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Welcome to the cynical podcast with the discussion of current affairs in China. In this program,
we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help
us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and
society. Join me each week for in depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to
how we think and talk about China. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week for really
one of the very last times from my soon-to-be on the market home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, a National Resource Center for the Study of East Asia.
Listeners, please support my work by becoming a paying subscriber at SenecaPodcast.com. Please
do subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations.
The last few weeks have given us an extraordinary stretch of summit tree in the Chinese capital.
Donald Trump's visit to Beijing, his first as president since returning to the White House,
was followed only four days later by the arrival of Vladimir Putin to visit back-to-back by
the leaders of two of the world's other major powers, arguably the other two major world
powers hosted by Xi Jinping in quick succession. Whatever one makes of the substance, the choreography
alone has set off a great deal of interpretation in Washington, in European capitals, and in
Moscow. But the conversation I've been especially eager to have was about how all of this is
landing somewhere else entirely, that is in the capitals of the global south.
And there are some big framing questions to put on the table.
Our leaders in Legos, in Rasulia and Jakarta, Nairobi, breathing a sigh of relief, are they
hopeful that a more stable U.S.-China mode is for Vendy, means they won't be forced
to choose sides, and that they can get on with a business of development in a less turbulent
environment, or is there foreboding, a sense that they're watching not stability forming,
but a consolidation instead of a G2 world, one in which the agency that middle powers
and non-line states have painstakingly carved out over the last decade somehow gets squeezed
back down. Is China being seen as the indispensable convener, the one capital that can now host
both Washington and Moscow within a single week, or conversely as a power being pulled
in two directions itself, and forced to perform balancing acts of its own? And underneath
all of it, what does this moment do to the kind of multi-alignment strategies that so many
global south states have come to depend on? Well, to help me work through all of this,
I am genuinely delighted to welcome back to the show. Someone I've collaborated with
now for many years, and whose work I admire enormously, Eric Olander, founder of the
China Global South Project, and host of the China Global South podcast. Eric and his team
have built what is truly the most indispensable English language resource for understanding
China's engagement with Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. He draws
on a network of contributors in places that most Western China watch outlets simply
don't cover. If you want to know how a Chinese finance port is actually being received in
Coastal Kenya, or what Brazilian commentators are saying about a Lula Xi exchange, or how
Indonesian elites are reading Beijing's South China Sea Poster, Eric's operation is where
you go. It's a model of what serious on the ground, multi-vocal journalism about China
can look like. And over the years, our shows have leaned on one another. It's often enough
I think that we're now, I mean, he is a real intellectual partner in this work. Eric,
welcome back to China. Great to see you, my man. Great to be back, and you're hired
as the marketing chief for the China Global South Project. Well, Kenya painting, that's
the thing. I'm hard up these days. Anyway, it's just wonderful. I am a very good morning
to you. Very good morning to you. I always want to borrow phrasology from your show.
It's hot and rainy here in Southeast Asia this time of year, but yeah. But we're
excited. The rains are finally here. Yeah. Yeah. Eric, let's start with a big picture.
So in the days since these two visits, what have you and your team been hearing from your
contributors and your contacts across the Lowell South, this huge region that you covered?
Is there a dominant mood and it would be lead relief for opportunity, anxiety, foreboding
as I was saying, or is it genuinely fragmented depending on, you know, where you're listening,
give us the tour. Interesting because we spend a lot of time looking at the discussions
in Asia, Africa, Latin America. So we have a site in Spanish that's focused on Latin
America, and then also a separate site in French that's focused on Africa. And so this
conversation about the summits is very interesting by virtue of the fact that, and here in Vietnam,
it was the same situation too. I mean, like it was the pro forma coverage that you saw.
Not a lot of discussion about it. Nowhere near the kind of intensity of the conversations
that people have been having in the US and Europe about it, about this kind of movement
of great power politics. I think you have to understand the moment that we're in right
now. So in Kenya, there have been, for the past week, massive riots over petrol prices
and taxes going up. There's been violence on the streets here in many parts of Southeast
Asia, the fuel shortages are pressing down on everything. So I think people have a lot
more things on their mind other than this. And everybody's kind of a little bit exhausted
of trying to figure out Donald Trump. And what does it mean? I think the performance that
Donald Trump gave did not really reassure a lot of people. The groveling that he did with
Xi is a parent lack of understanding of things like the Theocity's trap and other things
like that, just kind of did not instill a lot of confidence. And so I think a lot of people
in global South countries from what we could see were just kind of not really paying attention
to the summit in the sense of what is every machination going on between what did Xi do,
what did Trump do, what were the body languages and all of that. What we're seeing though,
much more and the same time the summit was going on is rapid movements here in Asia in
particular to accommodate for the new realities. And so at the same time as the summit is going
on, President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines is preparing for a trip to Japan to meet with
Japanese Prime Minister Taikaiji and said something very interesting that triggered an enormous
amount of buzz out here that in the event of a Taiwan conflict, the Philippines would
invariably be drawn in because of the proximity to Taiwan and also the fact that there's 200,000
Filipinos in Taiwan. This captured the headlines a lot. China, of course, reacted furiously.
And what was interesting was that again, we did not see the United States come to the
support of an ally partner on this rhetorically speaking. This is something that the Japanese
have been complaining about for a long time that when they made similar comments that they
would be brought into a Taiwan conflict, the US was nowhere to be found. So all of this
together sets a context of uncertainty and people weren't focusing as much on the summit
as on the actions and what comes out of it. And I don't think there was a lot of tangibles
that people could really base decisions on. So they're just moving on now. And you're
seeing the movement, we can talk about Japan and South Korea as well. There's really a
growing sense of alienation from the United States that they're going to follow through
on their security units in Asia. Let's focus on Asia right now. And I need to time stamp
this. We are speaking here on the east coast of the United States at little past nine in
the evening on May 21st. It's the morning of May 22nd where you are. And we've just seen
the news that the United States has paused delivery fulfillment of a 14 billion dollar
arms package to Taiwan. This has just been announced by the Secretary of War. And that
in addition to that, the undersecretary of what used to be called the Department of Defense
Elridge Colby will not be as had originally been announced visiting China in advance of
Pete Hegseth's trip there. Now, this is all, you know, of course, we will let a lot of
people were afraid that this was going to happen.
had signaled his hesitation about approving the arm sales he'd sort of talked about the
arm sales being in advance in interviews that he did. So now I think Taipei's worst fear
is confirmed, but you know we're here to talk about the reaction in the global south. How
is this news likely going to impact other countries of the region?
So what Trump has been able to do is remarkable in a historical context. When you see South
Korean President Lee Jae-mi-ung and Japanese Prime Minister Sinai-Tekaiichi smiling together,
being so close together, I mean this is one of the most strange geopolitical and historically
strained relationships in the modern era. And they are recognizing that they need each other.
And since Tekaiichi has come into power, she's leaned heavily into rebuilding relations
with South Korea. And this week we saw a summit between those two. And it was all smiles.
And this is a reflection of the new realities that Trump has brought them together. And that
is something that we saw it a little bit under Biden, but this is so strained. And at
the same time we're seeing Japan was just, the Japanese Prime Minister was just in Vietnam.
She was just in Australia. Marcos is on his way to Tokyo. And there is a sense among
some analysts in this region now that Japan wants to put itself back at the center of
an Asia-Pacific security architecture. And again, this is where China has to be very
concerned because pushing the United States out of the Western Pacific doesn't necessarily
mean life gets easier for the Chinese in Asia. And I don't think there's an appreciation
of that in a lot of the Chinese discourse. They're so focused on the US right now.
Well, but the movements that Japan is making is tremendous.
Let me push back on you a little bit there because I do hear it a lot when I talk to people
who are sort of in the Chinese strategic class. They're not unaware that China has benefited
from. They're not unaware. No, to be sure, absolutely. But I think the focus is far
more on the US. But I do agree. There is, I mean, there's certainly sensitivities in
China, obviously, about Japan. I mean, right. I mean, it's not just Japan. I mean,
China understands that it had benefited from the, you know, the fact that the public good
of security and balancing in the Western Pacific had been something that the United States
had provided. And that when that was a pillar of stability, it was a useful thing for China.
Of course, they had nurtured the Syria, but they're a little bit like the dog that caught
the truck right now and getting what they wished for. That's right. And so the concern
that Chinese need to have right now is that, you know, their defense spending has been
stable for much of the past 10, 15 years. And that may not be the case going forward.
If the security architecture breaks down in this part of the world, they're going to have
to start spending a lot more on defense. And that's not something that the Chinese economy
and its current state is well positioned to do. So I think, again, we're resetting the
board out here in very profound ways. And that is, and maybe I don't know if it's fair
to put that all at the doorstep of Donald Trump. Remember, the whole pivot to Asia never
fell through with the United States? They never followed through on that. And so maybe
this was bound to happen at some point anyway. And Trump is just accelerating that trend.
But I can tell you, it's happening right now. And it's really happening in quite dramatic
ways, which is fascinating to watch, but it's happened.
It's interesting to hear you describe the result of the summit being sort of increased
instability when in Washington and in Beijing, I think many people are sort of celebrating
and sort of letting out a sigh of relief at what now promises to be a couple of years,
at least, of relative stability. This new framework that not only that Beijing has proposed
evidently, and that the Trump administration in its fact statement following the summit
has agreed to of constructive strategic stability, right? The Chinese read out leaned
very heavily on that phrase. Trump characterized it as that he added, of course, with reciprocity
and there were, there was an additional framing in the American readout. But the fact that
he used the same construction about constructive strategic stability. How is that landing in,
let's start with, and move out concentrically, let's start in Southeast Asia where you are.
Is it being taken seriously as a description of a new equilibrium or is it read more or
cynically as just mere choreography?
I talked to a Philippine scholar this week to ask that question, and I got a very bland
answer. And this is why I think you're going to be disappointed by my answers here, which
is that I just don't think that people in these countries are putting that much weight
in the kind of stability you're talking about. Because I think the sentiment is there
may be stability between the US and China. But if you're in Panama, or if you're in Vietnam,
or if you're in Angola, or any of these countries, the tensions are going to keep coming. I mean,
the US ambassadors that have been sent around the world aren't going to start pulling back
their punches on China anytime soon, simply because there was a summit. And we see this
playing out right now in Central and South America, where US ambassadors in Peru and Panama
and others have just been unstoppable in their criticisms of the Chinese. And so I think
if you're sitting in these countries, you're much more pragmatic. I mean, remember the context
of this, this narrative that, well, you know, the post Cold War era was one of the most
peaceful and stable areas in history. And that's why the rules based international order
are something that we should cherish, right? Well, if you're sitting in Vietnam or Angola,
or Nicaragua, you're thinking to yourself, no, the Cold War was not a peaceful era. The
war was fought in the global south. The tensions were waged in the global south, not between
the Soviets and the Americans. And I think there's a sense of this as well that for some
of the older generation, they'll think to themselves, listen, we've seen this movie before.
What happens in Washington, Brussels, Beijing, and Tokyo doesn't necessarily mean that it's
going to be stable and quiet here. And so I think there's a lot of skepticism about that.
Let's also be very clear that there are a lot of pressures now on these countries, particularly
because of the energy squeeze. Right. And so I think a lot of people just aren't focusing
as much on these great power dynamics as just getting through the day.
Fair enough. And the local news. I do want to come back to the framing, but before we
do, let me ask you this. I mean, so as you say, during the Cold War, the proxy battles
were all fought in what we're not describing as the global south. So there was a version
back then, it was the third world, right? It was then called the third world. There's
a version in which, you know, leaders of global south might genuinely welcome strategic
stability between the U.S. and China, because it means the kind of great power turbulence
of the last few years finally calms down the pressure to pursue multi alignment to have
to hedge that is a distraction. There's another version, though, where the stability just
is simply a euphemism for this kind of G2 condominium that Trump is so fond of that reduces
their room to maneuver that that echoes too much the Cold War. Which of those readings
do you think has more purchase right now in the capitals of the Global South, insofar as
there is any? There's a universal consensus among developing countries that they don't want
to get sucked into this drama, that they want stability, that they don't want to have to
pick a side. There is not a, there's very few countries, even the countries like Argentina
with Javier Malay, who is a Trump East, if you will. They talked about this week renewing
the swap agreement with China for their currency swap. They still talk about lots of trade
with China. So again, there's a rhetorical and political side of this, and then there's
an economic side. So even in the more polarized parts of this ecosystem, people are looking
for balance and looking for stability. So no one wants to choose a side in this.
You know, the really skillful ones have been able to exact concessions from both sides.
I mean, a country you're very familiar with like Vietnam, they haven't, they sort of benefited
from this, this great power competition in some way.
They have and look at Lula was just in, in President Lula from Brazil was just in Washington
talking about a big rare earth deal with the Americans. I mean, that's right. And at the
same time, we got a report out from the China, Brazil business council that came out two
weeks ago that showed that Brazil is now the number one destination worldwide for Chinese
investment. Well, so this is, I mean, Brazil is really playing its cards so well on both
sides. And remember, Lula and Trump have had a very contentious relationship, but yet
pragmatism still is driving this engagement and this need for balance. Same with Kenya.
We'll welcome U.S. officials and Chinese officials with the same level of enthusiasm.
So you know, the, the desire of these countries to not get sucked into this and to continue
economic growth with stability is always going to
be welcomed. So clearly when they see some kind of datant that happens between the US and Chinese,
I think there is a sigh of relief that's brief. However, we have to remember this is Donald Trump.
So next week, tomorrow, there could be a truth social post that comes out that says, you know,
Xi Jinping used to be my friend, but now he's the worst person in the world. We're now going to
cut everything off. And so I think people, listen, they're not new to Donald Trump. He's been around
for 10 years doing this stuff. So if you ask them quietly and privately, do you have faith?
They'll probably go, I have faith for today, but I'll tell you tomorrow what the situation is.
So the dependability of the United States now is something that's in question. Conversely,
by the way, if you ask them, and this has been something that's coming out consistently,
is do you have faith that the Chinese are going to be reliable partners? They'll say, yes.
And so Donald Trump's chaos has contributed to the perception that China is the more reliable
partner. And that is not something that's fully understood necessarily in the US, but it is
something that is deeply, deeply entrenched now in many of these countries. That's the thing that
China has been selling, you know, at the China development forum, which was just after the release
of the 15th five year plan. I don't know if you saw this, but Li Chang, the premier gave a speech
ordinarily in these speeches, he will sell Chinese dynamism and the growth, GDP growth and everything.
And talk about China being open for business and ready for investment because the audience is a
bunch of mostly Western CEOs. And of course, a lot of Chinese entrepreneurial elites as well.
But this time, it was a completely different message. The message was reliability and stability.
It was, you know, sort of China as adult in the room, China as the island of stability in this
chaotic environment. Interesting. Curious. I mean, I have a feeling I know what you're going to say,
but does the Putin visit in any way complicate any of this? Or does it reinforce any of these?
Because I mean, yeah, I didn't think so. No, just based on what you're saying.
No, not in the least. Again, Putin, particularly in a country like Vietnam, is not seen as a
as a hostile entity. I mean, the Vietnamese prime minister within days of the US
Israeli attack on Iran, went off to Moscow to secure New Oil and to sign a deal for a nuclear reactor.
This has been a boom for Putin who's now selling oil at Temple of the Price and providing energy
relief to a lot of countries around the world by providing new oil access. So no, Putin isn't seen
as as as contentious in many parts of the developing world as he is certainly in the US. And well,
within there's large factions of the US that don't see him as as a problem. I mean, Ask Tucker Carlson,
right? But you know, setting that aside for a moment, I'm I think, you know, the atmospherics
of the Trump visit were very important. And I think a lot of people have been and have distracted
by this this need to talk about the deliverables. But what came out of these visits that actually
does move the needle for economies of the global south? Are there, you know, new commodity
arrangements, ag purchases, rare earths, tariff carveouts? Do people in the global south look only
in vain for any real substance to have come out of this? I don't think that people look to these
summits as any more than they did, for example, when Gorbachev and Reagan got together. I mean,
clearly there was an arms control kind of thing there. But in terms of how that impacted on the
ground daily life in Costa Rica or in Laos, I don't know if people drew a direct line between
these big summits and their their current scenarios and their current situation. So I think it's kind
of similar today. It's a little bit abstract. They they like again that these guys are talking.
I think that's preferable to not talking. They like stability over instability, obviously,
because that impacts their ability to grow. But at the same time, I just did not get a sense
through our editors and our conversations that we've been having that there was as much passion
for this summit as there was in the US and Europe and elsewhere. Were you surprised by that?
Yeah, I just I mean, again, and I'm, you know, this is a huge let's be clear here. This is a huge
swath of territory we're talking about and we yeah, yeah, you know, just have insights into very small
pieces of it. But you know, we I certainly hear in Vietnam, I mean, it was covered in the paper,
but it wasn't the thing that everybody was talking about. People didn't like, you know, cluster
on the street looking at, you know, their phones and newspapers and hearing what the latest was
from Beijing when Trump was doing this or Putin was doing that. Most people went about their
daily lives and even in the policy circles, I think there was a lot of like, this is interesting,
but it's one of 80 things that's going on right now that I have to be following here again in
Southeast Asia, the movements of the Japanese, the movements of the Ferdinand Marcos, those are
much more closely followed. And, you know, Trump's antics do not make front page news here that much
anymore. And this is I mean, I think Americans have a sense of main character syndrome a little bit.
And I remember this when I was talking to people and they were about the ice,
you know, you know, events that were happening in Minneapolis. And, you know, some Americans were like,
we're, you know, the world is watching are people in Vietnam paying attention? And I said, no,
no, they're not paying attention to this because they've got other things to worry about.
And it's worse when you're talking about a guy whose whole sort of life revolves around watching
the US-China relationship, right? Yeah. And so, I mean, so I think that is quite important.
And, you know, there was, and I'll just tell you, our podcast this week on the China Africa podcast
was all about a huge decision by the Court of Appeals in Kenya that came down that forced
the government to reveal the standard gauge railway contract with the China X and Bank.
Nobody in Kenya paid attention to that. It barely got any coverage. It got a little bit in the
business press. No TV coverage. Nothing. That was five years ago. Yeah. That was going to
save me. That's all we want to talk about five years ago. Okay. I mean, and this was where the debt
trap kind of origin, you know, one of the big debt trap kind of accusations came out of this where
they said, you know, part of the contract was going to be the handover of the Port of Bombasa,
which of course is not part of the contract. Revenues from the Port of Bombasa would be used to
repay the loan in the event that there was a default. But anyway, so I just even a big story like
this didn't get any traction in Kenya this week. And we were marveling at this on the show
because they had the fuel riots and because there's so many political scandals. And I guess my point
is there's so many other things going on. And so people are just not paying that much attention to
to things that are happening very far away that don't really have a direct impact on their lives.
Eric, I don't even know to ask you next because I mean, my whole assumption going into this would
have been that, you know, that I'd be able to ask, you know, a reason by region for more granular
stuff. But no, I mean, and again, that's why I set up front. I think I'm going to disappoint you.
Now, are you going to find, I can imagine in the comments, people are going to show, you know,
some discussions on Twitter in Bolivia and in India about this. I'm not saying it didn't get
coverage. Don't get me wrong. I just don't think there was anywhere near the excitement or interest
that we had in the US. And that was to some extent in Europe because we're on the front lines of
this. But for a lot of these countries, I just did not see the scale of interest that I think a
lot of people in the US think there might be. So Eric Bricks has expanded significantly, but it's
also become more internally, you know, heterogeneous, right? Was there Bricks subtext at all to Putin's
visit specifically? How should we think about Bricks as a vehicle right now versus a kind of vibe?
You know, you were the one who years ago talked about Bricks as this sort of, you know, anti-American
grievance club. And, and you tended to poo poo it. Does it have more of a, of a raison d'ath,
gedaures it? You would think it would when one of its members, Iran, comes from their full attack
by the US and Israel. You would think that this would be the moment for Bricks to circle around
its membership, particularly as this grievance type narrative has really taken hold in parts of
the Bricks. And you would think they would be screaming from the rafters. Well, not only is that
not happened, but we're seeing, to some extent, some very serious cracks emerge in the Bricks. So
there was an interesting thing that happened, that coincided with the Trump visit, that Wang Yi
obviously had to be endaging for the Trump visit. But at the same time, they scheduled a Bricks
Foreign Ministers meeting hosted by Astrish Ankara in New Delhi. And so clearly, Wang Yi,
the Foreign Minister, can't go to participate in that. But rather than, you know, say, okay,
Wang Yi can't come, but in many cases, Vice President Han Jong has taken on a lot of high profile
foreign policy type of roles. Again, he has a largely ceremonial role as Vice President,
but he has done a lot of meet and greets with visitors who come through. And he's very prominent
in the foreign policy kind of space. He met Trump at the airport. There was no reason that Han Jung couldn't have gotten on to a plane and gone down to New
Delhi.
to stand in Wang Yi's place.
Instead, what the Chinese did is they didn't send anybody
from Beijing.
And that was very notable.
And so, I got some pushback from people in Beijing
and saying, "Well, listen, we can't do everything."
And I said, "Yeah, but you're big enough to do two things
at once."
And being able to have a big event in Beijing
and send a high-level emissary
who is near the foreign policy rank
is something that you can do.
They didn't do that.
Instead, they sent their ambassador.
- I mean, it's entirely possible that it was a deliberate
downplaying of just to play up the importance
of the bilateral relationship
in a way that would Trump find flattering.
- Exactly, here's my take on it.
I think that they did not want a risk.
Anything coming out of a bricks meeting
that would antagonize Trump
because Trump has already been very vocal about the bricks.
- That's right.
- And so I think this was a signal to Trump to say,
"Listen, we're not gonna cause any trouble
during this visit by having a big statement
come out of the summit."
And then, but here's another interesting thing.
So I think that was a concession to Trump,
who again, has been sensitive about the bricks currency
and the use of the dollar.
And remember, he wanted to put like 100% tariff
on all bricks members for a while, and you know,
the bricks has been a thing for Trump.
So my guess is they stayed away.
That doesn't bode well for the bricks, though,
that it's a group of convenience for the Chinese.
Okay, when it's convenient,
they'll send somebody when it's not.
We'll stay away.
And sending an ambassador to a foreign ministers meeting
is-- - That's bad for him.
- That's a slight.
There's no other way.
You know, in diplomacy, they're very, very sensitive
about rank for rank, okay?
And in the protocol, in diplomatic protocol, you know,
you don't send people who are of different ranks
for the most part.
This was noticeable that they had an ambassador there.
And again, they could have sent another high level emissary
and they didn't.
The other thing that was very interesting
out of the foreign ministers gathering in New Delhi
was they didn't come out with a joint communique,
a joint statement at the end.
Because India's relationship with Israel
is very different than that of the other BRICS members.
- Right, right, right.
- And this was the same problem
that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization had
when they made a statement on the last June attack on Iran
and intentionally kept India out of the loop.
So we're starting to see some pretty big cracks
in these coalitions that were ostensibly created
to be alternatives to the Western led, you know,
international order and Western coalitions.
It would surprise me, Eric, if New Delhi hadn't
paid very close attention to the summitry.
I mean, they have a vested interest
in this like Vietnam.
Both New Delhi and Ho Chi Minh City
have been used by the United States
quite deliberately to counterbalance China.
When that leverage goes away,
when the United States seeks as it evidently has
rapprochement with China, when there is a data,
they lose some leverage.
Is there no anxiety about that?
Especially after the sort of humiliations
of last summer when Trump sort of rounded on India.
So, so abruptly, what's Delhi thinking now?
- I mean, so we just had secretive state Marco Rubio
in India for the Quad gathering.
And again, this was something that our non-resident
fellow Derek Grossman, who many of you know,
he's at USC and he's very well written, you know,
said that the Quad is on life support.
- Yeah, that's what I read. - That's what he said.
And yeah, and so the fact that Rubio went,
probably delays any kind of imminent death of the Quad.
But again, I think it's all these groups
are coming under strain because the coalitions
that held them together have different priorities now.
So the US is not as passionate about the Quad,
and it doesn't seem like China is as passionate
about the bricks as it once was.
I mean, again, just go on the actions.
I am sure that Chinese listeners to this
are going to be furious and saying,
no, we still love the bricks, we're very committed to it.
We help to find, you know, to create it.
But again, not sending somebody at such a pivotal moment,
you know, can only be seen as a slight to the bricks.
- I ask this specifically about New Delhi
because India is the one actor in the Venn diagram
that is in overlapping member of both the Quad and of bricks.
- And the SEO.
- And the SEO, yeah, yeah, and the SEO.
- And India sees its relationship with China
in much more pragmatic terms, I think, today
than we've seen in a long time.
And so Modi has made it clear over the past two years
that number one, deploying tens of thousands of forces
to the line of actual control is not sustainable.
And again, both India and China have seen
that there is some sense in dialing down the tensions
and getting to a more pragmatic level of engagement.
Both sides have told us over the years on many occasions
that while a lot of people see this as a detent,
deep, deep suspicions on both sides exist and persist.
So we're never going to get to a point in any near term future
where we're going to see some type of cozy, upbeat,
friendly coalition between the Indians and the Chinese.
Can they get to a modus vivende
where they just are comfortable existing
without necessarily having 50 to 70,000 troops
and heavy artillery facing each other?
That's probably going to happen.
Although, let's be very clear.
Despite all the flowery rhetoric of now flights
have resumed between the two countries,
we've seen ambassadors back in each other's country,
students are going back and forth.
They have pulled back some of their troops,
they have not pulled back the bulk of their troops.
And the heavy artillery is still there
and the Chinese are deploying
very, very sophisticated weaponry into Tibet,
which is only there for rapid access
into the borders on if needed.
So again, it's interesting to see how the headlines
and the reality sometimes don't align with one another.
At the same time, this past couple of week,
the anti-Chinese sentiment in India,
went up quite a bit over the past, say, one to two weeks,
when word came out that Chinese technicians
were on the ground working with the Pakistanis
during the Operation Sindoor,
the 10-day war between India and Pakistan.
And that is something that really
riled people in India, the fact that the Chinese
were actively helping.
It's one thing to say we're an arms vendor.
We sold the J-10s to the Pakistanis.
We've sold the HQ-9s.
We've sold these weapons.
The Pakistanis are using them
were 10,000 kilometers away.
That's one thing.
But when you have personnel on the ground
working with the Pakistanis,
that's something that really got
onto a lot of people's skin in India.
So these tensions are very close to the surface.
Also interesting note, by the way,
JF-17 fighter jets, Chinese made JF-17 fighter jets
and HQ-9s, which are basically the surface to air missiles,
are now in Saudi Arabia for the first time.
And so Pakistan set the deployment
of 8,000 forces to Saudi Arabia
and Chinese weapons now are on the ground in Saudi Arabia.
That's another interesting wrinkle in all of this.
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- We'll get to the golf.
I do want to go region by region with the caveat
that I understand that I'm likely to be sort of,
well, disappointed by the kind of tepid lack
of response to the nonchalance of response
to the whole rubric of this conversation
was how are they responding to the symmetry?
Apparently, they're not,
but let's go region by region.
We'll start with Africa. - Sure.
- Where you have such a great grounding.
Where are things on Focac follow through the forum
on China-Africa cooperation,
on the security footprint,
the critical mineral corridor,
did this round of symmetry register
at all meaningfully in African capitals?
We've talked about Nairobi already, but.
- Yeah, I mean, again,
the focus on China-Africa relations in Africa today
is much more on the new Tera-free status
that 53 African countries have with China.
- Yeah.
- There's a lot of excitement about that
and the potential that it brings to a lot of African countries
to increase their exports and to China.
And at the same time, noticeably that they can't do have the same
access to the European and the American markets. Let's not forget that even though Congress
did give a goa, which is the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which before Trump was
duty-free access into the US market, they resuscitated a goa, but a goa still has liberation
date tariffs in it. So it's a goa plus liberation date tariffs. So it's not duty-free access
into the US market. And so the Chinese in this move is great politics. However, there's
a lot of skepticism among analysts that it will fundamentally change the China-Africa
trade relationship. 70% of exports from Africa today to China are extractives, with unprocessed
extractives, the countries that will benefit most from this trade access for the most part
are the ones that are already doing relatively well. So South Africa has a very robust export
business. They will sell more fruit. They will sell more agriculture. Kenya may sell
a little bit more. We got some numbers last week that came out of the Kenya National
Bureau of Statistics that exports to China in 2025 collapsed. And that was their word,
collapsed. So, and this is very much typical of a lot of the African trade profiles with
China, except for the handful of countries that sell a lot of raw materials. Kenya in
2025 sold $130 million worth of goods to China and imported 5.3 billion.
Wow, like that is a problem. And not, and selling more avocados and more grapes and more
cut flowers is not really going to close that gap. Most of the Chinese exports to Africa
are intermediate goods, chemicals, precursors, machinery, telecommunications equipment, things
like that. That is a great profile of exports because those intermediate goods help businesses
to generate revenue and other products. So, that's actually not a bad thing. But this
imbalance that exists is very hard to correct. And right now there is about a $100 billion
trade surplus in China's favor. And so, the Chinese to their credit are really working
hard to address this. So, Jiro, our Africa editor was in Beijing last week and was told
by one African embassy that the Chinese Commerce Department, a customs department, and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs are together organizing training seminars for African customs officials
to best take advantage and understand how to overcome some of the non-tariff barriers.
You know, these very high phytosanitary requirements that China has to bring in agriculture into
China, for example. And this is exactly the kind of work that needs to be done right now
to help repair this very distorted trade relationship between Africa and China.
Now you talked about Folkac. This is a very, very interesting time because Folkac next
year will be held in Congo, Brazaville. This will be Folkac 10. So there's obviously the
symbolism of 10 Folkac. This is a very exciting thing. So we're just now starting to get word
that the early organizations and planning sessions are starting. And so it usually takes
about a year. The dynamics of Folkac over the 10 previous meetings or 9 previous meetings
has changed a lot. In the early days of Folkac, back when Jiang Zemin started this in 2000,
the Chinese would basically slip a piece of paper to the African delegation, say, this
is what we're going to talk about. This is what the agenda is. Thank you. Today, that
doesn't work anymore. And what we've seen increasingly over the years is African agency
in this process is increased substantially. And there's great work by people like Hannah
Ryder at Development Reimagined and other groups who are pulling together the African
delegations 12, 14, 16 months in advance working on the agenda priorities and really asserting
themselves much more in the process. So this is a collaborative process rather than a Chinese
driven agenda. That's something to look for. The thing that I've been advocating for in
the run-up to Folkac, and we're going to start writing a whole bunch of policy briefs
for policymakers in Africa on recommendations for what to prioritize in the Folkac conversations.
Give us a preview. My personal, and again, I don't know if my teen agrees with this,
but my personal thing is they should be focused on two things. Number one is having China
help facilitate internal African trade through the African continental free trade area. So
improve logistics, infrastructure, everything so that you can sell a product from South Africa
to Nigeria much faster. The other thing is focus then on how to take advantage of this
duty free access into the Chinese market. I would get rid of all the other stuff out of
Folkac on security, on blue water, on culture, on everything else, and focus on trade and logistics
that can generate jobs and growth. They're obviously not going to do that. They may, I think,
raise these up in priority. What's in it for China to facilitate internal trade?
Well, here's the interesting thing. When we talk about one of the key trends of the 21st
century, and this is going to be a little preview of my recommendation at the end of
the show, Justin Yifu Lin, he's the fame Chinese economist. He did an interview with Guantai,
the kind of nationalist Chinese online website, and he talked about kind of how China should
best take advantage of the current moment. One of the key things is moving manufacturing
out of China into global south markets. We're seeing that now. Here in Southeast Asia,
the Chinese automakers, for example, are setting up factories like every other week. There's
a new announcement of a new Chinese auto factory setting up in Brazil, in South Africa,
the same thing. Well, that's encouraging. As manufacturing goes out, they're not bringing
those factories to sell back to China or to set up a factory in Indonesia that will then
sell to the United States. That BYD factory is meant to sell to Indonesia.
Into Africa. No, in this case of Indonesia, but in South Africa, it's meant to sell into
the Southern African market. When we see high sense and you see BYD and you see these
Chinese manufacturers now setting up in places like Africa, that is meant for regional distribution
rather than international transatlantic or transient distribution. This is where the
AFC FDA becomes very important. If BYD can set up a factory in South Africa and then sell
a car in Nigeria, that would be very good for Nigerian consumers who get access to all these
new products. Right now, it's very difficult to ship a car from South Africa to Nigeria.
You can do it by boat where you have to go around, but in terms of overland, it's very difficult.
That's the same with all products. There also needs to be tax harmonization, trade harmonization
among the various countries. China can help with that as well. The one thing that African
countries have to be concerned about, though, is that the Chinese are increasingly exporting
their very low cost production methods to Southeast Asia, to Africa and to others.
They have an ability to produce at profit margins that are just so low. That makes it oftentimes
very difficult for local competitors to meet not only the China price in China, but the China price
in their backyard. There is a concern among some in Africa that if too much Chinese manufacturing
ends up coming into the continent, displacing local manufacturers and then basically taking
advantage of the free trade access through the AFCFTA, that doesn't necessarily bode well
for African producers, even if it's a benefit to African consumers.
It just incentivizes them to get a hold of some of those Chinese capital goods,
to get some of those Chinese manufacturers. This is a sort of twist on a few months ago,
you did a great show with James King. You remember that about the $6 toaster. I guess it's encouraging
to hear that Lini Fu is saying that even to the Guedcha Wang, which is probably in deep denial
about the problem of not shedding low-end manufacturing as the flying geese model would have had it.
Well, let me let if we can just spend a few moments on what Lin talked about. I think this
article, and I'll give you the link to put in the show notes because I think it's important for
people to read because he's given shape to something that's been happening and he calls it the
three moves. This is in response to the U.S. trade actions against China. He says, number one,
Chinese companies have to move up market. He says, "As long as our products are high quality
and inexpensive and can meet the needs of other countries, barriers will make it difficult to
completely block the market." High quality low cost. That is what the Chinese do. That's what makes
it very difficult for others to compete with them, but that's one of the moves. The second move
is this localization thing we talked about, and that we're very much seeing in the global south.
Here in Vietnam, which is very interesting, if you go up to northern Vietnam, there's a
province called Bechnin Province. In many ways, it's starting to look a lot more like the
Makila Dora's along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Where, you know, an engine for Ford or GM would go across the border six, seven times before it was shipped out.
Now what we're seeing is we're seeing pre-production materials come from China, come into Vietnam for final assembly, and then go out.
Some people call that, "Okay, just transshipment." It's more than just transshipment to evade, to evade Tarris.
What we're seeing now is, again, just like in the US-Mexico relationship, it was a complementary relationship.
Lower-cost labor here in Vietnam benefits Chinese producers, so you can make the hard expensive part in China, and then the low-cost assembly part can be done here.
That's a cost advantage more than just transshipment. This is part of what Lin is talking about in terms of the localization. That's the second move.
The third move is, he says, "Move South."
So he says, and here's to the quote, "We are moving South by expanding our engagement with Belt and Road partner countries and global South markets across regions such as Latin America and Africa, today more than half of China's exports go to BRI countries with over 60% destined for the global South."
And there he's absolutely correct. And this has been one of the mitigation factors that the Chinese have against US pressure.
Asia is China's largest regional trading partner. And this is something that, again, the folks in the White House don't understand. I've heard Peter Navarro talk about how, what are they going to sell to Southeast Asians to make up for the Americans?
You're like, "Yeah, yes, they are." And that's exactly what's happening.
So there are the three moves that Lin talks about. And none of this is new. He's just given shape to something that's been happening for 10 years.
So move up market, move to localize, and move South. I think that's a very interesting framing that he's done.
Indeed, indeed. Well, let's move ourselves along to another part of the global South, to Latin America, which he just mentioned.
Lula, Shainbaum, Trump has been leaning hard on Panama and Mexico in particular.
How are those leaders reading the new shape of the relationship between the West and China against the tariff pressure that they're under?
So we've been spending a lot of time on this, in part because we have our new Spanish language site, China and lessomedicative, which Maria Cervantes is our editor based in Lima is doing a fantastic job in really getting a lot of traction.
So if anybody speaks Spanish and reads Spanish and wants a dedicated focus on Latin America, I highly recommend it.
And it's allowed us to dedicate a lot more resources to covering this. This is a region in many ways on edge.
The United States single, you know, singled out the Western hemisphere in its national security strategy with the intent of expelling China from this region. Now, it's going to be near impossible for China to be expelled as a major trading partner.
And the new president of Chile cast who came into power, he told the US, this is a red line. We're not cutting our trade with China. Okay. So we're going to do other things to accommodate you, but we're not cutting trade. We rely on it too much.
And that being said, when you see how Argentina and Chile, for example, have opened investigations now into Chinese space stations in their countries, that the Peruvian president, you know, Peru's had like six presidents or seven, I don't even can't even keep count now in the turnovers just been remarkable.
But whenever, you know, the ambassador, the US ambassador, who's a moral logo friend of Trump, you know, says something provocative. Everybody drops everything and says, what did he say? And we're now in Panama, you know, there's the FAFO, right? We all know about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're in the find out phase right now in Panama. Yeah, I heard that show you did. And there has been this escalation that has been dramatic, where they, and literally president Romulinos, when he in January, when they expelled CK Hutchinson from the both ends of the Panama Canal after the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional, he literally publicly said, I don't think there's going to be a reaction from the Chinese.
And that was very, very, very naive, curious why he would even bother to say something like that, because the level of China literacy in this part of the world is exceedingly low.
And we work with a lot of Latin America, China scholars and these wonderful groups that are there. And they, they just, they pound the tables constantly trying to raise the level of China literacy and to educate stakeholders on how to better understand China.
And President Molino is showing you the price of what happens when you are ignorant about this. So in March, I think something around 90 Panamanian flag vessels were detained in China that continued into April.
And the premise here is that China's the world's largest trading power. Panama makes millions of dollars through its vessel flagging ships. And if those ships are not as valuable, it's not to have a Panamanian flag on your ship means you're going to run into delays, then countries and companies are going to avoid Panama and go to Liberia or go to other countries that do a lot of flagging.
That's the message here. And then at the same time, the Chinese, you know, gave a, what I, you know, almost like a mafia type warning, like, you know, the mafia walks by your, your bakery and says, yeah, be a shame if anything happens.
And they basically said that to Merisk and to, to a Swiss shipping company that now took over the concessions on the Panama Canal and they said, we think you should leave and not do this. They didn't say the what else, what happens if, but the implication is that if Merisk runs into problems in China, that's a huge part of their business.
So this is what the find out looks like. And these countries in many parts of the global south are particularly Latin America with the exception of Brazil are not really strong enough to push back on this.
So they're caught in a very difficult position where the US is beating down on them. But at the same time, they have a lot of pressure, economic pressure that can come from China. China has a lot of leverage on many of these countries.
And then we should talk very quickly about Honduras.
Honduras has a new, new government in power and they are actively talking about putting their, their relations with China on review now to consider about switching back to Taiwan.
Yeah, I mean, it would be going back to Taiwan because they have flipped flopped already. That's right because they didn't feel that when President Xiomara switched from China, from Taiwan to China, there was this expectation that money was going to rain down from the skies in the form of BRR spending and other things.
And a little bit has come certainly on, you know, particularly in the hydroelectric sector, but nowhere near what they expected. And so that's opened up the door for political pressure from the United States and domestically to switch, to potentially switch back.
And so, so it's been interesting. And then the last point on this Taiwan issue, which remember the Caribbean is the largest cluster of countries now that still recognize Taiwan. So it's very important to Taiwan. But Santiago Peño is the president of Paraguay was recently in Taipei right before Trump was there in Beijing.
And just had a love fest with lighting the end. So Paraguay stands as probably the most enthusiastic country that has diplomatic ties with Taiwan. And he was adamant in saying we're not going to switch. So there could be some momentum in the Americas for more support for Taiwan, especially of Honduras switches.
Not from Washington itself. Well, Washington loves this idea. And again, this is something that they've been pressuring quite a bit is to is to have Latin American countries hold firm on supporting or at least the Caribbean countries that still remain diplomatic partners with Taiwan to hold firm.
Right. I was making a joke in reference to the the advance on the arms sales. Yeah. Anyway, let's move finally to the Gulf. We've done Southeast Asia pretty well already. And let's talk a little bit about the Middle East. The Gulf States are courting Washington Beijing Moscow all at once often with the same officials.
You would think that they were very much implicated in the recent Beijing Summetry. What does it look like from Riyadh or from Abu Dhabi right now?
There's a consensus emerging in the US. I was listening to Ross Dowtuts podcast in the New York Times and he interviewed this military fair scholar who said, well, who's the biggest winner in the in the war and without losing a microsecond of a breath to China.
Yeah.
And I just want to remind everybody that at the end of the Gulf War China emerged as a rocks largest purchaser of oil.
And when everybody was saying how you know the setbacks for China in Iran and Venezuela show that Trump is playing 4D chess and the Chinese are now on their back foot.
I just I didn't believe it and I don't believe it and I think China is going to come out of this somehow they're going to come out of this winning on all sides.
I think their relationship with the Saudi Kingdom is going to be fully intact I think the relationship with Iran is going to remain intact I think the relationship with the Emirates is going to remain strong.
I just I'm looking for the major setback for the Chinese.
in the Gulf and I'm not seeing it. I think the Chinese are going to reduce their energy purchases
from that region. I don't think they want to be exposed to this level of vulnerability. Again,
it's not going to go to zero to be sure. But something remarkable happened in just the past 10 days
where Brazil displays Saudi Arabia as China's second largest supplier of oil. Process that.
Okay. Russia's number one, Brazil is number two, Saudi is number three. This is what we're
going to have to get used to in the future. That the mix of the oil suppliers in the top 10 for
China are going to be much more varied than they are today. So that region will be important
strategically for China, but not because only because of energy. And so I think that's very
important to take away from this. I mean, they look at the Emirates in particular as a key priority.
I mean, 400,000 Chinese expatriates live in the Emirates. It is a major vector for trade and for
logistics for the Chinese for banking and financial services and for tech as well. I think these
are going to be huge markets for Chinese new energy products and vehicles and e-mobility.
So and again, and the fact that this ties into Taiwan that the acting Secretary of the Navy,
Hong Kong, said to the Senate today that we can't move weapons to Taiwan because we're running
short. I mean, just is a dream for the Chinese. And if they're taking fads out of South Korea to
move them to the Gulf, again, this they couldn't they never could have imagined this would happen.
So this war has been nothing in them, you know, but good for the Chinese. Obviously,
the energy impact and the economic impact is enormous on China. And they can't, if this thing
goes on for another four or five months, it's going to cause real problems in China like it will
everywhere else. Sure. Gas is already equivalent to $5 a gallon. Yeah. I mean, but the geopolitical
upsides are real for the Chinese. There's no doubt. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's undeniable,
even now in the US, that this was a colossal mistake that is benefiting Russia and China more
than more than almost anyone else. But is Beijing under any pressure from any of the Gulf
capitals from Riyadh, from Abu Dhabi, from Doha, to play a bigger role in bringing the conflict
to an end? I was a little surprised how Beijing wasn't a little more forthcoming about this,
because you know, it does feel a pinch. It would benefit. It wouldn't be beyond Beijing's abilities
to put a little more pressure onto Iran. So there's a lot of reluctance in Beijing to get involved
in these things and to get sucked into them. And this is, we did a great interview with Jeremy
Friedman, who is at the Harvard Business School. Yeah, it was very good. He wrote a piece in foreign
policy on this issue as well, that China's reluctant to take on the burdens of global leadership,
because it just doesn't want to get into these things. But China does have to be careful,
because Iran is continuing to throw weapons and to attack its neighbors. And if we can start tracing
back the chemicals in those weapons or the actual drones or the actual materials directly to China,
that's certainly going to cause problems for the Emirates and for the Saudis when Chinese
material starts landing in their apartment buildings and blowing up things. And my guess is that
the Saudis are having conversations with the Chinese to say, listen, you know what, cool it.
Stop, don't send, and that's going to be a much more potent message than the Americans trying
to send to say cool it. It's not in your long-term interests to keep supplying them precursors or
chemicals or to support. We understand you're going to support them with oil buys. We understand
where you're going to ship some EVs there. We understand you're going to have a trading
relationship with China with Iran, okay, but cool it on the stuff that ends up on our porch.
And my guess is that's the conversation, because we always have to remember that the paramount
relationships for China and the Gulf are the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Way more important than Iran.
Iran is important politically, but it's nowhere near as important
economically for the Chinese. And so in the hierarchy of their relationships,
they want to make sure that relationships with Riyadh and the Emirates stays stable.
So on my guess, that is going to be where the pressure points are. And if the Americans are smart
and I don't give them that credit right now, they would work through the Saudis and the Emirates
to pressure the Chinese rather than they go directly. Because if it's seen politically in China
that they are kind of taking direction from the Americans to pressure Iran,
that's never going to pass. It won't pass with the Iranians and it won't pass with the Chinese,
right? But if it's the Saudis and the Emirates who are pressuring the Chinese,
then I think that's more politically feasible in China. Because the US hawks are real in China.
Just like we have our China hawks, they've got their US hawks. And them taking direction
from the Americans is on an issue like this is I just I don't see it happening. Remember when Chuck
Schumer, you know, blindsided she on live TV when he asked for help on Iran was about two years ago.
That didn't go down well. Jake Sullivan went to Wang Yi in Bangkok when they had a meeting and said,
can you help us with Iran? Went nowhere. So we should know now after two years of making these
requests that this is not going to work. So the Americans should find a different way and the way
is through the Emirates and through Saudi Arabia. Eric, you've got a fantastic network of
colleagues and contributors down that spans the globe. You've got them in seashells and Lima
and Jakarta and all over the world. What did they pick up in the last couple of weeks that just
hasn't surfaced in the Anglophone coverage of, you know, look, I mean, I'm sure the audience is
getting tired of hearing me come back to these summits. But let's not let's not talk about that.
But, you know, just sort of this rupture period, this whole period since, you know, January,
since Davos. What is it that we're missing in the North American discourse?
How difficult life has become for a lot of people because of all of this.
The tariffs have been punishing for people. Now, the oil and energy shortages have been
punishing for people. The instability for most Americans is reflected at the gas pump.
But for the most part, daily life still continues on generally the same. Things are more
expensive to be sure, but they go on all the same. The instability in countries with weaker
governance who are dependent on commodities as exports who are, you know, the vulnerabilities
are just much, much higher. And I think this chaos that has come into the international system has
not, has not been good, obviously. I mean, I'm stating the obvious here. I mean, this shouldn't
be a surprise to anybody. People I think themselves, of course. But I think when in the daily life,
the level of uncertainty here, so, you know, here in, in Southeast Asia, there's very few shock
absorbers in the system. Right. Not a lot of buffers. Yeah. So a country like Laos and Cambodia and
the Philippines, they, they went to shortened work weeks immediately within, we're talking within
weeks of the energy being cut off. Right. And that shows you how, how vulnerable this all is.
And so daily life is impacted in, in quite severe ways. You know, for the most part in Vietnam,
things have been stable. And in this government has been very, very rapid in its adapting to the
environment. I don't think other countries are, are in that, in that situation. And so again,
I point to Kenya this past week in the turbulence that's been there over the, the fuel tariffs that,
that, that the government put in and then eventually took off. And I think also in places like Peru,
where Maria are, are editor in, in Lima says that, you know, the exhaustion of every day following
what the US ambassador says. Does he mean at this time? What does that mean? He said something. He
said this. What do we do? And that just takes so much energy away from other governments.
And I think that's part of what's so draining for a lot of people. So by the, so the reason I come
back to why the summit itself was not as much of a, a draw is because people have been following the
day to day kind of, you know, just dramas that are coming out of US entities, particularly in the
Americas. That by the time this thing happens 10,000 kilometers away, they're, they're numb to it all.
And we as Americans, by the way, have become numb to a lot of this, right? I mean, who remembers what
the Trump scandal was from four weeks ago? Much less a year ago. And so I think there's a fatigue
that that's kind of settled in across much of the world on this. And they're waiting to kind of see
how this plays out. But in the meantime, they're taking decisive actions as we're seeing here in Asia
and in Africa to reorient themselves away from the United States and to de-risk from the United
States. The reconfiguration of the international order and alliances and partnerships, the speed
with which that is happening is something that you
cannot imagine. It is remarkable to watch where leaders like the Angolan and Ethiopian
presidents coming to Vietnam is not something that we would have seen two or three years ago
with the intensity that we're seeing now. Every day these guys are on the road trying to figure out
a new way. I mean, just again, we go back to Takaiichi. This woman is getting frequent flyer
points in Asia for she's been everywhere just in the past month. And that is something I don't
think the North American discourse is picking up. The world is going to be different after all of
this. Americans will not understand this. It's really, really reshaping the whole topography.
Yeah. Yeah. It is reshaping the whole geopolitical topography. And I think Americans want all the
benefits of hedge money without any of the costs. And they're going to find out what it means to be
in the second place. And I don't think you know, you're in my lifetime. We've never been in the number
two. You know, final observation. There was a great comment on Instagram. I forget who it's
for tonight. I don't want to plagiarize it. But they said this was the first summit since the end
of World War II, where we didn't know who was the most powerful person in the room when a U.S.
president was in the room. Right. That's remarkable. Yeah. I mean, yeah. This was the first summit at
which the United States and China were genuine peers. It was really a remarkable piece of theater.
It really was a remarkable piece of theater. And she was right out of central casting. I mean,
he just, he played his role perfectly. I mean, a lot of people were focusing on the body language
differences between she and Putin, you know, between Trump and Putin when she was, you know,
very warm and effusive with Putin, but very kind of distant and cold with Trump. I don't know what
you read into that. I think that's part of she's theatrics as well. Watch she any time he meets with
the Japanese Prime Minister and he puts on this frowny face and this distant handshake. And so he
does that, you know, I don't know how much you should read into it in terms of substance, but it is
interesting to watch the, you know, the performance of it all. It's deliberate. It's not particularly
subtle and it probably conveys exactly what it appears to convey. Eric, let's leave it there for
now. Thank you so much. This has just been magnificent. Even if my premise didn't hold up under
scrutiny, that's how it goes sometimes. That's how it goes. That's the fun of these conversations,
right? That's that's the fun of it. It a lesson learned here. I need to be prepared for, you know,
the possibility that what I assumed was not what my guest assumed, but, you know, better than I do,
I absolutely take your word for it and consider me schooled here. Let's move on to paying it forward.
The segment of the show where I asked you to name a younger colleague or somebody, I suspect there's
somebody in your orbit who maybe needs a morphal some introduction. I want to, I'm not going to name
a single person. I'm going to name a group. And it's a group that I've been working with for
quite some time. It's the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. It's a team led by
Kevin Gallagher. These guys are doing just some fantastic work. It's a group of young researchers
who are doing the kind of nuts and bolts data collection analysis on Africa, Latin America. They
focus a lot on new energy. They focus a lot on China. And we are partners with them. We showcase
their work. We have a great report that's up on our site that came out on China Africa trade trends,
which is really important to have these data sets that really benchmark where we are. And that,
that again, is the best antidote to the toxic narratives that are out there when there's actual data
that's produced by a team of Africans, Chinese, Americans. I mean, a really international team.
So I just want to give a shout out to Boss University's Global Development Policy Center,
the entire team there. All right. Kevin Gallagher and company contracts. I mean, they are fantastic.
I've known about them for, it has to be a decade now and doing this. And they're consistently
producing this work. And that's really important. That's right. Yeah. Great one. Great one.
And what about for recommendations? Do you have a book you've read recently or anything that you
want to shout out? I've come in, you know, I've, I've been negligent in my kind of China research
over the years in studying she and understanding she more than the superficial what we do. And I read
Kevin Rudd's book on she. And that was I think that's like his PhD dissertation. And it really
read like that. But it was important. And I've come to the point now where I don't believe you can
understand modern China today, contemporary China. If you don't have a deep, thorough understanding
of who she is as a person who is worldview and whatnot, the same, for example, you cannot understand
the United States today without understanding Trump and MAGA. And I mean, you can try. But if you
don't understand Trump's worldview, you don't understand where we are today. So I'm, I've gone down
a rabbit hole of books dedicated to she. So again, I started with Kevin Rudd's book, which I do
recommend, by the way, it's been controversial. Quite a few people, very knowledgeable scholars have
disagreed with a lot of his key points. But I think it's important that you read it. So you have
an understanding of that discourse. Now I'm reading party of one, the rise of Xi Jinping and China's
superpower future by Chun Han Wang, who is the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if he's still
with the Wall Street Journal, but he was a longtime Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
The book is excellent. And I'm halfway through it. And I'm going to read another Xi book after this.
But I'm really immersing myself in trying to understand Xi's worldview and his history and how
he sees the world. Because he will be with us. I mean, if assuming his health stays at least for
another five years, right? I mean, so yeah. And he's shaping China in such profound ways comparable
to what Trump is doing to the US. I need you to jot down a few of your best insights as you read
through this whole literature about Xi. What are the things that you learn from it? And I'd
love for you to come back on the show and share that with us. No, be great. I mean, you know,
just learning about his, the upbringing and, and again, the turbulence going from a princeling to,
to some of the difficulties he had and you're then trying to kind of see how that has shaped his
his worldview today is. Have you read, have you read just through Ian's book?
The party's interest is comfort. No, the biography of Xi Zhongshun. I'm going to put that on to,
oh yeah, that's the Xi Zhongshun book. Yeah. So I'm going to get that's all part of my rabbit hole
that I'm going down. And, and of course, this is all tied into even to Richard McGregor's,
you know, famous book and some of the party party and seeing the relationship by how the control
the party has and then Xi's relationship and dominance of the party, which again brings echoes to
Trump's dominance of the Republican party. Again, it's not, there's, they're not parallels there,
but it's interesting to see how these two men have reshaped the political systems as much as
they have. And I don't know as much about Xi as I feel like I should and that's why these books
are are really timely. Excellent. I'll look forward to that conversation. I definitely have my own
thoughts. I'm going to go in completely opposite direction for my recommendation and talk about a
duo, a rock duo from Quebec called Anzine de Poitrine, which means something like, you know,
cardiac Anzina, right? They are, like I said, a duo. People describe them as microtonal math rock,
which strikes me as about right. These microtonal eddies, they play notes between the notes.
It's not your typical 12-tone scale. There are at least microtones like you'd find in Indian music,
but it's also highly, highly technical. There's a lot of extremely difficult poly rhythm and stuff
like that. It's all done by two people. One guy who plays a double neck with a bass on the bottom
and a microtone guitar atop, and they use loops. They use, you know, a sampler to be able to
sort of capture in real time what they're playing so something will continue to loop and they'll
play something atop it. And it is utterly bizarre. A friend of mine sent around a message,
just saying, "Is this the emperor's new clothes or the second coming?" And we had to listen through
a few times before deciding pretty unanimously. This is the second coming. These guys,
they're anonymous. They wear cookie outfits that are all covered in polka dots and they're made
of paper mache and they have outlandish, clownish looks. But if you, if I had to throw out a few bands
that you could put together to sort of approximate what they are, they're almost like Frank Zappa
meets King Crimson with Sleepy Time Gorilla Museum and Mr. Bungle thrown in. If any of those
names make any sense to you, but that's what it is. It's just so out of this world. I mean,
we've been waiting really for something like this to come along and breathe new life into progressive
rock. These guys might be it. It's truly something to see. Angie, that's Angie, I-N-E,
De Poitrine, P-O-I-T-R-I-N-E. Check them out, you can find them all over YouTube now,
and I'm very late to this. So this is quite a sensation, but I only started listening pretty
intently about three weeks ago. But check it out. Eric, man, what a great pleasure.
always Kaiser it's great great fun to be with
you and also to be partners on your platform where we put a lot of our shows and our podcast
is part of your network. And it's just, it's one of the highlights of what we do.
Well, likewise, I'm incredibly proud to have you. And, you know, you, we, I think we're,
we're meant to be together, man. We're just really meant to be together forever. All
right. You've been listening to the cynical podcast. The shows produced, recorded, engineered,
edited and mastered by me, Kaiser Guelts. Support the show through substack at cynicapodcast.com
where you will find a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio
and video featuring Eric. Email me at
[email protected] if you've got ideas on how you can
help out with the show. Don't forget to leave a review on Apple podcasts, enormous gratitude
to the University of Wisconsin Madison's Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the
show once again this year. Huge thanks to my guest, Eric Olender, partner eternal. And
I thank you for listening. We will see you next week. Take care.
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