 Today, we're going to be talking about last week's China-US summit between President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping of China. It was an interesting moment in bilateral relations, especially given the recent escalations over the past year from the Biden administration when it comes to China-US relations. I also want to talk about President Xi Jinping's speech that he gave in San Francisco. And to join me, I would like to welcome KJ, an outstanding member of the China-US and our enemy campaign, and just a very, very insightful scholar who has, and journalist who has been reporting and studying these issues for quite some time. It's such a pleasure to have you, KJ. Thank you. Pleasure to be with you, Cole. Thanks. I want to start by asking China and the United States for, I want to say the better part of a decade have been on a collision course to conflict. Many say that we're in a Cold War, if not approaching one. And some say that we're on the brink of hot conflict, of a shooting war with multiple areas, whether it's the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea. Also the Korean Peninsula is an issue which affects China-US relations, rather the ongoing Korean War. Moreover, there's the trade war launched by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration. Most recently, President Joe Biden tapped his Indo-Pacific czar to be Deputy Secretary of State. He's awaiting confirmation to actually take that office. But I want to get your insight on what is Campbell's potential appointment mean for China-US relations, especially with those escalations in the background? Campbell's appointment is very, very bad news for US-China relations. Campbell is the individual who is responsible for architecting the Pacific Pivot, which is the plan of encirclement and escalation and rollback containment against China. This was developed starting around 2009 by Kurt Campbell, declared by Obama in Canberra 2011, about five days ago to this, about, it was declared 12 years ago and five days ago to this date. And that essentially signaled the kickoff point of US escalations against China. Came with a plan of encirclement, of military encirclement, of escalation. It also had an explicit doctrine of war called air-sea battle. And it also had an economic arm of economic warfare called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. So it was an incredibly belligerent maneuver. And in order to understand this, we kind of have to dial back a little bit earlier to the 1990s. Remember, in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States essentially declared in its defense planning guidance document that it would be the unipolar hegemon. That's a fancy way of saying it would be the boss of the world. And you had this neocon triumphalist crowing where they declared the end of history. History had ended. They were history's victors. There was nothing else that was going to change. US exceptionalism and capitalist neoliberal system was the final word on political history. And the only thing that was left were a little bit of cleanup or mop-up operations. And they engaged in these mop-up operations in the Middle East. And this continued under the rubric of the war against terror, primarily against what they referred to as non-state actors. And essentially, they considered themselves to be doing what they referred to as armed social work. They were in control. And all they needed to do was to continue to do a little bit of social work, armed social work, and put the natives in their place. All of this upended around 2007, 2008, when the global capitalist economy collapsed. And it was only through the aid of China that the West and the United States was able to pull itself out of this complete systems collapse. And as a result of that, instead of expressing gratitude towards China, no good deed goes unpunished. And this was when the plans, which had been incipient or on the distant horizon in the 1990s, were put into concrete form. And so we started to see this plan for encirclement architected by Kurt Campbell, Air Sea Battle, which was a doctrine of war, essentially to choke China out and to strangle it in the South China Sea with deep penetrating aggressive strikes inside the Chinese mainland, essentially to decapitate and to destroy it and create complete chaos. And then we also saw the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was discarded, but we still have a kind of continued form in the various sanctions that we see currently that the US is engaging in for decoupling. So all of this is to say Kurt Campbell is very, very bad news. He is what Cannon was to the first Cold War. Kurt Campbell is to this second Cold War. And I'm very, very concerned that this Cold War is rapidly feeding up into a hot war. Now there was, I guess, some might call it a step towards some kind of change, referring to the summit last week between President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping. There were some agreements, mainly things around people-to-people exchange, more direct flights and easier visa access, as well as a few other significant things like the fentanyl deal and some climate change commitments, not necessarily really big ticket reforms, though, to China-US climate cooperation as it stands, which is virtually zero since former Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan last year in 2022. But right as Xi Jinping and Joe Biden were meeting, Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was traveling across the Asia-Pacific, signing new, sorry, announcing new military agreements with multiple countries, India, South Korea. What is the message that, I guess, the United States is sending by, on one hand, having a very frank and seemingly constructive summit in San Francisco, but on the other hand, still continuing the same policies of encirclement? Well, the message the U.S. sends is jackalind-hide, good cop, bad cop behavior. And this is deliberate. As I said, they refer to it as armed social work. It's the roses, the flowers, and the beatings followed by roses and flowers and beatings. It's the kind of a pendulation back and forth between manifesting overtures of good behavior followed by punishments, chastisements, threats, intimidation. And all of this happens at the same time. And this is part of a coordinated doctrine that the U.S. has worked out during the Afghan war. The think tank called Sina came up with a doctrine called Cohen or counterinsurgency. This is the armed social work. And essentially, the idea is to treat the official enemy in this constantly vacillating, pendulating way in order to disorient. And so what we can see here in the San Francisco summit is just a kind of a momentary kind of lull or pendulation or a tactical retrenchment because the U.S. has its hands full in the Middle East and in the Ukraine. But I would say that it doesn't change anything. Currently, we have a poly crisis happening, which is disempowering for the hegemon of the world. And what it is doing, I think a good analysis, is an Australian professor by the name of Warwick Powell said that essentially it's an act of deceit in preparation for more war, just as the United States and the EU was preparing or pretending to negotiate over Ukraine over the Minsk Accords, therefore disarming and giving the impression that he was interested in diplomacy, even as it was arming to the teeth. Powell argues that essentially the same dynamic is happening against China. That is, Taiwan Island is being Ukraine-ized to the max. It's being packed full of weapons. Japan and Korea also packing themselves full of weapons. The Philippines is also militarizing. And as all of this militarization is going on, there is this overture of diplomatic engagement, which is kind of smoke and mirrors, a kind of subterfuge, if you will, to buy time, to regroup in this poly crisis, and to move the crisis, move the threat even further. It's a little bit like that game of Red Rover. You freeze when you're looked at, and then as soon as you think you have an opportunity, you keep rushing forward. And each time as they escalate and get closer and closer to a kinetic war, that becomes the new floor. This is what they mean by guardrails. They say, oh, we're doing these things, and now these are the new guardrails. And each time they've ratcheted up the hostilities and the tension even further. So of course, in the San Francisco summit, there were some token outcomes that we can point to, agreements around fentanyl precursors, mill mill deconfliction channels, discussion around AI. But the real core issues that needed to be addressed, that is cold war, hot war, economic war, and provocation around the Taiwan, all of these were passed over in silence. And so that signals, that sends a very, very poor signal that any de-escalation or calm in this current moment has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It should really be considered the calm before the storm. Now, according to the Chinese delegation, President Xi did raise US interference in Taiwan during their discussion. But the White House read out was, of course, quite different. You did have a lot of right-wing people in Congress, thinking of Representative Gallagher, who falsely claimed that she threatened the people of Taiwan, the residents there, during the discussion. Of course, there was no such threat made during any of the discussions on record. But it is the case, though, that US interference in Taiwan, as you mentioned, has not stopped. In fact, just in the past few months, there's been a number of escalations, such as arming Taiwan with the foreign military financing program, which is only reserved for sovereign nations, which is in many ways a violation of the One China policy, which the US officially says it believes in. There was also the first time we're arming Taiwan with US tax dollars in 40 years, as opposed to just loans. And we've seen, I guess this is not in the past few months, but since 2020, US forces have been in Taiwan. Of course, there is this strange kind of cycle where Biden will say the US military will go and fight with China over tensions in Taiwan straight, and then there'll be walk backs from someone else in the administration. Knowing that reunification between Taiwan and China's mainland is a very important issue to Beijing, why is the US poking there if it does claim to believe in the One China policy? So the US is using Taiwan as a provocation, just as it used Ukraine as a provocation. All seed-borne invasions of China have either happened through Taiwan or through the Korean peninsula. And so this is the source spot. This is geostrategically critical. Taiwan is the center of this encirclement. And the United States knows that if it creates enough irritation on Taiwan, primarily through arming it, and also by encouraging secession, because Taiwan is an integral part of China, then China will be forced to respond. The analogy that I sometimes give is that it's like you have somebody in your family who's locked themselves in their room and they're not coming out. That's fine. You make sure they have water. You make sure they have food. But from inside their room, if they start packing their room full of weapons and explosives and gasoline, then the question becomes, how long can you tolerate that before you have to disarm that situation? And that's the situation that the United States is trying to create for China right now over Taiwan Island. If we think of an analogy, it would be imagine that China was arming separatists in Texas or California or any part of the United States, which has secessionist tendencies. And these exist. And if China was not only arming these secessionists, but deciding or declaring that there were actually two Americas, that there is the United States and then there is another legitimate state and all the while pretending that it's not doing that, but packing this secessionist tendency full of arms, giving them training, giving them millions of dollars of weapons, and then flying or moving your ships close to that state, how long would the United States tolerate this? Would the United States tolerate this? I mean, it would be seen quite literally as an act of war. But essentially, this is what the US is doing. And it has passed legislation called the Taiwan Enhanced Resiliency Act, which was simply a reshuffling of the Taiwan Policy Act, snuck it in through the NDAA. And so now this is legislation that has passed. And essentially, it is a plan on the part of the United States to quote, unquote, ensure the independence and sovereignty of Taiwan province, an integral part of China. It is the US has declared that it is going to ensure the independence and sovereignty of Taiwan Island. And it has, within this legislation, it has plans to micromanage the political affairs as well as the military of Taiwan Island. I really want to also explore the dynamic between the Biden administration, where its goals are with the wider Asia-Pacific region, because you mentioned the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was initially this way to advocate more what the United States calls the rules-based order applying to trade in the region. When, of course, that term, rules-based order is very problematic for a number of reasons when you kind of look at the way the United States kind doesn't really think the rules of the international community apply to itself. But we've seen Lloyd Austin also ramp up the US militarization of the Philippines, expanding bases there. Just yesterday, they launched Joint Sea and Air Patrols in the South China Sea. The US is also with Australia and Britain patrolling the region with the AUKUS military pact. Japan's getting in the action as well. US Marines are militarizing Okinawa and a lot of the other islands in Japan aimed at China. A lot of people don't really understand that for someone living in Beijing, this seems like the recreation of the Eight Nation Alliance almost, which is a group of imperial powers that subjugated China in the 19th century. So with all these military alliances, do they really think that they're going to build up popular support across the region for a war against China, especially with those people? They're not looking for popular support. I don't believe that any of the citizens of any of the countries in the Pacific or around China want war. It's the quizzling elite that is driving their country to war, just as the quizzling elite in the Ukraine provoked this war. So in South Korea, you have Yoon Seol-gyal, who is the most unpopular president in the history of Korean poll taking. He's driving the country towards war. He is creating an alliance with Japan, which is the former colonizer of Korea. This is something which was unthinkable until Yoon Seol-gyal came into power. And Qishida is enacting the Japanese desire to remilitarize. These are unrepentant militarists who, at one point, prior to the disarmament, they killed 25 million, 30 million Chinese on the continent. And they want to remilitarize and become the kind of attack dog for the United States, along with South Korea. South Korea has 3.7 million troops, highly trained, highly effective, that can be put at United States disposal at an instant, because the US has operational control over all of South Korea's troops under the current agreements. And so that creates a huge moral hazard in terms of manpower, cannon fodder. It has endless cannon fodder, essentially, to throw up against China. The Philippines has also been dragged into this. Again, this is the son of the dictator, Marcos, who himself was a US quisling. And now he's cast his lot with the United States and is militarizing. He's created, given the US, four new bases. And he's going along with US provocations in the South China Sea, which are the main choke point against China. There are three key areas or key flash points along the Pacific, North East Asia along the Korean Peninsula. That's like the bridge of the nose, if you want to think of a vulnerability. There's Taiwan, which is like the chin. It's the core interest. It goes straight to the center. And so Taiwan is the second vulnerability. And the third is the South China Sea, which is really like the throat or the carotid artery. Essentially, it's the place where China can be choked off. And the Philippines is allying with the United States, with Australia holding up the southern front in order to create the possibility of choking China off along its key trade routes in the South China Sea. So all of this is very, very worked out in detail. As I said, Air Sea Battle was drafted in 2009 and they've drafted multiple revisions and new documents regarding war with China. And so all of this has been escalating, no end. But it speaks foundationally to the fact that from China standpoint, they see it as not simply like the Eight Nation Alliance, I would say that it looks like the Hideyoshi invasions of the 1590s when Japan tried to invade China and Korea. And then I think regarding the Trans-Pacific Partnership, there's a dimension of this war. There's a Cold War escalating into a hot war which involves military escalation and sowing bases and armaments like dragon's teeth all around China. It's like a perfect noose. And then there's the other dimension of this which is lawfare and economic warfare. And the TPP was a very, very concerted attempt to choke China out of the economic system in the Pacific and essentially isolated. That didn't work. So now you have a whole bunch of other sanctions. Biden tried to transform the TPP into the IPEF, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which is simply kind of a TPP version too. But that has run into some roadblocks right now. But all of this is to say there's a constant economic warfare. There's a constant attempt to isolate and exclude China from the economic system, sanction it as if it were Cuba or Iran or North Korea. And at the same time, there's constant lawfare legal warfare that is happening. And all of this is framed and facilitated and made possible by this constant barrage of information warfare. That's really the pre-kinetic and the sub-kinetic dimension of this escalation against China, constant demonization, constant propaganda against China, constant lies and mendacity in order to justify violence and war and to manufacture consent. Yes, yeah, I'm thinking about that too. It makes me realize how the push for war with China also is not only threatening China and conducing the region, it also has a negative impact on people living in the United States because this propaganda will lead us potentially to a conflict that will be very, very bad for the lives of so many people here. I just think about also how the TPP, even though the United States didn't end up getting into it, it would have been a massive corporate, theft of public wealth. And this really affects us as well, especially vulnerable people. It's a very harrowing moment for China-U.S. relations. It's a very harrowing moment globally of what's going on from the genocide happening against the people of Palestine to the other forever wars the U.S. has involved in in Africa and the Middle East and Eastern Europe, as well as the ongoing blockade of Cuba. But I want to circle back to where we can maybe find hope. And I was reading Xi Jinping's speech that he gave after meeting Biden. He said, peaceful coexistence is a basic norm for international relations and is even more of a baseline that China and the United States should hold on to as two major countries. It's the wrong view. It is wrong to view China, which is committed to peaceful development as a threat and thus play a zero-sum game against it. China never bets against the United States and never interferes in its internal affairs. China has no intention to challenge the United States or to unseat it. That's Xi Jinping's words. I want to get your response to, do you believe that China's president says that in good faith? And if so, how should the United States respond if it wants to be serious about peace? Well, this is the dilemma or this is the challenge, Kale. I don't believe the United States is sincere about peace. What it wants is a tactical pause. And I think that we just have to name it. The empire was built on genocide and it has perpetrated multiple genocides and it is willing to perpetrate genocide. Again, it is even as we speak right before our eyes genocide is happening in Palestine. There's no other way to describe it and the United States is greenlighting and enabling and running cover for it. And I think, just think back to the images that we have of Jabalia refugee camp pulverized into dust. Children pulled out of the rubble. Entire families dead. Grieving mothers, what's that term? Wounded child, no surviving adult. This is how the empire works. And I'm thinking back to South Korea or the Korean War when the first time the US went to war with China and they pulverized North Korea into dust. Journalists traveling through North Korea at the time said that it was like traveling on the surface of the moon that there was nothing left standing. If you can imagine Jabalia refugee camp multiplied by 10,000 fold, that's what you had. Everything, every house, every school, every hospital, every childcare center, every outhouse was pulverized into dust. This is how the empire functions. And so when you ask what gives me hope or where is their cause for optimism? I'll be honest, I don't think there is a lot but I think even inside that, we have to be optimists of the will, right? Pessimists of the mind and optimists of the will. I do think that the Chinese made a very, very good faith effort to engage with the United States in a stabilizing and positive fashion. Originally they had asked the United States to ensure the five agreements of the Bali summit. If you recall the Bali summit of last year, the US agreed that it was not going to try and change China's system. It was not going to try and engage in Cold War. It was not engaging in a hot war. It was not doing economic war. And it was not going to encourage and provoke China over Taiwan. It was respecting the one China principle. And then immediately after the Bali summit, the United States initiated the BIS sanctions, the CHIP sanctions, which the New York Times characterizes as an attempt to extirpate, root and branch China's technological ecosystem, essentially to prevent China from developing any further. They referred to it as an act of war. CISIS referred to it as a four point strangulation with intent to kill. And this time after the summit here, immediately after the summit, another set of enhanced BIS sanctions kicked in and they're tightening the tourniquet even tighter around CHIPs, not to mention all the other sanctions that are all in place, not to mention all the other military exercises that are happening as we speak, the turning of Taiwan into a military base for the United States, B-52 runs in Korea, a strategic nuclear bombing rehearsal over Korea and right next to China, et cetera. There's an escalation is constant. So even inside this incredibly escalated situation, the Chinese are making a good faith effort with the United States and saying, look, let's get this right because the world is big enough for both of us. There's no need for us to be on this path of conflict. Nobody wins. And therefore we have to engage and find a way to find mutual understanding and win-win. And so they gave a five point plan you can see they put a lot of work into it, but the first point is we have to have right perception of each other. We are not out. China is not out to get you. They're not out to replace you. They're not out to dominate you. Jointly develop clear understanding and that can be the foundation upon which you can build a right communication, manage disagreements skillfully and prevent conflict, develop mutual cooperation, jointly shoulder responsibly, develop public goods for the benefit of the whole world and then jointly develop people to people exchanges to support all of the above. They put forth a very, very constructive program. They offered to work together towards it and it fell on deaf ears as far as I can tell. And so what we have remaining is President Xi's outreach to the people of the United States which is really about developing people to people exchanges. I think this is the one bright spot in that I think that the Chinese leadership understands that if the US leadership is not willing to step up and engage in a constructive fashion, then the appeal has to go out on a sub-national and on a people-to-people way. And I think President Xi simply by virtue of his sincerity and presence when he gave those speeches, I think that he made some inroads in that. He received three standing ovations and I think that in and of itself speaks volumes. Yes, well, I really concur with how you find hope in people-to-people exchanges on the horizon, especially since we have peace activists who we're always working with at China as our enemy who go to China and come back and share what they've learned. And on the point about like the future where China and the US could produce public goods together, I think about the COVID-19 vaccine when in the height of the pandemic, it took the US a long while to actually agree to not let the vaccine be patented. And there was a lot of other producers and China was able to come out and say, the vaccine should be a public good. And this really kind of goes, I think to the heart of how, it's important to just reframe just the way our priorities are. We should be doing these things, solving global problems together. And I guess this is one of the reasons why it's important to keep building the peace movement and create opportunities for a peace economy and learn from insightful people such as yourself. And I just wanna ask you, is there anything, any other observation of China, US affairs that you think is very important for people to know? Well, you know, they say that, you know, history is made when leaders meet and one or both of them is transformed. And in this meeting, there was no transformation that happened. This is simply prologue to more escalation. I believe that it's just a kind of plateau before there is further escalation. And I hope that I'm wrong, but I really don't think that this train, which is moving on a very, very set track as constructed by Kurt Campbell and his team at CNAS, I don't think this train is going to deviate. At best, the only thing it's going to do, it's going to stop and refuel, but it's not going to move off its tracks. And so then it becomes incumbent upon us, even as individuals, to work, to build good person-to-person relations. And I believe that if there's enough of us who do this, who tell the truth, who bear witness to the possibility of good relations, if we continue to do that, then we have a chance. And so instead of this large-scale tectonic shifts, what we need to do instead is to engage on the retail level, if you will, if everybody can build relations on a kind of massive people-to-people relationship, then I think we have a little bit of a chance. The challenge there is that, I think the ruling elite are so set in their ways and they will not be easily dissuaded. And I believe that they would rather see the end of the world than the end of their privileges. And so that's the danger and the risk that we face in this current moment. Indeed. And peace-loving people can't let that happen. KJ, it's been so great to talk to you and hear everything you have to share. Thanks so much. And I just want to extend to everyone, keep supporting peace and keep learning, seek truth and facts. Thank you. Thank you, Kayle.