Tom Friedman
speaker
94 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tom Friedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Ezra Klein Show · Tom Friedman Thinks We’re Getting China Dangerously Wrong · 15 Apr 2025
podcast
Great to be with you, Ezra.
Why? Well, basically, all the American business executives in China left China during COVID, virtually all of them. And then after COVID, we began this process of decoupling. So you basically had six years with very, very little American presence there. When I was in China last year, I felt like I was the only American in China. You just didn't see any other Americans.
Not tourists, not business people, not nobody. I wrote then that it was like America and China were two elephants looking at each other through a straw. Having just been there two weeks ago, I would say now they're like two elephants looking at each other through a needle. The aperture has just gotten tiny.
Yeah, I mean, basically over starting with Trump one and then into the Biden administration and now Trump two kind of became against the law in Washington, D.C. to say anything positive about China. And because of that, there was an aversion to going to China. There was an aversion in American industry began to develop of hiring Chinese.
There was an aversion of American college campuses to sending students to school in China. And so you've got this giant asymmetry where China has today 260, 270,000 students studying in America. And we have, I don't know, a few thousand studying there. Right. And the backstory to this is not all an American failure at all.
It has to do with also what happened in China beginning with the rise of President Xi Jinping between 2012, 2013, and then making himself, in effect, president for life. China went in reverse. It made a U-turn.
The China that we thought was, you know, more or less two steps forward, one step back, but on a trajectory for more openness at home and more integration with the world, that really stopped under Xi Jinping. And it was combined.
with a program Xi launched, which was to basically make sure that China dominated all the 21st century industries, from aerospace to new materials to autonomous vehicles to robots. And that changed the whole chemistry in the U.S.-China relationship. But central to that, Ezra, was that the ballast in this relationship was always the American business community.
So they were the ones who, for many years, beginning in the late 70s, were making money in China. And even whenever the relationship got rocky, and even when we perceived China was not living up to trade obligations under WTO, American business would basically lobby and say, look, be cool. It's okay. We're still making money here. And what happened, this combination basically of
Xi taking a U-turn, fewer and fewer American businesses feeling they were getting the benefits out of China that they wanted and were having to transfer too much technology. And then China rising on its own with its own technological homegrown tech prowess. Those three things really kind of blew up the relationship.
Yeah, I can't speak to the espionage. I just don't know. And you get into these kind of Washington conversations with officials where it goes like, if only you knew what I knew, you would be more worried. And my reaction to that is, I wish I knew what you knew because it would put everything more in perspective.
But I also, part of my reaction to that too, Ezra, is that I hope we're doing the same to them. I hope we're spying and conducting whatever we need to do for our national security purposes.
But the notion that they can't innovate, what gives the lie to that, as if you talk to American businesses who operate in China or European businesses who operate in China, what they'll tell you is that we first came here for the market. And now we come here to be close to the innovation.
That we cannot basically be in touch with the cutting edge of our field, particularly in autos, unless you're here. So China realized it could not compete with combustion vehicles with America. And so it took the decision to leapfrog them right to EVs and ultimately autonomous driving cars. It did so by basically having its smartphone companies become car companies.
So when I came to China after COVID, I said, whoa. When I was last here, Xiaomi was a phone company. I came back, they were a car company. When I was here last, Huawei was a phone company. I came back, they were a car company. And so basically they put their cell phones on wheels. And the reason this is important is that when you get into a Didi, Didi's their Uber, and
It is a seamless digital experience from the rest of your life. It syncs up with your cell phone. I rode in a Huawei car when I was just there. I was riding with someone from Huawei. He took out his laptop, pulled down a screen that came out of the ceiling, and his laptop immediately synced with that screen, and he was working in the car. He says, what would you like to see?
Do you want to see anything? I said, yeah. Get me Paul Simon's concert in London's Hyde Park. I'd like to watch that on the way to your campus. It was up in, I'd say, about 30 seconds. The sound, Ezra, you know how you buy cars now every two years and they always say, it's got Dolby surround, yada, yada. I have never in my life heard sound like this in a moving vehicle.
it is just so far ahead of anything I've seen here. Volkswagen, for instance, I met with their China head when I was there. They've got a whole facility there, they call it, in China for China, that unless you're competing with the best, what my friend Jörg Wittke, the head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce calls the China Fitness Club, unless you're in the gym with them,
Yeah, because what you see, Ezra, when you're there is the product of 30 years of being in the fitness gym. And it's a particularly Chinese fitness gym. And it kind of works like this. New industry comes along, let's call it solar panels. Every major city in China decides they need a solar panel factory.
And the local government subsidizes it, maybe domestically born, maybe a partnership with a foreign one, maybe a foreign one. And you end up in a very short period of time, I'm making the number up, but with 75 solar panel companies. They then compete like crazy against each other in the fitness gym, and five of them survive.
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