Political Scientist Answers China Questions

If Russian bots exist, do Chinese bots also exist?

I think first of all, you should look down at the comments

in this video and you'll probably get a taste

of whether there are any Chinese bots.

I'm Michael Beckley. I study modern China.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is China Support.

[upbeat music]

S-Sheepherder wants to know,

What do westerners get wrong about China?

Well, China's really big.

There's 19 countries around China,

and so that big military

that China has is spread quite thin

having to defend all of China's borders.

Or the big economy, you have to feed one

of the largest populations on the planet.

You have to maintain control over those people.

That all drains resources from the country

and means just that it's much more complicated

to analyze China.

You have both a lot of assets,

but also a lot of liabilities.

@snoowlions wants to know, When did modern China start?

Let's answer that with a timeline.

Let's start in 1911 with the collapse of the Qing dynasty

that ends thousands of years off and on of imperial rule.

China then collapses into the warlord era,

which is every bit as bad as it sounds.

Then the Japanese in the 1930s

really step up their aggression in China,

conquering big parts of it,

and basically starting World War II in East Asia.

The Japanese are defeated in 1945,

but at that point, the Chinese Civil War comes roaring back

between the Communists and the Nationalists.

The Communists win that Civil War in 1949.

They found the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong.

China initially sides with the Soviet Union in the Cold War,

but about halfway through,

they realize that the Soviets are actually their main enemy.

That paves the way for in the US President Richard Nixon

to go to Beijing.

And at that point, China and the United States

basically become allies in the rest of the Cold War.

The Soviet Union collapses in 1991

and that sets the stage for the US and China

to become major trading and investment partners.

That culminates in 2001

with China's entry into the World Trade Organization.

But especially after the 2008 financial crisis,

you start to see the United States

and China looking at each other more like rivals

feeling like their economies are under strain

and that the trade relationship

is not working out as well as they had hoped.

And that really paves the way

for the era that we're currently in,

which is one of tremendous hostility

between the United States and China.

hecubiss asks, Why would China even want to invade Taiwan?

So first of all, Taiwan is the seat

of a rival Chinese government that is democratic,

essentially tied security wise to the United States.

And so if you're the Chinese Communist Party

and you insist that this is all your territory,

you can't have this renegade regime

going in a different direction.

Taiwan is where the nationalists fled to

when they lost the Chinese Civil War.

So they want to finish that job.

It's smack-dab at the epicenter of the East China Sea

and the South China Sea

where about half of world trade flows through.

So this is probably, pound for pound,

the most strategic important waterway on the planet.

And Taiwan itself is, you can see,

the center cork of what the Chinese call

the first island chain in East Asia

that runs from Korea and the Japanese islands

down through the Philippines.

These are all American allies.

They host American troops.

China has no California, it has no west coast.

Its only coast is completely hemmed in by rival powers

that are allied with the United States.

Smashing Taiwan and taking it over

would give China an unsinkable aircraft carrier

in the most important waterways,

and blast a hole, not just geographically,

in the US alliance system in East Asia,

but really in the credibility of US alliances

'cause no one would trust the United States

if the US just let Taiwan go down.

Every single Chinese leader has said,

It's only a question of time.

We're gonna take Taiwan one of these days.

Xi Jinping has said that it's a situation

that cannot be passed down generation to generation,

which some analysts worry means

he intends to do this on his watch.

BW asks, Is there something America can learn from China?

Is there something that they're doing right?

China is really good

at mobilizing resources for national missions.

For example, China has installed more solar and wind power

than any other country.

China is the world's largest trade power in the world

and has forged trade relationships

with the majority of the world's countries.

And China has built infrastructure faster

and on greater scale than any country in human history,

then just the miraculous development

of bringing hundreds of millions of people

from living on less than $2 a day

to average disposable incomes of 5,000 to $10,000 a year.

That is a tremendous, almost miraculous undertaking

that China has been able to pull off.

And I think that only comes

from having a sense of national unity

and a willingness to pool resources for national purposes.

The United States,

it's a dynamic, open, decentralized system,

but the downside is it also generally does not mobilize

its resources on a national scale and unify

unless it's really confronted with a crisis

like a global war or a depression.

So there are areas of the United States

that are neglected in terms of infrastructure.

There are neighborhoods that could be built up.

There are education systems that are failing.

And so that type of rallying resources and coming together

is something that the US I think could look to to China.

But obviously you don't want to go too far

because part of what allows China to do that

is just a lack of civil and political rights

for the Chinese people.

@greatshistorian asks, Who is winning

the current trade war between America and China?

China is very much an investment and export-driven economy.

This trade war is really bad

for a lot of those major export industries.

There's been lots of closures, especially in eastern China.

There's been mass layoffs even just in the short time

that this trade war has been going on.

Now on the American side, the consumer market

is roughly three times the size of China's.

So consumers are the ones

who are being hurt by this trade war

because they're gonna have to pay higher prices for goods

that were manufactured in China.

Xi Jinping cares a lot less about GDP growth.

He cares about power

and about developing self-reliant, strong industries.

And if this trade war enables China to decouple

and reduce its dependence on the West,

I think he counts that as a win,

even if it crimps economic growth in the short term.

And for the United States under the Trump administration,

they similarly want to decouple from China

because they view it as a national security threat.

I see these two countries as having a distinct interest

in trying to get away from each other economically.

These dependencies, they both seem

to want to push those away.

ChaseTheTaco.

Serious question. Is China truly a Communist country?

I know it seems crazy

if you look at the Shanghai skyline,

you fly in through the Beijing airport.

That is the gilded veneer

on the outside that's been built up.

But if you look at the super-structure of the economy,

what's actually the driving force behind it?

It's a very strong state presence.

All of the land in the country

is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.

The energy industry, the banking sector is state-owned,

90%+ of the financial assets flowing around the country,

so these are all what Lenin called

the commanding heights of the economy.

And it can produce incredible output.

It can produce shiny high-speed rail,

it can produce gleaming skyscrapers.

But this is sort of like a new modern form

of a communist system

where you still have the party running the show economically

insisting on a one-party state

and a dictator ruling over it all.

Take Jack Ma, the former head of Alibaba,

has a major company in China,

and he gave a speech a few years back criticizing the way

that the government was running the economy.

He had his wings totally clipped.

He was sent out to Tokyo,

he had his empire completely dismantled

and now has basically had to come crawling back.

You've had many other billionaires simply just disappear.

And so at the end of the day,

even the high-flying titans of China's economy know

that their livelihoods depend very much

on their relationship with the Chinese Communist Party,

which is why you see many of the top titans of industry

in China in the National People's Hall

during these major conclaves sitting next to Xi Jinping

because they're effectively part

of the same-party system that he operates.

DizzyMajor5 wants to know,

What do the Chinese people think of Mao Zedong?

Is he considered good or bad?

The standard answer taught in Chinese schools

is that he was 70% right, but 30% wrong.

Here's Mao as a young revolutionary.

He was a journalist for a long time.

He actually wrote a whole pamphlet in 1940

about democracy and freedom in China.

Of course, once he becomes Chairman Mao,

a lot of that stuff goes away.

The 70% right was he unified the country

which had been ripped apart by decades of civil war.

He instituted a mass education campaign

'cause he wanted to lift China up.

So that led to widespread literacy.

He wanted women to be active participants

in the labor force.

Now, in terms of the bad, his so-called Great Leap Forward,

which was this scheme

to turn China into a superpower in just a few years,

took millions of peasants off of their farms,

put them in communes,

had them melt down their pots and pans.

As a result, the food supply ran out

and 45 million people starved to death

or were beaten or shot along the way.

And then in order to insulate and protect himself,

he then launched the Cultural Revolution

where he basically turned

the Chinese people on the Communist Party

to purge many of his rivals.

That probably killed another million to 2 million people.

So ruthless, brutal, but effective

in terms of bringing China together,

which for much of Chinese history has not been the case.

@SuperCoach137 asks, How did the one-child policy

work out for China?

It resulted in several hundred million abortions

when people, starting in the late 1970s,

weren't allowed to have more than one child.

You'd be subject to massive fines,

equivalent in some cases to a year or more of your income

if you had a second child.

In the '50s and '60s, China had a massive baby boom

because Mao Zedong wanted to turn China into a superpower.

So he encouraged Chinese families to have lots of children.

So then when China did a 180

and implemented the one-child policy in the late 1970s,

you had this baby boom generation

coming into the prime of their working lives

and they had relatively few children to take care of

'cause they weren't allowed to have them

and they had relatively few elderly parents to care for

because so many of them end up dying

in the famines and the Cultural Revolution.

So in the '90s and 2000s,

you had anywhere between 10 to 15 working-age adults

available to support every elderly retiree

in China's population.

That's two to three times the global average.

It's five times what the United States currently has.

And so as a result, China's population

was primed for economic productivity

and demographers think that alone explains

about 25% of China's rapid economic growth

over the last 30 to 40 years.

The problem for China is now the situation is flipping

where that huge baby boom generation

are retiring and falling onto the backs

of this tiny one-child generation.

That 10:15 ratio is gonna collapse to 2:1.

In the 2030s, China's gonna lose somewhere

like 70 million working-age adults in the next 10 years

and gain 130 million senior citizens.

That's gonna be catastrophic for China's fiscal balance,

for its economic productivity.

@RightSideofMB says, Siri, what are Chinese ghost cities?

Ghost cities refer to entire apartment complexes, airports,

shopping malls that are either mostly or entirely empty.

And it's a result of China's economic model,

which is very much about collecting the resources

of the Chinese people under the state

and then plowing them into certain industries,

including into the real estate sector.

It works really well for an authoritarian government

'cause it's easy to pay off cronies who own the companies

that are doing all of the building.

The problem is it runs amuck.

These companies, they're getting paid

whether the apartments are occupied or not.

So they build a bunch of stuff

but then people aren't moving into them

and now that China's population is declining,

there is going to be ever-lowering demand

for a lot of this base infrastructure.

MehmetTopal wants to know,

How much power does Xi Jinping hold personally?

Is he an absolutist like Louis XIV or like Stalin?

I'm gonna reserve a certain category

for divine-right monarchs like Louis XIV

and distinguish that from Xi Jinping.

So Xi Jinping is probably

the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.

He's made himself president of everything for life,

but at the end of the day, he's one guy.

And so his ability to pay attention

to everything that's going on in his vast sprawling country

is inherently limited.

So the real estate crisis that's going on,

he's demanded that people be more frugal

and not speculate on real estate,

but the market is kind of doing what it's going to do.

And as a result, you still have that ongoing crisis.

Zero COVID.

You know, he locked down Chinese people

in their apartments for months on end.

At a certain point the Chinese people had it

and you saw protests emerging

that seemed to have encouraged Xi

to back down and undo that policy.

And he also has to worry about rivals in the party,

which is why he's embarked on

this massive anti-corruption campaign, purging more than

a million senior CCP officials along the way.

We do know a bit about his backstory.

His father was a high-ranking official

serving under Mao Zedong, but he was purged,

and in fact, Xi himself and his family were purged

during the Cultural Revolution.

Xi was sent out to the countryside

to basically dig a bunch of holes.

His father was humiliated,

Xi himself was denounced by his own mother,

and his half sister died during the Cultural Revolution.

It's all speculation, but people think this may have had

a big effect on him and that's what he thinks of

when he thinks of rule by the people,

which may explain partially why he seems so committed

to centralizing all power under himself

and basically installing himself

to the point that he's literally written himself

into the constitution

and obligates other people in China

to read what he calls Xi Jinping Thought,

which is his own sort of philosophy

about how to guide the country.

@nic_moneypenny wants to know,

What was China's ultimate role in the COVID-19 pandemic?

We don't know for sure

because China, the government,

has gone to extraordinary lengths

to cover up how COVID emerged

and details about the virus.

We know that in late 2019, they basically got rid

of a lot of their virus samples

that were related to coronaviruses.

They floated conspiracy theories

that a virus actually came to China from frozen food

that was imported from outside of the country

and they didn't really allow international inspectors

until very late.

And even then, when the WHO came

to try to figure out where the virus came from,

it was a highly scripted,

almost sort of like North Korean tour around the facilities.

And as a result, we just don't know where it came from.

The two major theories are that it either emerged

from this wet market in Wuhan

because of the animals

that were being eaten and slaughtered there.

The other major theory is that it emerged

from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,

which is China's premier place for studying coronaviruses.

And we know the virus itself has certain features

that you really only see

if it's been modified in a lab rather than naturally.

The bottom line is, we don't know,

but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence

that it was done in this lab,

which is a center of not just Chinese research,

but of a multinational research attempt

to analyze coronaviruses.

@JerryDunleavy asks, Whatever happened to Tank Man?

And how many people did the Chinese Communist Party murder

at Tiananmen Square?

So what Jerry is referring to is that famous image

of a man standing in front of several tanks

that are rolling into Tiananmen Square

to run over demonstrators, mainly students,

that were protesting there in 1989.

We have no idea what happened to Tank Man,

he has never been heard of since.

It wasn't just a crackdown in Beijing and Tiananmen Square,

there were massive protests

in basically every provincial capital around China.

More than 80 cities had mass demonstrations

that were then forcibly put down.

According to the party,

roughly 200 to 300 people were killed.

But most Western estimates suggest

it was 10 times that amount.

The way that the Tiananmen Square protests

are often portrayed is as a pro-democracy demonstration

by the Chinese people.

And certainly there were elements of that.

A lot of the students in Tiananmen Square

were calling for more democratic governance.

They built a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty

in the middle of Tiananmen Square.

But really the crisis starts

and the reason why

it spreads across the country was economic.

There was massive inflation.

This led to massive demonstrations.

A lot of people weren't being paid

for jobs that they were employed to do by the state.

And also keep in mind that communist regimes

were starting to crumble, especially across Eastern Europe.

So the tail end of the Cold War

and this belief that the legitimacy,

the functioning of a communist system is under question

and led to mass demonstrations

and even a split among the elites

in the Chinese Communist Party.

Since then, now the Communist Party is very much,

We have to stay together.

We either stay together or we hang separately.

I think that informs a lot of the emphasis

on repression put on in China today.

MiltonMerloXD wants to know,

How does censorship work in China?

So there's an actual Propaganda Department,

that's what it's called in China.

They set guidelines about what is allowed to be said

and what is not allowed to be said.

It's all pretty predictable.

You know, criticizing the Chinese Communist Party,

promoting democracy, Western liberal methods

are all kind of looked down upon and and squelched.

What the regime then does

is they have this vast great firewall

to control the internet

where they use a combination of artificial intelligence

and then hundreds of thousands of people

that are actually working to monitor China's internet,

which is partially sealed off.

What the censors really go after

is not so much people going off

and mouthing criticism about the leader,

but much more about trying to organize politically,

whether it's a house church, or student group

or anything where you get people together who can then talk

and then rally and potentially grow their numbers,

that looks too much like the start

of an alternative political party.

And the Chinese Communist Party says, No.

We have a monopoly on power.

We're the only political party

that's allowed to be had in this system.

And that seems to be what the censorship regime

is primarily dedicated to squelching out.

@mbateman says, Wait, China's domestic surveillance system

is actually called Skynet?

I know, it's kind of on the nose.

It is called Skynet.

The idea is that there's hundreds of millions

of surveillance cameras

that have been set up around the country

as if it's a net coming from the sky.

China has pioneered methods to take all of the images

that are being absorbed by these cameras

and then use artificial intelligence

and speech and facial recognition technology,

even gait recognition,

so how you walk can be identified.

And at this point they're starting

to export elements of this system to more than 80 countries.

Cuba, Pakistan, Cambodia

have all imported aspects of this system.

And so some scholars think this is the emergence

of a new type of authoritarian system

that seems to have a lot of advantages

in terms of population control.

@Spencemo_c asks, How does China's

social credit system work?

So in addition to video cameras

and speech and facial recognition technology,

the Communist Party has access to your financial statements,

to your police record, your education,

any kind of disciplinary action.

And so what they've done is basically created

a dossier on every single citizen.

And so what they can then do

is instantly punish Chinese citizens

by saying, Oh you, you jaywalked.

That's a point.

And so now you're gonna have to pay more if you want a loan

or you may not be able to travel as freely

or it may take longer to get your passport

when you go to a government office.

There essentially is like a score

and sometimes they'll actually post names

of people who have been blacklisted

because they've committed certain crimes

or they've been infraction of certain regulations

encouraging people to report on each other.

ItsAllOver_Again wants to know,

Why is China so God-like in the world of manufacturing?

Well, it's so God-like,

because it's designed to be God-like.

You have an authoritarian system

that essentially obligates the Chinese people

to put their life savings in a state-owned bank.

That means the government has tons of money,

a war chest that they can then deploy

at what they call strategic industries.

So they've spent hundreds of billions of dollars

every single year for more than a decade.

That's 10 times what other rich countries

in the OECD or the United States spend

as a share of their GDPs.

So in for example, the electric vehicle sector,

China has spent about $230 billion.

Semiconductors, biotechnology,

all of these key strategic industries.

And at the same time, many foreign companies

have sent over lots of investment and training.

So Apple, for example,

has spent about $275 billion in investment in China.

That's more than the Marshall Plan

that the United States used

to help Europe recover from World War II.

Apple also trained millions of Chinese workers, 28 million,

which is more than the labor force of California.

And also a lot of this is determined by their geography.

China has a long coastline right in the heart of East Asia,

which is the most economically dynamic region in the world.

So many of the world's supply chains

flow through these waters.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, you had China setting up

what they called Special Economic Zones,

especially in the Southeast and places like Shenzhen

as well as in Fujian province.

In some industries,

whether it's electric vehicles or in rare earths,

China currently produces anywhere between 60 to 90%

of the global market.

And now China has ports lining up and down its coastline

that serve as export platforms essentially

for the rest of the world.

In addition, China has extremely low labor costs

because several hundred million people

from the poor provinces in the west,

they move to the richer east coast provinces

to work in factories for very low wages.

But that provides essentially a bottomless source

of cheap-but-effective labor

for China's manufacturing juggernaut.

Roxi USA asks, What percentage of pharmaceuticals

does the US import in from China?

In terms of antibiotics, basic antibiotics,

it's upwards of 90% that include

at least some ingredients that are made in China.

And so this has become another national security threat

where the United States worries

that China could potentially cut the United States off

from basic pharmaceuticals

if there's some kind of crisis over Taiwan.

Whether China would actually do that remains to be seen.

@toxiccowboy1 asks, Are we headed to war with China?

It's not completely out of the question.

In addition to the conflict over Taiwan,

there's also the risk of a war around the Philippines.

That conflict really stems

over who controls the South China Sea

where a lot of trade passes through

where most of China's oil imports pass through.

Under international law,

the Philippines gets 12 miles out from their coastline

that is their territory,

and then another 200 miles out from their coastline

that is their exclusive economic zone.

China says, No.

That is all, that's just all Chinese territory.

And they've been building artificial islands there.

They've been turning them into military bases

and they formed what they call a maritime militia.

So thousands of fishing boats, coast guard vessels

and naval ships that are basically shoving other countries

out of their exclusive economic zone

and confining them

to narrow bands along their own coastlines.

The Philippines took China to court in 2016,

the World Court, which ruled that China's historical claims

to the South China Sea are null and void.

And in recent years China's really been turning

the screw on the Philippines,

one, I think to invalidate that ruling

and shatter its credibility,

but second, 'cause the Philippines

has started opening up new military bases

for the United States

'cause they say, We need some protection from China

so that we can have access to our territorial waters

in our exclusive economic zone.

The Chinese have a saying,

You should kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.

Meaning you should make a bloody example

out of a relatively weak adversary

to send a message to the more powerful ones.

The Philippines have very little

offensive air or naval capability.

So you just have to worry that Chinese would look at them

as a very juicy target; weak but symbolically important.

@adamncheck asks, Is TikTok just a China app

to make Americans do dumb stuff to get likes and views

and keep us distracted while they take over?

The Chinese version of TikTok,

you're only allowed to use it for 15 minutes

to an hour or so depending on your age and status.

And they also try to insert educational wholesome content

in addition to all the fun cat videos

and everything else that people are watching.

So I think the Chinese know

that this system is maybe not the best thing

that kids should be spending all day on.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company.

Under Chinese law, ByteDance is required

to hand over data to Beijing whenever

and in however much it wants it.

It's like putting a Chinese spy balloon in your cell phone

with your biometric data,

everything you've liked and disliked.

There's been studies done suggesting

that the algorithm in TikTok in the American version

was promoting certain views

like after the October 7th massacre in Israel,

more pro-Hamas views were being amplified

or pro-Russian views on the Ukraine conflict.

@NOYK1847 asks, If Russian bots exist,

do Chinese bots also exist?

I think first of all,

you should look down at the comments in this video

and you'll probably get a taste

of whether there are any Chinese bots.

China, it's been well documented,

it uses both bots

as well as what is called a 50-Cent Army

basically has a bunch of mainly kids and young adults

who are paid 50 Chinese cents

per internet post that they make

to destroy, undermine the credibility of messages

that maybe cut against the Chinese Communist Party.

It's reported there's probably

several hundred thousand people

that are essentially employed as internet trolls

by the Chinese Communist Party, in addition

to obviously using artificial intelligence and bots.

@Psalm_Sixtynine asks, Why would China want Tibet?

I think it becomes very clear

when you look at a map of China

and you can see that most of it

is the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas,

and a lot of it is also desert.

And so most of China's population is packed in here

and they're desperate for water as well as strategic space

to defend themselves against enemies.

And so Tibet, which is in this area here,

is highly strategic.

For one, a lot of the glaciers up in the Himalayas

are where the major rivers of Asia start,

both flowing down into China

as well as flowing down into Southeast Asia and into India.

So if China can control that territory,

it controls the source of vital water supplies.

At the same time, China and India,

which is now the most populous country on the planet,

have a longstanding rivalry,

and Tibet is the high ground

literally looking down onto India.

In addition, the Chinese Communist Party

essentially inherited the borders

of the previous Qing dynasty empire,

which included Tibet led by the Dalai Lama.

And so when China took over Tibet and conquered it in 1951,

the Dalai Lama fled to India

and has been running a government in exile

in India ever since.

This next question is from TapestryGirl.

Mom says China could take over the United States

because they own our debt.

China does own some US debt. It's in the 3 to 4% range.

It topped out at about 7% about a decade ago,

generally in the form of treasury bills.

And a lot of this emerges

just from the economic relationship

between the United States and China

where China is exporting a lot of goods

to the United States.

And the United States will often pay for that,

essentially with a piece of paper that says

IOU in the form of a treasury bill.

Analysts have looked at whether

they could use this as a course of weapon

and basically concluded

they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

The value of that asset would suddenly plummet.

Japan owns more US debt than China does.

So I don't think that this is a unique China thing

or that they could use it as some type of weapon

to coerce the United States.

Let's take a question from Quora.

Is modern China more influenced

by Confucianism or Marxism?

I would say both because they lead in similar directions.

Marxism-Leninism stresses the idea

of public or communal ownership of the means of production

to produce wealth.

That is owned by the state in China.

It's led by what Lenin would call the vanguard party

staffed by a top leader that is making decisions

on behalf of the people.

And that's consistent with certain elements of Confucianism.

Confucianism obviously has a long lineage,

thousands of years in China.

Confucius, a philosopher who emphasized a natural harmony,

people knowing their place in society,

that everyone has a certain role to perform in that society,

and that you have to have a benevolent leader

that leads on behalf of the people.

That obviously appeals very much

to Chinese dynasties over the millennia.

You have Xi Jinping today grafting that on

to a Marxist-Leninist structure of the party.

@Gus_802 asked, What happened

with the Chinese spy balloon hysteria?

In January, 2023, the United States detected

a balloon floating over areas

including a nuclear missile silo in Montana.

What it was carrying

was all this advanced surveillance equipment

that was about the size of a regional jet airliner.

So we're talking about

a major piece of hardware floating around.

China's done this in more than 40 countries,

in Japan, over Taiwan,

they've been floating balloons

even over potentially over American bases in Europe.

And there's a fear that China is testing out

this alternative surveillance system.

Because balloons emit almost no radar signature,

they're really hard to detect.

They hover around 60,000 feet, which is higher

than a commercial airliner but below satellites

in this area where people really aren't looking.

It gives China eyes and ears over sensitive US sites

that otherwise they wouldn't have.

The US sent a fighter jet up eventually to shoot it down

and then the US grabbed all of the technology that was there

and observed the balloon's flight.

That might have actually helped US intelligence

more than Chinese intelligence.

@all4stops asks, Who is winning the tech war

between China and the United States?

I think they are each dominating

different types of technologies.

The United States is still doing quite well

in high-value areas.

So advanced computer chips, aerospace,

the complicated jet engines

that you need to fly a jumbo jet or a fighter.

China on the other hand dominates scale

taking existing technologies from other countries

and then mass producing highly effective,

cost-efficient electric vehicles,

run-of-the-mill computer chips,

rare earths, pharmaceuticals, medical PPE.

There's so many areas where China

can just flood the market with sheer scales.

Both of those types of technologies

are really important for a modern economy.

They're also very important for military power.

So each in their own way is sort of winning in some ways

but also has major vulnerabilities.

@JoeBart85120716 asked, Does China own American farmland?

Yes, China does own American farmland.

It's like 0.05% of American farmland.

But some of this farmland is near American military bases,

especially Air Force bases

including some of those where American strategic forces,

nuclear forces could be taking off.

And so there is a fear that if China has this land,

they can put things on it, explosives, missiles,

that could potentially attack American bases

if there is some kind of major war

and destroy US aircraft on the ground

before they even get up into the air.

We don't know the details on that.

You'd have to get classified information,

but the amount of farmland is small,

the location is a little bit scary and questionable.

cakeba asks, Can someone explain Hong Kong to me?

So Hong Kong was a British colony

after the first Opium War in 1839

all the way up until 1997

where Britain agreed to hand back Hong Kong to China

and in exchange, China pledged to grant Hong Kong a, quote,

High degree of autonomy.

'Cause within Hong Kong there was a different rule of law.

There was an independent judiciary.

So you saw massive protests there

over the last five or six years when China

was basically trying to erode a lot of those freedoms,

crack down on the press,

crack down on the free flow of investment,

and also on the way

that the Hong Kong government is selected

and the Chinese government passed national security laws

that made it possible for them to remove protestors,

take them to mainland China.

So at this point it seems like Hong Kong

has basically become another large cosmopolitan,

but ultimately Chinese city

run by the Chinese Communist Party.

IronLover64 asks, How does the quality of life

for the low class in China compare

to that of the United States, let's say in a red state.

So why don't we compare the poorest of the poor in China

to say average wages in Mississippi,

which is the poorest state.

For China, roughly half the country

is living on something like $5 to $10 a day.

In Mississippi, that's gonna be three

to four times that amount.

There's a lot more obesity in a place like Mississippi

than there is in China.

On the other hand, in rural China

you have a severe problem of malnourishment

and rudimentary healthcare.

Researchers at Stanford went out

and they found that roughly a third of rural children,

their IQs are around 90, which is really low,

because of malnutrition from a young age,

a lack of education.

The average education level is about an eighth grade

or seventh grade level in rural China

'cause high school costs money.

And so a lot of Chinese families,

their kids will just drop out of school.

And the other issue is that your citizenship in China

is tied to your locality.

And so if Mom and Dad go

to an eastern rich coastal province to work in a factory,

they can't bring their kids with them

'cause they won't be allowed to go to school.

So they're just sending money back

and maybe only seeing their kids

a few times or maybe only once a year.

So just in terms of the basic healthcare and education level

and then just in terms of the amount of wealth

that someone in Mississippi might have

versus someone in poor rural China,

it's a very stark difference.

@Captaintrips333 asks, What's going on

with the Uyghur Muslim population in China?

So there's about 10 to 12 million Uyghur Muslims.

They live mainly in a province called Xinjiang,

which is in the western part of China.

Basically since 2017,

China set up what they call reeducation centers

or vocational education centers,

what people in the West have called concentration camps,

and what the US government deems an attempt at genocide

and basically put in a million

to a million and a half Uyghur Muslims,

so a substantial part of the population, in these centers.

We've heard from people that have come out of them

that there's a lot of indoctrination, that they are enforced

to renounce their heritage and to learn Mandarin

and basically to assimilate with Chinese society.

A big part of what the Chinese Communist Party is about

is making sure a Soviet-style collapse

never occurs in China.

And one of their theories

about why the Soviet Union broke apart

was that the Soviet Union

was like one of those Hershey chocolate bars

that's divided into little squares that you can break apart.

It was these disparate republics

that all went their own way when they suddenly could.

So there was a fear that a minority region like Xinjiang

where these Uyghurs were living

was going to try to separate from the mainland

or was gonna become a base of terrorism directed at China.

So unfortunately the Uyghur Muslims

are experiencing severe repression right now

under the Chinese Communist Party.

loefferrafael asks, Does China support

or promote communism around the world?

I don't think China's promoting communism anymore

the way that the Soviet Union

used to bankroll revolutionary movements.

They have engaged in this Belt and Road Initiative

where they've loaned out more than a trillion dollars

to more than a hundred different countries,

mainly so that those countries can employ Chinese companies

to build infrastructure on their territory.

So whether that's building ports or roads or soccer stadiums

or what the Chinese call smart city systems.

There's a port in Greece for example,

that is highly profitable,

it's an important, valuable piece of infrastructure

that China helped fund and build.

One out of every three infrastructure projects

in Sub-Saharan Africa over the last 20 years

has been built partially

or entirely by Chinese companies.

So you see a massive spread of infrastructure

and part of the reason really stems

from the 2008 Financial Crisis

and the resulting trade protectionism

that was emerging, backlash against Chinese products.

The Chinese decided, We need to open up new markets.

We can also get these countries more hooked

on our ecosystem of technology standards,

5G networks, smart city systems,

and that way we'll have dominant market share

in a lot of these areas

that are gonna be really the growth of demand

in terms of consumption going forwards.

They also bring that surveillance system

that allows would-be dictators

to keep easier tabs on their populations.

@ostenati asks, What happens when Xi dies?

Who's next in line? And will they be good for China?

I think chaos could potentially ensue

because he has not designated a successor.

He's written himself into the constitution.

He's basically treated like a demigod

in terms of Chinese propaganda.

And if you look at the history

of the Chinese Communist Party,

there has only been one completely orderly

and peaceful transition of power.

And that's when Xi himself came to power.

All of the previous leaders,

it was a vicious power struggle

and there were split authorities.

So for example, Deng Xiaoping is purged

and then eventually comes back to power

and has to put down his enemies and imprison them

in order to take the helm.

Then Jiang Zemin comes to power

after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989,

basically 'cause the Party realizes

it needs to unify behind a candidate

or they're just gonna disintegrate.

Then when Hu Jintao comes to power,

Jiang Zemin is not willing to give up a lot of his power

and he keeps himself as commander in chief

even after Hu Jintao becomes president

and general secretary of the country.

It'd be like as if Joe Biden was still head of the Pentagon

and the military and commander in chief,

even though Donald Trump

is now president here in the United States.

In other words, in Chinese politics

it's very rough-and-tumble,

even though it happens behind closed doors.

Chaos is entirely possible.

And if you just look at the broad sweep of Chinese history,

vicious power struggles tend to ensue.

Some people hope that you'll get

a Chinese Mikhail Gorbachev,

you know, the Soviet leader who made nice with the West

and liberalized a bit at home.

I think you might actually get a Chinese Vladimir Putin.

It seems like the one thing

that everyone in the Chinese Communist Party can agree on

is that the Chinese Communist Party

should continue to rule China in perpetuity.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching China Support.

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