It's often said

there's only two kinds of people in the world,

those whose data has been hacked by China

and those who don't know

that their data hasn't hacked by China.

That statement is actually more true than you might think.

[upbeat music]

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.

[upbeat music]

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.

The 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 2034

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

'cause American fighter aircraft

run out of gas after 500 miles.

These are the kind of nightmare scenarioses

that keep American defense planners up at night

and frankly, for good reasons

[upbeat music]

China is surveilling US data.

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 healthcare information.

So China has a long history

of trying to gather up data on American citizens.

So it's no surprise that now there is this worry

that at once you allow

an app like Tik Tok onto someone's phones

it's only one update away from becoming spyware essentially.

So for all these reasons, there's a great worry.

And I think a great reason to worry.

[upbeat music]

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

the United States also backs the government on Taiwan

is further an example that Chinese use

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 [laughs] it doesn't make any sense.

[upbeat music]

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 a number of regimes.

It 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 II.

So 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 had 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 while I think it's certainly true

that the United States has the power to wreck the world

and wreck the world it has in various ways.

It also has the capability to really

make the world much more peaceful and prosperous.

[upbeat music]

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 3 million additional security guards

2 million internet sensors, 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 gonna 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 had hardliners versus reformists

and the party almost collapsed.

But I think that China's leaders essentially

learn the lessons of Tiananmen.

They realized that they either stick together

or they're gonna hang separately

and no one has taken this lesson

further to heart than Xi Jinping

who has purged thousands of his political rivals.

He's stacked the highest decks of the Chinese government

with people loyal to him.

He's even written himself into the Chinese constitution.

So while Xi Jinping certainly has created many enemies

by crushing a lot of powerful Chinese families.

He has cult a personality and his iron grip on power

will make him extremely hard to dislodge anytime

in the foreseeable future

[upbeat music]

US-China relations have worsened

under the Trump administration.

I think that's basically true.

Donald Trump is the first US 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 World War II.

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 US-China relations.

I think part of it was actually reaction

to China's own rise in international aggression.

China's just become a much more active,

muscular and authoritarian country over the last decade.

So I actually think US-China relations

are gonna 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 multi-lateralism.

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 gonna remain the same.

[upbeat music]

China is a superpower.

Not yet.

When analysts look at what makes countries powerful

and what has 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 them win over allies

and partners to your cause.

So all these reasons China's an extremely important country

but it still lags pretty far behind the United States

which has three to four times China's wealth,

five to 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.

[upbeat music]

China's the world is the 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

it 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 blocks.

The US 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 gonna be a fair amount

of what is called decoupling between the two economies.

It's gonna 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.

[upbeat music]

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's having to spend more and more

to produce less and less.

At the same time China's debt has ballooned eight fold

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 news

at the same time that its economy is slowing.

And if both of those trends continue

China's super power ambitions could be crushed.

[bright music]

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.

[bright music]