Gordon Chang
speaker
524 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 23 May
Gordon Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now, his successor, Deng Xiaoping, instituted and started to institute norms and guidelines and understandings about the way the party would transfer power from leader to leader. Xi Jinping jumped that, which means anything can happen, Mike. So, the mechanics of it are anything, anything is on the table.
And especially, remember, Xi Jinping, I know this is going on a little long, but I need to give you some context. Yeah, please. When Xi Jinping took over in 2012, no senior Chinese leader got too much credit or too much blame because every decision was made by consensus across the top of the political system.
But by taking power from everybody else, Xi Jinping ended up with total or near total accountability, which means when things are going bad, Xi Jinping is being blamed for everything because he's got nobody else to blame. So you can see how that system can work where enough people get together and say, Xi Jinping, you're out.
And by the way, we've got a lot of unhappy military officers who are ready to come in to Zhongnanhai, which is sort of like their White House. So things can be a little dicey there right now.
Well, I really appreciate it, Mike, because this is an important conversation that you wanted. So thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Love to do this again.
It not only has port operations at both ends of the canal, it's got infrastructure there. It's got a lot of state enterprises. So there are many ways that Beijing can block the canal if it wanted to. And some people say that the first indication that we will have that China intends to use force in East Asia will be an accident. in the Panama Canal because that will prevent the U.S.
Navy from surging ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific fleets through the canal. So there's the concern.
I think the Chinese regime is a little unhinged because the rhetoric certainly is not justified by what's occurring today. And I think it reflects a couple of things. I think, first of all, the Chinese are just enraged that President Trump is not deferring to them. For millennia, Chinese diplomacy has been intimidation of others. And Xi Jinping has been particularly good at it.
And probably Trump right now has just said he's had enough. But the other thing is that these tariffs do pose a danger to the Chinese economy. Xi Jinping has turned his back on consumption as the basis of the Chinese economy. That means his only way out is to export. And it's not just Trump's tariffs. When Trump does this, he's giving inspiration to others.
He's giving them cover to others to do the same thing. So I think that the Chinese are panicking in addition to just being so upset that we're not bowing down to them.
That's a great question. Because if we go back to 2018, when President Trump imposed his Section 301 tariffs on China, 25% across the board, China absorbed somewhere between 75% to 81% of the cost of those tariffs. And now China has even more incentive to do that.
The only thing is that China right now might have less flexibility to do that for various reasons, technical ones related to the currency. But the point is a good one. And I think China will absorb a majority of the cost. It's going to hurt them, but I think they're going to do it because they have no choice.
Canada and Mexico present a very different situation than China. And Trump did not back off on the China tariffs. He imposed two rounds of 10% across the board tariffs. He didn't blink. With Canada and Mexico, there are reasons to just deal with them in a different way. They're our neighbors. They're friends. We have an integrated economy with them.
And a lot of people think that Trump is trying to sort of isolate China. Well, to do that, you need to have both Ottawa and Mexico City on board. You need their help. So I think there's a lot going on here that is more complex with regards to the Canadian and Mexican tariffs, which President Trump has delayed.
There's no indication that the Chinese have improved on fentanyl. You know, it was very interesting today that the Chinese government put out a timeline of all the fentanyl control measures that they've put in place over the years, but they've just gotten worse. Xi Jinping has violated promises to three American presidents now about fentanyl. As President Biden in 2023...
President Trump in 2018, and President Obama in 2016. So, you know, when the Chinese say, well, you shouldn't be imposing costs on us. You should just be trying to talk to us with mutual respect. Well, we've tried that now, and it hasn't worked. So President Trump did the only thing that he could do, which was to go after China for killing basically 70,000 Americans a year. Do you anticipate...
I think that we're going to see more trade turbulence. And the reason is that it's not just fentanyl. It's also predatory and criminal trade practices, especially the theft of US intellectual property. And I think Trump also knows that he's got the upper hand. Remember, the Chinese economy is less than two-thirds the size of ours.
And especially if you were to look at the Chinese economy and its real estate, because they exaggerate their gross domestic product numbers, it's even smaller than that. But the other thing is that China is the trade surplus country. Last year, its merchandise trade surplus against the U.S. was $295.4 billion. Trade surplus countries have no ammunition in trade wars. Trump knows that.
So, China's only hope is to try to convince parts of the American public to work on Trump. But if that doesn't work, and I don't think it will, Trump is going to hit these guys, as he should, no question about it. All right.
It's probably the property sector, which is completely overbuilt. In September 2023, a former senior statistics official in a public forum said that China had enough vacant apartments for 1.4 billion people. But he admitted he might be wrong and the number of vacant apartments be sufficient for 3 billion people. There's just no way to get out of that in the near future.
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