Arthur Kroeber

They had fairly superficial kind of understandings.

And so I always felt pretty confident that I and people in my cohort, we understood China just as well as they understood the U.S.

And their blind spots towards the U.S.

system were very, very clear, right?

So for years and years, that drove me nuts when people would say that.

Now, I think it's completely true.

All you have to do is look at the student numbers.

300,000 Chinese students in the US until their visas get revoked.

We're struggling to get to 1,000 US students in China.

In the U.S., we closed down the Chinese consulate in Houston as part of a trade spat back in 2020, I think.

Chinese responded by closing down our consulate in Chengdu.

Complete disaster.

Whole sort of area of Western China really important that we have no eyes on officially anymore.

Decided that their Xinhua journalists are not really journalists, which is sort of true.

So we forced them to register as government agents.

The Chinese responded by kicking out a lot of our journalists.

Massive own goal for us.

So the types of interactions that U.S.

people have...

with China, directly on the ground in China, have been massively restricted compared to what they were a decade ago, partly as a result of Chinese government action, partly as a result of really misguided actions on our part, partly because of just like fallout from COVID and various other things.