this is gps, the "global public square." welcome to all of you in the united states examinand around world. i'm fareed zakaria. today on the show, next week marks an event china has been preparing for literally for decades. the 100th anniversary of the

communist party. where is this new superpower headed? are we at the start of a new cold war? i brought together a fascinating group of experts. also, the host of revisionist history malcolm gladwell on some of the things he's been thinking about deeply recently. from a future filled with autonomous cars and why cyclists are excited about that to why war games are so important in avoiding, well, war. plus, why college rankings may be biased against historically black colleges and universities. >> we have a system that is rewarding schools for no other reason than the fact they have a lot of money in the bank and that they admit a lot of rich, wealthy white students. i'm sorry, but that is

absolutely preposterous. that is crazy! but first, here's my take. eric adams is likely to be the next mayor of new york city after taking a commanding lead in this week's democratic primary. here's what he said on the night of the election. >> snowshoe media does not pick a candidate. people on social security picks a candidate. >> adams was making the point that democrats should take seriously the party's progressive wing makes noise and gets attention, but voters prefer practigmatists to ideal odds. chicago has seen a 40% growth in violence this year, and the focus on governance will only heighten. today the democratic party has

control of just 18 state legislatures compared to 30 for republicans. democrats spent tens of millions of dollars to flip the legislatures in arizona, north carolina, florida and texas. they failed everywhere, and they even managed to lose control of new hampshire's legislature. since states oversee redistricting and voting laws, 2022 looks very tough for democrats. democratic failures also play a role. put bluntly, too many democratic states have gotten bloated, mismanaged and corrupt. take new york state. it has a budget nearly twice the size of florida's, yet it has roughly the same population. its budget is just 12% smaller than california's despite having half as many people. can anyone even explain why?

this increased spending does not always pay off. steven malunga of the city journal compares tax revenues with the quality of public services, such as infrastructure, education and health care. new york has the eighth highest tax late but ranks 19th in quality of services. california is sixth highest on taxes and 37th on public services. states like new jersey and massachusetts, despite massive spending, have some of the worst infrastructure in the country. similarly, sky high education spending in these states doesn't translate into better educational outcomes. as ryan fazio notes in the new york post, new york spends nearly twice as much per pupil as the national average, get its fourth and eighth grade reading scores are no better than the national average. things have reached a tipping point.

nearly 14,000 businesses left california between 2009 and 2019. this seems to have gotten worse in the last few years with tesla, apple, charles schwab, facebook and hewlett-packard all announcing new reloecations or expansions in texas. the top states for running a business was texas, florida, tennessee, north carolina and indiana. the worst five were california, new york, illinois, new jersey and washington. the pandemic has opened up horizons for companies that are now thinking more aggressively about relocations, remote work forces and flexible office locations. all this bodes poorly for blue states. and it's not just businesses that are leaving blue states. people are as well. for the first time on record, california's population actually decreased last year. illinois was one of the few states to see its population

shrink over the last decade. as the "wall street journal" reports, it can't be the weather since every other midwestern state actually gained people over the same period. meanwhile, texas and florida together swelled by more than 6 million people. all of this, of course, translates into more political power. new york, california, illinois, pennsylvania, michigan, west virginia and ohio will all lose congressional seats while texas, montana, and oregon will gain them. these shifts plus redistricting could mean democrats lose the house even if they perform just as well in 2022 as they did in 2020. liberals don't like to face squarely the issue of democratic incompetence. new york, for example, handled the pandemic disastrously at the state and city level. as ryan cooper has pointed out, new york state's covid-19 deaths

rose faster than anyplace on the planet at an equivalent point in their outbreaks. its death rate per capita is almost 60% higher than florida's, yet new york heroes were fettered as heroes. the new york governor uncship uncovered errors. but it must first face up to its failures and work hard to show it can manage the governments it is already running. president biden is doing that at the federal level. at the local level, new york city would be a good place to

start. go to cnn.com/fareed for my new york post column this week. and let's get started. on thursday china will throw a huge nationwide party. there are propaganda films all across the united states are being required to play, exhibits, memorable collectibles and more. the occasion for all of this is 1900th anniversary of the founding of the communist party. in the ensuing century, it is what jeff sachs calls the ensuing story in american history. what comes next? widening internal fractures? a move towards democracy, perhaps? here to discuss ourie economy,

elizab elizabeth, ron and jen. ro ronna, you're a historian. what does this mean for the party? >> certainly not the communist party, certainly of this stature, of that size, has lasted this long. what it means is the party has survived 100 years the turmoil that any political party has seen. in 1921 started with young men to gather in tea houses to talk about marksism in the city of beijing, but along the way it's caused some horrific results, the illusion of the '50s and

'60s where millions have died, and the growth miracles in the last 30 or 40 years. all of those happened at the same time and that is what's correlating with the 100th anniversary. >> we hear a lot about the party, but the party is not the country. >> that's right, and i think in many respects this 100-year celebration is -- at its core is about legitimating the party in the eyes of the chinese people. by the time the chinese are six years old, they are in sdool w -- school with the glory of the party. it doesn't infiltrate the fact that the party is only about 6.92% out of 1.4 billion people, and they occupy all the important positions in government and universities and

hospitals and industry. but nobody votes these people in. this is a self-selected group, so it's up to the chinese communist party to legitimate i itself through its performance. it will be part of the narrative that has successfully fought outside oppressors, that it has this economic growth story, and that it has now claimed the grief of scentrality on the stage. it's a right of the chinese people to have a say of who leads them against this. >> do people, generally speaking, think the party has done a good job? per capita gdp in china has gone up about five-fold in the last

ten years. even with the pandemic, whatever happened initially, the chinese were able to control covid remarkably effectively. is the general sense one of competence and people willing to make the tradeoff of not having a say in the way liz was describing? >> right, fareed. i think it's sometimes hard to say because information is so tightly controlled in china and dissent is usually tamped down extremely effectively. but by and large, i think, the chinese has bought into this in exchange for political say. i think in china there is a spirit of general jubilation that china has finally arrived, that the century of humiliation, which as you described the years

in which china has suffered in the hands of foreign powers has finally ended, and we have begun the era of rejuvenation in china's restoration to its deserved glory. so nationalism runs very high, and nationalism undersea has been one of the most potent instruments, weapons, really, of the communist party, and i think the 100th anniversary, the performance of it, is just another way in which, you know, this is being expressed. when we come back, i'll ask the panel, are we watching the start of a new cold war?

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we are back with elizabeth economy, jia yang fan and ronna to talk about the economy. there is the belief that china has been obsessed. it's not really that expansionist. but under xi, there is a much greater sense of scolding countries, punishing countries, asserting china's rights. has china become more expansionist? give us a sense of what it looks like in a historical perspective. >> i think in some ways what china is doing today looks very much like what it's done over hundreds of years, which is in its immediate backyard in places on the borders like xin jia ng

where people are being held in retention camps, and the shutdown of the apple daily newspapers, china is showing, particularly under xi, that it is no longer going to accept a certain sense. when you go to the belt on road initiative, that big technology attempt to attract interest in the world, 5g coming from china, likely they'll take china's 6g and 7g when that comes along as well. then it was the political control. but is that the same as they had taking over territories. that kind of expansion, i don't think, was not in the mind of

the communist party. what i think china's communist party wants is for the world to think well of it and approve of it. i have to say for a historian, that looked much more like a traditional imperial confucious way of looking at things rather than a communist way of looking at things. if you treated an emperor right, he wouldn't mind so much what you did behind his back. but if you insulted him to his face, you were in for a hard time. there's some tone with that going on today with that very angry language. >> jiayang, xi does seem to point to the idea that this kind of nationalism that rana was talking about, there is an element of populism there. it seems to work domestically as it does in many other countries. >> yes, it really does feed upon

itself. i think that's what makes this revolution of nationalism so potent, because even among the young, especially those who have not suffered in the culture rev l -- revolution, the great step forward, they have only created china in its successive, economic reforms that have brought prosperity into the country, and they buy into xi's rhetoric of seeing the world beyond china's enemies. the u.s. being one of the possible enemies of china is seen as a country that is determined to bring shame and undermine china's future development. for the young, especially

millennials and gen-z who have grown up more connected to the world than ever, they see this as something that they must rally against. so for the rising generation of the chinese, they do, i think, buy into deceased nationalism because it is so strictly tied to their identity and their need to feel a pride in their sense of chinese identity. >> liz, do you think the biden administration is handling this new china more expansionist, more aggressive, maybe, in some ways? is biden handling china well? >> i think the administration has gotten off to a good start. i think they've, you know, sort of built upon the trump

administration policy in mo important ways, so i think the threat perceptions remain the same, but they've expanded the tools at their disposal to include much greater partnership with our allies. so working with the quad, japan, india and australia, but also with our european allies to focus on democratic values, talking about the sanctions against china, doing joint sanctions with the eu and u.k. in canada against china for its human rights abuses in xinxiang. i think the u.s. is back in terms of multilateral institutions, china withdrew from the u.s. saying it wasn't interested in holding the global stage anymore. the combination of both recognizing the threat and the challenge that china poses sort of across the board but also returning to many traditional foreign policy values and

approaches in terms of u.s. leadership on the global stage while still maintaining an openness to cooperating with china. i think that is important. secretary of state blinken has made clear that the u.s. wants to cooperate with china in targeted narrow issues like climate change in afghanistan, north korea and iran. it's not interested in a broad-gauge strategic dialogue where nothing gets accomplished and you're just talking for talking's sake, but it does make sense to work with china where they can. i think they've established a possible framework. we'll see how it evolves. it will be a very challenging relationship. >> this is a reflection on what is going to be the most important relationship the united states has in the world. probably for most countries it's the second most important relationship right now. thank you very much. next on "gps," what is on

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and see f9 only in theaters. ♪ ♪ malcolm gladwell is an industry unto himself. he has sold dozens of books in

different languages starting with "the tipping spopoint" in 2000. now he's a podcaster. it has been downloaded 100 million times in the last two years, according to his production company. he's out with a new season of the podcast and has many new and fascinating stories to tell. welcome back, malcolm. >> thank you, fareed. >> there was one that caught my attention and that was autonomous cars. everyone talks about this, and yet you don't see it happening as fast as people were predicting. are we moving rapidly to a point where we're going to be able to, you know, do e-mails while the car is actually driving for us? >> yeah, i think it's pretty clear it's coming. the question is how quickly. you know, for my debut, i went

to see the self-driving car a waymo and it's very difficult to sit in that and think we're not all going to be in self-driving cars in the future. i was blown away by the technology. >> but when you look at waymo, is that realistic? it's my understanding they're still pretty expensive. they look like some kind of tanks with dozens of cameras and sensors on them. >> they are. at this point we're in the earliest stages of the technology. i can't help but be optimistic that this is going to end up in a form that will be affordable and usable for all of us. the point of my episode was to imagine what would happen when every car on the road is

autonomous. that is the delicious future that lies in wait for all of us, because, as sort of a slightly tongue in cheek episode, but the thing that i was exploring was something that i read about in this wonderful paper from a guy named adam miller ball who is an urban planner at ucla who pointed out that if every car on the road is autonomous, in other words, if every car is perfectly behaved, right, because autonomous vehicles, if they're controlled by a computer, they are rational and patient and good-natured in a way that human drivers are not. what does that mean, this guy miller ball asks. well, it means that pedestrians, cyclists, runners, little kids playing soccer can all do what they want. they can take back the road. >> because the autonomous car will always give you the right-of-way. >> exactly.

why don't you jaywalk all the time right now? because you have a legitimate fear that one out of every ten times the driver is not going to see you and they'll kill you, right? that's why most of us cross at the light, at the crosswalk, look both ways first, because we're terrified of some dumb driver. if every car is autonomous, we're not terrified anymore. the cars are perfect. i tested this out with a waymo in a parking lot just outside phoenix and i was running alongside the car -- this is where the episode ends -- and just doing what i wanted, and the car was the most respectful -- every time i cut in frupont of it, it stopped. every time i ran in front of it, it slowed down. my track club will do its workouts on the interstate. i'm also a big cyclist. the reason i don't cycle in manhattan is that i'm terrified. i will no longer be terrified and nor will thousands and

thousands of other people. i'm not even sure it will be possible to drive a car across manhattan if every car is autonomous because the cyclists will be everywhere. >> war gaming. how did you come to think about war games and more plans and what did you find? >> i'm on the board of rand, and rand is one of the big war gaming shops in america. every now and again, we would have a presentation at one of our board meetings on a war game. and i always found them incredibly fascinating. in particular i was fascinated by this idea that there is a certain kind of insight you get from a prediction and a certain kind of insight you get from a plan, but a whole different kind of insight that you get from a game. everyone at rand in the war game world quotes this famous line from thomas schilling, nobel

prize winner, founder of game theory. and he said, no one who is intelligent cannot make a list of things that has not occurred to them. and point of war games are we play a game in order to expose ourselves to things that were outside our reckoning, that simply were too weird and unexpected and odd for us to have thought about on our own. and that idea is so crucial. the military gets this, of course, which is why they do war games over and over and over again, because they're aware of their limitations as normal human predictors. he's aware, as schelling pointed out, they're unaware of a list of things that haven't occurred to them. i wonder if the rest of the world has not learned this lesson. i'm thinking of covid here. there were a whole list of things that had not occurred to us about a pandemic that we simply weren't prepared for, and

that we might have been prepared for if we had done these kinds of simulations at a place that are commonplace in the military world. next, malcolm has long been skeptical of certain college rankings. now he has new fodder for his thinking which he'll explain when he comes back.

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new projects means new project managers. talk to your doctor about adding protection you need to hire. i need indeed. indeed you do. the moment you sponsor a job on indeed you get a short list of quality candidates from our resume database. claim your seventy five dollar credit, when you post your first job at indeed.com/home. and we are back here on "gps" with the one and only malcolm gladwell. what about these ratings? what did you find about how it affected or how it dealt with historically black colleges? >> yeah, so i have been obsessed with college rankings for many years. like you, as a non-american, i came to this country largely ignorant of the higher ed system and have come away from my time here with the impression that it's nuts! it's completely crazy! one of the things that's crazy

about it is that we insist on using as our benchmark for assessing the quality of colleges this thing called the u.s. news rankings. so i decided i would investigate the algorithm that the u.s. news uses to rank colleges, and it's sort of quasi secret. i found some hackers at reed college who had hacked their way into the algorithm, and we proceeded to play a series of games. let's just find out. so one of the things -- and this is actually not funny, it's quite disturbing. one of the biggest variables in the use use news ranking is what they call a pure assessment score. this accounts for more than any other variability in the ranking. they send a questionnaire to every college president in the country and have them rank the academic reputation of all the other colleges in this did you not on a scale of 1 to 5. and that counts for a huge amount. right away you realize the absurdity of this. so if i am the president of evan

university in manhattan, i am ranking, you know, brigham young on a scale of 1 to 5. with all due respect to the rabbi who runs the shiva, i'm quite sure the brigham young guy has never been to shiva and yet u.s. magazine is asking them to rate each other on a scale of 1 to 5. it's absurd. i had my hackers do a regression on the pure assessment score to figure out what factors correlate most closely with a high score, a 5? if i take just three variables the size of the school's endowment, the amount of money they charge in tuition and the number of white people on campus, i can predict u.s. news' reputation score with 91.3% accuracy. in other words, a huge part of this algorithm is simply measuring how much money a school has and how many white

people it has on campus. that does not bode well, for example, for a historically black college which, by definition, doesn't have a lot of money because it's serving a population that's at the other end of the socioeconomic scale and that doesn't have a lot of white kids on campus and that by design charges a low amount of tuition because they want to be affordable for kids. so we have a system that is systemically i mpoverishing schools that provide opportunities to poorer kids and that is rewarding kids for no other reason than the fact they'vthey have a lot of money in the bank and they admit white students. i'm sorry, but that is preposterous! i don't even think most people who casually glance at those rankings in order to help their children make a decision about where to apply for cleolleges

realize how preposterous these rankings are. i have two shows on this. i go on for an hour and a half on how nuts these things are. i've just scratched the surface. i could go down every variable in the algorithm and show you, prove to you that it is so completely bonkers and that these variables had nothing to do with the underlying quality of the school. >> and it's not just that society takes them so seriously, it's that american high schools are essentially geared almost entirely to figuring out how to get kids into those colleges based on the very rankings you're describing. anyway, we have to go on because i have to understand why three of the episodes in the series are about one movie, a much beloved movie, "the little mermaid." but you come not to praise "the

little mermaid" but to bury it. i know you've watched it and you have daughters, so you cannot plead ignorance on this. i had not watched it. i went back and watched it at the grand old age of 57, and i discovered to my horror and shock that this movie is crazy! fareed, this is a movie about a young, spirited mermaid who is independent and full of life who gets into trouble and can only be saved, first of all, by a h handsome prince, she can save herself. and the handsome prince commits a murder in cold blood, an execution of a witch. this is a vigilante mou v-- movie. this is a vigilante movie focused on nine-year-old girls.

i got britt moring, a screen actress, to rewrite the ending. our ending is a good ending. it's the ending you want your daughter to listen to. >> as long as you like sebastien the crab, i'm okay. >> i love sebastien. he's not the problem, let's just put it that way. >> malcolm gladwell, always a pleasure. >> thank you, fareed. next on "gps," donald trump unleashed his fury at social media companies for banning him from their platforms. it turns out he isn't the only current or foreign leader seething about social media. that story when we come back. mobile app so you can quickly check the markets? yeah, actually i'm taking one last look at my dashboard before we board. excellent. and you have thinkorswim mobile- -so i can finish analyzing the risk on this position. you two are all set. have a great flight. thanks. we'll see ya.

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and now for the last look.

on thursday, hong kongers flocked to newsstands for a piece of history, the last printed issue of the pro-democracy newspaper "apple daily," a monument to the city's longlasting freedom. it was forced to close after the company froze its bank accounts, arrested its journalists and imprisoned its founder, the activist jimmy li. the news is tragic but not unexpected. china is a communist dictatorship and it has been dismantling for months. the trends are now visible in some of the world's largest democracies. some of these elected governments are clamping down on free speech and in an increasingly dynamic place, online. take india. a company that could have 850 million smartphone users by next year. last month a raft of new rules

went into effect that makes social media companies criminally liable for content that users post online. under the new laws, companies like twitter and facebook have 36 hours to take down posts that the government finds objectionable including posts that are deemed to be counter to public order, indecent morality or bad subjects to india. modi might interpret such categories very broadly. reuters reported last month that india asked social media companies to take down posts referring to the, quote, indian variant due to the second covid wave. in january they ordered twitter to block hundreds of accounts belonging to politics and journalists. here's the tragedy. india is not alone in this

trend. look at indonesia, a country that was becoming increasingly democratic and open in the last two decades. as the communists reported, its government has issued a series of new regulations that require tech companies to take down objectionable content with as little as four hours' notice. that's in the case of content depicting child sexual abuse or inciting terrorism as well as the troublingly vague category of content that disturbs society, again, to be interpreted by the government. also vague is the category of companies subject to this law. it certainly includes social media companies, but it could include news websites large and small, which means the law, effectively, could censor all press. these laws are little more than digital censorship in the guise of regulation. but sometimes countries use eve.

look at nigeria. they took to twitter to make an announcement. it was banning twitter. they took down a controversial post by president abdul mahari and temporarily suls pe-- suspended his account. his post as agitating was seen as a thinly veiled threat in a country riveted by tensions. donald trump still barred from twitter himself issued a statement in enthusiastic support of nigeria's actions. still, the nigeria government has begun talks with twitter this week, no doubt spurred on by the outrage by nigerians of dissent in that country. all over the world, governments are battling tech companies for control of online spaces.

but it's one thing to invoke laws to stifle hate speech and abuse and quite another to use them to silence criticism. when thinking about this issue, it's crucial to recognize that in most developing countries lacking traditional infrastructure, forums and communications, the internet has become a central platform for life itself. in nigeria, a country plagued, people took to social media to try to arrange lifesaving oxygen for their loved wones when the hospital ran out. social media is the only check on governments. so when democratic governments seize control over the internet, they are really seeking to

extend control over the lives of their people. thank you for being part of my program this week. i will see you next week. you need an ecolab scientific clean here. and you need it here. and here.

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i'm brian stelter and we're sitting by t