Those whose data has been hacked by china and those who don't know that their data has been hacked by china.

That statement is actually more true than you might think.

Yeah, Yeah.

Hi, I'm Michael Beckley, I'm an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and I'm the author of unrivaled why America will remain the world's sole superpower today.

I'll be debunking myths about the future of international relations between the United States and china.

Mhm.

The United States and china are destined for war.

I think that's not true, but it's not totally false either.

What I would say is that the United States and china are destined for rivalry.

They are the two most powerful countries in the world and have very different visions about how the world should work.

So the United States is a democracy, china is an autocracy and certainly wants to promote that vision of governance.

United States treats Taiwan as an independent entity in everything but name china considers it a renegade province.

The United States wants one open global internet and china wants every country to be able to censor the internet as it sees fit.

Wired's february issue features excerpts from the book 2030 for which imagines an all out war between the United States and china that starts in the south china sea.

The south china sea is an area of dispute because that's one of the world's major international waterways.

Is this the most likely scenario for us china war.

I think it's possible.

I don't think it's the most likely scenario China could very well beat the United States in a war and I think that's especially likely if the war happens over Taiwan.

Taiwan is only 100 miles from the Chinese mainland.

So China could throw its entire military at the conflict.

The Chinese military could hit targets on Taiwan without ever having to leave the Chinese mainland in the first place.

The US military of course is coming from thousands of miles away.

It would have to operate mainly from two bases that are on Okinawa Japan.

Those are the only two American military bases within 500 miles of Taiwan and China actually now has missiles that could wipe those bases out in a sort of Pearl Harbor style surprise attack the United States would then have to fight from Guam Which is 1800 miles away from Taiwan.

And that's a huge problem because American fighter aircraft run out of gas after 500 miles.

These are the kind of nightmare scenarios that keep American defense planners up at night and frankly for good reason.

Okay china is surveilling us data.

Yeah, that's definitely true.

Every country spies on every other country.

But what distinguishes china's espionage and surveillance?

It's just the sheer scale.

So if you just look at 2014 alone it was revealed that china had hacked into the Office of personnel management.

They took the data the deepest darkest secrets from american government workers including CIA operatives during that same year.

They hacked into Marriott and stole the passport data and credit card information.

They also hacked into anthem and took 78 million people's health care information.

So China has a long history of trying to gather up data on american citizens.

And so it's no surprise that now there is this worry that it, once you allow an app like Tiktok onto someone's phone, it's only one update away from becoming spyware essentially.

So for all these reasons there is a great worry and I think a great reason to worry the CIA is fueling anti chinese groups.

The CIA has done this in the past.

So during the Cold War china was conquering Tibet.

And at the time the CIA actually funded tibetan gorillas.

They of course lost their battle.

Since then.

We just don't know what the CIA has been up to.

But the fact that United States also backs the government on Taiwan is further an example that chinese used to say, look, the United States is clearly meddling in our internal affairs.

I think that's certainly true.

It just may not be through some of the groups that people have surmised, Some people think the CIA is funding the Falun Gong which is this religious sect within china, there's no hard evidence that that actually went through.

If the CIA is in fact funding the Falun Gong.

They're running some serious interference because members of the Falun gong have gone on to found the epic times, which now is spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories within the United States that are basically causing americans to turn on each other.

I don't know where to go with that, but it doesn't make any sense.

The United States is the biggest threat to world peace.

I think that's true, but I also think the United States has the most potential to be the biggest contributor to peace.

So just as the most powerful country in history, when the United States puts its weight behind something, the world gets remade.

Whether for better or for worse, the United States has just in the last couple of decades toppled the number of regimes of course has military bases on pretty much every continent.

It's the only country that can fight major wars far beyond its borders and the catastrophes are obvious.

You look at Iraq Vietnam, the list goes on.

I think some of the successes though are less obvious and one that I would highlight is this system of US alliances that got extended after World War Two, the United States has offered security guarantees to dozens of nations and that has helped create zones of peace around the world.

Countries that have an alliance with the United States have pretty much never been invaded or how to fight major wars.

So what these security guarantees have done Is essentially allowed countries to not have to build big militaries to defend their own borders, to not have to fight for resources or market access, which was the norm for Millennia prior to 1945.

So, well, I think it's certainly true that the United States has the power to wreck the world and wrecked the world.

It has in various ways.

It also has the capability to really make the world much more peaceful and prosperous.

The chinese government is about to collapse.

I think that's very unlikely China has arguably the world's strongest internal security force.

So take the american law enforcement system now add on top of that three million additional security guards, two million internet censors, 600 million surveillance cameras and something that china calls the people's armed police, which is actually essentially an army of 1.2 million troops that is directed inward at china's own people.

So the bottom line is the Chinese Communist Party is not going to go down without a fight and it can fight like hell.

Now, the only way you would actually get a collapse of the Chinese Communist Party is if there is a split at the elite level, that's what happened prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre, where you have hardliners versus reformists and the party almost collapsed.

But I think that the chinese leader is essentially learned the lessons of Tiananmen.

They realized that they either stick together or they're going to hang separately.

And no one has taken this lesson further to heart than she Jinping, who has purged thousands of his political rivals.

He stacked the highest decks of the chinese government with people loyal to him.

He's even written himself into the chinese constitution.

So while she Jinping certainly has created many enemies by crushing a lot of powerful chinese families.

He his cult of personality and his iron grip on power will make him extremely hard to dislodge anytime in the foreseeable future.

Us china relations have worsened under the trump administration.

I think that's basically true.

Donald trump is the first U.

S.

President to really wage full spectrum competition with china.

He presided over a huge boost in US military power directed into East Asia.

He made the most aggressive use of tariffs against china that we've seen since really the Second World War.

It's a very aggressive upfront policy at the same time though, I don't think trump himself was the sole architect of this shift in U.

S.

China relations.

I think part of it was actually reaction to china's own rise in international aggression.

China has just become a much more active, muscular and authoritarian country over the last decade.

So I actually think U.

S.

China relations are going to continue on the same trend during the biden administration.

The one thing that democrats and republicans seem to be able to agree on is that the United States needs to get tough with china.

The one major difference is that biden is all about multilateralism.

He's all about allies and so he's trying to build an alliance of democracies.

So it's more of a difference of tactics.

But the overarching strategy of what the United States is doing with china is largely going to remain the same.

Okay, China is a superstar.

Yeah, not yet.

When analysts look at what makes countries powerful and what is really driven the rise and fall of great powers over the centuries, it's a few basic components.

One of course is wealth.

You need just lots of money to buy various forms of influence and invest in technological innovation.

You also need a big powerful military in case things get tough and you need to rectify the situation through force and you also need some kind of global narrative.

You need some kind of story to tell or some kind of ideology that can help win over allies and partners to your cause.

So for all these reasons, china is an extremely important country but it still lags pretty far behind the United States, which has 3 to 4 times china's wealth, 5-10 times its military power projection capability and nearly 70 allies.

Whereas China's only ally is North Korea.

The US dollar is the world's reserve currency.

It's used in 90% of international financial transactions.

China's currency is only used in about 2% and of course America's soft power, its global appeal has taken a pretty big beating over the last few years but it still ranks above China.

So with gaps this big in money and muscle and allies and partners, you can't really consider china a superpower in the same league as the United States at least.

Not yet.

Mhm china is the world's largest economy.

That's actually true china's rise has actually been quite steady over the years.

It's gone from a nation that was mostly dominated by peasant farmers to one where there is a burgeoning middle class today.

If you adjust for the fact that things like food and clothes and haircuts are cheaper in china than in the United States, then china does in fact have the largest gross domestic product.

Or GDP.

Having a big GDP is not the same thing as being really wealthy or having a strong economy.

GDP just measures spending and it would be sort of like measuring the wealth of a family if you just looked at their credit card statement.

Obviously just because you spend a lot of money doesn't mean that you're necessarily rich, china does have a lot of mouths to feed 1.4 billion people and no country has run up as much debt as china over the past decade.

So while china certainly does have the largest economy that's not the wealthiest country in the world, The world is divided between two large economic blocs.

The U.

S.

And chinese economies are intertwined in so many different ways.

The big debate is over whether these two countries are starting to diverge whether there's this new cold war between the two countries where each country will develop its own technology and those technologies won't be compatible.

I actually think there is going to be a fair amount of what is called decoupling between the two economies.

It's going to take decades most likely.

But I think there's been so much bad blood stored up by the recent trade conflicts that both countries now are looking for ways to if not entirely disentangled at least try to walk back some of their economic entanglements will china become a superpower?

It's certainly possible but china will have to overcome two main hurdles.

The first is that its economic engine is starting to slow down.

So China's economic growth rates have dropped by 50% over the last decade and I think even worse productivity has declined by 10%.

So China is having to spend more and more to produce less and less.

At the same time, China's debt has ballooned eightfold.

Just over the last decade, no country has racked up this much debt this fast in peacetime.

The second obstacle is a geopolitical backlash.

So according to china's own government sources, anti china sentiment around the globe hasn't been this high since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Some of this is Covid, but frankly a lot of it is a response to china's aggressive, so called wolf warrior diplomacy.

The fear for china is that it may be confronting a tightening geopolitical noose at the same time that its economy is slowing.

And if both of those trends continue, china's superpower ambitions could be crushed.

The bottom line is that for the next decade at least US china competition is going to likely continue across the full spectrum of areas of world politics.

The good news is that these two countries do need each other at the end of the day, they need each other to solve big transnational problems like climate change, to regulate the global economy.

So with the hope is that cooler heads will prevail and the two countries will in fact cooperate, but it's certainly not guaranteed.