Arthur Kroeber

He got rid of all of them, 100%, right?

And he then replaced them with one, which was the trade talks that he had in his first term.

That was the only basically mechanism that we had of communication.

Did this create a specific problem?

It did.

So if you look at the early stages of COVID, right, back when SARS came out in 2003, there were staff members of the United States Centers for Disease Control embedded in the Chinese Centers for Disease Control or their equivalent organization, right?

And that relationship, in fact, grew significantly in part because of SARS over subsequent years.

And that was a very, very useful channel of getting information out.

It was not perfect.

It had plenty of problems.

But the absence of that channel I think was really catastrophic in the early days of COVID where we literally had no way of understanding what was going on within the Chinese system.

There was no back channel that enabled us to get even a little bit of a head start on what was going on.

And I think that had very, very dire consequences.

You can probably –

trace many, many, many deaths and a lot of social chaos to the inability of the U.S.

and China to communicate at that critical moment, right?

So we have essentially dismantled the whole structure of communication.

The

took the same view.

They introduced a few more things.