Is China Winning?

Kaiser Kuo on mutually assured disruption and the race for the 21st century

In Trump 2.0, China has surprisingly taken a backseat to a renewed focus on the Middle East. And as the United States becomes less predictable and reliable, China has positioned itself as a stable partner on the international stage.

In this episode, the Institute for Global Affairs’ Jonathan Guyer is joined by Kaiser Kuo, host of the China current affairs podcast Sinica. They discuss how China is thinking about the United States in this moment, the country’s approach to technology and innovation, and why China won’t replace the United States anytime soon. Kaiser also points out that American and Chinese people have far more in common than they may realize.

Kaiser Kuo is a writer, podcaster, and musician based in Beijing after spending nearly a decade in the United States. He is the host of Sinica, a weekly podcast about current affairs in China. Sinica features Kaiser in conversation with journalists, academics, policy analysts, and businesspeople with important perspectives about China’s development and changing role in the world. He served as editor-at-large at The China Project — and made his mark in the music scene as a rock guitarist.

Find Kaiser on X: https://x.com/KaiserKuo

Listen to Sinica: https://www.sinicapodcast.com/

Transcript:

JONATHAN GUYER: Welcome back to None Of The Above. I'm your host, Jonathan Guyer. You may have heard about Chinamaxxing, the new trend among Gen Z, but it does seem like China has been pretty absent from President Trump's foreign policy in this term.

Today I'm joined by Kaiser Kuo, host of the terrific podcast Sinica. He's constantly in conversation with some of the leading minds on China—academics, journalists, analysts—and he's based out of Beijing, where he has a front row view on some of the social and political change happening there that we might be missing.

We discuss whether China is winning the 21st century, what to make of US policy, and much, much more. We hope you enjoy this conversation, and if you do like, subscribe, share, and drop me a line: info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Hope you enjoy!

GUYER: Kaiser, welcome to None Of The Above.

KAISER KUO: Thank you, Jonathan. Great to be here.

GUYER: Tell us about your podcast Sinica. We love it. It's very in depth. You have given a 360 for listeners on China and China policy. How did you get started with it?

KUO: So back in 2010, in March, I think it was just around the time that the actual podcast app showed up on smartphones, on the iPhone particularly.

GUYER: Throwback.

KUO: I was in a conversation with a very good friend of mine in Beijing, another expatriate living there. And he was asking me the usuals. “What podcasts are you listening to?” kind of questions. We had, you know, there weren't many to choose from so it was a lot of overlap. But then neither of us can remember who put the question to the other: “why aren't there any good China podcasts?”

And then immediately, we sort of realized we ought to do one. I mean, we were both well connected. We knew a lot of journalists, academics, people in policy circles, and thought that we could probably do a pretty good current affairs roundup every week. So, we just happened to know a guy who was doing a language learning podcast, had a studio, said he would sort of do the production work, all the editing and so forth, and all we needed to do was show up with questions and a guest and he would take care of the rest. So yeah, it was born, it was on April 1st, an inauspicious day, but April 1st, 2010 that we launched the first show. Yeah.

GUYER: And so, what are the debates happening among American policymakers, experts, the kind of the wizened leaders of the policy community in Washington? How do they see China policy right now?

KUO: Yeah, I think a lot of them are sort of waking up to the reality that China really has risen. It's no longer something that... I mean, they're no longer really talking so urgently about stymieing China's rise. I think there is a lot of recognition now that the Biden era, that continued of course during Trump, but the Biden era—technology export restrictions, especially around semiconductors, that hasn't exactly produced the desired outcome.

That China, you know, is pretty close to American frontier models right now, is probably beating the United States substantially in terms of diffusion of AI, just to name one of several technologies of the fourth industrial revolution that China's, you know, doing very well in. So yeah, I think policy around technology, policy around trade is really changing. I think, you know, the kind of grim fact that a year now after Liberation Day, you know, President Trump had to eat three big taco meals served to him by Xi Jinping.

I'm lamenting the fact that we had to have the postponement happen, because of course the Iran war, but he supposed to be in—

GUYER: Let's pause on that for a second, because that meeting was really anticipated and I think would've been a lens into what the administration's really doing on China, but now we don't... When is that rescheduled for? It’s in May?

KUO: Next month. Yeah, it's gonna be in the middle of May, which is really unfortunate because—well I mean, it's fortunate for me that my daughter's graduating college, so I'll be back in the States and won't be on the ground for that.

GUYER: Congrats.

KUO: Yeah, thank you. But I'm more disappointed that it didn't happen March 29th as it was supposed to be, or March 31st through April 2nd, because April 2nd, of course, was the anniversary of Liberation Day, and the optics would've been delicious to have him here in Beijing. Maybe served Peking duck and, you know, maybe he could have substituted a corn tortilla for the usual duck pancake and told him it was a Chinese taco that he'd be eating. You know, “Trump always chickens out,” right?

GUYER: So, in China it feels like they're winning the great game, the great power competition, and Trump has totally distracted America in all these new endless wars. Is that the perception you're hearing or what you would've anticipated to have been watching for in this summit?

KUO: Well, I'm sure I'd be chided by my friends in the Chinese strategic class for framing it in terms of winning. But I think that China's—I think they've played a pretty smart game, that is they've really sat on their hands and not had to do much. You know, we've all seen the cover of last week's Economist magazine, right? That famous Napoleon quote about interrupting your enemy when he is making a mistake.

GUYER: Right.

KUO: That's very much the sense here. Although I think there is a healthy caution against overconfidence, against hubris. China understands that, you know, it hasn't come out of this thing entirely unscathed. I was just at band practice and everyone rode to practice today on their electric scooters rather than driving their gas cars. Some of them have gas cars still, the savages. And they told me that gas is now the equivalent of five US dollars a gallon. It's nine RMB per liter. So that works out to five bucks a gallon, so it's not cheap.

GUYER: And what was it before?

KUO: Oh, it was much cheaper, you know, it's gone up about 50%.

GUYER: So, there's a kind of perception that there was a kind of bipartisan approach to China that, you know, Trump 1.0 was really focused on strategic competition. Biden took on the mantle of a lot of that. Is Trump 2.0 breaking some of that consensus from your perspective?

KUO: Yeah, very much, and I think that, you know, if you talk to anyone in DC in the beltway who watches this stuff, I mean, the thing they all say, and I've heard it from several people now, is that Donald Trump is his own China desk officer.

If you look at—yeah, he seems to be the decision maker when it comes to China policy. He seems to have really irrigated all decision making on that particular issue to himself. You look at the China hawks, they're more or less in full retreat, at least in eclipse. Now, that could change. But you've noticed how quiet people like Peter Navarro have been on China, even Bridge Colby—Elbridge Colby has been relatively quiet when it comes to China.

GUYER: This is the number three at the Pentagon who wrote this very important book on countering China strategically, strategy of denial. But yeah, he’s been not focused on that, at least in the public scene.

KUO: I mean, he is sort of the ultimate hedgehog, right? He has this one idea, which is we need to pull everything out of Ukraine and stick it all on Taiwan, right? That's been his song for a long time. But you can see that things have changed, even on the question of Taiwan, considerably.

And I think there are many, many factors we can look at as to why Trump's tune has changed. I mean, part of it is just, you know, the whole cards thing, in this game with Xi Jinping, he's, you know, we are in a situation now that I've seen described, and I like the phrase mutually assured disruption—not destruction, but disruption, right?

Where essentially, the United States and China are now keenly aware that each have a hand on the other's air pipe, right? You know, their air tube to the surface, that they can sort of choke one another off. China, obviously with its near monopoly lock on the processing of rare earth elements and the United States, you know, with its huge IP portfolios spread throughout the advanced tech ecosystem, right? It can deny inputs to China.

And so, we're sort of at this impasse right now and I think Trump understands that at a very fundamental level that, you know, Xi Jinping does have indeed a pretty strong hand to play, and that it's in the interest of both sides right now to buy time so that they can, you know, alleviate this problem. They can sort of find their way to reduce their vulnerabilities to one another.

GUYER: And how is Trump making time for this? Or is it just, I mean, we have Venezuela, Iran, possibly Cuba. These are massive conflicts that the US is, you know, being incredibly militaristic. It's taking up all the bandwidth.

When you say Trump is the China desk officer, I mean, who's behind him? Who are the staff, the thinkers, the people that are making MAGA 2.0 happen on China right now? Or you're saying it's really just the president?

KUO: I don't really know. I don't have a clear insight into this. I'm not a DC insider. I mean, the best I can do is talk to smart people and they'll tell me that it's basically Trump himself now.

GUYER: It's fascinating.

KUO: But it's not just that. I think that there's another key element to this and that is that Trump sees, I mean he has—I'll give you one thing—he has a kind of, you know, low animal cunning.

He has this ability to smell blood in the water. He smells changes in the, sort of, electorate. And one of the changes that he's certainly aware of, because he spends so much time on social media, is how younger generations, especially Gen Z, have really changed their views when it comes to China. I think that he doesn't see China bashing any longer as a surefire winning electoral issue. Probably neither do a lot of Senate and House candidates right now, you know, in either party.

GUYER: Sure.

KUO: So yeah, I think that's actually working, you know, to lower the temperature. I mean, we may, you know, laugh at this whole Chinamaxxing meme, this whole phenomenon. It's been now a year and a couple of months since DeepSeek, since that TikTok refugee moment where, you know, suddenly all these people fled TikTok as it looked like it was about to close and went onto this Chinese app called RedNote, and had a splendid time, were warmly received and had their eyes open.

I think there's a sense among them that they've been collectively gaslit, not just by the media, but also by political elites and by, you know, the strategic class about China. They feel like they've now had their eyes open for better or for worse, to a very different China. You know, all these influencers and such are coming over here. And yeah, the party knows better than to get in the way of that. They're not necessarily, you know, bankrolling it. I think that's probably giving them too much credit, but they aren't getting in the way of it.

GUYER: And you're in Beijing right now. Beyond the gas prices, how else are people thinking about the United States? Is sort of the cultural dominance, the way the US has had this soft power, is that evaporating a bit as well in this Chinamaxxing moment?

KUO: That's less detectable. I mean, I think that there's always been this real kind of dualism in popular, say non-elite attitudes toward the United States. There's a lot of fondness and a lot of admiration. I think that there's no one who can convince me otherwise that there's a profound similarity between ordinary people in these two countries, more than in any other country pair I can think of. Especially considering, you know, how geographically far apart they are.

There is, yeah. I think there's a real similarity. I think a lot of people who come here are surprised to find that, surprised to find how similar a lot of the way things are done in these two countries. I think there's a very similar vibe and I think it has to do with just being continental sized economies that ultimately kind of harbor this belief that they can be self-sufficient, they can be autarkic, you know, they don't need to speak more than one language.

GUYER: And are your kind of friends, colleagues, collaborators, and just people you pass on the street—are people still going to the United States? I mean, our organization did some polling that showed that more than half of Americans want Chinese students, want to allow Chinese students to study in American universities. But we've seen the Trump administration put all these restrictions on immigration. It's a lot harder to get visas, and is that having a felt impact on people you know in Beijing?

KUO: Absolutely. I mean, and more than just the restrictions, there's just sort of a hesitancy. I mean just last week there was a University of Michigan, I think he was a graduate student or postdoc, a researcher in a case who, a day after being interviewed by the FBI, jumped off a building.

GUYER: Oh my goodness, that’s tragic.

KUO: Yeah, and this happens a lot. There's a real sense that, if you work in STEM fields, especially in anything remotely sensitive, you're not exactly welcome in the US. The sense that it was a place you could go and there would be wide open opportunities, that's really gone. And one of the things that the Chinese government has been leaning into is the sort of re-recruitment, sort of repatriation of especially technology talent that's gone to the United States, to major research universities or to Silicon Valley, and they're spending a lot of money to bring people back and they've been quite successful, have trumpeted their successes.

So, I know a lot of people close to me who have children in high school who had all along been planning to send them to the United States, are now thinking about other options. They're looking at Australia, they're looking at places in Western Europe, they're looking at Scandinavia, they're looking at Canada, and of course the UK. Probably foremost the UK.

GUYER: So there's still a kind of orientation towards Europe, towards English-speaking countries. But is there a kind of like, how does China see itself right now in terms of the BRICS countries? You know, originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—grew in recent years but hasn't been a big player. Does that bloc still have currency here?

KUO: It certainly does. Not in the same way, of course. I mean, nobody's talking about sending their children to study in India or in South Africa or Brazil, or Russia for that matter. I think there is a very clear sense that China has played a very good hand in the Global South. More generally, the BRICS are part of that. The SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, is part of it. They really sense that things like the Belt and Road Initiative, all these efforts to sort of put public goods out into the world and to sort of win friends through just sort of doing business there. Not through traditional aid and not through, of course, you know, nakedly extractive and transactional relations with the Global South. You know, I think most Chinese sort of view their own approach to building friendships there as having been a whole lot more enlightened. They understand there's a post-colonial hangover that they've been able to exploit.

They understand that the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza especially, has really strengthened their standing. You know, the United States has lost a lot of moral high ground. Western Europe has lost a lot of its moral high ground. And so, a lot of the countries of the global South have been looking to China. And they're seeing of course things like what's just happened with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez coming to Beijing, saying really all the right things. Even his criticisms of China have been so cleverly, diplomatically, couched that, you know, it's going down well with Chinese audiences.

GUYER: Yeah. I mean, Sánchez's Spain is a really interesting figure in the context of this Iran war. But tell me more. I think the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is one of the most interesting groupings that kind of doesn't tend to cross the radar of Washington as much as it should. Talk to us a bit more about that.

KUO: Right. You might remember back in late August and early September, there was a Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Beijing. The SCO is a group of—I can't remember the number of countries that started off mainly with, sort of ex-Soviet CIS states in Central Asia, of course, along with China. Their remit was fighting Islamic terrorism or other forms of separatism, religious fundamentalism, that sort of thing, in the region. But then, you know, it evolved like BRICS and like some of these other organizations.

It may have begun life as sort of this anti-transatlantic alliance kind of grievance club, especially an anti-American grievance club, but it's taken on actually more significance now as it, you know, has built some investment institutions, banking institutions. It has seen sort of architecture for security and things like that starting to come into place. Now, the optics of, you know, having Putin and other leaders there who are not, you know, particularly beholden to the United States or friendly to them, that was a very, very strong image.

Then it was followed, of course, by the gigantic military parade to celebrate the anniversary of Japan's defeat in the Second World War. So that, I think, gave it a bit of a boost in terms of people's awareness of the SCO. But I'm not ready to, you know, declare that it's going to be something that's going to change the global balance of power in a fundamental way.

GUYER: But it does seem to also have some resonance with the kind of, the fall of the dollar, the hollowing out of American power worldwide. And it kind of shows there's these other forums coming about, even if, you know, this has been around for a while, but gaining new resonance at a time where the US is—I don’t know if we want to use the word decline, but the dollar ain't what it used to be, especially in the context of these new oil wars.

KUO: Right. There was some mention in the Chinese press, quite a bit of it actually, about the fact that the tolls that Chinese tankers paid to the Iranians to transit Hormuz were paid in renminbi (RMB) rather than in in dollars, right? I think that there's also been a little bit of pushback to that. Look, I mean Chinese are very pragmatic people. By and large the technocrats who are in charge are cautious and they like to under promise and over deliver, and they're not popping the corks exactly here.

They recognize that this is a terribly unstable situation, that it is a real threat to global stability and the economic health of China down the road. Look, nobody believes some of the punditry in the United States that wants to spin this as, you know, four-dimensional chess that Trump is playing this long game, that ultimately his moves in Venezuela and in Iran were all about defanging China somehow. Nobody buys that, but at the same time—

GUYER: Okay, neither do we.

KUO: Right. But at the same time, they certainly believe that China doesn't skate through this entire affair either.

GUYER: So, I wonder what is next for China? I mean, it seems like on a kind of industrial policy level and a tech policy level, one can argue that they kind of won. They've got the high speed trains, they've super-developed their economy. You know, I'm sitting here in New York. I think we'd be pretty impressed by what's happening in Beijing and the mega cities and the construction and the social services that come with a lot of that. What is the next phase that you see of China's development now that they have made such a great tech advance?

KUO: Yeah, it's interesting that you should say, I mean, because of course we are just sitting here a month or so after the release of the last Five-Year Plan, the 15th Five-Year Plan. And these documents are really remarkable. You can look at them and you see exactly what the administration is prioritizing, seeing where they're really assigning their KPIs all the way down the road. It's not a Stalinist style command economics planning document. In fact, it isn't even called a Five-Year Plan anymore. The language has changed, it changed back in 2006 in English. They still call it in official documents a Five-Year Plan, but it is now become sort of more guidelines. But still, I think they have a lot of force and if you look at the track record of previous Five-Year Plans, they tend to deliver.

So they are very, very ambitious in continuing, in tech policy, to push—I think maybe there's been a sequencing shift, that they are not prioritizing the sort of zero-to-one innovation so much as they're prioritizing industrialization. They're looking at diffusion of these cutting-edge technologies, trying to find ways so that every enterprise, every manufacturing outfit is using AI and is gaining economic leverage through the deployment of AI. It's very, very ambitious.

This is not the first time they've done this. They did the same thing, you know, with the advent of digital computing. They've done the same thing with the internet. They’ve really tried to harness it. I think that is sort of the Chinese approach to it. They value this sort of ex nihilo innovation, the kind that we tend to fetishize in America. We see innovation as this creation of something from nothing. The lone inventor toiling in his garage or in his lab, you know, whether it's in Menlo Park, New Jersey, or Menlo Park, California. That's our fetish, right?

For China, it's more about diffusion. It's more about taking what's already there and making sure that it spreads throughout society and is used really well. And thus, the huge emphasis on electrification. I think we can't leave this part of the conversation behind without talking about China's transformation into a full-blown electrostate.

GUYER: Talk to us about that. What do you mean by that? Just like the rural areas being deeply connected, or...

KUO: It's not just that, I mean the grid itself is a thing of wonder. The amount of electricity that's generated and especially the huge growth of renewables, of photovoltaic. You know, China basically manufactures very close to, I'd say 95% of the world's photovoltaic solar panels. And it is an absolute giant in that. For two or three now, I think it'll be three years running, China has installed more solar and wind together enough to double, year after year after year now, the total installed base of renewable energy in the world each year. So it's mind boggling the amount that we're talking about. I mean, you can go on Google Earth, you can see some of these gigantic solar fields. It's really, really an impressive thing.

But, you know, here in China, I think when they're thinking about, for example, the whole technology stack, the AI stack especially, they're thinking from watts to bits, right? They're really thinking in terms of the whole value chain, from electrical generation all the way down to, you know, tokens.

GUYER: And so, have you kind of become an expert by way of osmosis on tech, AI, renewable energy, just because it's so on the front lines of everything that's happening in Beijing and in China?

KUO: I would so never in a million years call myself an expert on any of that. I'm far from an expert on it, but I have—I mean, I know more than your average bear probably—but I do think that in my work, I get to talk to people who are bonafide experts. I think they're, one of the great things about them is probably none of them would be so hubristic is to call himself one, but that's the sign of a true expert. There are people who I've come to know who have at their command all of the statistics, you know, who can tell you month-to-month what the energy mix is in China, how many new gigawatts of solar or nuclear or offshore wind were deployed, who can tell you with great granularity about stuff. That's not me, but I certainly do sort of see it in aggregate and know it well enough to be sort of blown away by it.

GUYER: Yeah. I mean, one thing I find really fascinating is this, kind of, what is called the civil-military fusion, this kind of state effort in China to get the whole military-industrial complex into the 21st century. And I think what we're seeing in Washington is a lot of the Trump administration figures kind of emulating that.

KUO: Well, it didn't start with Trump. Let's face it, I mean, we've always done it too, right?

GUYER: We just call it something a little different.

KUO: Right, right. It has this sinister name and we attach it to China and we pretend that we don't do exactly the same thing. You know, when Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, had some pretty minor military service in his background, something that gets trotted out all the time... If you were to remove anyone who served in the US military from technology companies in America, that wouldn’t leave you with much, especially from the boardrooms.

Look at this dustup between Anthropic, you know, between Dario Amodei and the Pentagon. Right? I mean, it's obvious that there's a desire, and it's a very natural one, for the national security establishment, for the defense establishment to want to get its hands on this technology. No different than China.

GUYER: Well, and I think the Anthropic dustup was amazing PR for them. I mean, they got to both seem pro-peace but also the most advanced company in the United States. It was kind of a coup for them, which was fascinating to think that OpenAI would go from being the frontline company on this, to then taking a bit of a backseat here. Pretty remarkable.

KUO: Yeah. You know, let's remember what a, just a completely dyed-in-the-wool China hawk, though, Dario Amodei is, right? These people still—I mean, and it helps their own bottom line. They frame AI competition with China as this existential problem, that we need to beat China to AGI, whatever the hell that means. Or, you know, if they find it first, they're gonna do their worst, right? I think that it's kind of... it's terrible.

GUYER: So, what does cooperation look like with China on the geopolitics of AI and so forth? Is competition the only way, or do you see a cooperative way in all the conversations you're having on the podcast and as you think about something that wouldn't lead to war, God forbid?

KUO: Yeah, I mean, I think we need to get past this sort of psychological barrier for us. I mean, we somehow have convinced ourselves that any effort to lower the temperature with China on AI competition is sort of a surrender. That's nonsense to me. I mean, we are still reaching for these really... We're still trying to kind of do a Tonya Harding on the Nancy Kerrigan of China, to kneecap China.

We're still talking about ratcheting up technology export restrictions at a time when it's clear to me—I don't know if you saw, there was a pretty great New York Times op-ed just the other day from somebody who's on the front lines of that, who had written a remarkable book—I'm told, I haven't read it—about one of the big figures, I'm forgetting his name right now.

GUYER: Sebastian Mallaby.

KUO: Yeah, Sebastian Mallaby.

GUYER: CFR, yeah.

KUO: Right, CFR guy. I mean, he had just come to China and said he was a hawk. He's completely changed his mind and he now believes that we should pour our resources into cooperation into working with China to try to head off some of the major threats that AI poses. And look, there's two countries in the world that are miles ahead of everyone else. Again, not just in AI but in all the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution. Whether we're talking about, you know, in the life sciences, in quantum computing, everything. It's unacceptable that they don't work together to try to address some of these major problems.

GUYER: And is it just this Cold War framing that persists? I mean, is some of this narrative that the United States just has one conception of great power competition?

KUO: Yeah, I think it's deeper than just Cold War. I mean, in the Cold War, we never regarded the Soviet Union as a true multi-dimensional peer competitor. They were absolutely a security competitor. But what did we ever buy from Russia? I mean, the occasional bottle of Stoli. We saw the Bolshoi when they came to town, you know, we didn't buy much. I mean, I guess there were some redneck collectors who bought AK-47s and things like that but no, there weren't a whole ton of exports. There was never an economic competitor. Japan was an economic competitor, of course, in the 1980s but it was never—not since its defeat, not since 1945—a viable military competitor. China is both.

And it's not just the fact that it's both, it's what it's done to the American psychology. I really think that the thing that sticks in the American craw is, you know, it's a species of the old playground thing, but it's deeper than that. I think that China has sort of, one after another, kind of knocked out these load-bearing walls of American exceptionalism. It's really undermined American confidence. So many of the things that we thought were sort of axiomatically true and that were load-bearing in our self conception. That's been difficult to take.

As we feel this sense of relative decline, our reaction is to find a scapegoat to lash out at, and China fits the bill on all counts. You know, the so-called China shock has hollowed out our manufacturing base in the first place. China has had the affront to operate a functional and quite successful market economy without having the decency of becoming a democracy first, right?

GUYER: All those big ideas fell to pieces.

KUO: Yeah, you know, you're not supposed to be able to innovate unless you have free flow of information. Wasn't digital technology, especially the internet and social media, supposed to undermine authoritarianism? Wasn't it supposed to bring these authoritarian states down? Instead, it's done something very different, right? It's in many ways buttressed them, made them able to have even greater state capacity.

So yeah, one after another. Look, where are we now on industrial policy? We used to be terribly allergic to it even as we practiced it. Where are we on free trade now? We used to be the great champions of it and we're now this, you know, beggar-thy-neighbor state.

GUYER: Interesting. And what about, sort of China in the region, China in Southeast Asia? How do you see that playing into things? Because the South China Sea in particular has been this tremendous flashpoint, but I think us in the United States right now are so distracted, as I said, Western Hemisphere wars, Middle East wars, trade wars. What is your assessment of what's happening with China in its own region at the moment?

KUO: Well, I mean there are a number of nations, we’re at 11 nations in ASEAN, and they all have different relationships with the United States and different relationships with China. But I think what they mostly have in common, I mean in aggregate, is they're looking for hedging strategies, right? They don't want to drift too close to Scylla or Charybdis. Right now, they're interested in keeping a healthy distance and maybe playing them off against one another and extracting concessions as they're being wooed by two suitors, right? So there are definite opportunities, but of course they feel extremely vulnerable.

These are the economies that are most hard hit really, by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz right now. China looks sort of enlightened in that, we can give you more of these incredibly solar panels now, batteries for your car industry, we’ll build BYD factories in your towns, we’ll help you with your bauxite mining and with your nickel extraction. So, there's a way that China has benefited from this.

You look at a country like Vietnam in particular, I think it's very interesting how for so long the United States has sort of looked to Vietnam as this counterweight against China that was sort of our friend in the region and is overlooked an awful lot. I mean, Vietnam very much resembles China in that it's a very quickly marketizing country, economically, that is still very much a single-party state, that has pretty onerous internet restrictions that has a lot of problems with minority nationalities, all these things. But you don't hear a lot about that, of course. Part of the reason you don't hear about about that is because they're even stricter about foreign journalists in residence in Vietnam than China is. So, you know, party to party relations between China and Vietnam are very good. There are a lot of major projects that are going on.

Now, with the Philippines, China is talking about joint hydrocarbon exploration in some of the contested areas of the South China Sea. There's this weird rupture moment and Trump in particular is making for strange bedfellows in China's neighborhood.

GUYER: What about in the Middle East? Because I was always fascinated by China kind of brokering this rapprochement a few years ago between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Obviously, China just played a big role in this two-week ceasefire between Iran and the United States and all of the machinations there. I mean, how is China diplomatically engaging with the Middle East right now?

KUO: I mean, China has a lot of interests with a lot of countries, right? People somehow have built up this idea that it was an ally of Iran. It never was. It never has been a formal treaty ally. But they forget how close they are with the UAE, with Qatar, with other countries in the Gulf, how close they are with the Saudis. You mentioned this Saudi-Iranian deal that they made. I mean look, a guest who came on my show said “pushing on an open door” and he's absolutely correct.

GUYER: Sure, exactly.

KUO: And I think it's sort of the same with this situation, with this two-week truce or this two-week ceasefire.

GUYER: Exactly.

KUO: I don't know how much I trust the reporting that I've seen. It just seems rather thinly sourced to me, to say that China had much of a role in it at all. I mean, I think it was sort of in the interest of all parties involved to play up the idea that China had a role. I think the United States has wanted to have China feel a bigger stake. You know, Pakistan never misses an opportunity to sort of flatter and offer a little bit of sycophantic praise to Big Brother China. And of course China has an interest in projecting this idea of itself as a peacemaking country.

But I've not seen solid evidence. I didn't see, you know, flight logs of Chinese diplomats going back and forth or anything like that. I don't know. None of the sources have been on the record, so I’m reluctant to pronounce on that. But I mean, your larger point—obviously China has keen interests in keeping its ties good in the region.

GUYER: Well, we've talked about a lot of groupings. We talked about BRICS. We talked about Shanghai Cooperation. We're talking about China diplomatically in the world. I think one needs to be problematized above all, which is the CRINK, this new Axis of Evil that has a lot of attention from the militaristic circles in Washington—China, Russia, Iran, North Korea—because I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence that, beyond economic connections and maybe a handful of weapons sales or tech transfer, I don't really see China backing Iran to the hilt or...

KUO: Of course not.

GUYER: ...backing Russia to the hilt. Yeah, talk to us about that, because that seems to be this really bizarre conventional wisdom that's taken hold in Washington. And we know it's not that wise of an insight because the acronym is so bad, CRINK, it sort of tells on itself. But yeah, how do you see that kind of new Axis of Evil narrative and how would you problematize it?

KUO: I mean, it's an absurd fantasy and the acronym, as you say, is very bad. It sounds like something that Ian Fleming would've made up for SPECTRE or...

GUYER: Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

KUO: What was that? Get Smart had some, you know, criminal organization, right? No, it's absurd. Look, I mean, we could we go one at a time. I mean, let's start with China and Russia.

GUYER: Yeah, please.

KUO: I think there's been a real misunderstanding about how the Chinese senior leadership feels about the war. And part of this, the onus is on China because they have been terrible at really making their signaling land effectively. As far as I can tell, look, both of them feel a certain bond having been sort of frozen out during the Biden administration and during the first Trump administration as well, sort of frozen out of the polite company of the rules-based international order—always sort of being kept on the outside. And they have a sort of shared set of talking points about how the West is always trying to undermine them through this and that. And, you know, I think that there is a certain internal logic, if you exercise a little bit of cognitive empathy, you can sort of see where both the Russians come from and where China comes from.

You know, Russia—look, I am somebody, just cards on the table, who thinks there's no excuse for the full-scale invasion of February 2022. There's just no exoneration for that. No matter how much of a security threat Russia felt at, you know, the potential of NATO membership for Ukraine, no matter how many promises made in the early nineties had been violated. And I think that there's some truth to that. But their sense of being frozen out united China and Russia. It drove them into each other's arms in a way that we describe here in China as, it's like huddling together for warmth. Like if we don't strip down to our skis and get into the sleeping bag—I don't like you, Putin. Putin, you don't like me either, Xi—but we're gonna freeze to death unless we huddle. Right? That's the sense. That's the metaphor.

There is no love lost. They have a very long border. It's been a contentious border. There is, as I said earlier in our conversation, there is sort of a natural amity between the United States and China, between Americans and Chinese. I feel there is no such amity, you know a natural one, between Russians and Chinese. There's a lot of mutual suspicion. You have to remember, they actually did fight in 1969. Hundreds were killed in Damansky or Zhenbao Island in the Amur River. So, this is sort of a marriage of convenience. They've been pushed together into this. Xi Jinping believed, I believe, in February at the Asian Games, when he announced, hand-in-hand with Putin, announced this no limits friendship thing, that what he was doing was, in this game of Texas Hold’em that the Russians were playing with NATO, giving him another powerful face up card so that there's no way that NATO wouldn't have bluffed.

Because the only cards we saw, their hand at best seemed to consist of, well, we won't put boots on the ground, we won't actually directly intervene. At most, we'll arm the Ukrainians and we will sanction you. Sanctions before that first weekend after the invasion didn't have the ferocious reputation that they quickly acquired after that weekend, you know, so nobody foresaw...

GUYER: It seemed to be a paper tiger.

KUO: It really looked flimsy and certainly from Beijing's perspective it looked flimsy. So, he thought that he was ensuring essentially that NATO would fold. That did not turn out be the case.

GUYER: So, we covered Russia, we covered a bit of Iran. Is there more on Iran-China you think is worth mentioning here?

KUO: Not really. I mean, look, there's a lot of empathy toward Iran. I think they recognize in one another what they like to think of as civilizational states. That's not an unproblematic self-conception, but they certainly believe Iran to be one of the ancient great civilizations of Earth. In the same sense that they believe China to be. They, I think, recognize a lot of potential in Iran. I think that the general thinking is, they had this sort of lunatic religious ideology. We have this charismatic leader and this lunatic, you know, extremist ideology. We got over it and got super pragmatic and made money and opened to the world, and so can you. They think that the sort of Iran as China possibility is still there. And of course, they see it as a very, very large potential market and a very large trading partner. It's got a lot of mineral resources that China badly needs and oil of course. But no, we can move on to North Korea if you want.

GUYER: Yeah, tell us about China-North Korea, because that's such a fascinating—

KUO: Yeah. So I mean, most of Chinese people I know in the strategic class, I think the metaphor they would reach for is—and I've heard this directly—is, we've raised this angry pit bull in our backyard. It's very bitey. It'll lunge out and bark at the neighbors, attack the neighbors. It's bitten kids, but we don't wanna put it down. Actually, sometimes we wanna put it down, it's really annoying. But when somebody comes prowling around your house, it's good to have that ferocious dog. It's a bit like that.

GUYER: But in actual fact, it's a kind of oversold, overdetermined, overhyped relationship in Washington?

KUO: Yeah. I mean, look, again, no love lost between the two of them. The Chinese regard them as a gigantic pain in the ass. If they could remove the nuclear threat painlessly, they would do that. They don't like it. But you know, the alternative is a very closely US-aligned combined Korean state. The, what, 48 million people of the south and somewhat less in the north—a very, very large state, you know, Vietnam-sized state, that would be US-friendly, right on their border. They wouldn't want that either, right?

GUYER: And just while we're talking about all the baddies out there, and I’m kind of problematizing that term but...

KUO: I heard the air quotes.

GUYER: China and Venezuela, China and Cuba, are these relevant relationships that are connected to Trump's renewed militarism on these countries?

KUO: Well, look, I mean, China had a lot of money invested in Venezuela and of course it was the biggest export destination for Venezuelan oil. So it stung, but I mean it's not existential. It's certainly not worth fighting over and, you know, China had a bit of a diplomatic bruise from having had a senior diplomat present in Venezuela, talking to Maduro, the very night before he was abducted. Not a good look.

But I think people have made way, way too much of a big deal about the egg on China's face for Venezuela. I don't think that it's that major of a consideration, and probably the same goes for Cuba. I mean, they don't want to see Cuba fall under the growing portfolio of Marco Rubio, who now seems to be sort of the governor general for a lot of the neocolonial properties of the United States, but yeah, I don't think that they're too invested in that. And there are certain historical sensibilities that they're very aware of.

GUYER: And so big picture Kaiser, how do you see China? Is it replacing the United States in the international system?

KUO: No, no.

GUYER: Is it stepping into the fray in places with the self-destruction of USAID and US soft power and US trade policies? Is it just quietly getting a lot done while the US is fiddling? How do you see China’s role then?

KUO: Yeah I mean, it’s not losing this opportunity. It's not sitting idle as this happens, but neither is it going in and filling in the so-called vacuum that's been left by the retreat of American power. China has actually much less appetite for that than probably most people imagine. It will be opportunistic in some ways. There are many features of the so-called rules-based international order that China would like to see tweaked. It wants more representation for countries in the Global South, China included, in the IMF and the World Bank and the WTO and in these organizations, in accordance with the rules that were established by those organizations.

The upshot is that China is not looking to supplant the United States, but it also kind of abhors a vacuum, in the sense that I think they buy the idea of the Kindleberger Trap, right? This idea that when you have an incumbent power that is no longer willing or able to provide public goods in the world, and the rising would-be incumbent power doesn't step in to provide those goods, you have a very bad situation. And that, in the words of Charlie Kindleberger—the economic historian who was sort of the architect of the Marshall Plan, who coined that phrase—he thinks that the rise of fascism in the twenties and the thirties especially, you know, the outbreak of the war and the Shoah, the whole thing, was the result of a Kindleberger Trap where the rising power of the day, the United States, rather than sort of taking the reigns...

So, I really wonder why it is then that we are so loath to see China try to put public goods in the world, you know, why we we're so prickly about things like the Belt and Road, or our reaction to things like the Belt and Road Initiative is to sneer at it or to jeer at it or to cheer whenever it stumbles. That's not what our attitude should be. We should actually be trying to involve ourselves in it. I think that China wants to see the world move into something that's generally—they want a more multipolar world, but also one that has stronger multilateral institutions. I mean, they're the last power that really truly believes in the United Nations as an organization. They've played their cards in the UN very well. A lot of their diplomatic wrangling in the Global South has ultimately been about securing votes in the UN and in the UN Security Council, right?

But there's no appetite, I think, to become the new global hegemon. I think that they're very aware that they have limited capacity to do so. They have limited human capacity to do so. They don't have the skilled people out there in the world to be able to handle that. They're very aware of their shortcomings in that regard, and that's to their great credit.

GUYER: Well, Kaiser, this is an incredible briefing on China economically, technologically, diplomatically, and its role in this very dangerous world today. Thank you for coming on None Of The Above. We really appreciate it.

KUO: Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you for having me.

GUYER: Thank you, Kaiser, for joining me on this episode, and make sure to check out the Sinica podcast. None Of The Above is a production of the Institute for Global Affairs at Eurasia Group. Eloise Cassier is our producer. I'm your host, Jonathan Guyer. We couldn't do this without our team: Lucas Robinson and Ransom Miller.

If you enjoyed what you heard, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening right now. Share it with a friend and please send me a note: info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Til next time. Thanks for tuning in.

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