Cina e Stati Uniti, un confronto totale - Altri Orienti live a The Last Question [ENG]

Bob Marle e Assanziro, i Pink Floyd da Benezia. Poi Madonna, in Irvana, Dalla e dei Gregori. Sono loro i protagonisti di Dal vivo, la nuova serie di Corea Media, dedicata a cinque concerti e pocali che si sono tenuti in Italia. Io sono Carolina di Domenico. Io sono Raffele Coriglione, potete ascoltare dal vivo sulla vostra piattaforma audio preferica. Parò una breve introduzione di Kaiser in italiano, IGN, something about you, nothing bad. Perché come vi dicevo prima, in realtà quando abbiamo cominciato a pensare a questo summit, il primo nome che mi è vendentemente è stato il suo, quindi l'abbiamo subito contactato. Perché per chi non lo conoscesse, Kaiser ha questa grande abilità, dal mio punto di vista, di raccontare quello che succede in China oggi, quindi parla di China contemporanea, attraverso i prodiversi angoli, uno dei quali è la tecnologia. Questo perché ha una grande esperienza di lavoro anche in China, ha vissuto anche negli Stati Uniti, ora è tornato a Pekino, io già si in Beijing, e ha lavorato principalmente come direttore della comunicazione internazionale di BY-DOO che è il più importante motore di ricerca cinese, ma definirlo solo motore di ricerca oggi abbastanza limitante. E nello stesso tempo, dal 2010, è lo host di un podcast che si chiama Sinica Podcast che io ho invito tutti ad ascoltare, che è un getto ai perfetto in realtà per entrare in contatto con la realtà cinese, perché lo fa traverso interviste anche di autori di libri, ma anche di specialisti, che permettono proprio come dire di avere degli strumenti per indagare maggiormente la China che cambia ogni giorno, che rivela sempre qualcosa di sconosciuto, ovviamente, per studiarla anche meglio, perché fornisce tantissimi appunto appunti e strumenti, si grazie per andare più a fondo. Anche perché, come dire, la bellezza di occuparsi di China, almeno lo dico da parte mia, è quella che ogni volta che si capisce qualcosa si apre fondamentalmente un barato di incomprensione. Quindi io credo che la sua presenza ci aiuterà a desplorare alcuni temi in particolare oggi, che sono la relazione con gli stati uniti, le questioni legate alle AI e lo sforzo che ha fatto la China per diventare oggi una potenza tecnologica. E poi vedremo anche, parremo anche di un argomento che di solito tende un po' a buttare giù, ti raggiungo un po' la corda di chi ascolta, però credo che sia interessante per noi ci appare a rimanche di Europa. Faggia caldo, capisco che "I'm just kidding about Europe because it's not a really nice topic for us, you know?" E nello stesso tempo cercheremo un po' di vedere come si sta muovendo la China. Trall'altro stavo giusto ricordando a Kaiser, cuo che noi ci conosciamo dal 2008, quindi suma, abbiamo una certa esperienza e una certa conoscenza di lo intervistato per la prima volta al periodo dell'Olimpia di quando si parlava tra altro di blog. Parlava ancora di China come World Factory, come Fabrica del mondo. Oggi invece parremo di China come superpotenza tecnologica, quindi cercheremo in sieme di fare un po' questo percorso. Vado veloce perché non abbiamo tantissimo tempo, siamo già un po' tirati, quindi so let's start, ok. Great, thank you for that introduction in which I'm sure was very generous. First of all welcome Kaiser, and I'm very excited you are here in Rome, in Applausion. Siamo chiaramente manche prima a Paolo Arduino L'OElla componente metal di tutto questo via Entie Y. So let's start with Trump's last visit in Beijing. About China and the United States, where we are now in European. We're in a state of what I would describe as mutually assured disruption, and because of that state of mutually assured disruption there is a semblance of stability, although because one of the actors involved is Donald Trump, you can never assume stability. So we're in an unsure situation where each really has the other in a chokehold. The United States has demonstrated that if it wants to, it can hurt China's developmental trajectory through denial of key technology inputs to China. On the other hand, as we saw last year, China is able to fight back. China is able to restrict the exports of processed rare earths and other critical minerals, and the United States, as we can see, is not in a position to tolerate that kind of disruption. Now, I think we've seen with the crisis in the straightforward moves that China is able to a very great extent to tolerate disruptions that the United States is unable to. So I think that there are some men's and men's lessons learned from that, and that has produced the state of, I would say, temporary truce. And what do you think about the Chinese approach to Trump? Because the first time he went to the White House, I feel the Chinese leadership was afraid of it. Now it seems they know better Trump. What is the approach of Chinese leadership and Chinese people to Trump in your opinion? Yeah, I think that the leadership learned many lessons from the first Trump administration. They have not sat idly by. They have done much to proactively prevent them from being in a position where they are forced to cave. So they have, I think, equipped themselves very well. They have pursued more autarty, more autonomy in many technological processes. Have eliminated many of the potential choke points that the United States might have been able to leverage while very clearly developing their own capabilities vis-a-vis the United States. So I think whether you're looking at it from the perspective of economic or strategic capabilities, China is in a much better position than it was during the first Trump administration. We talk about this because I ask some questions. We have a China for a long time, look at the United States as a great country, as something to imitate, to copy. And now it seems they change their behavior. I would be careful not to overstate that. I think there's still a lot of admiration for the United States. I don't think that they, while some of the rhetoric may appear to clear the United States in a state of terminal decline, no strategic elites in China truly believe that. They all understand that the United States still has very deep reserves, that it has, for example, a talent pool that draws not just from the 1.4 billion people that China has, but from the entire population of 8 billion around the world, that it still possesses very, very fine research universities, that it still holds a lot of attraction to a lot of people around the world, that it still has considerable soft power, that it still has, despite Donald Trump's best efforts to destroy them, it still has important alliance systems around the world. So they don't, I don't think they, they, no, to be sure, they, I think, are more clear-eyed about what the United States is. They may occasionally say it's a paper tiger that it's all off and puff, but won't be blowing anyone's house down. I don't think that that's what is truly believed, though. And what about the US approach to China? We, we saw these phenomena, it's, it's called China-Mexing, for example, the fascination of American people for China, because China is a developed country, everything works in China, in terms of safety, everything works, not like the United States. What do you think about this? Yeah, I think that, again, the United States is a very, very diverse country, but one thing that has clearly happened, really since January of last year, of January of 2025, is we've seen a real, what young people would call, a vibe shift, a mood change, and it's not, it's most pronounced, obviously, in younger demographics. If you look at people 18 to say 30, they have clearly changed in their attitudes toward China to become much more admiring of China's competence, its ability, its state capacity, its ability to get things done. And there's, you know, ample reason for people to do this. I think every day on their Instagram feeds and on TikTok and on the very social media, they see a lot of very, very impressive Chinese infrastructure. We're reminded today that doing something very high-tech, like this conference, on a physical location of ancient infrastructure poses some problems, for example, as many of you fanning themselves. It's not always the easiest thing to pull off, and so they're admiring, I think, of that. But what I think is significant about that is these, pockets of admiration span the entire American political gamut, the whole spectrum, from the left in which the most, I think it's fair to say, the most vital political force is the so-called abundance movement. And they see China's manufacturing capability, they see its ability to deliver services and good infrastructure to people. So left is admiring of it in that way. On the right, in the libertarian center too, there's a lot of admiration for China's technocratic competence for the ability of the state to actually organize life. And on the far right, even on the populist national right, I think there's some admiration that's rooted in the idea that China, they see as a more or less homogeneous, ethno-state, it's 92% Han Chinese, that there is a single unified language and a lot of people who are anti-immigrants on the American right, they see that as something to admire. So a lot of people are finding something to admire. I think what Donald Trump has brought to this is that he possesses, if nothing else, a kind of low animal cunning. He has a very well-developed sense of smell for politics. And he realizes that bashing China is not necessarily going to be a winning political issue, especially when China can now bash back. So it's not a particularly successful political strategy he has managed to silence most of the so-called China hawks in the administration, which used to be quite numerous, but now they're very much in retreat. That I think is a very big sea change in American politics. Now, that doesn't mean the whole game has changed. I think there are still a lot of people, people who are close to the Biden administration and its policies, who still champion policies of technology export controls of trying to knee-cap China, trying to prevent China's emergence as a genuine technological rival to the United States. Yes, talking about technology, we need to be, maybe because of information, sometimes superficial, sometimes stereotypes. We were surprised that China suddenly become a technological superpower. So I said we met in 2008. So if I think about it, 2008, Hujin, Tao leadership, incredible growth, inequality, social stability, the oxygen pin, and this big effort to push the boundaries of technology. So what is China today? How do you describe China today? Yeah, so the question really through this is how did China become such a native-aid state? How did it fly in the face of so many of these beliefs that are deeply embedded in Western thinking about the relationship between authoritarian politics and innovation? I think probably in Italy, just like in the United States, through much of the decade of the 2000s, they would look at Chinese technology and say, China is only capable of imitation. Not of actual innovation. They would grudgingly admit that China seemed to be good at developing new business models, incremental improvements on existing technologies, but nothing that they could point to and say, this is wholesale innovation. I think that was true for a while. What puzzled me about that, though, was this, in, say, the year 2000, when I was working in the Chinese internet sector already, it was common to hear this, and this sort of, you know, speak talking down to China, but behind that criticism was an expectation that this country should be able to produce world-beating technological innovation. The question that always bothered me is, like, why would you expect that of a country that had just emerged from dire poverty? Why would you expect that of a country whose per capita GDP at the time was still lower than that of many sub-Saharan African countries that was still lower per capita GDP than Argentina or than Mexico or Turkey? I didn't hear people in the year 2000 saying, where's the Brazilian innovation? They were saying, the Turks can only imitate, they can't innovate. Why do they expect something different from China? And I think the answer to that has something to do with this expectation that China, with its emphasis on technology, on education, with its long, proud history of historical innovation, the four-grade inventions of paper and the compass and gunpowder and what have, this set up the sort of expectation. Now, of course, people believe that you weren't able to innovate in a country that was authoritarian. And I thought that was very strange, too, because you had only to look at recent historical examples, I mean, what country launched the first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin. That was the Soviet Union, which was not a liberal democracy need, I remind you. There was the Soviet Union, a liberal democracy when it put Sputnik into space. What country developed the V2 rocket? In fact, Leonardo, right, when he was doing his great work in Milan under the court of Louis Vuitton Vico de Sforzfe, I mean, he wasn't a liberal Democrat, right? It's not the pre-installed country. It turns out, to make an innovative smartphone app, you don't need to know the truth of what happened in Beijing in 1989, in Tiananmen Square, right? So yeah. So how they innovate in some way, for example, deep-sick was a big surprise for how do you live the Sputnik movement about deep-sick? Yeah, deep-sick is one of many very, very innovative companies that have been popping up. I mean, there was just one, there were a couple of like, manned as, for example, at the camera right after, and we've seen quite enough, like Z.ai, Jirupo, which just listed in Hong Kong, a very, very big IPO. There are. Simply, I mean, if you look at the last names of the researchers who are publishing the leading AI conferences, many of them are Zhang and Zhang and Yang and Wang and Chen and Li, and you know, Li, I mean, there are a lot of Chinese people working whether in Silicon Valley or in Boston or in Austin or in Beijing or in Xinjiang or in Shanghai or in Hongzhou. I'm joking. Yeah, absolutely. Hongjiang. China, I think we need to understand it as an ecosystem that has developed, it's a full fledged ecosystem where all the very pieces are in place and where the state has acted as a quite effective coordinator that has incentivized the kind of innovation that is the example of the three in deep sea. And it's also solved one of the big problems that, you know, B. Devils AI in the United States and I dare say in Europe, which is energy. China's energy, its electrical grid is really world-beating. I mean, continental scale, ultra high voltage wires, and of course, needless to say, one that is increasingly being fed by solar and other renewable energy. Yeah, about this. Hello, I'm Mario Calabresi. With emergency, we have made a podcast to report the choice of peace in the city of the public debate. With me you can also listen to Francesca Manochi, Simone Pieranni, Thomas Montanari and Marco Damilano. Then listen to Pudia on your favorite audio platform. Hello, I'm Lorenzo Pregliasco. And I'm Lorenzo Baravalle. In the podcast which is made in Italy, in collaboration with Will, we will tell you every month the moments that have made the story of our country. The moments of collective joy and tragedy, stories of presidents and common people. And events that have been signed before and after. Then listen to these stories on your favorite audio platform. I want to go back to something you mentioned before. You told me in an interview, you said, AI in the West, he's seen as Black Mirror TV series, just to understand. In China it's more like Star Trek. Does this still hold today? Where does that come from? This optimism of Chinese society? Yeah, that's a joke that I've made before. And I think it still broadly applies. But in the United States, in the UK, in much of the West, we have a pessimism about technology. We're deeply suspicious of technology. We are suspicious, for example. example of our tech moguls. I mean, there are not a lot of people who will stand up and declare what fans they are of Mark Zuckerberg right now. There are not a lot of fans who, especially in major metropolitan areas, who think that Elon Musk is somebody who is not deeply problematic. In China, it's quite different. I think that there are many layers, and you have to understand that a society is a matrix of social and cultural and economic and political fabric that really creates a soil in which technology is more nurtured and is able to grow better and soil that is poorer. In China, at a very basic level, ordinary people, anybody who has lived in the last 40 years, has essentially only known their lives improving in lockstep with the device they have to hand, whether the laptop or the desktop computer they have at home or at the office, or the device they're carrying in their pocket, as it's bandwidth speed, as it's processing capabilities increase their material lives have also gotten better. So they see these things happening in parallel and don't necessarily, you know, squeeze apart whether this is correlative or just or causal, but the fact is they're not deeply suspicious of technology. But I think there's something deeper and more historically rooted in this, and that is that Chinese understand their own history, the lessons of the so-called hundredth century of humiliation, as being you cannot fall behind in technology. You do so at the peril, the very existential peril of the nation. They believe that the reason why China fell from the very forefront of human civilization by the end of the 18th century to fall so badly behind the West so that it could be at the mercy of the West, to have its cities pillaged, to have colonized, to have land seeded to other states, is because it fell behind technologically. And you also have to look at the latter of success in China. When they look at how, who is in power, who has authority in China, who has wealth in China, it's almost uniformly people who studied science, technology, education, mathematics. The culture is such that, you know, it's not like America, where the smart student is picked on, doesn't sit at the good table in the lunchroom, never gets the girl, is bullied by the football player. No, it's the opposite. China is really the land of nerd empowerment. It truly is a place where, if you are a good student, it means you have social power as well. And that will translate ultimately into economic power and political power in the cultural capital. It's a very different world. But still it works, this thing, of education and social power. It's still working in China now. I believe it is, it's still working in China. I think it's maybe less pronounced than it was 10 years ago, but it's still certainly there. It's still certainly, parents have a very big role in deciding their children's educational and ultimately professional futures. And it's really rare that they will say, yes, go ahead, study English poetry or study the Italian Renaissance. No, they say, no, study engineering physics or study AI. Yeah, AI, absolutely. Computer science isn't it? Okay, now, what about the relation between China and European Union and European countries? What do we miss in the understanding of China? So as we all know, at the beginning of last week, we had this European council dinner, your Prime Minister, especially the Friedrich Merz was there. Of course, Ursula of underlying. We're in on the brink right now of potentially a major trade war. I think we need to think about one basic principle that has animated, I think, a lot of my thinking about China. That idea, it's called cognitive empathy. We all know what empathy is, ordinary emotional empathy, right? I don't need to know much about you or your family, if you tell me your wife was diagnosed with cancer, I know how to feel. I don't know anything about your relationship with her, but Shirley must love her, therefore you must be sad. And I would know how to feel at emotionally, but I don't know anything about, if I don't know anything about the way my policy or my rhetorical pronouncements land on the ear of Chinese, then I'm in trouble. I need to understand something about their lived experience, about their values, their attitudes, their habits of mind, the formative events in their history. I need to understand that. That's called cognitive empathy, this ability to turn the chessboard around and to see it from the other side. It's something that we should develop a network, and I see it missing both in Brussels and in Beijing right now as we enter this period. For Brussels, I don't think they understand, for example, how morally freighted the language they use when they describe China's overcapacity tends to be. They say things like, you're cheating, you're using unfair business practices, you're flooding or dumping into our markets, you're suffering overcapacity. They think there's this deliberate manipulation of the value of the Chinese currency. Some of this may be true, but the way that it lands on the Chinese ear activates a kind of emotion that is not unique to Chinese, but Chinese have a unique word for it, that the word is "wait you," and it's this emotional state that's activated when somebody accuses you of doing something wrong when all you've been doing is trying to do the right thing. You feel unfairly criticized. It's a particular kind of feeling. So China believes it's been playing by the rule book that the West wrote, that it's been saving, it's been investing in infrastructure, it's been producing quality goods at low prices, it's been producing a lot of photovoltaic arrays, it's been producing electric vehicles and batteries that are going to help us to prevent climate change, so we don't have summers as crazily hot as this one in Europe. They think that they're doing the right thing and they feel wrongly accused. The worst though was when Friedrich Merz started talking about the need for a new plaza accord. Do you know what the plaza accord is? Anyone raised their hand? So in 1985, believing that Japan was undervaluing its currency that Japan was exporting unfairly using industrial policy, state subsidies to unfairly compete against American and European firms, the United States, France, Britain, and got together with Japan and they forced it to re-value its currency. The currency almost doubled in its value within the first few months after the plaza accord was held at the plaza hotel in New York in 1985. Economists will debate whether this was the direct cause of what happened in Japan beginning roughly 1990, which was of course multiple decades of very, very low and sometimes negative economic growth, contraction or very low growth, the lost decades of Japan where we saw that massive real estate bubble pop in the very early 1990s. So China, in China there's not a sophisticated debate over what really the plaza accord was about, but they understand it as meaning the West ganged up on an Asian country forced it to re-value its currency and sent its economy into a tailspin. So that's what they hear when Frederick Merz talks about the plaza accord, he should know that this is how Chinese policy makers will hear it. China for its part, I don't think they understand or they don't bring aboard the politics of the auto industry, they understand how important the auto industry is in Europe, especially in Germany, but they don't think about how it's such a pain point politically, how those out of work auto workers in the state of Saxony are going to go out and vote for AFD, for alternative for Deutschland, the far right party. How it will bring more far right parties into power, which is exactly what Brussels does not want. So that's ultimately what the point of neurology in Europe and Beijing needs to better understand that. Thanks, Kalisero. We are in the end, but because it's the last question, some it's the last question for you. Not the Azimuth one, of course. It's speculation. If we zoom out 10 or 15 years, China deploying AI at scale, the West paralyzed by regulation and fragmented, and Europe trying to stay independent. So what's the actual end game scenario? I'll start to say where Europe will play a role, and it's hard to see any, I mean, of course, there's some contributions to some of the layers of AI that are coming out of Europe, for example, ASMR. But really, this is a US and China question. I think that when I'm asked to forecast 10 and 15 years in the future, the tool I reach for is scenario planning. And in scenario planning, we try to come up with a two by two matrix built on two axes, right? That are defined by being very high impact, but very high uncertainty variables. So one of them, I think, is maybe obvious and suggested by your question itself, which is, you know, who will win the AI race? However, that's defined. Now, I have a lot of problems with the framing of it as a race to begin with, and we can get into that, but we don't much time. So AI will China, with its strategy of extensive AI diffusion, will that win out, or will the American headlong rush toward AGI? Will they win? The other axis, I'm, it was tempted maybe to think that there's some kind of geopolitical element to it, but I think it's actually better if we look at it also in terms of AI. What kind of technology will AI actually be? Will it be one that compounds leadership? If you win the AI race, does that mean you lock in a permanent advantage that your lead will only increase because you've reached AGI already before your competitor? Or will it be the kind of technology, more like more of the familiar foundational technologies that we've seen, like, you know, electricity or, or, you know, the internet where it will diffuse broadly, it will give decisive advantage to no one party that even winning it, you'll have fast followers that the lead will not be quite so meaningful. So that will give us four different quadrants. One, you could see very easily would be one in which China quote unquote wins, but in end AI proves to be decisive. And that's, of course, the nightmare for anthropic or for, you know, all the frontier labs in the United States, and for, of course, the Pentagon. You know, that would mean that China's approach would come to define standards that its models would come to be in use, that its approach to AI governance would ultimately win out globally, that it would win global markets with its AI foundational models. Another one adjacent to that would be one in which China wins, but it's actually quite a diffused kind of a win. You know, the technology doesn't come for a compounding advantage that it allows for fast following. There you could see, I think that's actually a trajectory we're very likely on. I don't believe that nobody, whoever gets to AI first will win it all. I tend to think that this is what we're looking at. A world in which China ends up winning much of the global south, that its approach in diffusion will be actually the thing that is fast following, that it will actually confer a greater advantage, that its advantage in energy, that it's ability to scale to go from one to n rather than zero to one will prove a decisive advantage. And then the other two, of course, are ones in which the United States wins. You know, the United States winning and having this compounding advantage, of course, would be what Dario Amade or Sam Altman dream of, or David Sacks or for that matter, anyone of the Biden-Bros and their foreign policy blob. And, you know, I suppose there's a possibility of that, but to me that's very speculative, it's very science fiction. And of course, another possibility is that America wins and approaches AGI, but China gets there on its heels, the rest of the world, open source, open weight models, even AGI, AGI models, become ubiquitous, become accessible. And the costs continue to come down driven in large part by China's ability to deep drive down token costs, to drive down training costs. And AGI becomes something that is widely adopted, is transformative at a microeconomic level, but does not confer any one state with an overweaning advantage. Thanks, guys, everybody. We have to go. Thanks a lot. It was a pleasure to have you here. Ciao, I'm Isabella Ragonese, and in the new season of MUBI Podcasts Italian contemporary, we talk about all those films that have made us travel. From the waves on the roads of the whole world, to the trips that fall into our mind, without leaving home. You can listen MUBI Podcasts Italian contemporary, on your audio platform preferred. Ciao, I'm Lorenzo Pregliasco, and I'm Lorenzo Baravalle. In the podcast "Quisifal Italia", we have been working with Will. We will tell you every month the moments that have made our story of our country. The moments of collective joy and immense tragedy, the stories of presidents and common people. And the events that have been signed first and after. You can listen to "Quisifal Italia" on your audio platform preferred. Thank you.