we are awaiting the other team, the other side, the other chamber to come forth with a number we can agree upon. we will figure out the best way to get this done quickly. neither mcconnell nor i want to shut down.

discussing the economic warfare as a part of the decade's quest for global dominance leveraging a multifaceted strategy for the current world order. i'm the founder and president andhe we are pleased to have you here some in person and some tuning and live for the conversation. in the economic realm the party believes companies and governments to follow beijing's rules which benefits to the detriment of all others. how they can resist and to safeguard u.s. national security we are proud to be joined by

bethany into the recently published book beijing rules china weaponize to confront the world. also joining us, senior director for economy of the competitive studies project and former china director on the security council. research professor at gw law school and during the obama administration's the senate unanimously confirmed as commissioner of the trade commission. today's discussion will be moderated by greg singleton senior fellow. before we dive in, just a few words. more than 20 years now, beats operated in an independent nonpartisan research institute exclusively focused on national security and foreign policy as a point of both bride and principal we do not support foreign funding, we never have and never will.

for more on our work do visit our website and follow us on twitter.cr that's enough from me. over to you and the panel. >> thank you for the introduction and for joining us today in person or virtually. let's dive right in. it's wonderful to have you back even if just for a few weeks and many congratulations on your book. i think all of us sort of devoured it. i want to talk a little bit about something we talked about for a feww years and that's the idea when china joined the wto it was this idea that it was going to become this trustworthy partner in trade. free-market and democracy were somehow inseparable but the book details didn't work out that way. >> i think it is understandable. it's easy to look back and say

we were so naïve how could we have granted the chinese communist party. the promise of the future behavior. but the '90s were such a decade of optimism and i think it makes sense to see perhaps the chinese government would have gone the way of moscow or some of the others, the whole wave of democracy that we saw, but w that's not what happened o so instead what we see these as the economy got more and more integrated instead, the chinese government became very good it came up with of these innovative and quite creative to use all of its economic links to shape the behavior behind its borders into shape the individuals, companies

and government to bring them more in line with the chinese communist party's core interest. you could call this a kind of global authoritarian sanctions regime althoughon most of them e not traditional. one of the things you mention is the de facto sanction. it's also been counterproductive which is interesting because there's a narrative out there that china is winning over all of these countries. what does it look like in places like africa? >> i just got back from a trip in july and one of my chapters is about ethiopia and my take

away. in the pandemic it was the trump administration was critical of him because he seemed to echo the planes of the response right in the middle of the chinese government to basically cover up and it was striking. people talked about his background but what i look into it was the foreign minister from around 2012 and when he was the foreign minister of ethiopia,

inthat was the peak, that was te pinnacle of the close relationship with china and they still have a close relationship, but his job as foreign minister was to store that close relationship with beijing. he went to beijing and announced with his chinese counterparts a comprehensive leveling of the relationships. any one-party state and ethiopia that's how he's related to beijing so when you look at the way the chinese government was reaching out to ethiopia and giving them tons of infrastructure and assistance. it shaped his behavior because he knew that he couldn't criticize him publicly and that is what we see and how he

guided. that was the wrong decision but it was harmful. i don't actually think it was an agent of china. i think that he was shaped by his long-standing relationship to t try to get his way in a way they could accept. what was encouraging about this is when it didn't work, when they were not able to get science for the independent mission to understand origins of the current virus and became more critical and they censored him he changed his tactics.

at the foreign governments that can often work but it doesn't always work because there are independent institutions and at the end of the day the foreign government individuals and actors have their own agencies and are not chinese citizens, so it's not predictable and i think that is encouraging for the u.s. not to give up, but to continue to try to engage. >> you can start to see the rhetoricli reinforced and amplified about this ideology infused order and how it's taking part and we highly encourage everyone to check out that piece. it was great and i'm not sure you will be able to go to

tanzania again anytime soon. >> ith want to bring in our othr panelists. thank you for joining us. i will start with you. it's good to have you. i thinke it was a pretty stark image of you called and i love this term chinese brute force economics. are you a little more optimistic or less optimistic on this issue now that you're out? >> thank you for having me. i feel lucky to be sitting next to bethany when her book came out in early august we downloaded it on my phone right away and listen on the commute and got through it really quickly because there were so many things right and i think thisrc issue of the economic coercion and weaponization of the economyow has been growing

attention in washington and around the world the last ten plus years f probably since the fire to that first shot against japan with the rare earth export incident. but i think very skillfully she avoids a couple of traps that are true of a lot of the analysis out there of either on the one side people often paint china with a really broad brush and put basically attach the same level of skepticism to any kind ofin economic activity or entity coming out of china so that of course isn't right, or on the other side failing to acknowledge the long-term strategy that it has been pursuing.. bethany does a fantastic job of not falling into either trap and

giving a vivid accurate promotion of the problem that's neither too optimistic or pessimistic and another thing she gets right is acknowledging that in theoe united states we'e used economic coercion as well and getting a very careful how our use of coercion and power is different without falling into the trap. i left government almost two years ago and when you are in policy you spend time staring at the big problems very close up right up against your nose and the toolkit you have available seems much too small, much too finite and these policy tools into trade tools, diplomacy

often seem kind of clunky and not well suited to this large complex issue with the weaponization. since leaving government,he i've had the opportunity to engage in the private sector particularly technologists who are doing really exciting things and getting just a couple points of encouragement are i think there's been a change in a couple of the major power centers in the u.s. economy. so if you kind of break it down very simplistically main street, wall street, silicon valley, main street in silicon valley there is now a broad recognition of the challenge and companies and investors and technologies that are starting to bake this into their planning. there is a lot more work to do but especially on that third power center where they still need to be brought along and a sort of aligned with the national interest. but that is an encouraging shift

over a few years ago. adand then also kind of getting back to that toolkit there is so much exciting work being done to findnd workarounds to some of these challenges like processing critical minerals. it is a challenge, but companies are out there doing interesting things. recycling rare earth that we have and developing alternatives to lithium and things of that nature.n >> it's fascinating because when we are building government you think that if you have this buffet of options but because you are literally drinking from the fire hose every single day i think it's limits our ability to think about new tools that didn't work or exist in the cold war and the role of technology and this debate have to expand a little bit.

you've had the opportunity to see this both in government and also inty the academic domain. i think you were at the front of the line both in tech and law and how the chinese are sort of using patent courts to their advantage so i was wondering how do you see it fitting into beijing rules? i think as we all struggle together with the topics we've been discussing so far it gives us a chance to remember a few

things. we can emotionally, intellectually thrive with just a little bit of complexity. things don't have to be all of one or one of another. i think the question you're asking gives us a chance to get a little more comfortable with aid discomfort on things. what do i mean by that? here is an example. two ideas you can walk and chew gum. we could be huge fans of the people. we could be optimistic about the chinese country and government and find in its past and hope for and its future with good

reason lots of opportunity to collaborate. we discover what the so-called hawk would observe. a serious present threat backed up, demonstrated by significant dangerous to us behavior and spoken about openly by their government. sometimes it is okay when someone is acting against your interest showing you that theyre are acting against your interest, telling you that they are deliberately acting against your interest. sometimes it is okay to take them at their word. it's okay we can believe people. so, we can look at and other middle zone. it is true.

it is good for everyone that the chinese professional bureaucrats in their courts, in their agencies, the courts and agencies that wrestle with important technologies like biotech. we had a pandemic, ai, machine learning, data science. we live in a high-tech world and also low-tech lithium, copper and everything else in between. these professional, commercial oriented tribunals are becoming an very good and powerful ways top-notch world-class in the way they use legal rules and the way they use economic analysis, in the way they function professionally as lawyers, judges and administrators and

they are also becoming much more fair in the sense that in a typical lawsuit between party a and b will pay much less attention to the identities of party a or b and favor one over the other even if one is a non-chinese party a or b and the other is a chinese party a or b. that all sounds really great. but you could applaud all of that and still want to avoid those tribunals like the plague if you do business outside of china. throughout the u.s. european,

korean, japanese, indian central and south american, african, southeast asian, middle east north african regions -- that's a lot of the world -- court systems and agencies operate generally to varying degrees of success. we are not perfect with a bunch of fairly enforced, reasonably enforced rules. for example, if a judge in the u.s. court while hearing the case between two parties learns that something about party a or b would be relevant to the fda or even the doj, that clerk or judge or staff in the chambers will in fact be punished if they pick up the phone and call the

other agency. if that judge or law clerk trades on that information, they can go to jail for that and we have lots of cases where we are individual court employees in fact called out by name and powerfully sanctioned for picking up the phone and doing that. but the chinese courts and tribunals under a system of great powers competition under a system of military civil fusion are quite openly demonstrably, powerfully reminded that if they don't make that phone call, they go to. consequences tend to drive out outcomes, so it shouldn't surprise us that in the u.s. court systems, british court systems, french court systems and so forth, korean, japanese,

there's less of that. but in chinese systems there's a whole lot of that. so we have to live with those realities in our mind and not take it personally and not make it personal. it's not that there is no opportunity for future positive engagement with china and the chinesein economy and the chinee government. but we have to be careful. we have to observe in the operating environment that we are in. and the things they control into the behaviors they demonstrate and the words they tell us about those demonstrated behaviors. it's okay to believe what we see and what they say. >> totally. it's interesting dovetailing on the comment it's not just what thena legal system is doing witn the borders.

it's increasingly this extra judicial jurisdiction to the chinese diaspora. the evolution that we have watched is demonstrative of this sometimes slow, sometimes fast push and pull. how do you sort of see this policy playing out in practice? >> the national security law the text of the law was released in the same way thatt it was implemented. a shining example of democracy. i can't remember if it was june or july, right around there, 2020. it was noon in dc which is where

i went and so is dropped right at noon for me and i remember reading through the text of the law into being more and more alarmed that the sweeping nature of the things it was targeting and how dramatic it was and how clearly political it was but whenle i got to article 37 and , nigel dropped because those articles effectively say any person anywhere in the world who breaks any of these goals can be legally targeted so it doesn't matter if you are a hong kong resident or not. it would effectively outline activism so the pro-democracy activism anywhere in the world. this was a pretty new approach

because the extra territoriality would be the extension of the chinese wall for interest beyond its borders was mostly de facto and the most extreme examples would be extra judicial renditions of kidnappings of people from australia and some other places where the use of its economy or other ways so blocking exports, whatever. but this was taking all that stuff like we are making this illegal and what is so particularly concerning in that moment has proven to be so is because hong kong's court had a reputation of being independent and professional. it was one of the highlights. one reason that made it such a great place to be based.

and also hong kong is a financial center and some of the articles in the national security law included a u.s. style sanction of if you do this or your assets will be frozen or there will be these financial consequences. and it was obviously alarming because it seemed to be an attempt by the chinese government to take this prominent legal system and use it in a very authoritarian way and india, that is what we have seen and that is increasingly how they are attempting to implement this. having the goal of being able to do something and whether or not you can actually do that are two different things but here are some examples we have seen that there have been articles in "the

walle street journal" published and then i can't remember specifically which government official, i think some security official has actually written in "the wall street journal" this is a violation of the national security law. okay what does that mean. and you see people who, the major person to have his assets frozen because of the committees committee's a media tycoon now and another court, and other trial, so using the legal system and financial system to go after free speech. i'm still very concerned. we haven't seen some of the worst possibilities of this yet. for example, the national security law to force western

companies in hong kong to essentially sanction any financial behavior that goes through hong kong and use the international financial system in that way. because of our dominance in the financial system we can use financial sanctions as a way to have a really strong affect against terrorist financing around the world or money laundering or nuclear nonproliferation. we haven't seen the government able to do that because they don't have this kind of dominance over the system but hong kong has a very prominent position so there's this question of if the authority is under the sum of beijing, try to use hong kong in that way. be proactive to use any money that is flowing through the hong kong banks, to try to punish people were trying to arrest people that are having a leg layoverto hong kong. will that force people out of

hong kong or are people still going to view it as such an important place that they keep theirat businesses there, that e airport remains an important hub, and i would say the chinese government has correctly assessed that there is almost nothing they cannk do besides sending in tankst and murdering people. there's almost nothing they can do that will get people to leave hong kong unless in a way that actually lends the power there. but i think that scott is much more of an expert on the particulars of this ban im and ieer briefly, on a different topic, i want to briefly say that what scott said about the difference between the chinese people the end of the chinese government to try to make a distinction in that and how difficult and important that is is a key point and this is something written about for the foreign policy magazine and i think you read it in that piece

the best i've ever seen anyone write it because you said yes there's atr distinction and thas important but many people are annationalist of support the party. this is a difficult and nuanced thing to keep hold of at the lesame time we are dealing with chinese people in a people to people away so i want to throw that out there in a way that before i forgot. >> that nuance sometimes feels like it is missing from the discourse and identifies the threat but also has certain values we hold dear into the ane language we use is so critical. it sounds going back to the hong kong law, the 2017 national security law for the first time and wordse like all. there isny no bounding and so yu

start to work through like article seven of that wall is explicit. you're working throughdi and hit this is a discourse and there is really no end to where this can go and you can see quite clearly how it can be misinterpreted and sort of applied as a weapon. but it's in their own words. our chairman talks about this a lot. just use the speeches. and as the american people learned about how they are talking about these issues in their own language you can sort of develop i think a healthier understanding of how china sees the world and also particularly i think the focus on tech though you focus on so much on the special project is one of the biggest points that we are witnessing right now. you call it techno economic

competition and i think we haves to start to us' these words that didn't exist in the cold war. i was a kid back then but i don't remember seeing them. we need to start to use these words as labels. in the new emerging technology in this new competitive space howto do you sort of see that playing out in the lid of the research that you do you talk about 2030 a lot as an important sort of marker. why is 2030 important and what does that look like? >> if i can go back to the last point on the importance of taking their word seriously, i want to add a couple layers to that because it is important. when the ccp says something we shouldn't necessarily take it literally because it is marxist propaganda and you have to have an understanding of the meaning end of the context so don't take it literally but take it

seriously. however, there are a lot of critics of those of us who take it seriously. you are overhyping certain things and not reading the whole speech so they are sort of criticizing our -- we have to have this iterative process of looking at the actions, looking at their words ass a kind of guided to interpret the actions. so you kind of mentioned hair standing up on the back of your neck moment when you read the national security law. my awakening moment came back in 2017 when he was coming before the central committee for the party congress and gave his big speech that for me was a turning

point in understanding china had a global invasion is not regional so when he walked onto the stage and said it's time to move to the center of the global stage and lead the transformation of global governance that kind of woke me up. i wasre about three in the morng because the time difference, but i had been watching china for more than a decade at that point and i feel silly that it took me that long. they are aiming to be a global power. so it was kind of a belated tiawakening. but then of course the actions had been pointing in that direction. irare there words are pointing n that direction and they've continued to do that ever since. but to get to your question, we were founded onol the premise tt technology is the central issue. the technology is changing everything about our lives, our

security, our economy, our society and the rate of technological change is moving faster and faster so even as you have these geopolitical trends, the battle between autocracy and democracy, the war in ukraine, you also have a rapid rate of technological change and the best recent evidence of course is the revolution that we are witnessing right now that started about seven or eight months ago. so, we are really focused on asking the question is the united states positioned an organized to stay ahead were in some cases where we fallen behind and in collaboration with our allies and partners. what we are focused on doing is not just admiring the problem because there is a lot of that going on in the city but also coming up with solutions, action plans and recommendations

convening the private sector and the public sector together and seeing where is the ecosystem and we can leave it to the market to generate technology in the economy and where does it need either organizational solutions, biggerr investments, orat better, stronger more agile public partnerships so that is what we are focused on. whento we started in 2021 we looked at the end of the decade and said by around 2030 we should know one way or another either china will continue the rapid upward trajectory gaining more and more power and dominance for trends that go in the other direction it could be demographic, the economic slowdown perhaps contingency in taiwan, election cycles or perhaps stumbles and budget cycles and other dynamics on our side. either way by 2030, we should

know one way or another. i think our timeline has kind of truncated and sped up particularly because of events since we started like russia's attack on ukraine and then this rapid rate off change we are seeing in technology so we are focused on the next couple of years getting positions organized to win. >> we were talking about before we came to the panel there is a lot of references to are we in a new cold war with china increasingly the question we have to ask ourselves we have to go faster now and maybe those windows we thought were appropriate i think we have to constantly be monitoring them and you do an excellent job of that. wee are shifting a little thoug. you were at the trade

commission. it seems like in the intervening years when you were there, trade has become a little bit of a four letter word. i would say on all sides of the political aisle how do you think that evolving rhetoric either helped or hurt america's position and is free trade the dead? over to you. >> it's a great question. i think a few things are just worth observing. there are observations that are a little bit complex but only a little complex. they are walking and chewing gum at the same time once again. so, for example we like differences. we like them within our society. we like them around the world. differences exist.

different identities, different characteristics, race, gender, politics to a whole range of preferences, attributes, capacities, talents, challenges and the more groups of human beings permit trade, facilitate trade. it doesn't do me any good when i've got lots of apples to be around other people with lots of apples. but it really helps me if somewhere out there there are folks that want mayan and have different things than i would

like. the presence of differences and the norms and activities, trading across the differences can beiv a true win and positive some for everybody. trade can be quite nice and support a diverse and inclusive productive society. if it is all that good, everyone would be psyched about it positively forever and yet we know in our history that's not always the case across the political spectrum around the world. here in the united states we remember with regret that there waswh a time which we went to wr with ourselves and we remember

it was in part about slavery and we i think all hope that would have been enough to bring us to war with ourselves. but the second biggest driver was trade. modifiers are always challenging but they were different and that led in part to the civil war. soav we have seen this before. we have survived it and we can get through it again. it's not ultimately to our advantage, so i think we can observe trade tensions are serious and we can be nervous,

appropriately guarded and engaged around howwi to cope wih some of the challenges and we can talkk more about that. more robust i don't know that that would even help us even in the short term and so another way of thinking about this is we want tools in our toolkit but that is a difference between a phillips screwdriver and a flathead screwdriver there's a difference between those and a hammer. you can really mess up your screwdriver if you use it as a hammer all the time because you need those to engage the next screw you're u going to turn and you can really mess up your hammer if you use it as a

crowbar all the time. i've enjoyed working there. they grew up in direct response to that tension over trade. at the time it was called the tariff commission but that's only part of the mission. we do see even as china is robustly and aggressively engaging we do see u.s. courts and agencies, british courts and agencies, dutch, german, french and so forth. chinese data and parties,

perfectly neutrally the same as the u.s., dutch, german, french et cetera so for example people look at it as a protectionist agency. there's plenty of cases where the parties went. there's a number of agencies and tribunals that collected data from around the world and most of them use subpoena power. it was set up to have that but it's chosen through much of its existence not to use it so chinese governmental bodies and commercial bodies and global bodies, non-chinese, non-us and u.s. provided data willingly. why? because they trust and have verified that their data is

treated confidentially and limited to the use for which it is provided so we can have systems. we've done this before. in the united states and other parts of the world we can build tribunals that would handle and facilitate rules-based tribal systems globally. but as both of you have pointed out, we have to be careful with the rhetoric so as not to just call each time one particular party of a particular identity wins or loses, don't just call that a response to that party's identity. that would be a bad outcome and use of the tool. sometimes it iss a good use of the tool because there is a substance to the analysis that is verifiable by everybody so i think itn is key in tribunals

like the itc. it's not the only one but it's an agency that was set up with a specific mission in mind. that horrible thing among professionals, talk and listen to each otherro professionally about the substance of the activity you're doing and if you have to talk and listen specifically about substance you can get all sorts of things wrong. we all make mistakes but the other people around you, point them out and that is a future not a fall so the mechanism by which we add adjudicate drives the outcomes not just of who wins. that's not what we should focus on but rather do we all have trust in the systems and so i

think free trade or loan rules-based trading is something that will return. it's out of fashion right now you are correct and we can talk about how to get it back into fashion. but the good news is there is broad support for it across the u.s. political spectrum and around the world and even among chinese peoples of the current government doesn't use that strategy. that's their decision and of theirprerogative and we should acknowledgeut that and engage tt seriously. o >> i think you sort of hammer home the point of trust and i think one thing i loved about your book youud didn't just stuy the beauty. i think the phrase so many of us in government try to embrace

when weco can you do outline soe common sense measures of the economic and democratic rights in the book so i guessyo what do you think are some of those measures and do you think it is possible to reach that type ofly consensus? >> i had two types of herecommendations and one of thm is in the national security sphere. the thingla about that in large part because of people in government starting in the trump administration and through the bidenac administration now a lot of the measures have been implemented or in the process of being implemented so this would be in the international space having an industrial policy or policies plural and working on the resilience and getting partners to work together in the economic and trade sphere and

now more partners are working on. ..le i can see that because i wrote my book proposal in 2019. it was published in 2023. and so when i wrote the proposal there were all these things need to happen. of course i do not come up with them myself necessarily citing a lots of people's works, think tanks et cetera. as the years went by i had to edit theen book to set this shod

happen and say this happened. something that horrible people are talkingng about but has not happened yet but we think baby steps in thatng direction is the creation of something like an economic article five or 10 economic nato. or a mutual economic defense treaty. something like this. some kind of mechanismd, between democratic partners to that when one of them is targeted by the sanctions for illiberal reasons those partners would immediately take into action with emergency assistance of some kind. curative measures targeted china to help lift some of the authoritative pressure many different actors are under. ti have been other side of my recommendation. make 14 separate recommendations in my book.

i'm focused on putting democratic guardrails on comic behavior. not national security guard guardrailsdemocratic guardrailse have on the one hand a chinese government that's obsolete committed and they have have attached their illiberal their authoritarian goals to epic not behavior. every single ceo in the entire world has any interest in the chinese market knows they cannot tweet about their employees can have surveys. all of this kind of stuff it. it has been one of the most successful pr campaigns in history.on but on the u.s. side on the democratic side we don't really have that. we don't associate with trade at and actual legal and regulatory sense, it's economic values. it is like free trade. that is democratic, right? no free trade. some actually political some democratic values doesn't bring

human'' rights. i have 14 recommendations that seek to bring this back together. some of them are fairly direct and some are not. our complicit, deeply complicit in the chinese government censorship in the chinesech market. the handle of deterrents for u.s. companies self censoring to please a beijing. foreign agencies acts in every state in the u.s. to provide transparency. her basically lobbying on behalf of beijing. very into political controversiall territory. we ship campaign-finance reform and have a public campaign financing option the only way to

fund its campaigns on current u.s. politics will be much better. the bobbitt we have in d.c. i will leave it there can keep going. 5a book for the rest of the recommendations. [laughter]a parks with a few minutes of our q&a with 90 seconds over two scott to talk l about a lot of u talk about recent testament for the house select committee on china highlyme recommend what happened the policyie response will shift q and a. >> ibid. new transparency and a level playing field rules and laws people generally respect what bethany has written about in the last two chapters there

is an emergence policy consensus with promote and protect what the industrial strategy. the chips act investing in her own competitiveness. essentially s running factor in the protect puts the export controls. what is missing is the third element that's got such an expert in. because that missed my calling as a baptist minister pulling market demands. what companies need to thrive over the long term. we have seen trying to dominate more and more of the i strategic industries on the global market share.sh there is less and less market share available that operate according to market principles and more and more going to china. we moved in the direction of

demand alliance. more trade and invest with allies and partners but less with china but not in everything, not in soybeans or commodities were particularly critical technology. >> i get yelled at sometime for my boss. and now i've got to stick with ap to build on what each of you craig, bethany and liza i will start with a pink panther the pink panther returns movie, comments doctor clouseau walks into a fancy hotel manager coatr coat and your gloves. clouseau gives them though for the not nice man walks out the front door. nice convertible waves bye-bye and drives c off. you can call that theft you can

call that may be being a little too gullible do not be the pink panther might be my first recommendation. a little self-help. i we project as individual businesses, into china a little more than maybe we should, we should not be surprised when the nice man with her hat, gloves, coat, walks out the door instead of giving them back to us. i think we should use other private law systems and other teorganizational systems that we have used on other countries heavy is of great success for years. we'll talk about how lawyers use those tools and a manager use those tools.

compliance operations to society to up it's a game a little bit. just open its eyes a little bit more. and we can come as professionals, whether we are professional practitioners or educators we can educate each other. and businesses inside the united states and among our allies. and how to use these tools for. >> thank you so much credit want to turn over to the audience. i know we have a few questions here that were submitted online. i will turn overbrook oxide michael a voice of america. i have a question for bethany and the panel about hong kong. it's really interesting conversation you had earlier.

bethany was then china realizes they can be put to much anything in hong kong chart have the murder people on the streets. in western american businesses continue toey stay in and make money there. my question is should american they can keep doing a business businessknowing that is thed re. and leaving help or hurt the hong kong people how much of an impact with leaving have on have china behaves and what china's policy is in hong kong? thanks. >> those are great questions. i am often asked those questions but china in general if companies in china are the chinese people i think? typical response or attitude toward that base the fate of the

chinese people in their lives whether or not those are good or bad. it's really determined by the choices of the chinese cummins party and the chinese government if light-skinned harder for them that's totally at the fault of the government that controls our lives. i would say the same is true of hong kong. if someone pushes the ball down a hill out roles and hit someone kills them at the fault of the person to push the ball down the hill. the chinese government has been the situation hong konge untenable and people leave because of that that is beijing's fault. however to the question of should companies leave question with the stout mechanism of the time to force them to leave. butrk to make framework in the book i think there is an

asymmetry. on the one hand to the chinese government get a a lot more regulation, a lot more pushing, a lot we have to do this, this, and this. for authoritarian reasons. and on the u.s. side we have a lot less ofat that. and i think what should happen here andc i do not have a specific set of recommendations specifically for hong kong. the u.s. government should become more proactive in having more guidelines by which companies need to operate. i think the way the biden administration took a few small steps toward something like a reverse mechanism whereby an outbound investment screening a mechanism for that's a great mechanism. and that should be bolstered. it should be made stronger and more sweeping should also be combined not just with national

security concerns but also human rights, rule of law and democratic concerns. because only in that way only if you have a push on the u.s. side for highest standards for u.s. actors or actors deeply linked with the u.s. economy, only in that way are you making this a contest between equals because right now you have the chinese government versus individual companies who is always going to win? the chinese communist parties always going to win. it's a much bigger than any company in the world for the u.s. government has more regulation that affect the behavior of the u.s. companies in beijing is not happy about that, it becomes a government to government issue. that is a contest of appears and that is where we can have policy discussions we can let our values and form that debate. our democratic values are human or humanrights values and that y shareholders and a bottomli line that is what i have.

>> any other questions? >> hi my name is caleb think thank you for being here today appreciate thing you said i found it very insightful permit questions but economic resilience. and i am just curious if we look at the u.s./chinese economic competition in the view of ain cold sprint as you were describing earlier. >> it's mine by the way. [laughter] i think that is a great way of framing and assessing the current situation. but i feel that present situations like russia's economy or now during the cold war in the 1900s and also around the world even and iran you see a supposedly weak economy can still sustain themselves and keep going for decades.

without collapsing without regime change is a bush era is sort of famous for. as you assess this cold sprint scenario how do you assess china's economy? how do you assess the challenges facing chinese economy with that markets with the labor shortages and unemployment rates? i am just curious how use assess that within the context? >> yes, happy to give that a shot. there's been an amazing shift in a narrative around the slowdown in the chinesese economy. on that is in all of the headlines everyone is talking about it. my personal view is they are in the middle income trap and they are never coming back to rapid growth. however i don't think that's a reason to take our eye off the ball. they are a huge economy they spend as much as they spend on their military we do not know

how much that is. but itge is a lots. it's a small percentage of their gdp the same with technology plant they are just so darn big already and my view even at slower rates of growth even if growth falls to zero they can continue to fund these things that are challenging us pla, technology development that is a small percentage of their budget and gdp. they can scrimp and pinch on social programs and keep it down as long as they' want that is te autocrats prerogative. we cannot let ourselves be distracted by that negative mood music coming out of the chinese economy. i agree they will be able to muddle through at least on these particularly problematic programs likee the military and civilfusion strategy that are cg the summer charm. >> i cannot agree more. i wrote a piece this week on

pouring salt follow policy she always knew they would reach it at some point he has been battening down the hatches preparing for this moment they are inn' very rough seas i don't think going to throw them a life preserver i'm not sure it's in our interests either. there will be the strong push, pull rhetoric in washington howa much of what happens in china will impact and boomerang on the united states. right now economic indications suggest very little. weight may beat me too divorce ourselves from this logic that prevailed for very long time that if china's economy goes south our's will to. in many ways our economy is too hot and most would agree. that diversification strategy think provides us with a little bit of a protective blanket in this moment. the president xi has a very long-term perspective. i think his goal right now is a controlled economic contraction. on the other side of the reform

a structurally reformed chinese economy thatof his party first they can get rid of what he assesses are the corrosive capitalist forces. he seems convinced he can do it. i think he has convinced himself on a lot of things that maybe there isn't much reason to believe that it's going to play out in this next election year i think there's going to be a need for insightful analysis on what it means for the united states. another question? >> i thinken you did a great job when you look at market access is a form of the prc. i guess in congress whether be it outbound or sanctions regime generally a topic that keeps getting brought up is basically does the u.s. dollar dominance. where we have seen headlines prc

doing deals in non- dollar deals, do you see that actually occurring down the line were currently right now the united states has prevalence in that? but the prc being able to move in to where they have the market access they have a clutch on that but then also being used in international production any thoughts from you or any of her witnesses? >> old testament briefly. oh just say a few things than what the experts take it. i think we are seeing some steps in this direction. but with things like the new digital r and b you see an uptick in transactions especially since russia's invasion of ukraine. however i think the real force here is the chinese government does not want to let go of control. you cannot have it both w ways u cannot be the world's reserve currency while maintaining such control of the r and b.

i do not see the art and be replaced and the dollar maybe a little bit around the edges. [laughter] >> l given academic advertisement we have a new research initiative and we are running out of foggy bottom campus over at gw but his joints among academics at gw and d.c. in cambridge and england and yale up in new haven. leadership international from antiquity to tomorrow boy that's a mouthful why do we say that? because we have found if you look back three or 400 bc china you look back in the same time. in egypt. if you look back another 1000 years the area between the

tigris and the euphrates. is a very different people. theyve look different they worshiped different they speak different languages they do very different things to some degree. but what are some big common themes in every one of those systems around which we have actual textual proof they use legal rules around property rights. around management. around a security. they use those tools in those different places across those centuries because they were compared good ideas are good not because they are mine or yours or someone else's. they are good because they work. it is worth recognizing that people across time and across

identity have faith in those good g ideas they are attractedo those good ideas. they want to use those good ideas. if we stay as academics in the business of finding and reminding ourselves of those good ideas and then as a professional state in the business of deploying those goor ideas, that will go a very long way toward answering that and let's call them topics of the day.y. >> can i add one quick thing? what we are seeing is the chinese government trying to create one off sections of asians. that is what for example in that medium term and the international use of the r and b could be useful for that this of different taken up the financiaa

system because if i may this a brief follow-up as individual businesses whether you are a u.s. or l.a. member business or even you are a chinese member business. you still have got to remember the pink panther. if you show up and that kind of system and that kind of monetary system because what you think you are going to do is getting away with a convenient trading platform to avoid sanctions or avoid money laundering to do it to text and or avoid criminal or worse risks, you could do that you can hang out in the neighborhood. but bad neighborhoods are bad neighborhoods for reason. people kill each other in those neighborhoods people eat each

other for lunch and those neighborhoods you can get eaten for lunch in that neighborhood so i would no' go to that neighborhood. part of what we want to do as individuals and professionals is just remind people that is what' a bad neighborhood looks like it's not going to be safer folks to go there. people are smite because i don't to get eaten. >> it's interesting china talks openly about sanctions and its economy. t we are seeing a collaborative approach with russia, iran maybe even northoo korea. what is so fascinating about this g20 summit fishing pins obviously not going. but they're all going to be at the belt and wrote form in china in october china global order. we have to search awaken ourselves to the idea that china does not necessarily need to

beat the g20 to be influential. built on the 130 a have it. we talk so much about global security initiative global civilization initiative. as for going to understand think this alternate architecture beijing according to beijing's rules. we are wrapping up here. books you get a signed copy how do you beat that. thank you all folks that are streaming and here if you're interested in learning more our china program. until then we will see you soon. thank you so much for stopping by and for taking time with us today. >> pick up your edible version of the book. c[laughter] >> you cannot beat it it's ae' cookie.

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