothing. And today, most of the people have at least served the beginnings of a middle-class life, the biggest car markets in the world, and so forth and so on. So I'm not denying they've made progress, but there's been a tremendous amount of waste involved and a tremendous amount of borrowing. So this is the thing scholars will say that is a ticking time button. It's that what is gonna happen when the banks start to fail? Right now, they aren't letting them fail, but we've had meltdowns in Asian countries before, 1997, and we have one in our own country in 2008. And so that's, again, it's kind of hard to say. But I think, again, I have seen also the demography, also just inefficiency in general. They're doing their total factor productivity. It isn't very high. And part of it is their agriculture is still so labor-intensive. They are still working a lot of the fields by hand. And a big farmer field in China today is like the size of a football field. That's a large farmer. It's just, it's extremely inefficient. I, again, this was a few years ago, but not decades ago. This was back in the early teens. They were still in the parts of the countryside cutting off wheat and taking it out and laying it in the road for the buses and cars to run over to trash the wheat. That is how they were doing it. So, this is all the way of saying their capacity to spend on military is not unlimited. And as I said as well, they're spending as much on internal policing as they are in their military. And they have to do that to keep themselves in power. So as impressive as the growth has been and as smart as Deng Xiaoping was to do what he did. See, some of these other Marxist leaders in Cuba and Venezuela haven't been able to figure that out. And they're mired in poverty and going nowhere. And again, I've been in Cuba and I was appalling. But they just won't make those kinds of reforms. They just won't open up. China did open up, but it's not unlimited. They have some very severe weaknesses in their model. That is going to limit them at least somewhat from unlimited military spending. So I'm kind of curious, along with what you're speaking to, China's seen an unprecedented amount of growth for any country within modern history. So within it, part of me is thinking is, don't they have more to lose? I mean, the value of what they're gonna gain for small islands within a global economy, COVID is the first time it's interrupted their economy that suddenly now they're seeing a downfall. They're vulnerable. So why give up that kind of juggernaut for the sake of prestige in the world? I think that you're right. There's a beginning of a middle class. The laborers there work very hard and menial jobs without the sophistication of modern equipment. So their toil is going to build a middle class. They lose that middle class. They lose the people. They lose all of the investments, et cetera. Seems that there is more to be lost than they could possibly gain. Very well said. I hope that there are wise people in China telling you Xi Jinping and their other leaders exactly what you just said. And they should recognize that. And that's why, is this a function of prior principle? Because if it's pure economics, there's no sense. I know. Part of it is you paint yourself into a corner. If for 70 years you sit, our number one priority is to reunite the country and bring back Hong Kong and Taiwan into Mother China where they belong. If you've been saying for 70 years that that's your number one priority, that's hard to back down from. Like a several thousands of years the Chinese tried to control Mongolia. They've never, they have been a defeated people. I understand and that's an excellent example as well, but I also, part of the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party has always been strong nationalism. And that's probably the number one thing they rely on and the number one thing that they drum up among the people is nationalism, pride in China. So you ask if it's pride or pragmatism. Well, when again you are relying on nationalism as a main pillar of your support, then it's hard to downplay it. But I would certainly hope, but I think here's the other thing I would say. And this is how, here's where I would defend what the, I do not defend bombastic overheated rhetoric that is more likely to provoke than actually do any good. But quietly showing China what a huge price they would have to pay for aggressive actions. I think that's a good idea because that gives them the incentive to reinforce what you just said. You have more to lose than to gain. So that's where I would defend a strong deterrent posture. And the quad can be part of that. Okay, I'm afraid, yep, our time is up. Thank you. But thank you, very stimulating questions. Great audience, I thank you so very much.