Lex Fridman: commitment

Transcript context

…And whether that matters or it’s a part of the calculus at all, because after all, they are leaders of superpowers. I think for Trump, it matters. Personal relationships matter, but of course we see a lot. We know a lot about Donald Trump, we know a lot about the White House. And actually, let me just say as a tangent for whatever you think about this particular White House, one of the things I really like is that every single member of the cabinet is willing to talk for many hours every single week, talk about what they think, how they see the world, explain Donald Trump’s approach. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with what they’re saying. Maybe you say they’re dishonest, maybe they’re misrepresenting, but there’s a lot of information. That’s something we don’t have with China. And as a fan of history, for me, and as a fan of deep political analysis of the world, it makes me sad, because it’s a very asymmetrical amount of information. But anyway, let me, if I can lay out this particular complexity we’re in now, this trade war between us and China. Now, you’re not an economist. In fact, you think deeply about the history of peoples and the history of China. You think about culture, you think about protests and the movements and so on. And there’s some degree to which this trade war is less about the economics. Now that layer is also very important and we could discuss it, but there’s also a deeply cultural standoff almost happening here, which would be interesting. So in April, as people know, Trump escalated a trade war with China using tariffs, raising them on Chinese imports to 145%. Xi Jinping then responded by raising tariffs on US goods to 125%, and suspending exports on certain rare earth minerals and magnets to the US. The Chinese government also indicated, it would limit the import of Hollywood films, and restricted certain American companies from operating in China. rtain rare earth minerals and magnets to the US. The Chinese government also indicated, it would limit the import of Hollywood films, and restricted certain American companies from operating in China. Now after that, Xi Jinping broke silence on April 11th, and again on April 14th, and since, basically saying that China is not backing down and positioned himself in China as the “responsible superpower,” that promotes, as you were saying, the promoter of the reasonable multilateral global trading framework in a stable global supply chain. He said “For over 70 years, China’s progress has been built on self-reliance and hard work, never on handoffs from others, and it remains unafraid of any unjust oppression. Also, he said there are no winners in a trade war and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation. This was all set as part of a tour of Southeast Asia, and he was calling on China and the European Union to defend international rules opposing unilateral bullying. At the same time, I saw that China’s escalating internal propaganda, including interestingly, it would be nice to talk to you about it, the use of the Mao Zedong 1953 speech during the Korean War where he says, “We will never yield. ” My question is, with this standoff, who do you think will blink first? Where does this go? So I think one persistent, there’s a lot to unpack there, of a historian too. I think that the reference to being bullied by a foreign power is something that comes up periodically, and plays to this notion of a hundred years of national humiliation that’s been talked about by generations now of Chinese leaders, to talk about that period from the 1840s to the 1940s. There were a group of foreign powers who were involved in bullying China in one way or another, and you can selectively pick one or another. So there is a way in which this can be. And if Xi Jinping gives that kind of speech in Southeast Asia, he’s speaking to a place where there is knowledge of times of the past when the United States was an aggressive force there. It’s also a part of the world where there have been times when China has been that. So there is a way of positioning vis-a-vis other parts of the world, that is crucial part of this, that I think, I guess I’m circling around it, but there’s a tendency in discussions of US-China relations to think about it in terms of a bilateral discussion or dispute. Even though time and again, we realize that places other than the United States are key variables in these things. So the US and China being at odds in the Mao era, what changed things dramatically for that wasn’t so much even a change in… Yes, Nixon was the one who went to China, but what made it possible for Nixon to go to China was that the Sino-Soviet split happened, that actually it was tensions between China and the Soviet Union that altered equations for the United States and China. I happened to be in China in 1999 when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and three Chinese citizens died. And there was tremendous discontent about that, anger about that it within China. And there were some rare protests that the government allowed to happen, but students were worked up about it, and there were protests outside the American Embassy and the British Embassy. That happened. And then in 2001, there was a spy plane incident that happened. So there was a lot of discussion that the next decade was going to see US-China tensions being the major force in the world. 9/11 happened. It was a dramatic reset for the trajectory that the US and China were on, which these are two totally different things, the Sino-Soviet split and 9/11. But in both cases, no matter how careful you were at parsing what was likely to be the next five years for US-China relations get dramatically changed by something that happened that wasn’t the US and China. And in the current situation, the trade war, I know that it’ll be very important that China can try to increase sales of consumer products to Europe.…

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