Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander, an Eagle one from Eagle
Speak at Seer Shore your home for a discussion of national security issues and all
things maritime. And good day everybody, and thank you very much for joining
us for another edition of mid Rats. We appreciate you taking time today to
listen with us, whether you're with Live or you subscribe to the podcast,
and maybe we're joining you on your commute this week in this beautiful springtime.
It's uh. I don't know about where it is where you are, but
we've just had a great weekend. Hope your weather has been as nice as
ours. And if you are with us Live, I'd like to go ahead
and do my usual alter call and extend an opportunity for you to go over
to the chat room. We've already got Paul and anyc there sitting there waiting
for you to arrive, and that's a great place where if during the course
of the show, if you have some observations you'd like to share, or
there's a question you would like for us to point to our guests in the
course of the next hour, that's the perfect place to do it because we'll
both be monitoring during the show. And speaking of which, won't we just
go ahead and roll into the show right away when when you look at the
first two decades of this century, time isn't marching on quite quickly. As
the US, the West and all of our friends were pretty distracted on some
of our policing actions and small wars and Central Asia and the Middle East.
The People's Republic of China in the open really slowly, deliberately and steadily grew
her economic, diplomatic and military power to the point that she does even have
the world's largest navy, which is even more impressive when you look at it
when it's localized to the Western Pacific. And in the last year, really
throwing on our third year, a lot of the brain trust and attention in
the US and the West again has been focused on the largest conventional land war
in Europe since the Second World War. In the last half year it's been
back to the Middle East that just can't seem to leave anybody alone. However,
in the background, the People's Republic of China has, as it's been
doing, slowly, steadily and deliberately growing her power and influence, and she
does have her own challenges but she doesn't seem to be interested in playing all
the games that everybody else does. And we've got a returning guest today to
revisit this topic and to give everybody anuther state, and that is Dean Chang.
He is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a
senior advisor for the United States Institute of Peace, and a non residence fellow
at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, and all sorts of great things.
But today he's with us on mid Rats Dean, welcome back. It's great
to have you on board. Thank you for having me. And like I
kind of prattled on a bit in the intro, it's been a busy quarter
century so far, at least for us and our friends. That the People's
Republic of China has decided that we can do what we want to do,
but they're more interested in other things, especially in the last year. She
has not been standing still waiting for everybody to get an extra couple of minutes
of attention to look at what she's up to. So while everybody's been distracted
with other things in the last year, what has she been up to that
people really should be aware of. Well, it's almost a question of what
hasn't she been up to. We've seen China become ever more active around the
world, first and foremost not militarily. We can get to the military in
a minute. But we've seen their expand further their Belt and Road initiative,
which is in economic play, going far beyond where the historic Silk Road went.
The BRI involves investments in Africa and Latin America. There's no actual history
of any Chinese silk trade along those regions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
We've seen them go to the Moon and to Mars. One of the things
folks may not realize is that China is the first country to be able to
have its first shot at Mars work. Everybody else has had their first couple
of efforts, including US fail. The joke is that Martian air defense is
very efficient, but the Chinese mana should not only put something in orbit,
but more importantly to land on Mars and have their little rover work. That's
a huge statement about their overall space capabilities. They've also landed on the far
side of the Moon, which again nobody actually has done before, and when
it comes to the military. They now have the largest navy, they're working
at developing the world's largest air force. They have deployed a lot of nuclear
weapons, several hundred ICBMs out in Western China, and scarily, they put
a hypersonic glide vehicle in orbit. That's something we in the Russians chose not
to do during the Cold War because it's incredibly destabilizing. It creates the real
question, how do I know that the satellites that are up there or will
be up there in the future aren't going to be weapons? Right, Because
if you put a hypersonic glide vehicle in orbit, you could bring that thing
down with almost no notice. Maybe it's orbiting over Washington, d C.
Or over Omaha or over Norfolk, and you could do a heck of a
lot of damage if you sent that thing screaming in at anywhere from Mock five
to Mock twenty five with pretty much no warning. Yeah. One of the
things that I think I've heard you talk about before but probably need to talk
about is the way China is trying to change or impose its idea of the
rule of law on everybody else. And I think with space especially with their
mission to the Moon and their intention to set up a permanent base there and
a few other things, and like their idea of what the law of the
South Chinese Sea should be. Let's talk about how that affects what they're up
to. So China's attitude towards the South China Sea is everything within what's sometimes
termed the nine dash line or the ten dash line really should be treated as
Chinese territorial waters, sort of like Chesapeake Bay. And the problem there is
that the water that is encompassed within that line reaches within three miles of the
Vietnamese and Philippine shores. It essentially says those countries pretty much don't have right
to territorial waters or exclusive economic zones. The entire South China Sea the way
the Chinese behave should be theirs. That's very scary because five point three trillion
dollars worth of trade passes through the South China Sea. It is the means
by which Japan, South Korea, Taiwan get food, get energy, get
access to markets. What we are potentially looking at in space is a similar
rewrite of the rules. The Chinese basically are asking the following question, if
we get to the Moon before the Americans get back. If we start having
regular service to the Moon, because we're definitely going to not be one and
done. We're going to land, We're going to set up long term facilities.
We're going to you know, not only recruit them rotate crews, but
resupply them. What should be the language a space traffic management in that world?
You know, if you fly from Brazil to Spain, two countries that
aren't English speaking native English speakers, air traffic control. The talk out of
the cockpit, that's all in English. English is the language of terrestrial air
traffic management. What the Chinese are hoping to do is to say, that's
fine, you can have the Earth when you go beyond you know, Earth's
bounds. When you start going to space, hope you learn Chinese because that's
going to be the language of space traffic management. Yeah. That bowls into
what you see with a lot of things with the international community and the People's
Republic of China, where they say, you know, those are your rules,
and those are nice for your rules, but we had no say or
play in the development of your rules, and we are going to have our
own rules. So we see that and what they would like to do outside
of Earth the orbit we see that in something is as simple as all the
Philippines with water cannon. What are some other things that in the international order?
For what people are used to thinking it is that the Chinese aren't technically
trying to manipulate, but simply to ignore and create a new reality. Well,
one of the biggest examples is intellectual property, and the Chinese basically have
said, why can't we borrow quote unquote other people's intellectual property? You did
it when you were growing up, why can't we do it? They do
actually have a point. If you take a look at the early nineteenth century,
the early eighteen hundreds, we were not We the United States were not
very respectable of other people's intellectual property. The problem here, of course,
is that with computers and thumb drives, you know, before stealing intellectual property
literally meant trying to steal physical blueprints. Today you can download terabytes of data
in seconds, maybe minutes, and walk out with a thumb drive literally the
size of your thumb, or maybe a physical hard drive that is the size
of a wallet. I could, in theory steal pretty much all the stuff
that's worth stealing out of a major corporation that way, and that's one of
the fundamental areas that China has been engaging in overturning the rules. Another aspect
here is we are watching how they are behaving towards a variety of other countries
with regards to loans and things where they make loans. To be fair to
the Chinese, the loans are pretty clear in many cases, but if you
fail to pay up, they repossess, and they have repossessed entire ports.
That is something we really haven't seen in the twentieth century. Well, post
World War Two, there was a lot more of that early on, and
again it's not unique to China. Teddy Roosevelt was showing the big stick in
South America, not against the locals, but against countries like Germany who wanted
to would have liked to have done essentially the same thing towards local states.
The big question I think right now is whether or not Russia China is going
to rewrite the rules with regards to aiding Russia. We're hearing more and more
room and reports that the Chinese are slowly amping up their aid to Russia in
its invasion of Ukraine. They haven't gone as far as North Korea. North
Korea is just openly selling munitions. The Chinese so far seemed to be more
in the dual use aspect. But they're also buying a lot of Russian stuff
oil grain, and that's providing Russia with the most important resource of all money.
How much of what we see with China is a perpetual information gathering system
where they and I think we talked shortly before the show started about the Red
Sea where they sit. They sit in the in the Arabian golf for the
northern part of the Indian Ocean, doing the anti piracy patrol. But you
know they're collecting information about how the us NS allies are responding to the who
the missiles and stuff, talking a little bit about how they go about this
and what they do with it, because it looks to me like they're really
working hard to get inside everybody's udo loop and find a way to get their
first a lot of stuff. So people will often point out correctly China hasn't
fought a war since nineteen seventy nine. But unlike US, specially Americans,
they pay a lot of attention to history. If you ever watched Jeopardy.
You'll notice that the categories that the players often do least well on is history,
and the Chinese are the opposite. They pay a lot of attention to
other people's wars, they pay a lot of attention to history. And so
what we're seeing in places like the Red Sea Israel versus Hamas Ukraine is they
are watching their biggest potential adversaries, namely the United States and the West,
but also Russia. How are they militarily operating? What is the shot doctrine
for Thad and Patriot in Russian ballistic missile attacks and cruise missile attacks? What
is the behavior of US and British escorts when they are intercepting Huti missiles?
So you can be sure that they are factoring all of that into their own
doctrine with regards to what if I have to use my missiles against Taiwan,
knowing how the Americans are likely to behave, knowing how we have probably trained
the Taiwanese that allows them to figure out how to work against how to get
inside both our doctrine. But as important as you, says the Udulup,
the other piece of this is that we in here, I'm going to include
the Russians. We the West plus Russia have a very different approach to intelligence
than the Chinese do. We're always looking for the golden ticket, right we
are looking for Shijin. We would be looking for Vladimir Putins closest confidant.
They're looking for Joe Biden's secretary chief advisor. Who does he talk to?
Because if we can get that golden ticket, all will be revealed. The
Chinese are really very much like a Hoover vacuum cleaner. The joke goes that
if the Chinese were going to invade an island, they'd first send one hundred
thousand tourists over. Each would take one spoonful of sand. They'd bring it
back to China, and then they would rebuild the beach with that one hundred
thousand spoonfuls of sand to analyze how deep is the sand and how hard is
in will it support amphibious vehicles from the like. They recruit people that not
even recruit. They establish relationships with people politicians when they're mayors, politicians when
they're city councilmen. But a whole lot of mayors and a whole lot of
city councilmen on the assumption that thirty years from now, some of these folks
may be i'm us representatives, governors, corporate executives, maybe even you know,
vice president or somebody on the National Security Council. So it's a very
different, longer term hoovering up lots and lots of small pieces as opposed to
focusing on that one skeleton key tellnel like how you mentioned their their approach to
Intel, because you know one of the classic examples of that, and you
just have to ask the question if you if you see it, this clearly
wants you know how many hundreds of thousands of times it's being replicated. Is
you know people like to make funny jokes about Representatives Wallwell and his social activities
with somebody who turned out to be a Chinese agent, thang Thing or whatever
her full name is. That's what people generally know her as. That wasn't
when he was in Congress, That's when he was a local official. However,
when you looked at his family, his CV and influence, you could
see how when they were racking and stacking, how do we get access to
potential future important politicians. He had the family background, and you know,
you talked about they're flooding the zone with tourism. You know, one of
the things that we've seen, as opposed to most of the decades of people
coming across the southern border were predominantly from Central and South America because that was
the easiest way to get there. Then we started seeing other nations come in,
Russians, Ukrainians, Haitians, Cubans, flying New Mexico come up here.
In the last few years, we have seen tens of thousands of not
all but mostly military aged males the People's Republic of China. But people were
first raised an eyebrow with it. I raise an eyebrow that I'm going these
are just folks that are trying to come here to the US because they got
a cousin in Chicago that they can get them a job. But when you
look at the long game that Chinese intelligence plays, there might be something there
there. What are your thoughts about all these undocumented residents that People's Republic of
China that we have coming up from the south, mixed in with all the
ducks, Could there be a goose or too? So The official number that
I saw was something like thirty thousand Chinese males of military age have been identified
crossing the southern border, So I don't know if that figures correct, but
let's work with that, okay, and let's leave aside those are the ones
that we saw coming over, so that doesn't touch on how many did we
not see? Right? Thirty thousand, so one percent. My math is
not great, but so check me on this. One percent of thirty thousand
is three hundred. Okay, so ninety nine percent of the people coming over
that we've identified could be going to work with their cousin in Chicago or Muskegee
or Sacramento. All right, but that still LEAs three hundred. How many
men and a Special Forces eighteen six so that's fifty special forces eighteens a year
who might be just gathering intel. Let's assume that all they're doing is gathering
intel. What would the head of so Calm give for fifty Special Forces A
teams to be able to penetrate China every year? But let's let's assume that
that's just too high a number. Let's go with thirty. Okay, it's
zero point one percent. That's five teams. How many people could you target
if you had five teams a year operating in the United States. How well
prepared do you think Weightman, Galveston, Baltimore, Omaha, Tinker are for
one or more a teams to come in over the wire. I mean,
and that's not even counting all of these tourists who just find themselves driving around
on US bases, sometimes running away from the checkpoint security folks and just say,
oh, I'm a tourist. I'm sorry. I didn't realize that this
large facility that says, you know, US military base Force Protection Status Bravo
was a military base. What do you think SOCOM would give for that kind
of capacity In China? Well, it's I mean, we're when we're talking
about their desire to get information and their continual probing, which I mean,
I think we could talk about a lot the Chinese. He says, there's
not much going on in the Taiwan streets right now, but you know they're
always sending aircraft out. They're always surrounding Taiwan with ships. You know,
how much of this is? You know, if we see it often enough,
do we begin to ignore it because it becomes an everyday event? How
much of it is? You know, as as we've already talked about,
they're they're collecting the information they need to know what's the response time if we
send a fast aircraft right up to the edge of you know, the the
jat where the Japanese Self Defense Force will respond? I mean, is this
And they do it with They do it with I've made a list of the
places you discussed in various articles. They do it with India, they do
it with the Philippines, they do it with with Japan, they do it
with Taiwan, and they do it with us all the time. Every time
we do you know, they just keep probing and probing and probing. And
I guess that you know, it's like the Boy who Cried Wolf. If
you if you every now and then a real wolf shows up, you've got
to be able to pay attention to it. But how much of this is
that as part of that whole of government approach to getting what information they can
and somebody's been going together, and you know, I think that it's important
to so they can assess on the stuff. As the phrase goes, embrace
the power of And I don't think it's in either war. I think on
the one hand, they're probing, they're probing us. They're probably our allies
are probing their neighbors to gather information because you never know who the bad guy
might be. Maybe not next year, maybe five years from now. You
don't know who's going to be in charge, so you can be sure that
they're correlating. Huh. So that's how this American ad reacts when we probe
him. Let's see, you know what, what will the next admiral do?
What will the next captain do? What will the next commander do?
He's worked with the Japanese. Let's see how they're Japanese counterparts operate. But
the other part, and you've mentioned dulup observe, orient decide act. What
can I do when during the Cold War we wanted to get inside the Soviet
Udulu. We figured all those command and control assets, all that you know,
better communications gear would get would enable us to make decisions faster. I
think that the Chinese approach is the flip side. How can I get you
to respond slower? Maybe it means getting you to think that, oh,
no big deal, I don't need to raise my alert level. We've seen
them do this before. Maybe it's political warfare. I can influence you through
a constant drumbeat of you know, we're bigger than you, We're stronger than
you. The future belongs to us. Maybe it's downright personal. I'm gonna
pay you a lot of money to look the other way to the next fifteen
minutes. Or I'm gonna pay you a lot of money to take this thumb
druft, don't ask what's on it and inserted into a computer at work.
I think all of these are parts of what we are seeing, and it's
very comprehensive, and like you said, it's not just whole of government,
it's a whole of society, right Because Chinese universities are state run, China's
media is state run. Chinese shipping companies that work out of places like Boston
are state run. China's space program is state run. So I can get
a whole lot of folks to work off the same sheet of music. I
think that's the mistake that a lot of people have is they see a lot
of what the pr does through a mercantilist view, because they do operate that
way in a variety of ways. But and we saw it when did it
start? Dean? About five years ago they really started to crack down on
some of their billionaires that were getting a little bit too big for their breeches
for the CCP, but they've got control over there. If it's a significant
economic force in the PRC, it's it's controlled directly or indirectly. Are by
threat of force by the CCP who's running things over there, and one of
the you know talking about the slow and the steady, we're going to take
our time. The future is now the Belton Road Initiative. A lot of
people, myself included, for a while, we're perhaps being too optimistic,
thinking that they're going to get too far over their skis. People are going
to see what they're up to. Their debt games aren't going to work out.
But you can see it from Cambodia west into Africa that appears the optimists
were wrong. Is that what you're seeing with the Belton Road Initiative that tendril
continues to grow in length and strength, regardless of the occasional little hiccup here
and there. So it's belt and Road initiative. I think it's always important
to keep in mind how this thing started. It didn't start as a foreign
investment program. It started as a jobs program. So I'm China, I
have built bridges. I have built airports, I have built ports. I
have built entire ghost cities. I have built cities for five million people,
eight million people, and that have like two hundred thousand residents. Why am
I doing this Because I've got steel plants and some implants that i want to
keep open. So after I've built literally bridges to nowhere and airports to nowhere
cities for no one, what do I do next? Well, I could
build infrastructure for other countries. Cool, that's great, But why do these
countries not have infrastructure already and why haven't Westerners built it for them? Because
they have no money. Well, I have these massive trade surpluses. So
tell you what, I'm gonna take a piece of that. I'm going to
recycle it by loaning it to these countries that they can then buy steel and
cement plants, sorry, steel and cement from my steel mills and cement plants.
That's great. Okay, So now I've got and by the way,
all those projects are going to be built by Chinese laborers. They're not going
to be built by locals in Africa and South America and the Middle East and
Southeast Asia. Now I'm going to send my own workforce over there, because
I that's what worries me. I'm trying to keep people employed because people who
are employed are not going to riot against me the government. Okay, So
fast forward a couple of years, and now the bills start coming due,
and now it's like, hey, I've got this debt thing that if you
pay me back, that's fine. I make money off of this project.
If you don't pay me back, Now I've got a legal basis for making
some claims. But I think it's important to realize it didn't start as a
debt trap. It started as a jobs program for Chinese steel workers and cement
workers. Now, though we're in a situation where the bri tendrils are definitely
coming home to roost, you are definitely getting more and more countries where they've
got infrastructure that you built. In some cases they're having trouble paying it back.
In other cases, you've cut interesting deals. At one point, Angola
had pretty much mortgaged its future oil sales for years to China to pay back
projects that the Chinese had built for them. Now, it is important to
remember though the Chinese actually built these projects. They actually built the bridges and
the dams and the railways and all of that, and they use that for
propaganda bology to say, look, we built this railroad in your country,
it's your railroad now. So they figure out many of the angles, they
play off many of the angles, but that doesn't mean it always started from
the angles that they're playing now. Yeah, but that that reminds me of
the recently the US is saying we don't want Chinese cranes because we know that
there's a software program there that could could could misdirection I say, important cargoes
and you know the whole what's the name of that hu way uh five G
telephone stuff. I mean, you know, they develop these things and they
look good, but then they also use them for for a guess, for
that information gathering or maybe even control. So kind of talk about that.
So partly I agree with you in part but let's take Huawei as an example.
Huawei. We talked earlier about China not obeying the rules. Huawei started
off basically exploiting massive cyber theft from a company called Nortel as well as from
Cisco. The computer folks are not the food folks. But part of the
problem here is they come in through the unlocked front door and the open side
window. Nortel, they're computer security people at the time, said there are
people rummaging through our intellectual property. There are people who are just literally stealing
us blind. And they went to the C suites. They went to the
young chief financial officer and the chief operating officer and said, hey, guys,
there's somebody in our system just pulling out data. Teil's attitude was,
you're just looking for more money for security, aren't you, because you're overhead.
Eventually the company goes bankrupt and the Chinese bought up the rest. So
Huawei. You know, we complain a lot about Huawei, but Huawei makes
a five G network from soup to nuts, phones, tablets, computers,
all the way through the servers and the routers and the five G based stations,
and they all work and they work together because it's a single integrated set
of systems. And we say you shouldn't buy Huawei to various countries, and
those countries say, okay, I get what you're saying. Who what should
we buy? And we also look at each other because there is no American
equivalent to Huawei in five G. Some companies make bits and pieces, but
nobody offers the whole thing. And then the Chinese offer financing, so I
will sell you a five G network cheap. And you're talking about countries who
look at this and say, okay, America, what have you got.
Larry Summers said, we show up, we bring lectures. The Chinese show
up, they bring airports. You might have also said, they bring five
G networks. That's a heck of a thing. It's like, the cranes.
Don't buy Chinese crans cool. Chinese cranes work, and Chinese cranes are
relatively inexpensive. What you got, what you got for me to I want
my port to run, I need cranes. So it's really hard to fight
something with nothing. And the Chinese, partly through smart plays, partly through
predatory and you know, subsidize economic policies, and partly because of our own
short sightedness, they get a corner on key parts of key supply chains.
And we're all like, oh, it's about chips. No, chips are
the thing, you know, Chips are what gets headlines. Cranes. Cranes
are boring. Cranes are dull. Cranes are just steel. Till you think
about what's offloading all those computers and all those containers and ports from you know,
Shanghai to Savannah. It's not just you know, people like to talk
about the whole of government approach with so many of these things, it's a
whole of society approach when you look how they it's horizontally and vertically integrated into
this real solid block. Uh. And it's almost as if it's it's creeped
up on us in the last couple of years. A few months ago one
of the best examples I saw this is Joshua Steinman. He put out a
graphic where you look at our missiles, our precision weapons that everybody says,
well, bas upon we've seen in the Ukraine, we need this many tea
lambs, we need this many patriots sm missiles, and they're all made by
our primes in the US. And what he did is the graph goes back
in the supply chain to the different providers and where those materials and those chips
come from, and he pulls it back three or four layers, and when
you get back it starts at layer at layer three, when you get a
layer four of the supply chain to produce these weapons that we're going to we
tell ourselves that we're going to need to rely on in case we find ourselves
in a shooting war west of the International date line. It's yeah, there's
American flags there, but there's a lot of Red PRC flags. So you
know, industrial policy is in a lot of parts, for good reason of
our political spectrum, a no go rule. But it looks like if you
were really planning for a serious economic and military, very challenged to establish world
order, that you would want to not only make sure that your supply chained
are inside your lifelines, but you find a way to put your competitors supply
chains at significant risk. And that's a lot more important for serious things than
what everybody saw on a retail level with COVID when all of a sudden we
couldn't get enough gloves and mask masks. So the Chinese take exactly what you
just said and flip it on its head. And this is the so called
policy of dual circulation. And the idea is I am going to create an
internal Chinese market, and in that market, I'm going to as much as
possible not allow anyone from the outside in. You may have heard of made
in China twenty twenty five that identified ten key technology areas that the Chinese said,
we want to be something like eighty percent self sufficient in we may have
to buy a few things from the outside world, but we don't want to
and we're going to work to prevent us from ever becoming really dependent. By
the way, those ten technology areas again, we think, well, aerospace,
right yes, microchips right yes, but also agricultural machinery, railway technology,
ocean shipping, all this old, boring, yesterday tech that is still
how you move stuff from the factory to the warehouse, to the port to
the customer. So that's one part of dual circulation. I am going to
be dependent on just China for this stuff. But the other piece of dual
circulation is I want to be an indispensable part of everybody else's supply chains.
I want you to buy my stuff. And whether that's because I'm going to
offer you great prices or good quality, sufficient quality, not that it's a
great quality, but sufficient quality, or I'm going to play off of the
well you have to be in the Chinese market. And still I'll hear that
from some companies, and all of that establishes a foothold and sometimes a dominant
position to the point where it's not clear you can make a seat of minifin
Kailomol. It's not clear you can make ibuprofen without at some point going to
Chinese companies to get the precursor chemicals. One of the countries that has resisted
some of this stuff in China is one of their neighbors and the world's second
most populous country. But let's talk a little bit about the relationship between what
I think is probably a key to the future in many ways in the Indo
Pacific, which is India itself. I mean, they've got a twenty one
hundred mile long border with China. They're an armed border on both sides.
They have control over various islands. India has controlled for various islands that lead
into and out of the Middle East, which would be on important slocks for
the Chinese. I'll know about what India is up to and what their relationship
is with China, and where is that going in your view, So,
the Sino Indian border is probably the scariest border nobody's ever heard of. Why
do I say that? If you think back to the Cold War, we
in the Soviets worked really, really hard never to fight each other directly.
We had proxies, we had allies. You had Vietnam, you had Afghanistan.
But both sides pretty much said, let's not kill each other directly because
you have nuclear weapons and I have nuclear weapons, and things could get out
of hand and where would we be. The one time was a Cuban missile
crisis, and the Cuban missile crisis saw both Kennedy and Khrushchev take steps in
the middle of the crisis to pull back. Right. Why am I bringing
this up in the China Russia China India context, Because the Chinese have crossed
the so called line of actual control with their troops for the last eleven years.
They have sent troops into Indian territory or Indian control territory in some cases
carrying banners that say this is our land. They have been resupplied some twenty
miles inside the Chinese the Indian side of the border of the disputed border region.
And now we have had cases where Chinese and Indian troops have killed each
other directly. They tried. They both maintained patrols along the border that are
unarmed. They have guns, but they are unloaded. So instead what happened
they used rocks. They used iron rods to beat each other to death and
in some cases to throw people over cliffs to fall a few hundred feet down
into ravines. The point here is the Chinese are willing to push on this
to the point of confronting a nuclear armed power directly. That should scare people
because that says we have a leadership that doesn't think that this is too dangerous
to undertake. India, depending on who you ask, might actually already be
the most populous country. The problem with India is that, unlike China,
it has nowhere near exploited the full potential of its population. You have millions
of people who are illiterate. You have a society that treats various casts as
subordinate. You have a system that treats women extremely badly. That is holding
back India's ability to really take on China is miltary industrial complex, has a
lot of failures, has a lot fewer successes. All of this adds up
to a lot of potential, which, if it converted into actual power,
economic power, military power, would be huge. But you know, and
part of this is because India is a democracy. Indian analysts will tell you
we cannot do what the Chinese have done. We cannot force people to not
have children, we cannot force people to become educated. But what that means
is that until the Indian society figures out how it wants to mobilize, if
it wants to mobilize its own populations to a fuller extent, it's you know,
it's going to be potential, it's not actual power. And an additional
element here is that, you know, Prime Minister Modi, the current Indian
leader, has really decided that Chinese is not a friend, partly because of
Chinese act activities, partly because he does see China as posing a challenge to
fundamental Indian interests. But they're democracy. There's no guarantee that the next Prime
Minister of India is necessarily going to view the Chinese as a problem. There
are elements in Indian politics who think we should join with China. We would
be unstoppable, We would be the two most populous countries. We are all
of the global South. Why should we work with the global North who exploited
us instead of working with the global South. That resonates in some quarters of
the Indian political system. So ten years from now, is India going to
be opposed to China? Hard to say. And culture and government does matter,
and you have to give I guess you don't have to. But the
CCP, especially after now past and dun King onward, they did an incredible
thing with a lot of challenges in bringing the Chinese people's standard living up into
bringing their country to the status that it is today. Uh, they got
a lot wrong. And I don't think anybody here will really want to live
there or be a citizen there. But culture matters, and you look at
it's not necessarily the communist culture either. You can look at two predominantly Chinese
nations small compared to the PRC. Of course, you look at you look
at Taiwan and Singapore what they have done, and uh, it's it's incredible
if you had a type of political and social cohesion UH and system that those
two have evolved to in our decade, and it could replicate with the incredible
thing in a variety ways. But when you look at East Asias the challenges
of transitioning to a higher income country, you know another another East Asian nation
that at the edge of living memory was completely broken down to parade rest.
South Korea one of the most modern countries on the planet. You also have
Japan after the Second World War, wasn't as devastated as say Germany was,
but still highly advanced society. They're all facing. As you know, Korea
and especially Japan already have turned the corner on being quote rich unquote nations.
The PRC is still grasping for that, but they have the demographic challenge on
top of it, and there's been some interesting scholarship recently about how Japan has
leveraged technology and policy to address their demographic challenge that they're kind of ahead of
everybody else's. South Korea hasn't quite done as much as Japan has, but
I haven't seen much coming out of the PRC about this demographic cliff that they
and their economy is going to face here pretty soon. And again it depends
upon whose data set you're looking at, but I believe it was twenty twenty
two their population actually peaked and is contracting in an accelerating manner right now.
For the PRC's great long term dreams, is that demographic headwind they're going to
run into be what do you think more or less of an issue than a
lot of people think here today. I think it's going to be a huge
issue, but it's also going to be taken very differently in China than how
we think about it. A very good friend of mine is an economist and
he had an opportunity to talk to a POMABIA member, so one of the
top twenty four members of the Chinese leadership. Now this is a while ago,
but I think his question answer was very revealing. He was said,
look, you guys are better data than we do. You know you are
facing a demographic challenge. You know that you're going to fall off a cliff.
Where's the concern. This POLYPIRO member looked at him and said, you
have to understand where not you do? You know what old people don't do.
They don't riot. That sentence right there should tell you that the Chinese
look at problems differently than we do. They understand that an older population,
an aging population, is less productive, is less innovative, that when you
have the overhang that they do, it makes our social security and medicare problems
paal by comparison, because everybody's got to pay as you go. Social welfare
system and in China's case, you have what's known as four to one four
grandparents and two parents are being supported by one grandchild, one worker, and
couple. That is almost unsustainable. It may well be unsustainable. So that's
one of the reasons why the Chinese official estimates of economic growth have been sliding
over time. Also, China is not particularly open to immigration. We have
a demographic problem in this country, but a lot of it has been addressed
through legal immigration policies. Japan is very very much opposed to immigration. That's
why they've pushed for robotics to replace it. South Korea is going to face
a demographic problem. The Chinese clearly are pushing robotics. They are cutting edge
on artificial intelligence. Part of that I suspect is how are we going to
solve the demographic problem. We're going to be like the Japanese. We're going
to do robotics because we're not going to import. We are not going to
allow massive immigration. And frankly, it's not other people want to immigrate to
China, but they are very while, they are very concerned, and it's
there are multiple reports that the Chinese have classified census results because they are not
prepared to publicly talk about a decline in population or the idea that they might
have fewer people than India. At the same time, they also see it
as reducing stress on the CCP and its ability to stay in power. An
older population, shrinking population doesn't need eight percent GDP growth anymore. It can
get by on five percent, maybe even less. It doesn't have to constantly
create new jobs because there are tens of millions of new workers coming online like
there were in the nineteen nineties and two thousands. So from a CCP control
perspective, it's not clearly all a bad thing. Well, let's uh,
let's shift focus a little bit. What what are they doing? What's China
up to in the Latin America. I mean, we've got they own substantial
iron mining capacity in Peru. I gathered, they've got these satellite control stations
in Argentina and a few other places. They're they're talking about putting troops in
Cuba. I don't know what their situation is with Venezuela, but with the
Guiana Venezuela thing, I just can't help feel there's a Chinese thumb in there
somewhere. Talk a little bit about what China is doing in Latin America.
Again a whole of society approach China. Huawei we talked about earlier. Huawei
has wired up a good chunk of South America. The combined cloud compute centers
for Huawei for China Telecom, etc. Equals or rivals that of Amazon Web
Services and Google down there, at least I believe that's the case. I
don't have the statistics in front of me, suffice to say they have a
substantial presence in Latin America in terms of cloud computing centers, and you can
be sure that that data the PRC can access it if it needs to.
You mentioned some of the raw materials. One of the big things to keep
in mind is lithium. Lithium, of course, is important for batteries.
The Chinese sign deals with Bolivia years ago to basically lock down the Bolivian not
just copper, but also lithium production because Bolivia is one of the largest producers
of lithium out there. So what you are seeing is a Chinese effort,
again not military, but economic, financial, technological partnership to basically make these
countries look at China as a friend and as important make sure that they don't
turn on China if the US puts pressure on them now it doesn't hurt.
Of course, if you have a president as you now do in Brazil who
is fairly the very socialist and outlook and looks at China as a good partner,
potentially for all sorts of reasons. Conversely, you have a new president
in Argentina who are press hates. But one things he did, unlike his
predecessor, is say I'm not interested in joining bricks the Brazil, Russia,
India, China, South Africa grouping that the Chinese are using as a stalking
horse. Instead, President Mela is basically saying I'm not sure I want to
get in bed with the Chinese. So you see a variety of reacts,
partly based on politics, partly based on ideology. Milay is much more libertarian,
partly based on finance and other aspects. But what you see is a
China that is making major plays, but not necessarily military. Might they put
troops in Cuba, Yes, it's certainly possible. I suspect that a Chinese
military presence would arouse the US. I would hope so. But they can
get really far without using military means and They understand that if there's one thing
that might arouse reaction, it's deploying Chinese missiles in Venezuela. I mean,
you know, sort of replay the Cuban missile crisis or something like that.
They're more than happy to use money to end technology and politics to win the
friends that they feel they need. Well, while we're looking at the New
World, one thing that's come out in an interview with the President of Mexico,
and it's been a regular topic, is that's been fentanyl here in the
US that mostly comes across the Mexican border. But those precursor chemicals, when
you follow the rat line, they go back to the PRC, and whether
you're talking about cocaine from South America or heroin that's coming from Central Asia and
other locations organized crime crimical networks. If there's a demand, somebody's going to
find the supply, and you couldn't make finanyl without those precursor chemicals coming from
the PRC. However, very little in my understanding, especially in the last
few years, can come out and be transported out of the PRC without the
government having a say and an overview of that. There are people who think
that the PRC is willingly, if not intentionally, helping this this trade of
fitanyl come into the US, just like the British Empire helped enable opium getting
into China a couple of hundred years ago. But part of me also realized
the fact that there's with this amount of money and the international networks of crime
that maybe they're having, they would have as difficult time clamping down on this
as we did on the rum running back in the twenties and thirties. What
on the on the Chinese side? Because I know you follow a lot of
the Chinese press and reports and stuff we've heard from Mexico, but I really
haven't heard much about the precursor chemicals that are used to create fitanyl coming from
China sources. Did it made it to open source over here in the States,
I might have to admit I don't track the fentanyl issue particularly closely.
What I would say is the following. If you are trying to sell opioids
in China, the penalty for drug running in China's pretty clear. It's a
lot like Indonesia elsewhere, it's death. So but if you're selling drugs abroad,
if you're a criminal gang it's a lot less risky, and if you
are the government, there's a lot of money to be made in corruption.
And to be fair to Huging being, one of his big things is anti
corruption. And while a lot of that is a mask for political moves of
his, you know, you disagree with my policies, you're obviously corrupt.
We'll take care of that. To be fair, there is also an actual
anti corruption effort underway. But now all that being said, are the Chinese
particularly learned about precursor chemicals, which, by the way, have a number
of legitimate uses being exported and then being used by criminal elements to sell fentanyl
and other opioids in the United States, the main adversary of China. Something
tells me that's not a high priority for them. And history, you know
what is it. History doesn't always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
I think that there is probably an element in the Chinese system that says,
yeah, you pushed opium in our streets. And by the way, it
wasn't just the British. There were Americans who participated in the opium trade.
Karma man, you know, you know what the saying. I'm not sure
that you can say this on a family radio program. Yah, so I
will simply say karma could be like a female dog. Yeah. I think
it was the Roosevelt family. What do they eupimistically call it the quote China
trade unquote. Yes, there's some American fault in that as well. You
are correct, Yeah, so, you know, I mean the thing here
is there's supply and there's demand, and the Chinese have a lot of influence
over supply, but there's an awful lot of demand, and what does that
say about our system that we have this demand? And then finally, you
know, you do have to ask from a policy perspective, how important is
stopping fentanyl for the United States. I mean, when the President of the
United States and one of his top advisors keeps saying, you know, even
nuclear weapons they're danger, but climate change is the existential threat, and I
want to work with China on the existential threat, kind of makes me wonder
just how high a priority puts on getting the Chinese to cut back on fentanyl
precursor chemicals. Well, speaking of existential climate change threats and stuff that China
has taken a real interest in in Antarctica, I think doctor Elizabeth U.
Chan has been doing a bunch of research on that. Are you familiar with
any of this stuff? And should we be concerned? Because there's a whole
lot of national but worthwhile things down in that area, including fishing and various
good minerals and stuff. So the Antarctic Treaty will be a for renegotiation.
The Chinese have, at this point, I think, tied with us in
having the most Antarctic research stations and are building more. So they may well
have more stations, and like the Moon, I suspect at that point they
will say, look, I got more presence than you do. I think
I should have more of a voice than you do. Now what might that
mean with regards to access to resources, oil, fishing, et cetera.
Is unclear. Strongly doubt the Chinese, with their demonstrated behavior about everything from
building coal fire power plants to overfishing in the destruction of and collapse of fishing
stocks, I don't think they're premier environmentalists. But there's also again an interesting
space element to this. When you look at orbits. There are some satellites
that are in polar orbits that go from pole to pole. They're very important
for maintaining observation over particular targets. They're not typically nuclear early warning type things,
but they do do a bunch of other missions, and those polar orbits
often mean that they are particularly close. Their closest approaches at the south pole
and their slowest moment is actually over the north pole. So an interesting question
is what might you learn if you put telescopes, lasers and other things into
your nice civilian research facilities purely for scientific purposes of course in Antarctica. That
is a great question and a good way to end the hour. I really
appreciate you taking time, Dean today to come visit with us again. I
look next forward to the next opportunity, and I couldn't fit your entire CV
on one page, so I had your abbreviated visit. You are a busy
guy, so I know you've got some stuff you're working on. So a
couple questions for you. One, if folks want to keep track on what
you and your band of associations are working on, where's a good place for
them to keep their eyeballs? And is there a specific project topic or two
that you're working on right now that we might see come up pretty soon?
Let's see you can find some of my writings over at the US Institute of
Piece. So my older stuff is still up at the Heritage Foundation, and
I'm hoping to cross fingerschair pull together some papers on China's space activities to be
put out through the Space Policy Institute later this year. So those are those
are I think some of the highlights of of what I've been doing to try
and stay out of trouble. Well, we support the mission and look forward
to seeing your work and talking to you again. Thanks again for coming on,
Thank you again for having me. Oh, thanks a lot. It's
always a pleasure for having you on. And thank you everybody for joining us.
And until next time, we hope you have a great Navy day.
Cheers. Wants to marry me and really for you being to blame for love
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