Is China Leaving the United States Behind?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

John, thank you for joining me and for the slew of fantastic essays you’ve done for Foreign Affairs over the past year.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Thanks so much, Dan. It’s my pleasure to be here.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You’ve spent probably as much time as anyone in the United States today trying to make sense of Chinese decision-making and foreign policy, both in your time in the intelligence community and then on the National Security Council before you left government a couple of years ago. How, as you watch Xi Jinping and CCP leadership more broadly at this moment, how do you think they understand American policy toward China right now?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think right now, I think they see a moment of real flux in our China policy, and a moment of potential opportunity. I think that, especially as you saw in the National Security Strategy and in the National Defense Strategy, there is much more muted rhetoric about China. This phraseology about being engaged in a strategic competition is not at the forefront of either of those strategies, right? And I think from the Chinese side, I think they’ve recognized that there has been a paradigm shift in Beijing toward a more hawkish footing, ironically thanks very much in part to the first Trump administration, which really broke the seal on this pivot to a more competitive posture towards China, their assessment is likely that this is not going to last. This is going to prove to be ephemeral, and there will be a snapback at some point, either after the midterms or after Trump, toward a more hawkish perspective.

And some of that is just ideologically baked into their system. I think it can be easy sometimes to go to Shanghai or some of these other cities in China and forget this is still a communist regime, right? And they do view us, especially under Xi, through that very traditional Leninist prism, where we are innately hostile to them. And I think that was true even before Xi. It was more subdued and muted, but I think that’s at the forefront of their mind. And so, I think now, especially in the next year or so, I think now they feel like they have an opportunity to do what they need to do to rectify some of the deficiencies that they still have, and strengthen themselves for the next round of competition with the United States.

I think the other thing that’s going on, and I think this was very significant in the run-up to the meeting between the two presidents in Busan, when China rolled out this expansive rare earth export control regime—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This was last fall, the meeting.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

This was last fall, and just weeks before the two presidents were scheduled to meet in Busan for their first face-to-face engagement during Trump’s second term. That, to me, as somebody who’s watched Xi for a long time, that very much felt like Xi shifting from being reactive over much of the past year—and really for much of the past decade, in many ways—to taking the initiative, and switching from being on defense to being on offense with the United States. And again, this felt to me as somebody who’s watched him for a long time, it felt a lot like Xi Jinping’s first term, where I and my colleagues, we had many days ruined by Xi Jinping doing something we had not quite anticipated, and him making big muscle movements on the international stage, and this to me feels much more like that.

And I think the main way that it’s manifested itself so far is not directly vis-a-vis the United States. I frankly have been a little surprised at how durable this rapprochement has been since the meeting between the two leaders, and I think that’s intentional by China. I think they want to, like I said, strengthen themselves. But I think the way it’s manifesting itself is how tough they’ve been on our allies and partners, right? And especially the Japanese, where they’ve been very tough on the new prime minister, [Sanae Takaichi], and reimposed export controls because of her statements on Taiwan. So, I think that presages a bumper year, potentially.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to pick up on lots of those points, but just to linger on Trump for a moment, how do you understand what is going on with the Trump China policy? I think if we’ve gone back a year, I won’t project this onto you, but certainly I and a lot of other people watching U.S.-China policy closely assumed that a tough line on China would be a centerpiece of the Trump 2.0 foreign policy, as it was with Trump 1.0. What’s your read of what is happening?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think what’s happened over the long arc of this year is, I think they did come in very much with that intention. And if you rewind to about a year ago, it was quiet on that front. I was referring to this time last winter as the “phony war,” where there was skirmishing and some diplomacy—we had done a couple of initial cuts of tariffs—but the real engagement hadn’t really gotten underway yet, and you didn’t really have that until Liberation Day. And I think that the administration—and you saw this in their public statements—they smelled weakness on the Chinese side, and I think inappropriately so. And I’ve had this theory that whomever briefed Trump about China and its economy early on in the administration must have led with the fact that China’s real estate sector was the locus of all their economic problems, or many of them. There would’ve just been a certain vividness to that.

And so, they came in, I think, wanting to be quite tough with the Chinese, and then I think what happened after Liberation Day, when China showed that it had the appetite to just ride this out, and were willing to play hardball, I think it surprised many people in the administration. And I think they had to do a pretty significant climb down from that. There was a great line in the New Yorker profile of Marco Rubio, where it said the president felt like he was checkmated because of the rare earths move. [Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent] had talked about orchestrating some kind of coalition as we made trade deals with other allies and partners, that China would then be the focal point of all that pressure.

And that doesn’t seem to have really materialized a full year later. Like, a little bit here and there, to be fair to the administration, like Mexico announcing tariffs, but other countries like Canada, of course, seem to be walking in the opposite direction right now. So I think the way I think about it is that there’s been a seesaw approach in our China policy: we came in wanting to clobber them, and then we’ve gone totally in the opposite direction, I think after Liberation Day, of really trying to mollify Beijing, or even appease them. We made concessions on export controls. It seems like we’re shifting from a policy of export control to one of export promotion now with China, where we’re trying to persuade them to buy Nvidia’s chips. And with some, I think, some concessions on Taiwan. I think Taiwan is probably where we have the most picture in light of the $10 billion arms sale that was announced late last year.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the other surprises of the second Trump foreign policy is the focus on the Western Hemisphere, though I will note that Brian Winter wrote a great piece for Foreign Affairs in December of 2024, predicting that Latin America would become a priority, though I think most of us have been surprised by just how true that has been. How have the Chinese interpreted and reacted to the focus on the Western Hemisphere, both in the National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy and also in our policy more broadly?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think it’s really a shoulder shrug from their perspective. And I think there’s this theory that’s floating around out there in some corners that by focusing on the Western Hemisphere, this is actually the administration equipping itself to deal with China over the long term, and to compete with China. And you see some people framing the move against Venezuela, in particular, through that prism. But I think from the Chinese perspective, they’re very parochial and very disciplined about their own interests. This doesn’t really affect their interests in a major way. It might be at most an inconvenience, but I think for them, the main thrust so far, and I think that the main hope on their side, is that this just gives them more space to focus on their own periphery, on the Indo-Pacific. They’ve been able, like I said earlier, they’ve been able to push Takaichi pretty hard, with a pretty muted response from the administration at this point. They conducted a pretty major military exercise around Taiwan at the end of last year, again, with a pretty muted response from the U.S. side.

So, I think they feel like this focus on other parts of the world plays to their benefit, and that’s traditionally how they see these things. If we are distracted with other issues, whether it’s the Middle East or with Latin America, that’s fine. What they don’t want, of course, is it to be inimical to their interests and their commercial interests in the region. You see that playing out in the way they’ve tried to play hardball on things like the Panama Canal and the Chinese company that’s involved in that. But again, it doesn’t seem like there’s a concerted effort underway from the administration to focus on economic development in Latin America, or things that would really pose a challenge to a lot of the Chinese firms that are just doing business in China, and that are really the centerpiece of their inroads into the region.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

On a previous episode of the podcast, Robert O’Brien, who was Trump’s national security adviser in the first term, argued that what was driving the rapprochement was a recognition on the part of the Trump administration that there are too many other problems in the world, there’s too much else going on, and it made sense to calm things on the U.S.-China front, in order to give the United States some space to deal with these other things. Do you think there’s anything to that? Is there anything to that logic, or is that an attempt by a former official to put lipstick on a pig, essentially?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

A little bit. In fairness, there is a lot going on in the world, but a lot of that, especially over the last month or so, is of the administration’s own making, right? These are not exogenous shocks to the system. Greenland is not something that anybody had on their bingo cards last year. Venezuela has been a longstanding and festering concern, but not a top-tier geopolitical challenge for the United States. And so I think it’s hard to make that argument. When I was detailed to the National Security Council during the Biden administration, there was also a lot going on, right? You had Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, you had the attacks against Israel by Hamas, of course, but there was still a focus on China. I think there was a sense that this was the long-term challenge and that we needed to be disciplined and methodical and not lose sight of that over the long term.

Because if that is the case, I think that very much plays into Chinese statecraft and diplomacy. I get this question sometimes about, When is the next crisis going to be with China? When are the guns going to start firing? And I think that gets the whole problem set wrong. Their approach is much more insidious. They want to avoid a crisis, they want to engage in these salami-slicing tactics, pick your metaphor, so things don’t come to a head and there is some kind of full-blown crisis. If we give them that space, that gives them space to do their own thing, and again, pursue their own interests pretty vigorously, I think. So, I think it’s a challenge, but if you give ourselves the space, you’re also giving China the space. And I think that is just the reality of the trade-off, and I don’t think you can really walk away from that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

A line that jumped out to me in one of your recent pieces for Foreign Affairs was this notion that in Xi Jinping’s mind, time is really on China’s side, that some kind of calm on Beijing’s terms in fact gives China the space to get stronger over time, and that contrary to some of the “peak China” discourse that has characterized the U.S.-China conversation, that they really do see their prospects improving over time.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think that’s right. And I don’t think it’s just a tactical point because of this pause right now between the two sides. You saw that reflected in the documents coming out of the Chinese Communist Party Plenum just a week before the two presidents met. And it says very explicitly in those documents that the international scene is favorable to us and we can take the initiative, which is kind of remarkable for the Chinese side. They tend to be much more reactive and want the other side to make the first move. So that is Xi’s guidance to the party state for the next five years, that we can take the initiative to shape the international environment. And I think it shows just how confident they’re feeling at the end of this first year of the Trump administration, where they’re really not isolated.

I want to dwell for a second too, if I may, on the point about “peak China,” because I feel like that was part of the zeitgeist that fed the Trump administration’s mindset coming in, right, and why they thought there was weakness. Yes, there was a weakness of the economy, and I think there had been a lot of bearishness on Wall Street which is where, of course, Secretary Bessent came from, about China’s economy in the wake of the pandemic, and you also had this idea that China was peaking. I think the irony for me, as somebody who follows the Chinese side very closely, is they have an analogous theory about us, I would argue. And again, it gets back to this ideological prism for viewing the United States. It could be Lenin from a hundred years ago: they view us as a declining, decadent, but still very dangerous power. And so I think from their perspective, that theory that Hal Brands and Mike Beckley had, you could turn it on its head and represent that as the Chinese perspective, right? That time is not on the U.S. side anymore, that we recognize that, and because we recognize China is not on our side, we are going to lash out in more violent and unpredictable ways. And I think they would point to things that the Trump administration has done over the past year, like the strikes against Iran, like the raid against Maduro, as exactly evidence of that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That these are the kind of flailing, desperate attempts of a declining power to establish something?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Exactly, exactly. And again, it gets to this other argument out there that’s floating around in some corners, that what we’ve done over the past year, these strikes, demonstrate the vim and vigor of U.S. foreign policy, and how we’ve been reinvigorated under the Trump administration. But I think from the Chinese perspective, I see very little evidence of that, that this has really caused them to recalculate or reassess their interpretation of Trump. And I think that’s true for Xi in particular. It’s worth recalling that when they did their summit nearly a decade ago at Mar-a-Lago, there was that famous scene where Trump told Xi about the strikes on Syria over a beautiful piece of chocolate cake. So this predilection for unpredictable violence, I think that’s already baked into Xi Jinping’s calculations. It’s not really going to send him scrambling.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do have to think, if I were sitting in, I don’t know, the PLA office, say, watching just the capabilities of the U.S. military, sometimes against Chinese or Russian defense systems, and then also watching the Russian experience in Ukraine, they do have to have some degree of, I don’t know, reinforced respect for U.S. military capabilities in that scenario, I imagine?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

I think that’s right. And again, it gets to their assessment of us. They do see us as declining over the longer term, but still incredibly dangerous. And especially the U.S. military, the proficiency they showed in the Maduro decapitation or what they do with Iran, I think that reinforces the assessment in Beijing. But I think the really interesting question from the U.S. policy side then is, What does that lead them to do? They’ve already got the most dramatic military modernization since World War II underway, they’ve already gone back to the gym to bulk up. If they redouble their efforts, what is that going to mean for the United States over the longer term, if they keep assessing that the bar is quite high for them to achieve their modernization goals, and they keep building more and more options?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you think that Xi Jinping’s sense of assurance, sense of confidence about the coming years is warranted?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

I think he recognizes that it’s going to be challenging, that it’s not going to be smooth sailing. I do think some of it is warranted, and I think part of it is because I think he has a realistic appraisal of what’s going on inside China. And part of it for Xi is generational. This is a guy whose professional career really started after 1978, after reform and opening up. So all he’s known his entire debt life is a China that’s recovering from the Mao years and is on the rise and is on the move. And so I think that sense of confidence about China’s place in the world and the trajectory they’re on, I think it’s quite sincere. And to the extent that there are real problems in the economy, whether it’s with involution, or overcapacity, or the problems they were having in the real estate sector, I think they have demonstrated an ability to recognize those problems.

And that’s one of the things that’s really disconcerting to me as an American, is that they’re able to say, “We have a problem, and then we’re going to marshal resources and focus on remedying it.” And I think Xi has done that reasonably effectively over the course of his tenure, even when it’s been really painful and challenging for the political and economic system.

And I think there’s this tendency sometimes to frame assessments in the United States as being binary. Either China’s going to surpass us, or it’s a pipe dream and they’re never going to, or they can potentially even fall apart. I think the reality is that even if they get a gentleman’s B on the homework that Xi has assigned the party state over the next few years, they’re still going to be a formidable competitor. I think it’s time to stop talking about them as a rising superpower, they’ve arrived. And it’s kind of like the United States: we can have a recession and still be a superpower. They haven’t had a recession yet on the Chinese side, or not quite—bracketing the pandemic—they haven’t had that. They have had a slow-down, but still five percent economic growth. I think they can have a few quarters, even a few years of slower economic growth, and they’re still going to be formidable as a power, and still pose a multifaceted challenge to the United States.

So, I think to just have that recency bias and just point to bad economic data over a few quarters, or just point at the top-line numbers for the challenges, it doesn’t really capture what they’re trying to do to fix that, and what’s going on under the hood, and what this is going to mean over the long term, even if it is as bad or as worse as some people think it is. This is still going to be a formidable challenge to us, and it behooves us not to underestimate them. We run a greater risk of underestimating China—and I think we have many times over the past few decades—than going in the other direction.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If I wanted to argue the pessimistic case, the case against that assurance, one thing that has been really striking over the past year, even with speeches like [Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s] about—and Canada’s, of course, economic rapprochement with China in recent weeks—striking that China, in some ways, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity here, that even when the United States is alienating allies, China seems to not be able to restrain parts of its system from, whether it’s doing military exercises or dumping exports into markets that are suddenly more vulnerable because of U.S. tariffs, that a moment when you can imagine them putting on a charm offensive and really bringing former U.S. allies and partners closer to China, parts of the system and the domestic economic needs make that very, very hard to do for them.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, yeah, and you’re right. I think after Liberation Day, in particular, I think a lot of analysts expected there to be some kind of charm offensive with US.. allies and partners, since it was an omnidirectional trade war, and that never really materialized. So my theory on this is that that is not by accident. This is not just the Chinese system tripping over itself. I think it’s an intentional strategy over the past year. And it’s not how we would do things in the United States, where we would take an opening to then ingratiate ourselves. I think what they are trying to do, with the Europeans in particular, but I think also with our allies and partners along their periphery, is they are trying to intensify the conundrum of our allies and partners, and show them they don’t have good options. And if you want to have alternatives to the United States, you better come around to our perspective on a variety of issues.

So I asked a Chinese academic who’s very well-connected in Beijing about this a few months ago, and his answer about this was really striking. I said, “Aren’t you guys worried about pushback from the Europeans, or some kind of fallout, given the way you’ve treated them over the past year?” And his verbatim response was, “So what? What are they going to do about it? They’re going to complain to the Trump administration. Are they really going to help them?”

And I think what we’re seeing now, actually, is that the Chinese play seems to be working. Carney has come around; he’s trying to make deals with the Chinese. And you’re even getting inklings from the Europeans that they want to come around; Macron was talking about welcoming more Chinese investment. So it’s not necessarily the case that they think over the long term and over centuries and dynastic cycles, I think it’s more about just being patient a year. If we do days and weeks, they tend to do more months and years in their thinking, right? And I think that does give them an advantage. And I think if you’re in Beijing, what happened at Davos and the appetite among our allies for an alternative, or to diversify away from the United States, I think it demonstrates to them that their approach is working.

There’s one other point I want to make, Dan, just to tie into your earlier question, too, if I may. I think one of the things that’s going on that plays to China’s favor, too ,is that there is really deeply rooted dysfunction in the system, as I argue in one of the pieces. I think one of the things that’s really striking to me now, in this moment, is that the way China’s dysfunction is playing out actually magnifies their international influence. This problem with involution and overcapacity, yes, it’s a reflection of a real problem, but the net result of it is that they have a $1.2 trillion surplus that doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. And Chinese economists will say, as long as there’s robust demand in the West, this dynamic is going to continue. You can create tariffs, but our companies are so competitive and push costs down so quickly that this dynamic is going to continue even if it decelerates.

And on the flip side, what they offer for a remedy in light of that dynamic is they say, “If you want to really rectify the numbers or reduce the trade imbalances, you should welcome more Chinese investment,” which also enhances their geopolitical heft, too. And it’s a really jarring contrast with the West where, yes, we have our own dysfunctions and pathologies, clearly, right now; they’re inhibiting our ability to compete with China, to get back to the Robert O’Brien point. Our pathologies and our dysfunctions are making it harder for us to compete with China, whereas China’s pathologies is actually in some ways facilitating their presence on the global stage.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I was struck by another point, in a piece you referenced in November, about the leverage that Trump gave up by publicly committing to doing three meetings—or saying he was going to do three meetings—with Xi Jinping in 2026. Why are those presidential meetings so symbolically important to the Chinese leadership? And when you look ahead to what we assume will be the first of those meetings when Trump goes to China in April, what does Xi Jinping want from that meeting?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, they’re consequential because I think China recognizes that for both systems, it’s going to inhibit, on the U.S. side, our appetite for taking competitive actions or doing things that could jeopardize those meetings. And so, they know it gives them leverage . . . Because they haven’t confirmed it on their side, so if things start to get hot, they can always say, “Well, maybe we won’t do the meeting.” And somebody is going to have to tell the president that his meeting that he seems very attached to could potentially go sideways because of something that happened at the Commerce Department or elsewhere. And their theory seems to be vindicated by events, right? There was reporting saying that Stephen Miller was going to be the commissar enforcing discipline on the U.S. side, that there would be no major competitive actions towards China. And I think that is what Xi wants, right?

And I think this gets to a deeper imbalance in the relationship that really spans administrations, which is that the U.S. side often wants a laundry list of things from China, whether it’s help with Iran during the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] process, help on the North Korea issue, help dealing with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and from the Chinese side, I think they want us to get out of their way. And I think that is a win for Xi. There are other affirmative things that he wants. I think he would welcome greater access to the U.S. market. I think they know they still need U.S. technology and knowhow. And so you do see elements of that, but even with that, they’re being very coy about it right now. You see how this is playing out with Nvidia, right? And there is a debate: is this just a negotiating tactic or is this real? And it’s probably a little bit of both, in all honesty; they’re not mutually exclusive. So I think that really gives China a lot of leverage. They want time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The point there being they both seem to be signaling some desire for chips, but also then instructing companies to buy as view of them as possible, and that’s the—

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Exactly. I think the divergence here is that the companies really want the chips because it makes sense for them from a business perspective, but I think there is some real hesitation among different parts of the apparatus, of the state apparatus, about, Should we welcome it? And either way, it’s proved to be an effective negotiating strategy because it seems, then, they’re holding out for more and more advanced chips from the Chinese side. So it’s just really interesting. So I think there’s actually very little that they want from the administration at this point.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you’ll let me indulge in a flashback here, I’d love to go back a couple decades, I suppose, in your career, when you were a CIA China analyst, I think watching Xi Jinping when there were not that many people doing so. This was before he had come to power. And you, again, were one of the people watching most closely as our understanding of who he was and what he would mean for China and the U.S.-China relationship changed. I’m just really interested to hear how your understanding developed, and when you started to see that this wouldn’t be a continuation of what we’d come to expect from Chinese leaders earlier and why it took so long for the rest of the American system to really process that.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think there was a real expectation . . . there were two big expectations about Xi, I think, in the public domain during that period when he was heir apparent. I think one baseline expectation was that he might just be Hu Jintao 2.0: this is going to be another wonky, technocratic guy, who seems like a cipher from the outside, and we don’t really know a lot about him, and he’s just going to continue to pursue the Deng legacy. And then, I think because so little was known about him, there was also this other mode that you saw in some places where he became a vessel for some people’s hopes, that he would reinvigorate a reform agenda in China that had in many ways stalled under Hu Jintao, his predecessor. And you had people on the Chinese side throwing around this term that Hu’s rule had been a lost decade. They were really living off of the fumes of the reform efforts from the previous era in the late 1990s and early 2000s under Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji.

I think watching Xi closely, though, I think there were clear indications early on that this guy was going to be different. They were muted and they were subtle, but I think just the fact that he was a princeling, I think, put him in a different position politically. I think he knew, had a better sense of the political system, and how it was really wired in a way that neither Jiang Zemin had when he was thrust into the top job amid the Tiananmen crisis, or Hu Jintao really did. And I think if there was any doubt during the period when he was the heir apparent, I think we very quickly got a taste within Xi’s first year of office of just how different he was going to be.

I think that the challenge for a lot of people was just trying to keep up with him, because he was breaking so many of the old rules of the game of Chinese politics by going after former Politburo Standing Committee members and Central Military Commission members. I think people kind of forget or kind of assume that this is a police procedural, where there’s corruption and then you pursue the corruption case to its natural conclusion, but that’s not how it works in China. This is like going after made men and living to tell about it, right? Especially in the security services and the military, these are the guys who control the guns, they’re at the heart of the party’s control of the system. And I think when he started making those moves, I think that’s when the ice started to break and people started to have this realization that this guy is not the same as what we saw before.

And I think you saw a similar appetite for risk on the international stage too, right, where he was making big muscle movements, like the Belt and Road Initiative, or I think the one that really captured people’s attention and imagination was what he did in the South China Sea. And I think that was when a lot of people who were not part of the China-watching community really had the realization, number one, that Xi is different, and number two, that when people say China is a long-term strategic challenge, this is what they mean. They have the capacity to make these big muscle movements that are inimical to U.S. interests, and I think that that was really when it became indisputable, in that kind of 2014, 2015 period that we were dealing with a different animal.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m so interested in the kind of epistemology of this—and realizing that when you were at CIA, you had access to signals and human intelligence that made this job easier in many ways, although probably harder in some ways, as well—how you went about developing this picture and how much harder it’s gotten now, not just because you’re out of government, but because the opacity of the system, the lack of connectivity between the two societies, how do we develop these theories, and what are the kind of pitfalls in trying to paint that picture of someone where you don’t get to spend a lot of time talking to them about their worldview?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, honestly I think the most important ingredient is just time, and just watching this guy for a long time. And I think the key thing is in my mind, there’s been kind of a cottage industry of people who are focused on Xi’s utterances, which is appropriate and part of the Pekingology, but from my perspective, you’ve really got to watch what he does more than what he says, and watch him over the years, because I think there is kind of a certain logic and coherence to what he’s doing. It’s not just about the text; it’s about the context. It’s about, What is he doing and why and what kind of system is he operating in? And so that is really one of the important ways to try to make sense of him, to go back to that moment right after Xi took power, just to make it a little bit more concrete, and when he started making these big moves in the anti-corruption campaign, going after what the Chinese call tigers in their system.

My operating picture of Xi Jinping is that it’s like when an electrician comes to my house, right? He understands the wiring that’s behind the wall, and he knows which wires he can clip safely and which ones are going to zap him, which I could not do, right? I would be zapped. And I think Xi as a principal, this is part of his heritage, that’s intuitive. He understands those networks in the system in a way that Hu Jintao or Jiang Zemin wouldn’t have, and this is why he’s able to do it, and do it safely, and do it with impunity. But you build out this picture over time as you watch him do these things and succeed in doing them, or watching him recalibrate when he does hit some kind of roadblock.

So I think it’s less about evaluating any piece of data in a vacuum and more about building a composite picture of this guy over time, because I think it’s kind of a mistake to say, “Oh, well, he’s just a cipher, he’s inscrutable.” This guy’s been on the world stage for a long time, we actually know quite a bit about his background, his family history, and I think there’s a lot you can say about him based on that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Did you have the chance to be in the room with him when you went from the intel side to the policymaking side in the Biden years?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I did. And unfortunately, when I started at the NSC, it was still the throes of COVID, so a lot of those interactions were either telephonic or a “Zoom where it happens” kind of moment. So the one time I was really able to see him in person was when President Biden and President Xi met on the margins of the G-20 in Bali, in 2022, which was quite a moment for me as somebody who had spent my whole adult life studying this guy, to actually see him in the flesh.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

What surprised you about seeing him? Did it change your understanding of what he was like in any way?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Not really, in all honesty, and I don’t want to claim prescience, but he was very much what I thought he would be. And especially in that moment—keep in mind too, we did that meeting right after the Party Congress, where Xi had really cleaned house and the leadership, evicted any remnant of his former rivals’ faction inside the system, and it was really his own guys at the top. So he just exuded confidence.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This is just after he had Hu Jintao marched out of the—

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, exactly. Hu Jintao is marched out, Xi looks on totally and passively, stone-cold. And I think in that moment, he was feeling very large and in charge, and very good about himself and about his position. And so that confidence, I think, came through. And I think even in the way he comports himself and carries himself . . . I’ve seen many hours of clips of him, how he comports himself in these Central Committee meetings, where, when he gives a speech, he speaks in this kind of very slow, deliberate manner. He doesn’t feel hurried, he knows everybody is hanging on his every word, and that’s very much how he is in person too, right? That there’s a certain confidence. I think what’s striking about him too is that, again, I’m very mindful of the princeling heritage, the fact that his father was a big deal in their system, and he had these references that I think are kind of esoteric for most Western audiences about the Communist Party’s history very much front of mind. And I think he demonstrated a proclivity to frame things that way, and to make analogies, and say, “This is like this moment in our history, in CCP’s history.” And so that was very unsurprising.

So I think that sense of history and that sense of confidence, those were two important prompts in my understanding of Xi Jinping, and I think those were in evidence in the opportunity I had to see him actually in action.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And so he would be talking about CCP history and leaving, I don’t know, Joe Biden just kind of scratching his head with confusion, I imagine?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Well, my job was to make sure the boss wasn’t scratching his head, right? So hopefully there was none of that. But yeah, but I think unless you were a specialist or somebody who really focused on these things, I think there were some moments where these are not offhand references for a Western audience.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You have a fantastic opening line in your fantastic essay in our November/December issue called “China Against China,” where you write, “Thirteen years after Xi Jinping ascended to the top of China’s leadership hierarchy, observers in Washington remain deeply confused about how to assess his rule.” If we’re getting him wrong now—if you’re getting him wrong—how do you think you might be getting him wrong? If we’re making a fundamental error right now, what would we be missing?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

So I think there’s a few different ways. If the problems in the economy are much worse than we appreciate and there is some kind of really significant contraction in China’s economy, that could be one way where it knocks them out of the running. But even then, I think there’s probably a floor on it. I don’t think there’s going to be some kind of total collapse of the economy. I think they probably still will have the resources to, number one, get through it, and be a formidable rival to the United States over the longer term. They just have that, I think, at this point. The one people always worry about, and I think especially in my line of work, is about the underlying stability of the system, which is hard to gauge from the outside.

So it seems very robust. Xi has invested a lot in the security services, which people like Sheena Greitens have done a wonderful job documenting over time, and Minxin Pei. And so it seems very robust, and I think Xi has real confidence that he has a handle and a grip on the society, but that is always kind of the trillion-dollar question about: is there more fragility built in than we’re seeing from the outside? But again, I think that they have a pretty good handle on things, and I think this is one of the ways in which we’ve gotten China more wrong than right over time. I feel like people have been predicting the collapse of the CCP since I started doing this. And even if there is real decay in the system, Rome didn’t fall in a day. It takes time for these dynamics to play out. And I think Xi, again, one of the virtues that he has as a ruler is that he is not just focused on these problems in the system and their deficiencies; I think he is obsessed with them.

They have studied closely what happened to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, and I think he was preoccupied, from the first day of his administration, about not going that way. Same thing with the Arab Spring, which happened right after he took over the number two job in the military—I think that really spooked him, and I think that’s why there’s been such a focus on rooting out corruption in the PLA, because I think a lot of these, not just analysts, but I think a lot of rulers in the Middle East thought that they had a strong grip on the security services, and they had what they needed in place, and then that all just melted away in the face of mass protests. So I think that has fed Xi’s preoccupation with the security services and with the military over time, making sure that that does not happen.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You note this moment in the essay where Xi returns to Beijing to become Hu Jintao’s number two, to become the heir apparent, from . . . remind me where he was prior to 2007, he was—

JONATHAN A. CZIN

He was in Shanghai.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

He was in Shanghai at that point.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Briefly.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So he comes back and sees a system that has succeeded in many ways, but where there’s this kind of rot there, problems of success. Describe that moment and what, as you understand it, he saw as these vulnerabilities that had crept into the system over the preceding years.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think the two big obvious ones, especially in retrospect, are really the corruption and then the insularity of the military in particular, and what had happened there. So the corruption is kind of the obvious one. And the way I think about it is that there was this notion floating around in the West for a long time that as China experienced this economic growth, surely there would be a rising bourgeoisie or middle class that will want a greater role in Chinese politics. The irony is that the Chinese also appreciated this, right? And the party appreciated this dynamic, too, which is why under Jiang Zemin, they had this very clunky ideological phrase, the Three Represents, where they basically co-opted those business elites. So they solved one problem and they solved it extremely effectively by bringing those people into the party and neutralizing that threat. The problem is then that now you had this marriage of wealth and power inside the CCP that didn’t exist before.

And yes, corruption had always been a problem in China, endemic, and it had been a problem in earlier phases of the reform era, but I think this really accelerated it. And I think Xi knew that from being out in the provinces, and he probably got an extra view into it when he was in Beijing. Because he would’ve just had a stovepipe view of it, that it was bad here in Xiamen, or it was bad in Fujian, but he would’ve had a bird’s eye view once he got back to the top.

And then I think with the military, there were obviously deeply rooted corruption issues within the military, but I think what may have been just as troubling, if not more so for Xi is just how insular it is, right? Especially for somebody who grew up as the son of Xi Zhongxun, who had cross-cutting ties across both the party and military elite because he had been a leader in China’s civil war, that didn’t really exist. And I think Hu Jintao, throughout his tenure, he didn’t have the network inside the PLA. He never really got his arms around that.

And I think it’s hard to appreciate from the outside. The PLA, even within China’s Communist Party, is kind of this sprawling high-tech empire unto itself that’s really impenetrable from the outside. There’s no oversight from Capitol Hill like we have in the United States. There’s no army of think tankers who are military analysts and specialists the way that you have in Washington. There’s not an Office of the Secretary of Defense that’s largely populated with civilians. There’s nothing. There’s really one node of civilian control and that runs through the chairman, and if there’s an heir apparent, the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission. And I think that was probably very troubling to Xi in a lot of ways.

And I think because, again, because of that princeling heritage, I think he had insight into what was going on inside the PLA because of his network. There was a really famous speech at the time that was given by one of his fellow princelings where he said, “We’ve built a lot of impressive capability over the last couple of decades inside the PLA, but we have a real issue with corruption, and we’re at a point now where only our own corruption can defeat us.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And the shift from this consensual collective leadership to much more centralized control under one person was Xi’s attempt to, or a recognition, that it would take that kind of stronger figure, that assertion of dominance in order to break through these pathologies?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think that’s right. And there’s this school of thought that there was a consensus that China needed a stronger leader, somebody who had their hand more firmly on the till. But I don’t think the people who ended on the opposing side of that were necessarily part of that consensus. I think Xi had an opening, and I think what he really did was take a crowbar to it and pry it wide open, and give himself a lot of space. And I think for a system like this, this is endemic, and I think I make the point in this piece, this is an observation that goes back to Aristotle about the way oligarchies function. That they tend to be subject to both centripetal and centrifugal forces, so when things get too loose and you’re too much in this collective leadership, things start to stall, the system starts to stagnate, and the natural reaction is not to move towards a more Western liberal system with checks and balances, it’s to go into the opposite direction, and to try to centralize power and clean house.

So, I think that impulse from Xi Jinping, I think it was there, and I think that there was a happy convergence in his mind of the party’s interests and of his own interests. This is good for me and it’s also good for the party to concentrate this power in my own hand, because having this loosey-goosey collective leadership approach is leading to rot. And I think some of that is actually built in, right? If your theory is that we’re going to have this collective leadership model, we’re going to have a balance of power at the top, what does that mean? It means you’re going to have a more stovepiped approach and the way you’re going to have something resembling checks and balances on the top leader is that you’re going to have this factional infighting festering beneath the surface.

And I think that’s kind of what we learned. That’s exactly what was going on underneath the hood during Hu Jintao’s administration. So, even that kind of collective leadership model is going to be inherently rickety in this kind of system.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the really surprising but persuasive points in that essay is that the CCP, especially under Xi Jinping, has, quoting you here, “demonstrated itself to be an incredibly effective learning institution.” How did that come about and how does that learning work? It obviously doesn’t have kind of democratic feedback, but it has found other ways to do that perhaps more effectively than we have.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah. I think a lot of it . . . this is part and parcel of the reform era, where you have this effort to systematically study and break down problems. And I think this is where something like Joseph Torigian’s biography of Xi’s father is really helpful. You really get this sense of these major figures in the 1980s, they didn’t have a game plan, what they were doing was unprecedented in many ways. They had a little bit of a model from some of the other economies in the region that had developed, but they were really groping through this. I think it’s really probably after the collapse of the Soviet Union, where there’s this preoccupation and obsessing by the party about studying this moment over and over again, and revisiting it and debating it to make sure that that does not happen to the CCP—kind of the last man standing, if not in an absolute sense, among communist powers in the world, how do we prevent that from happening?

And so they do have this whole apparatus, I think a lot of it located at the Central Party School, but also throughout these other government-affiliated think tanks, to think through these problems, and to be deliberate about them, and to study other systems and how they function and make sure that they are applying those lessons internally, and kind of, to use their clunky phraseology, they’re Sinicizing them: how do we take a little bit from here and there?

And that’s kind of been the story of their whole reform effort: how can we take what’s worked on a Western factory floor and apply it here? How can we take a little bit of maybe what’s worked in Singapore’s political system and apply it here? And so they’ve been very methodical about doing that and, I think, about institutionalizing a lot of that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

After watching the failure of Putin’s initial plan in Ukraine and coming to understand that he was surrounded by yes men who would nod along when he declared his intentions and not tell him how much rot there was and how much harder it’d be than he thought, I think a lot of people assume that the same was true of Xi Jinping: that there was no one around him to tell him that an invasion of Taiwan might not work that well or that the economy was suffering as much as it was. Is it your sense that he gets good information and that people around him can tell him the truth about policies going badly? What’s your sense of that dynamic, to the extent we know?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

So, my sense of him, again, I think this is . . . as somebody who grew up in the system and took over the family business, I think he knows that he’s going to get yes men, that when he looks around that room, everybody’s going to tell him what he wants here. So again, my mental model from watching him over time, because we do see him recalibrate and adjust policies over time, is that he triangulates. It’s not necessarily that he’s getting good information, but I think he gets people in some kind of setting where they can maybe speak more freely or tell them what they think, and then he triangulates that: if I ask one guy what he thinks about the situation, I ask somebody else, that’s going to give me some kind of picture of what’s actually going on. And you see this among all kinds of shrewd politicians, this is kind of how FDR ran the bureaucracy during the New Deal in World War II, this constant gamesmanship and triangulating. It’s different in an authoritarian system, of course, and it’s more intense, but I think that is part of how he operates, right? And I think that’s what he tries to get.

And what I’ve wondered about, especially as Xi’s been in his third term, is because he cleaned house and brought in a bunch of people to the Politburo Standing Committee who he’s known not just for years, but for decades, that this is more comfortable. If you’re Xi Jinping and you walk into that conference room for a Standing Committee meeting, you’re looking around and you’re seeing guys who are all your former aides at this point, and that’s much more comfortable, you’re not looking at Li Keqiang, who was the potential alternative to you as the heir apparent.

And I think from their perspective too, my theory about these guys is not that there’s going to be some cinematic moment where they speak truth to power to the president in a closed-door setting. But they know how to talk to the boss and tell him things that might be uncomfortable. I always think of that BBC show from the late 1970s, early 1980s, Yes Minister. So I’ve been calling these guys, they’re the “yes, but” men. “Yes, prime minister, this is a wonderful idea, but have you considered the following things that might delay us, or maybe the timing would be better if we waited six months to do something like this?” So that has been kind of my mental model of how he operates because he knows that that is a real risk, that everybody in the system is just going to tell you what you want to hear and that he wants to guard against that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And he’s smart enough to want the right kind of people around him in some sense.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think for a normal person, this kind of constant improvisation and playing people off each other sounds exhausting, but I think Xi is a political animal and I think he kind of relishes it, would be my guess.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You noted in the “China Against China” essay how important the strike against the kind of insularity of the military and performing the military was central to this project as Xi Jinping saw it. You also wrote a great piece with John Culver last year about the purges in the PLA. We saw another set of these just in the last few days. How significant are the latest ones and what’s your theory of what’s driving this?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

I think they are quite significant, and they’re potentially a seismic shift in Chinese politics under Xi’s rule. And the reason for that is that when this anti-corruption campaign got underway, the focus was really on Xi’s potential rivals, right? People who had been the incumbents of the system and allowed all this graft and corruption to fester, the people who had guarded the PLA for a long time from any kind of oversight from the party. And we’ve seen this shift, and again, this gets to the point about, How do you do this kind of analysis? A lot of it is about contextualizing it and seeing it not just in a vacuum, but as part of a longer narrative arc.

So that’s how Xi starts his anti-corruption campaign, and then he moves, in his third term, I think somewhat surprisingly given how much he cleaned house, to focusing on people who he appointed to these positions. But I think a lot of times his connection to them was kind of tenuous, and I think from Xi’s perspective, again, it’s like a mob boss: I made them, I can break them. They were disposable. So if there’s an issue or there’s corruption, he can get rid of them and just move on to the next person safely, without it being a threat to his power or reflection that there’s something deeper going on.

Now, with the removal of [PLA General Zhang Youxia], we’re really entering a different space, and I think it’s almost Shakespearean what’s happened. Because Zhang Youxia, they have a relationship that goes back to their fathers. They were comrades-in-arms in China’s northwest during China’s civil war. This is somebody that Xi has probably known for decades. And I think until recently, we didn’t just have historical evidence, but more recent evidence, that Xi really seemed to trust this guy. At the last Party Congress, he made an unusual move to keep Zhang around past the retirement age and bump him up and make him the top vice chairman on the Central Military Commission. I think that was kind of probably the greatest sign of trust.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This makes him essentially the top uniformed—

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yes, exactly, exactly.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, he had been kind of the second-ranked vice chairman in the last go-around, and so then he gets bumped up. So it’s not just that Xi has him stick around. He gives him a bump up and makes him the top uniformed member of the brass, right? So a real sign of Xi’s confidence in him. And my theory about how Xi Jinping was operating in his third term is that if you think of Chinese politics like a solar system, where Xi Jinping is at the center of it, and everybody else is in his orbit, my theory was there was an inner circle that was inside the asteroid belt, and I would put almost all of the Politburo Standing Committee there, and then Zhang Youxia in the military. And then for these other people who he had gotten rid of, like the defense minister, the foreign minister, these guys were kind of outside of the asteroid belt, and he could safely get rid of them.

But now Xi has gone after somebody inside that asteroid belt. And so the question that’s been on my mind that I am thinking through, in all honesty, Dan, is that I think there’s two ways to interpret this. Either . . . I tend to think that Xi is just ruthless and rational in how he goes about things, right, that there’s a certain method to what he’s doing. It’s not capricious, it’s not arbitrary, it’s kind of like the electrician metaphor I used earlier, right? He’s very circumspect about how he goes about doing this. And this could, in some ways—I think this is my inclination—this could be the ultimate illustration of Xi’s sangfroid, that nobody is safe: “I will go after you even if the relationship goes back to our parents.”

But I think given what’s gone on too, I do wonder a little bit in the back of my mind, is this kind of a psychological shift? Are we seeing Xi shift more toward a paranoid autocrat mode because he’s going after people who are so close to him, and if he doesn’t trust them, who is he going to trust inside the system? I’m hesitant to say that, but again, I want to be transparent about how I digest something like this, and how I think it through and try to assimilate it into the mental model that I have of Xi Jinping over time.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

That’s fascinating because in the piece earlier, and I think in your writing generally, and speaking publicly generally, you’ve been somewhat averse to the tendency among a lot of analysts here to interpret these purges as signs of kind of insecurity or lack of trust in the military, but you see in some ways it turning into some slightly warped version of that in this latest phase potentially.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think he’s worried about his own personal grip necessarily; I think he’s demonstrated that he’s got a firm grasp of the military. I think the challenge for Xi is that I think he probably doesn’t feel like he’s getting what he wants from these guys, right? And that’s why he’s had to clean house so thoroughly. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really striking. It’s not just that there’s one uniformed officer left standing on the Central Military Commission; it’s that if you look one level down at the people who might replace them who are one grade level down in their bureaucracy, a lot of those people are gone, too. This makes the Roman decimation system look quaint.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Does it affect in any way the risks of some kind of precipitous action on Taiwan in coming years?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

I don’t think so. I actually have been turning this question on its head. I actually think that Xi feels pretty good about the cross-strait dynamic right now, and I don’t think it’s driving him to clean house, but I think it makes him feel that he can do this with confidence, without too much concern. Because if you look at that dynamic in particular, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to be overly focused on Taiwan. It doesn’t even get a mention in the recent National Defense Strategy, right? And President Trump has made a number of comments about Taiwan that show a lack of firm commitment. Number two, President Lai Ching-te in Taiwan is in political trouble, right? He had this recall campaign over the summer that failed, his party’s in tough shape. And number three, there’s going to be an election in 2028, which is going to be a year into Xi’s fourth term, and the opposition KMT is making very favorable comments about Beijing.

So if I’m looking at this from Xi Jinping’s perspective, this feels like a relatively safe time to do what I need to do to renovate the high command and do something that’s complex and politically tricky to pull off internally. And I think it’s because he has that sense of urgency, he wants them to get there, and I think even just as impressive as the PLA modernization has been over the last couple of decades, he still feels like they’re not.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But this is the moment where he will not need to order a cross-strait invasion in the next year because of developments in Taiwan or shifts in U.S. policy, so he can afford to do it now.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, and I think this is the real paradox of following the PLA, in particular, is that, yes, there’s this real corruption, there is this real operatic drama at the top of the system, but yet we don’t see kind of a diminution of their modernization program from the outside, and even in their operational tempo, right? After they announced and finalized the purges of all these senior officers at the party plenum last fall, then they conducted a major exercise around Taiwan just in the closing weeks of 2025. So they’re still able to pull off a massive exercise like that, even with all this churn at the top of the system.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I want to go back to some of the tech issues that we talked about a bit earlier. This, certainly the Biden administration, but I think also more broadly in the U.S.-China dynamic, tech and AI especially has been really the center of how we think about competition. How does China understand what that competition means, and how do they, when they do a net assessment of where the two sides are, how do they see things?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

I think they see the U.S. side as still ahead in some key areas, and I think they recognize that. And again, I think they’re probably frank about that internally, and about figuring out reverse engineering, literally, What is it that we need to do, right? That’s why they’re making such a big push on semiconductors and these other areas where we have the lead. But I think what’s really striking when you look at the five-year plan documents that came out of the last plenum is that there’s a real mismatch between the two sides and how we’re handling the tech competition. I feel like here in the United States, there’s this AI myopia, right? And if you look at even our own internal economic numbers from last year, there was this one stat Derek Thompson had that the build-out of data centers contributed 50 percent of economic growth in the first half of 2025 alone.

What’s striking, when you look at the party’s approach to these issues, is that they have more of a portfolio approach. It’s diversified, right? S they are focused on AI, but again, they’re focused on deployment of it as quickly as possible, getting it out onto the manufacturing floors, and it’s kind of become a cliche now in China-watching circles, whereas we’re looking for God in a box. And that’s just on AI. They’re focused on, How do we apply this and how do we increase our productivity? And I think there’s not just the same overriding focus on AI, there’s also the focus on green technologies and green vehicles, which, of course, has gone away in this administration, and robotics, as well. And you see a little bit of that in the United States, but I think there is this real intense focus on hard tech and about manufacturing capacity, and that’s very explicit from the top of the Chinese system.

And so this is something that I worry about—bracketing the issue of the export controls that’s gone on in this administration—but do we have the right kind of approach to dealing with this issue wholesale? And are we looking at the right suite of technologies, or are we just buying, in effect, the things we want, rather than the things we need?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The export control shift does seem quite significant, as you’ve written about certainly, that we used to talk about export controls as this sacrosanct space that we would never trade away for anything, and the effective use of leverage over critical mineral supply by China and the concessions by the United States in response to it does seem like a paradigm shift, in some sense.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah. I feel like what we’ve done is we’ve shifted from a policy of export control to one of export promotion, where we’ll beseeching China now to buy not our frontier technologies or our frontier chips, but the penultimate ones, and it’s really flipped. And what’s striking to me, just in terms of the tactics of negotiating with China, we’ve made these offers on Nvidia’s H200 chips at the end of last year in exchange for nothing. We didn’t get some kind of concession that’s detectable from the outside. So there’s the problem first of, number one, negotiating over things that we had long considered part of our national security, but number two, if you are going to open the negotiation, you better get something really good for it. And I’m not persuaded that we really have in the process. So I think it’s really disconcerting.

And the export controls, I mean they’re challenging. There’s a lot of debate about them, but from my perspective, ultimately, it’s not a question about whether or not they are the ideal tool or not, it’s a question of what’s the alternative, right? And if you really accept the premise, which I think most people do at this point, that we are in some kind of long-term strategic competition with China, then why would you sell them your most advanced technologies? What is the real alternative to that? This theory that we’re going to get them addicted somehow, and that that’s going to give us leverage, that seems to carry greater risk than the risk of equipping them with our most advanced technologies.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This would be the kind of Jensen Huang and I think David Sachs and the White House would probably say the same thing.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah. And this is what I worry about too, is that we’re landing in the worst of all possible worlds. We’ve gone about doing these export controls, it stimulated the Chinese system, they already had pretty considerable efforts underway on this, but to really double down and reinvigorate or further invigorate those efforts, and now they’re not interested. And now we’ve explicitly said the quiet part out loud too, that the goal is to try to get them addicted, so why would they go about doing this? And this is illustrative of my broader concern of where we’re at now in terms of our China policy. I feel like we’re stuck. We’ve gone far enough down the path of competition with China that we can’t really go back to the earlier era focused on commerce and comedy, right?

But the things we need to do in order to compete with China effectively over the long term, I think there’s a real hesitation to go there, both because of the leverage that China’s accrued over time, but I think also the hard reality is that great-power competition is going to be expensive. The global war on terror was expensive, this is an order of magnitude of a greater challenge and more multifaceted. And I think that’s hard and I think people haven’t really come to grips with that.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

This is a question that I ask in I think almost every episode of this point, but I’m still kind of flummoxed by it. On the critical minerals front and the rare earths front, it is rather stunning to think that it’s been 15 years or so since people in the U.S. national security world were focused on the risk here, and saw what China was doing to develop leverage, and our own inability to develop our own supply, even though that’s technically possible. How do you account for that failure and what’s going to change it? Do you have any sense that we have finally gotten serious about this?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Yeah, so two thoughts on this. One is that I think it’s actually illustrative of the broader deficiencies in our China policy over the last 20 years or so, where we’ve been slow to recognize the problem, and even when it’s right there staring you in the face, we have not moved with alacrity to remedy the underlying problems. I think this is true on critical minerals, but it’s also true, I would argue, on dealing with the PLA’s military modernization. The last assessment from a bipartisan commission of the previous National Defense Strategy said, “We’ve been saying for years now that China is the pacing challenge for the U.S. military,” and it says, “They are continuing to outpace us in a growing number of domains and negated many of our advantages in the western Pacific.” So it’s not that people haven’t realized; it’s that it’s been very challenging for us to do what Xi has done so effectively: say, “Here’s a problem, here’s a challenge to our interests,” and then marshal the institutions to try to remedy this.

And I think on critical minerals, I think part of the conundrum is, it’s challenging for our government to do this. We’re not designed for industrial policy, right? It’s not clear who is going to be the focal point of this, right? Are we going to have state-owned enterprises do this, where we can do public-private partnerships? Who manages that? It’s a little bit easier in the defense space, which is I think why the administration went there, but we’re kind of late to the game. And I’m worried that for this effort—I think the administration deserve credit for focusing actual resources on this issue now at this point—but I do worry it’s going to be too little, too late. Even if you look at the case of Japan, where they have money and they are equipped to conduct industrial policy, and they have been focused on this, since 2010, I think they’ve gone from 90 percent reliance on China for rare earths down to 70 percent after 15 years.

And I think it just underscores this idea that the administration has—and I think some people think this—that yes, we have to hit the pause button now we’ve been checkmated, so we can get our act together, remedy these deficiencies that we have, this dependency that we have, and then we can refocus on competition. I think it’s going to be hard to do that. This is not a “this year” problem, or even this administration. This is going to be much more challenging. And this is just one area where China has this chokehold on our supply chains.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If you were going to suggest some lessons for the United States based on the Chinese experience and Xi Jinping’s experience turning his own party into a learning organization, as you say in the essay, what would those lessons be? What should we learn from Chinese success here?

JONATHAN A. CZIN

I think what I’m really struck by is that I think in the broader foreign policy community, I think there’s a pretty decent consensus on what we need to do, right? I think across administrations, there’s been talk about refurbishing the defense industrial base, right? There are stacks of reports about the critical mineral problems and the rare earth problems. But what I’m really struck by—and frankly, frustrated by—is that there’s a real disconnect. We all finally have a shared diagnosis of the problem, or most people have a shared diagnosis of the problem, and we even have some pretty good prescriptions on the table about what to do about this. But there seems to be a disconnect about how do we move from point A to point B? How do we pivot to Asia? We’ve been talking about this for a long time, some people are ready to put a toe tag on the effort. How do we refurbish our defense industrial base? How do we build up some of the power that we lost? Can we even do that at this point? And again, these are thorny bureaucratic issues, but these are also, like I said before, expensive problems to deal with too, and I think that is part of the hesitation about, how do we get there?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It brings to mind the fantastic last line of that essay, “China Against China,” you write, “Misreading Xi Jinping is ultimately part of the failure to address the problems facing the United States itself,” which I think is a really powerful closing point. So Jon, thank you so much for doing this, for the slew of pieces. I think we’ve got more coming from you soon, so readers can look forward to that.

JONATHAN A. CZIN

Thanks so much, Dan. I really appreciate it.