Is China Turning Crisis Into Opportunity? With Josh Rogin
China is in the midst of a global vaccination campaign. According to published reports, China’s Government is supplying 10 times as many doses to other countries as it is to citizens in its own country. China’s vaccination campaign is currently engaging 45 countries spread across multiple continents around the world. Why? What is China getting in return? And should the US also be engaged in vaccine diplomacy?
This is just one of many ways in which the Pandemic has upended geopolitics as we know it.
To better understand how China seeks to transform a global crisis that originated in China into a foreign policy tool, we sit down with Josh Rogin of the Washington Post. He’s one of the sharpest analysts on China policy and on US policy towards China. Having written about China for years and traveled Asia extensively, Josh is the author of the new book: “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, XI, and the Battle for the 21st Century”.
The Pandmeic has shaken up the US-China relationship. Where does China's role in the world go from here?
Transcript
DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.
[00:00:00] This is what they said to Brazil. Okay, you can have the vaccines, but you're going to need to take the Huawei tech as well. You have to reverse your decision to not take Huawei. And they did it, okay? So that's vaccines plus industrial expansion and economic expansion, right? That's, that's how they think about it.
And that's not how we think about it. We like to think we're above all of that stuff. But the fact is that geopolitics is a part of this pandemic, whether we like it or not. And the, and the, it, it, it's gonna. Manifests itself in lots of different ways. Welcome to Post Corona, where we try to understand COVID 19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics.
I'm Dan Senor.
China is in the midst of a global vaccination campaign. According to published reports, China's government is supplying 10 times as many doses to other countries [00:01:00] as it is to citizens in its own country. China's vaccination campaign is currently engaging 45 countries spread across multiple continents.
Why? For what? What is China getting in return? And should the U. S. also be engaged in vaccine diplomacy? This is just one of many ways in which the pandemic has upended geopolitics as we know it. To better understand how China seeks to transform a global crisis that originated in China into a foreign policy tool, we sit down with Josh Rogin.
of the Washington Post. Josh is a long time foreign affairs journalist, currently a columnist for the global opinion section of the Washington Post. He's also a political analyst for CNN. And having written about China for years, and traveled Asia extensively, Josh is the author of a new book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century.
Josh is one of the [00:02:00] sharpest analysts on China and U. S. policy towards China that I know. I highly recommend you order his book. The pandemic has shaken up the U. S. China relationship. Where does China's role in the world go from here? This is Post Corona.
And I'm pleased to welcome Josh Rogin to the podcast, who is columnist for the Global Opinion section of the Washington Post and political analyst at CNN and author of A terrific book, as I said in my intro, Chaos Under Heaven. Josh, welcome to the podcast. Great to be with you, Dan. And, and, and, actually, I normally say welcome to Post Corona, but normally when I say that to our guests, I always have to caveat that we're not in Post Corona yet, even though that's the name of the podcast.
But where I'm recording this right now, I'm in Israel, as we speak. I'm sitting here in the capital of Israel, and in the capital of Israel, And in Tel Aviv where I was this morning, you definitely feel like you are post corona. They are [00:03:00] virtually everybody's vaccinated and uh, apparently the mask requirement is coming off in a, uh, in a few days.
So, um, the country, the, uh, the country definitely feels, uh, like a window into we, where we are hopefully heading. Um, okay. So Josh, we have a lot to cover. And before we get into the substance of your book and your years of reporting, our listeners are often interested in the career trajectories of our guests.
So, tell us just how you wound up as an opinion journalist covering foreign policy for the Washington Post. Sure, thanks so much. So I fell, uh, uh, ass backwards into journalism in my failed attempt to become a, first a lawyer and then a scholar of U. S. Japan relations. Two things that I failed at, actually.
And, uh, I first, I went to the George Washington University and lived in Tokyo and learned Japanese and taught English [00:04:00] there and studied there for a bit and ate a lot of ramen and it was great. And then I came back. to Philadelphia where I grew up and I began working at a law firm in Philadelphia on human rights cases and applying to law school.
I thought that's what I was going to do with my life. Uh, as it turns out, it wasn't for me. And what happened was I found a bunch of research at the law firm that had to do with China's aggression, repression, and, uh, crazy diplomatic abuses. Of, uh, the country of Sudan. This is in about 2003, and I saw all of this research about how the Chinese government was helping the government of Sudan commit genocide against the people of what was then southern Sudan in an attempt to, you know, steal the resources of that region and Give some of them back to china and that scheme was so in a sense elegant and horrifying that I contacted some of my friends in washington to see what they thought about it.
And you know these days stories of china's Uh, [00:05:00] uh mischief in africa are well well known but in 2003 that wasn't the case and my friend joshua eisenman at the center Uh at the a think tank in Washington called the New America Foundation, uh, said we have to publish this. And that's exactly what we did.
We wrote an op ed in the Straits Times of Singapore, making the argument that China's, uh, complicity and atrocities in Sudan was an, a moral and national security issue that the United States must not ignore. And two things happened. I got almost fired from my job at the law firm because I was a paralegal and I wasn't supposed to be publishing and they didn't appreciate that.
So you didn't get clearance for running this piece. I took the George Costanza approach. I was like, was that wrong? Should I not have done, if anyone had told me when I got here that I wasn't supposed to be publishing op eds, I would have, you know, and they were like, sure, whatever. And I was basically almost fired.
And so I started to look for jobs. And I, the job that I found was at the Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun in Washington. And I applied for it and I sent them that op ed [00:06:00] and they called me in and they told me I had broken a big story and they offered me a job. And three weeks later, I was back in Washington working as a reporter for the Japanese newspaper.
And they said, go to the Pentagon. And I said, why? They said, you're the Pentagon reporter. So you were basically a Washington correspondent for the Japanese paper. Yes. But to be, to be totally honest, I was the assistant to one of the correspondents. I was the, 24 year old, you know, kid who was helping the senior Japanese correspondents, you know, get around Washington because they weren't, you know, from here.
And my job was to go to the Rumsfeld briefings. And you remember the Rumsfeld briefings, right? Those were epic briefings. Donald Rumsfeld was the best briefer in Washington. He didn't care what the policy or the talking points were. He loved to spar with the reporters. Tuesdays and Thursdays, like clockwork, he would hold court and give a lesson on briefing to everyone who would come to listen.
So I sat in the front row of my first briefing and I'll never forget because, uh, Martha Raddatz comes out of the bullpen and she looks at me. She says, you're in my seat. And I just looked at her and I [00:07:00] said, I don't see any names on the seats. And she said, what do you mean? To be clear, Martha Raddatz at that time in the Pentagon briefing room was like royalty.
I mean yeah front row seats like for the famous people and I was a nobody but I just sat there because I didn't know anything. She was the ABC right? ABC News. Yes, wonderful reporter, good friend of mine. She's terrific, yeah. Top of the game. Yeah, I worked with her in Iraq. She's amazing. My wife Allie used to work with her at ABC.
Anyway, long story short, uh, we looked at the Wrangler. He said, yeah, this isn't high school. We don't have assigned seats here at the Pentagon. And so she had to go sit in the back. And Rumsfeld, because he's Rumsfeld, is like holding court about Abu Ghraib and where's Osama bin Laden and When's the Iraq war going to be over?
Is the insurgency stronger or weaker than last week? And you know, he's, he's getting frustrated with these questions and he calls on me randomly. And I switched the topic to us Japan relations and his face lights up and he talks about us Japan relations for 35 minutes and trained the entire press conference and all of the other reporters were super pissed.
But I had 35 minutes of the defense secretary talking [00:08:00] about Okinawa and stuff. My bosses were thrilled. That was a front page news. News article in seven million Japanese newspapers. I couldn't read it because I can't read Japanese. I can speak it, but I can't read it. I'm like illiterate, but functionally illiterate.
Anyway, that became a thing. So for two and a half years, I was Donald Rumsfeld's foil in that briefing room. And anytime he wanted to switch the topic away from Iraq or Osama bin Laden, he would call me and I would reliably turn the conversation to U. S. Japan relations. And I didn't know if the fix was in until one time I didn't ask anything.
And, uh, in the hallway afterwards. He stopped, I didn't even think he knew my name, and he's like, he said to me, Josh, what, are you tired today? I could have used the end there. And that's when I knew the fix was in. So after about two and a half years of just me and Donald Rumsfeld making news all over Japan, uh, I hit what they call the rice paper ceiling, like the American kid at the Japanese newspaper.
There's no upward mobility for you. So again, I applied to a bunch of Japan related policy jobs. I just wanted to be a Japan scholar and [00:09:00] eat ramen and speak Japanese. Didn't get any of those jobs. But I got a job working for a federal computer week magazine, which at that time was a very prominent and respected Still is to a degree trade magazine covering the federal it industry.
Okay, which is a multi multi billion dollar industry But back in 2006 again, they weren't really focused on china But because I was working in the japanese newspaper and I thought I knew something about the region I started reporting on china and what I found was that there were there was a big problem here that a lot of people Were talking about Privately, but weren't talking about publicly, so I started to break a bunch of stories, and then I got a more prestigious gig at congressional quarterly, and then, you know, that was when Congress is starting to grapple with the China that had clearly become more problematic in a number of ways that was abusing our, uh, engagement, including its PNTR status.
And, uh, you know, It's WTO membership, but at that time, 2007 2008, we were still very Iraq focused, and there wasn't the appetite to take on China in a comprehensive way as a policy issue. [00:10:00] Nevertheless, people were talking about it, and the repression was growing and the aggression was growing. Then I got a more prestigious gig at Foreign Policy Magazine.
That was when Hillary Clinton and Obama came in, and this was during the pivot to Asia, and Kurt Campbell and Hillary Clinton were devising this pivot to Asia, Tom Donilon didn't like that idea, he wanted to call it a rebalance to Asia, and whatever it was, it kind of like fell flat because they never resourced it, etc, but even at this time, this was a period of great momentum.
Consternation about what to do about a China that was becoming more and more internally repressive, externally aggressive, and if you're interfering in free and open societies on a range of fronts. And Xi Jinping came to power and, you know, for the last couple years of the, uh And it was clear when he came to power that China was pursuing much more of a Cold War strategy.
It became clear over time, and you know, he came to power at the end of 2012, beginning of 2013, and the Obama approach was, Okay, we gotta make friends with this guy, and John Kerry invited Yang [00:11:00] Jiechi to his house in Boston to have a nice dinner and spend the weekend, blah, blah, blah. And they didn't, they didn't know.
In fairness to them, they didn't know, but there were more and more people inside the system saying, No, this guy's a bad egg. By 2015. By 2015, it was clear. I think it was clear by 2015, about 49 percent of the Obama administration thought it was clear by 2015, but President Obama wasn't one of those people.
Ben Rhodes wasn't one of those people. John Kerry and Susan Rice weren't one of those people. So the policy still didn't really change. And then, you know, the opening scene of my book is when, you know, the The Chinese leadership meets with the Kerry and Rice a week before the 2016 election. Can you imagine it?
By this time I'm working at, I worked at Daily Beast and then Bloomberg View. And weren't you at Foreign Policy Magazine at one point? Foreign Policy Magazine, yeah, for four years. I had too many jobs. I can't remember, you know, it's been a lot of jobs. All right. Uh, and over time, I just continue to track this China story.
And then in 2016, the [00:12:00] Chinese government, like all of us, like I expected, uh, they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win the election and that, uh, they were going to be made in the shade and everything was going to be copacetic and they were going to achieve. What Xi Jinping always calls the new model of great power relations, the idea of a G2, that the United States and China would be co superpowers, and we wouldn't interfere in their stuff and they wouldn't interfere in our stuff, but we really would, but we would say that we wouldn't, and that the rise of China under Xi's vision for the China Dream, uh, would go A pace unimpeded and then Donald Trump gets elected And the he flips over the chessboard.
Okay, but before we get to that, let me just ask you this question If you look at where journalism was Around that time. It was all during the 2016 campaign, and then immediately after Trump is elected, as it relates to the intersection of foreign policy making and American politics, it seemed like every journalist in Washington was covering Russia.
Exactly. [00:13:00] And you said, no, I'm not going to join. It's not that, it's not that I didn't think that Russia Story was a big story. It was that I was I had come to the washington post from bloomberg view and uh, Russia gate was in full effect And you know, I knew a bunch about it. I was you know, I had written, uh, you know, I was at the convention I broke that platform story.
I actually wrote the first piece defending carter page when everyone was attacking carter page So I was trying to go through it thoughtfully, but it the story as you can we curse on this podcast? Yes. Yes. Go ahead the story got all fucked up. Okay by everybody and At the Washington Post, they had 50, 5 0 people working on this story, and some of the best national security reporters in the world work at the Washington Post.
And I said to my boss, Fred Hyatt, I'm on the opinion side, I said, I can't compete with that. They have 50 amazing national security reporters who are going to be into this story every single day. I want to do a different story. He said, what story do you want to do? I said, China. And to his credit. Fred Hyatt and Jackson deal, uh, [00:14:00] gave me the time and resources to report out the China story, which involved, you know, traveling to Asia on their dime, you know, two dozen times over three years and, you know, to a dozen countries.
The first one I said I want to was I went to Dharamsala and I met with the Dalai Lama on the top of the mountain in India, where the Tibetan government of exile is. And when I pitched that to Fred Hyatt, I said, can I go to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama and interview him about Trump? He looked at me and he said, I hope you find enlightenment.
That was all he said. And I slowly backed out of the room before he changed his mind. Okay. So over those four years, you know, I just tried to be where the other guys ain't and that happened to be the China story. But. Slowly but surely, first the government, then Washington, then the rest of American society realized that the China story is actually the more important story.
And was it clear to you then that the Trump administration was in the process of completely From day one. Yeah, so basically that they were gonna [00:15:00] transform, or should we say they were gonna establish a new Consensus that would really be a bipartisan consensus. Well, it wasn't clear That's that how it was good That's how it was gonna come out and we can debate about whether or not that's exactly what happened But it was clear from day one that this was going to be a crazy story that they were going to change the u.
s china relationship in a way that even they could not predict because they were so Disfunctional in such a mess. That's why the book is called chaos under heaven It's a quote attributed to Mao Zedong where he says there is great chaos under heaven. The situation is excellent It means that the more messed up our system is the better it is for the chinese communist party and they know that And so the the overarching theme of the book is these factional battles inside the trump administration That played out in unpredictable and often destructive ways But what I knew is that You know, just listening to the campaign was that this was going to be a crazy story and that they didn't care at all what about the last 40 years of, you know, delicate, you know, uh, relations managed by the, you know, the China hands in Washington who have like had a stranglehold [00:16:00] over this issue since 1972.
And they didn't care about that at all. They didn't want to hear from those people. I remember the first time I met with Jared Kushner. He's like, well, I don't want these old guys coming in from these think tanks and telling me about foreign policy. Didn't they screw this up? And I said to him, I'll never forget.
I said, well, maybe you should just listen to hear what they have to say. You don't have to do it, but just take the information anyway. But he didn't, you know, that was the mentality. And so if you watch the campaign, you heard a lot of crazy and sometimes very accurate stuff said about China. And this was rooted in Donald Trump's 30 year belief of that, that the United States was getting screwed over by China economically and that he was the man to fix it.
And this was something that if I, as I did, if you read through the, all of his books that he alleges, alleges he wrote over the last 30 years, the books that have his name on the title page, uh, the message about China is amazingly consistent, okay? And it carried through the campaign. And then once the administration started, All of that campaign stuff went out the window.
And, the, the hawks weren't in charge [00:17:00] anymore. And Peter Navarro couldn't even get in office. And Bannon got fired seven months later. And now, and here comes Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and Gary Kushner to try to make a deal. And so that's that's the opening, is that they flipped over the chessboard but they couldn't set it back up again.
And the, Eh, eh, eh. Everybody sort of realized that when President Trump took the call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing wen during the transition, because it was immediately reported as the biggest blunder in 40 years of diplomacy. But what was funny about that, I mean not haha funny, but kind of ironic funny, and this is how I report it in the book, is that Trump didn't realize what he was doing.
In other words, so he takes a call, he takes a call from Taiwan, he's in the transition, and it's considered a total diplomatic faux pas. Because you're going to blow up the relationship with the most important other superpower, if you will, in the world. Exactly. And don't you know you're not supposed to be engaging directly with the Taiwanese government when you're a new president?
Right, but, but, Trump doesn't care about the policy, he cares that he's getting [00:18:00] ridiculed by the New York Times for making a blunder that he didn't Intent to make because no one told him that it was a blunder. They're just like do it. It'll be fine And so his he got really mad at his staff For not telling him that he was going to get reported this way and then that turned him against taiwan for many years And had an actual totally backfired and had a terrible impact on u.
s Policy towards taiwan to the point that trump even told a u. s Senator once as reported in my book that if the chinese take taiwan, there isn't a MF and thing we can do about it, and that's it. Yeah, go ahead. So so that's the chaos Is that you have people struggling to some to persuade the president some to trick him some to bring him along and?
Meanwhile, they're fighting each other and down inside the government Two levels down the bureaucrats and the intelligence people and the spies and the congressional staffers are playing their own games and those Those narratives, the a narrative of the political leadership of Bannon and Navarro and Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin and Jared, and then the, the next level, which is like Pottinger [00:19:00] and Matt Turpin and David Feith and all of these guys who are trying to link that to the system.
And then inside the system, all of those things affected each other and it's complicated and it was happening in the most chaotic place. And that's before the pandemic. Okay. So let's get to the pandemic pandemic. So let's fast forward to January 30th. Which is the first reported human to human transition of COVID that was confirmed in the U.
S. So, where were you at that point in following the story of the pandemic, and did you anticipate at the time that it would become a story that would result in a pandemic, consume the Trump presidency, potentially the presidency of whoever succeeded Trump, transform our geopolitics with China? Like, did you, did you see this as a big China geopolitical story struggle at the moment?
Well, it's hard for me to go back and, and discern what I, so I reported the story twice. I reported it as it was happening, and then I went back and re reported it with 300 plus additional interviews when I went to do the book. So, [00:20:00] uh, you know, what I can tell you is that at that time in our politics, in our government, There was a very small group of people who were sounding the alarm.
And first it was the national security officials, and then it was the health officials joining them. And they were fighting on that day of January, and that exact day, actually, about the China travel ban. And what had happened was that Matt Pottinger, uh, and Robert O'Brien And just for our listeners, so, so Robert O'Brien was national security advisor, Matt Pottinger was deputy national security advisor, but more importantly, Pottinger was really the architect of the administration's, the more hawkish, aggressive elements in the Trump approach to China.
He would say hardline. Hardline. The hardline approach were, were, were, uh, Ponder was the architect of it. He was a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He'd spent a lot of time living, living in Asia. Also served in the U. S. Marine Corps. Very interesting guy. Right, so Matt Pottinger was not only the head Asia official who spoke Chinese, who could re He had [00:21:00] sources, because he covered SARS in China in 2002 and 2003.
He had real sources, so he's talking to his sources And he has all these family members who were infectious disease experts. is a virologist who worked for the CDC. Right. His brother is a professor of epidemiology at University of Washington. It was one of the first breakouts. He's reading the intelligence.
He's reading Chinese social media. He's talking to people in Chinese and in China. And he's trying to sound the alarm. Nobody will listen. And he convinces Robert O'Brien. Now, they're both sounding the alarm. Nobody will listen. And then on January 30th, they're like, Listen, we've got to shut it down. And even the health people like Anthony Fauci were against it.
But once there was a, that, what you mentioned, Shut down travel. Shut down travel from China right now, and and that when they were it's the first example of human to human transmission in the United States That's when the health officials were like, okay, we got to do this, but you know Mnuchin and the chief of staff Mick Mulvaney We're like, no, we can't.
We're going to tank the airlines. It's going to tank the economy. It's going to cost you the election. Don't do it. And [00:22:00] Trump went with the national security people and he shut it down and he took a lot of crap for that at the time. And that wasn't sufficient to stop the pandemic. Doesn't excuse Trump's other excuses, but it was an example where he trusted the professionals over the politicos.
And by the way, the politicos were totally wrong because actually, if he had. Managed the pandemic better. He might have gotten reelected. So by delaying his response He actually hurt himself and probably cost himself the election And then six days later xi xingping calls trump and he tells him a bunch of lies about the coronavirus Namely that it would go away in warm weather And that you could herbal medicine herbal medicine would treat it and that you know It was under control in china all of these lies Fed into that garble inside trump's head and then came in out of the garble out of his mouth and formed the foundation of our terrible, confusing response policy at that time.
And then Trump starts to repeat Xi's lies in public and telling the American people that it's going to go away in warm weather. Many people are saying, but he didn't say that the many people was the [00:23:00] Chinese president who has an interest in lying to him because they're covering up the coronavirus.
That's crazy. That's a crazy story. So At that time, did I realize all of that was going on? No, I didn't know all that. I figured it out later when I retraced all the steps. But I did think at that time that, you know, when I saw what was going on in China, my first instinct was like, oh, I understand the character of the Chinese party better than most.
I know that they would hide the science. I know that they're jailing the journalists. I know that they're Keeping the information away. They're lying to us about our public health and we're about to suffer greatly for it That's what I instinctively knew. That's the big difference. That's when you listen to these scientists quote unquote friends of the lab though got people who are are Definitely, you know 100 percent sure it couldn't have been the Chinese, uh, Wuhan lab that had all the back coronaviruses.
Uh, they were the ones who was, who were telling everybody, uh, you know, Oh, this, whatever the Chinese government says is right. We're pretty sure the scientists wouldn't lie to us. They didn't [00:24:00] understand either that those scientists in China, those health officials. If they speak up, if they told us the truth, they would die.
They would get thrown in prison. Okay. So let's talk about that. So we now know to your point that the Chinese communist party punished doctors, as you said, jailed journalists inside China. They're still, still to this day, anyone sounding the alarm was basically. And hid the science, took what they knew, and locked it in a vault.
And barred the CDC from traveling to China, right? CDC officials wanted to travel to China, they weren't allowed. They engaged in a disinformation campaign about the origins of the pandemic. Correct. So Through the President of the United States, who bought it hook, line, and sinker. So, based on your reporting of the early moves of the Chinese government decision makers, what was their calculation at that point?
Did they really believe that they could sweep this under the rug and the world would, like, just move on and not focus on China? I mean, it seems a little naive. Well, it's impossible to know what happens inside the top ranks of the CCP. It's, it's, it's [00:25:00] essentially unknowable. But the, the best speculation I can give you is that they had no Inside that system, there's no, uh, dissent mechanism anymore.
In other words, whatever the top says, everyone does. And what everyone's trying to do is not to make any decisions that are going to get overruled by the top guy, and then they're going to get killed. And in that system, that's a dysfunctional system. We like to think, oh, authoritarianism is so efficient, blah, blah, blah.
But actually it often leads to these terrible decisions and these terrible outcomes, and we can trace this through the China's entire response, starting from the origin story and the initial handling. And leading all the way to today where they're doing the vaccine diplomacy, which I know we're gonna get to, uh, how they're went around the world to blackmail people with masks.
You know, just think of China vent ventilators, PPE, they control that all of it. Right. You know, and just to think of like the, the cruel calculation of going to a suffering country and then kicking them in the gut because they won't do what you want on like Taiwan or [00:26:00] shut up about the genocide or the uyghurs and dangling masks over their heads.
For their political agenda, and that's what I'm trying to get to is that all you need to know about the way that the CCP operates is informed by the fact that they were using their power and influence to save lives and use it, but to do the opposite, but not because out of China's interest, because you're right.
It's not in China's interest to do any of these things. It's in the party's interest. It's in Xi Jinping's interest to protect himself, to protect the party, and for that to happen, the party has to be omnipotent. The party is God. The party is the religion. And the party can't make any mistakes. You know, the party is infallible.
And so that's, that's the religion. That's the one thing they can't sacrifice. So how could we be responsible? How dare you say we're torturing Uyghurs. How dare you say that, you know, uh, that the, the lab was involved. Because once the party is wrong, the whole religion is called into question. And they might find out that Emperor Xi has no clothes.
That's what, that's why they're [00:27:00] making the decisions that are not in China's interest, not in the interest of the Chinese people who suffered greatly, and definitely not in our interest, because as we saw, it corrupted our response in a way that cost lives, that made people sick and die. Yeah, but China's image globally has been on the decline, and this seems to have accelerated it considerably.
So there's this Pew study from a few months ago, views that were, just reading from the Pew study, I think they surveyed 14 countries, thousands of, of respondents in 14 countries. And today, according to the survey, a majority in each of the surveyed countries has an unfavorable opinion of China. In Australia, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the U.
S., South Korea, Spain, Canada, negative views have reached their highest points since Pew began polling on this topic more than a decade ago. And a lot of the survey work was done during what you're, you know, not only All this, all this noise about the origins of the pandemic, but China's manipulation, as you said, of the [00:28:00] ventilators and the PPE.
So, I take your point that it was in the Chinese Communist Party's interest to protect the institution, but if you just look at that data, It didn't work. It backfired, it didn't just not work, it blew up in their faces. Exactly, that's exactly right. And it continues to because they continue to double down.
Because even today, they still won't give us the science. Even today, they're blackmailing countries like Peru. They say, if you want your vaccines, Peru, uh, you're gonna have to dump diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. That's a real example. But of course, the Peruvians are like, Oh, well, we can't accept that we can't yield to the blackmail because then we'll just be Beijing's bitches forever.
And, you know, it's it's too humiliating. Right. But they can't do the other thing either, which is what they're doing, which is to refuse the Chinese virus because their people are like, how can you not give us the vaccines over Taiwan, you know, so they put the government of Peru in a position where it might collapse and.
You know, what my argument was when I was talking to the Biden, I'm trying to convince people to care about [00:29:00] this, right? That, you know, that we've all had this awakening. Okay, well, and what I keep getting back is like, oh, well, we can't play games with vaccines. We don't want to do vaccine diplomacy like the Chinese do, but they're doing it.
And in a vacuum, even their horrible tactics will have a lot of success. In other words, if we don't have something else to offer a lot of these countries who are suffering this pandemic. They'll be forced to take this corrupt and sort of, uh, sinister Chinese Faustian bargain and that's what we're seeing, so And less, and less effect, uh, less effectuous vaccine.
I mean, the vaccines are worse, too. Right, but it's better than nothing. If I had a choice between nothing and the Chinese vaccine, I would put that shot in my arm right now. Okay, so, so let's, I want to get to that in a minute. First, I just want to talk about China's vaccine campaign domestically on this podcast.
We have done episodes on the, on the state of the U S vaccine campaign. We had a conversation with Scott Gottlieb. We did, we've done a lot on the Israeli campaign with Yonatan Adiri. And we've touched on the UK and European campaigns with, uh, [00:30:00] with Brett Stevens and Neil Ferguson, but we rarely talk about how the Chinese vaccine campaign is going in China.
Now the, I've seen numbers, I saw numbers late February, March, where China had just vaccine something like, just administered something like north of 50 million doses for a country of 1. 4 billion people. And that's, those are. Public numbers. The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference spokesman released those numbers compared to the us.
At that time, 75 million doses had been administered for a population of 330 million. So whether you compare it on a per capita basis, or you compare it on an absolute basis, China's domestic campaign is really, really slow. Why? Okay, so I think there's a couple things going on. You know, one is that countries with low levels of outbreak, in other words, the countries that did the best at the front end of the pandemic are doing the worst to the back end of the pandemic.
Right? And it's an interesting because we see this in Taiwan, [00:31:00] in Japan and South Korea and Singapore, you know, they had lockdowns. Uh, they had low rates, low deaths in Taiwan. They had 10 deaths total of the whole year. 130, something ridiculous like that, uh, but they have no shots, right? And so for most of these countries, it's a story of, oh, well, we didn't, you know, we, we, we got the first thing right, but we got the second thing wrong.
Where in America, we got all the early stuff wrong, but we did really well on the vaccines. And that, you know, that's, that's one part of the story. But again, in China, What they're doing with all of their vaccines is they're using to expand the CCP's power and influence all over the world They're giving away more vaccines than they're putting in the arms of their own people There's a reason for that.
Think about that for a second. It partially it's because they have less cases. It's true Okay, and the P and but the other part of it. It's a form of clinical trials. It's no it's it's a it's a form of Economic and Industrial expansion because you get the vaccines. This is what they said to Brazil. Okay, [00:32:00] you can have the vaccines, but you're going to need to take the Huawei tech as well.
You have to reverse your decision to not take Huawei and they did it. Okay, so that's vaccines plus industrial expansion and economic expansion, right? That's that's how they think about it. And that's not how we think about it. We like to think we're above all of that stuff. But the fact is that geopolitics is a part of this pandemic, whether we like it or not.
And the, and the, it, it, it's gonna manifest itself in lots of different ways. The vaccines is just the first phase of it, by the way, and how we, uh, approach vaccinating the rest of the world, which I think we're failing on, clearly, despite some noble efforts in COVAX and all that stuff, and the Quad's gonna have a million shots, too bad they chose Johnson Johnson, but they could, they didn't know that when they chose it.
But the Chinese are way ahead on that. Okay, and again, this is they're not 10 feet tall. They make mistakes It's a bad system But there are some things that they do that are very smart and getting way at ahead on being on Exporting vaccines [00:33:00] has given them a lot of options diplomatically militarily industrially and we have to respond to that Okay, and we're not doing that right now.
The biden administration is just not okay So China has pledged something like 10 times more vaccines abroad than it has distributed at home. They claim they're on track to, you know, manufacture something like, I don't know what the number is, uh, 2 billion vaccines by the end of the year or something, and they're engaged with like, 400 with 45 or 50 countries.
So they're, it's all over, right? It's in the Western Hemisphere. Including in our backyard. The Western Hemisphere where it's the most prevalent. Right. Okay, so now come to the We ought to think about that. We ought to do something about that. So let's talk about that. So let's talk about Should the U. S. be doing the same thing?
Not the same thing. We should be doing the better thing. What's the better thing? Given these, uh, giving countries shots without strings, okay? Okay. Were they like bad shots with strings from the Chinese, or good shots without strings? If they had one choice [00:34:00] in the matter, besides that or dying, they would take the good shots without strings.
But we're not giving them to them for a lot of bureaucratic and stupid reasons, okay? So we're, we can't fight something with nothing. We have to, if, if the rest of the world has a chance to Do business with us and, uh, you know, uh, join us in our aspiration for things that we believe in, like human rights and the rule of law and freedom and democracy and the freedom to think what you want and choose your leaders to some extent and participate in the world community and love who you want.
That's better. People around the world will like that better than what the Chinese are offering, which is you better shut up about the Uyghurs. Take the shitty vaccine, stick it in your arm, and then we're gonna send you a bunch of hair that we shaved off the Uyghur women's heads, you're gonna put it on your head, and you're not gonna say anything about it, and then we're gonna have them pick the cotton, and then we're gonna send you the shirts, and you're gonna put those on your backs, and if you dare speak up about it, no shots.
That's what's going on right now and our response is, Oh, we'll get to you when [00:35:00] we get to you, we, we got to America first and then, you know, we'll put a bunch of money into the problem and, you know, come see us in six months. Okay. That's why we're losing the vaccine diplomacy. Not because we, uh, the, the Chinese are so smart is because they have the only offer.
On the table and these countries are suffering and you know We're not safe until everyone's safe and it makes economic and strategic sense without the chinese even being involved for us to export more shots and to stop the variants in the worst places because that's They're going to come to get us and we're going to have to Have come up with new vaccines and we'll go do you want to do this every year?
I don't want to do this every year, but so the chinese vaccine will take Take, you know, Sinovac or Sinopharm. The efficacy rates are something like in the low to mid 60s percent. And in many countries where they're going, when they're surveyed, whether it's Turkey or the Philippines, the Chinese vaccines are unpopular.
People are uneasy about taking them. Your point is something better than nothing and people will suck it [00:36:00] up. They're using antiquated Uh, development methodologies for these vaccines. They're not, you know, they're basically, they're not using, they're not using MRNA technology there. So go ahead. Yeah. No. So now there's a push by the progressives left on the left and human rights organizations, including Nancy Pelosi, by the way, to get Biden to hand over all of the intellectual property for vaccines, the MRNA research that was funded by DARPA, by the way, that we spent 25 years developing.
To release the IP and just get rid of all the patents, which on a human level sounds like such a wonderful idea, but if you just think about it for 10 seconds, you realize that it's crazy and naive because once you do that, essentially what you're doing is you're taking our entire bio Tech industry and you're delivering it to the chinese communist party in a silver platter and what they'll immediately do is just steal everything build a thousand factories and put all of our biotech out of industry industry out of work and then because they always screw it up, they'll, [00:37:00] you know, that's gonna, there'll be a.
Billions of bad, more bad vaccines. God knows what they'll do with that research. And, uh, you know, so this is, again, it's complicated. It's very easy to sort of, you know, simplify everything down to like, you know, China bad and, and, and we, but the, the truth is that, uh, we have to get our act together. The, the grand strategic competition with China.
Can only be one if we engage in it. And if we devote our time and resources to it, that's what the book is about. Is that we got to do more and we, you know, it doesn't mean we have to do everything. It doesn't mean we have to overreact. We don't want a cold war. We don't want a hot war. Those are bumper stickers that the sort of pro China community will throw at you to dissuade you from responding to China's aggression when it comes to vaccines or anything, we just have to be clear eyed about.
what they're doing and then actually have a response. We have to have our system work, which it hasn't done in quite a while. And is the Biden administration's resistance a just general foreign policy directional decision or, or they're, they're concerned that we don't have the [00:38:00] capacity? They're trying to figure out how to work their computers, and they're, they just got there, and they're, they're, they're setting up meetings to set up a process to, uh, determine how to write a paper, and then the paper's gotta, you know, be workshopped, and then they gotta have a meeting about the workshop, and then they gotta start the process, and then they gotta review the process, then they gotta socialize the process with allies and get their input, and then they gotta feed that back into the process.
You know this, Dan, because, you, you know, it's a difference, really, like I'm not saying, the Trump administration had no process, it was a disaster, but the Obama administration was all process, and this becomes an alibi for inaction, and this is what we're seeing, okay? And I was talking to State Department officials this week about this very problem, and they were like, listen Josh, We just got here seven days ago, half my staff isn't there, and, uh, you know, I really, I want to get into this, and I'm gonna get a briefing in a couple weeks, we're gonna have an IPC meeting in, in, in July, and I'm like, Jesus Christ, you know what I mean, like, the whole world's gonna pass us by while these guys [00:39:00] figure out, you know, which office to sit in.
And, uh, you know, again, that's not a democrat that happens in every administration, but meanwhile, things are going on in the world. So I think a lot of it is just regular old bureaucratic dysfunction and Washington malaise. I mean, Derek Scissors at the American Enterprise Institute argues, like, even if you don't have a, a total global campaign on vaccinations, pick a few strategically important countries, right?
Well, we have, right? So we, we, we have a loan program with Mexico and Canada, right? And But what about South, but what about Southeast Asian countries? And we have the quad program to, for a billion shots for Asia. Right, so that's for where? Philippines, Indonesia? Southeast Asia, all of it. Okay. And, and that's a small step in the right direction.
I'm, right. So again, praise where it's deserved and credit. Criticism where it's deserved. And, you know, there are some things happening, but it's just like, you know, it's just not enough. It's just not quick enough. People are dying and, uh, you know, the, the chess board is, [00:40:00] is advancing and, uh, you know, it's just, it's just too little, too late.
What is the. What's the Chinese government's propaganda narrative about how the U. S. has handled the vaccine? I'm sorry, how the U. S. has handled, what's the Chinese government's propaganda about how the U. S. has handled the pandemic? For anyone who wants to read a lot of, like, Chinese Communist Party propaganda, just search my name on Twitter, and in my feed, you will see the core of the arguments, okay?
And what's interesting about that, actually, is that, well, much of it comes from what we understand as Chinese Uh, Communist Party propaganda. It's like Xinhua, their fake media, and you know, all of their various trolls and bots, and all that clanky stuff like the Russians do, just like Facebook pages that are just ridiculous, and you know, videos of dancing Uyghurs, and hostage videos with Uyghurs, Praising Xi Jinping and telling us how dare you say there's a genocide.
That's the easy stuff. That's the obvious stuff, okay? Uh, the more [00:41:00] insidious stuff is the stuff that they launder through American institutions and American voices. And, uh, this is a lot of what's in the book. It's called Uh, Chinese influence operations and political interference, and it's a huge problem.
And at this, the Chinese Communist Party is way better than the Russians ever have been. And what they do is they seed our institutions with millions of dollars, billions of dollars, actually, uh, and campuses and companies and Wall Street firms and Hollywood studios, and they corrupt as many elites as they can on both sides.
Right. So Hunter Biden and Neil Bush, two sons of two presidents who are compromised and took a bunch of Chinese money, uh, for a reason. It's because they don't care who's in power. They'll, they'll try to corrupt anyone who will be corrupted. Ivanka Trump, Neil Bush, Hunter Biden, three children of presidents who took corrupt money from the Chinese government through proxies, right?
It's done through proxies, all sorts of proxies. That's the big, that's the biggest problem. And [00:42:00] the, what, what I'm getting to is that. If you listen to those proxies, you will hear the same messages. And that's how you trace the influence. How, why is it that the same Uyghur genocide denialism is coming out of some American voices and some Chinese Communist Party propaganda voices?
You know, why is it that when, on the same day that they attack Somebody for, you know, the lab theory and the global times that it happens to come out of this American think tank in the same way on the same exact day. I happen to see it because they're both attacking me on my twitter feed. That's that's how it works.
They. They bombard you with, uh, in your language from your people in a way. And that's why influence operations are so insidious is because, you know, everybody does soft power, everybody does spying, but in that middle ground, in that hybrid gray zone are overt. actions that conceal a covert purpose, and that's what makes them dangerous.
And so when you go to a Confucius Institute event, uh, it might be fine, or it might be, you know, [00:43:00] uh, corrupt. And when you go to a think tank that's getting funded by a Chinese energy company, it might be fine, or it might be corrupt, because the money is the, is the conflict. The money is what compromises us, and that's how they do it.
China's the world's top pharmaceutical manufacturer. Speaking of some of their, some of their power, right, including the chemicals that are used in the pharmaceuticals. Correct. Do you, so, do you, it sounds like you do believe the relationship, that whole supply chain relationship is just going to change dramatically.
Yeah, so, okay, so I, yes, one way or the other, so, you know, I see this sort of, this phase of the pandemic crisis, meaning the actual pandemic, this is the end of the beginning, assuming we don't go back into another surge, which I, I pray we don't, uh, even if we all get shots and we, nobody gets the coronavirus or less people get the coronavirus, that's just the first phase of this, okay, because it, this, the pandemic has changed geopolitics in, in ways that we can't, we're just beginning to understand.
I identify sort [00:44:00] of five different areas. One is the vaccine diplomacy, which we just talked about. The second is supply chain reorientation. Okay. It's a limited, limited decoupling of critical technologies that feeds Biden's plan to build back better and return good manufacturing jobs for the industries of the future.
That leads to the third one, which is a high technology decoupling and competition that takes place not by onshoring critical things. In other words, okay, it looks like we're going to need to make our own mess. Why? Because there's going to be another pandemic, and we don't want to get blackmailed for masks again.
Okay, so we can build a bunch of masks, that's easy. Right, that happens on, and, okay, if we can get some of those chemicals and rare earth and all that stuff, and maybe build some semiconductor foundries, that's going to be better. If the, if the, if the, if the, if push comes to shove, right? The high technology competition happens off of our shores.
This is about what will be the infrastructure for economies of the future in the rest of the world. And that's a competition between our system and China for the third world or the [00:45:00] second world or the fourth world, okay? And that's about Huawei and 5G. And artificial intelligence and all of these things and that those those industries will also fuel our future economy.
So we can't afford to ignore them. And they're also where some of the Chinese Communist Party's worst actions sit because they combine that technology expansion, as we discussed with all of their other mischief. Okay, so that's number 3. Number 4 is the recovery and reconstruction competition because All these decimated economies are going to need huge, huge amounts of investment.
Where's that money going to come from? And who's going to get those contracts? And who's going to do all of that recovery and reconstruction while the Chinese are thinking about that very hard. And they're building the capacity right now to do that recovery and reconstruction, and we are not. Okay, and that leads you to the fifth one, which is the Wall Street collusion battle, which has been brewing for a long time, and that means right now we have a situation where all of these maligned Chinese companies, which are more and more controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, are being funded by American investors.
To hundreds of millions of [00:46:00] American investors who are doing it mostly unwittingly because the investment is done through passive means. I'm talking about index funds and, uh, you know, institutional investors, your pensions, the army's pension, and this is a fight that really got kicked off. It's in the book.
And in the end, in 2020, when people like Robert O'Brien started battling with Steve Mnuchin about this very issue, but then it ended, right? And, uh, and the Biden administration hasn't figured out what they want to do about this. But the fight goes on. And the idea is, do you want your pension, and this is my pension too, uh, going to the company that builds the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls?
Does that bother you? Okay? Uh, you may say yes or no, but then even if it doesn't bother you, do you realize that when the U. S. government sanctions that company, this is a real company, it's called HikVision, that that's going to hurt your portfolio, okay? Because you're invested in HikVision even though you didn't know it.
Does it, do you care about that? And this is the fight that's only just beginning. All right, I want to Wrap up by talking about the [00:47:00] origins, uh, what we know now at least about the origins of the virus. So there, by my lights, there are basically three theories. There's the animal wet market theory, you know, bat in a cave, bite some pangolin, winds up, which winds up in a Wuhan wet market, and that's how it ultimately transmits to humans.
That's the most. common explanation, or has been at least. The second is, there was a lab in Wuhan and there was some deliberate nefarious activity to, to leak the origins of the virus. And the third is that it was in a Wuhan lab that is trying to predict the next, doing research to predict the next pandemic, which is funded, you know, internationally by hundreds of millions of dollars.
And. It got accidentally leaked from that lab, you know, some 10 15 miles away from where the outbreak broke out. Where are you now in, among those three [00:48:00] theories? Yeah, I'm of the view that we should investigate all the possible theories as much as we can, and figure out the coronavirus, no matter what that truth ends up being.
Now That is not a dodge, that is actually what we must do. Now, the implications of that By the way, that's kind of a controversial position. Please, tell me about it. Again, look at my Twitter feed, you'll find a lot of people criticizing me for saying just that sentence. Now, what the implications of that is that we actually have to include the lab in that investigation, necessarily, that it can't be avoided.
The reason that that's controversial, of course, is because for a year, the Chinese government and the Wuhan lab people and their best friends, who are the American scientists who are involved in this gain of function research, led by Peter Daszak, and the EcoHealth Alliance, overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the NIAID.
Explain who Peter Daszak is, because he's, he comes up commonly. He's, he's the, he's the, you know, guy who was funding a bunch of the [00:49:00] gain of function research at the Wuhan lab. The same research, by the way, that Robert Redfield, not a anti China conspiracy theorist, a virologist, the head of the CDC during the outbreak, said he thinks that came from an accidental leak from the lab, from this gain of function research.
But for a year, Explain, explain what gain of function research is. Gain of function research is where they, Peter Daszak and Dr. Shi Zhongli and their 100 best friends go into Yunnan where the bats are, or anywhere where the bats are. Keep in mind the bats live a thousand kilometers away from the lab, and they dig up all the bat coronaviruses they can, and they bring the most dangerous ones into the lab, and then they do experiments to make them more virulent and more dangerous and more, uh, infectious to humans.
That's what they were doing. That's what they admit that they were doing. That's what they To try to predict and anticipate the next pandemic. Exactly. Using 200 million dollars of US taxpayer money, the PREDICT program was meant to quote unquote predict and pre empt the pandemic by finding the most dangerous viruses, making them more [00:50:00] dangerous and more infectious to humans, and then playing around with them and then trying to To predict how they might break out now.
It is a crazy thing to think about that the predict program It not only did not didn't predict And preempt the crisis but may have accidentally sparked the crisis. That's a a very Disturbing thing to think about not because it implicates china by the way because it implicates us because that's our research too Because we were doing it with them and because diplomats warned in 2018 that this exact research might cause a pandemic So let's stay on that for one second u.
s. Diplomats Two years before coronavirus. Right. They, this coronavirus, they, U. S. diplomats say, like, Houston, we have a problem, this could leak, and then we have a pandemic. They were sounding the alarm, and they went to the lab, and they found that they didn't have enough safety procedures. But specifically, they wrote in these cables, we're worried about the research where they're using bat coronaviruses to To increase the infectiousness using the spike protein to the ACE2 [00:51:00] receptor.
What that means is that they would take mice, give them human lung characteristics, and then run bat coronaviruses through them until the bat coronaviruses got really good at infecting human lungs. That's what they were doing, and two years prior these diplomats were like, This is dangerous! We should probably keep an eye on it.
Nobody listened. Nobody cared. And then when the outbreak broke out right next to the lab, and it was a bat coronavirus that had a, you know, a spike protein that infected the ACE2 receptor, all of the friends in the lab, all the peter dags in the world were like, Don't look at the lab. Whatever you do, do not look at the lab.
We're gonna go look in the markets. By the way, the Chinese CDC disavowed the market theory in May 2020. Nobody cared. Then they have a WHO investigate. So in other words, these guys are conflicted. It's the clearest conflict of interest. You could imagine it's the definition of a conflict of interest. It would be like having Robert Kardashian investigate OJ.
Okay, it would be like sending, it would be like if, because this is what Peter Daszak said on 60 Minutes, he says, Oh, well, don't you want the people who are the [00:52:00] best friends of the lab to investigate the lab? We're trained virologists. It would be like Robert Kardashian going to the jury and saying, Listen, I know OJ real well.
I'm gonna go and ask him. I don't think he did it, but I'm gonna go ask him real seriously. I would know if he's lying. He said he didn't do it. Case closed. You know, we can all go home and I'm going to go look for the one armed man. That's the analogy. Okay. And what Peter Daszak did is he took this, then the WHO to its great shame, makes an investigation team handpicked by the Chinese government.
The report was written according to Anthony Blinken, in part by the Chinese government, and the only American they include is Peter Daszak. Okay. And they rejected the people that the U. S. government wanted to have on it. And he says, Oh, well, we're. I don't think it was the lab, but we're gonna go there anyway, and we're gonna look him right in the eye, and we went there, we looked him right in the eye, I believe them, and I'm the expert, so no more looking into the lab.
Now, what's funny about that, not funny, haha funny, but kind of ironic funny, is that as Peter Daszak is releasing this whitewash report, which is meant to tell you that we don't need to look at the lab, [00:53:00] Dr. Tedros, his boss, the head of the WHO, not a pro Trump, anti China conspiracy theorist, says, disavows it, takes a crap on Peter Daszak's report and says, no, no, we have to look at the lab.
And the reason that he was doing that, not because he's a big fan of the lab theory, it's because he realizes that we have to take a look at the lab and that he's trying to save the credibility of his organization, which the Chinese government and the Peter Daszak's of the world have destroyed. through their very shameful and very obvious whitewash.
And for the Chinese Communist Party, for their propaganda, that's enough for us to not know, for us to not think about, like, we're going to be able to figure this out. That's, that's, that's, that's a win for them. But the last thing I want to say is that the craziest part is that They added a fourth theory, because once they disavowed the market, we found that it wasn't the market, actually, because the first cases had no connection to the market.
They found some old guy, who had never been to the market, he didn't know about the market. So, they came up with a new one, which is Who was an early, who was an early patient. An early patient, in other words, they, [00:54:00] the, they proved scientifically that it couldn't have originated from the market. The market was like, just one amplifying event of many.
Anyway, the Popsicle Theory The Popsicle theory is that it came into Wuhan on a frozen food package from somewhere. Could have been Italy, could have been Norway, could have been Bishkek, okay? Could have been New Jersey, okay? And so what Peter Daszak wants to do is he wants to go and go around China and the rest of the world searching for every palm civet and Prairie dog, and mink, and pangolin, and frozen package of fish sticks that ever might have gotten its way to, and look for the virus there, and I say let him, I say have fun with that, go do that for the next years, meanwhile someone's gonna have to look into this lab, okay, and it can't be him, you can't have the Robert Kardashian inter Investigate OJ, we're gonna have to find somebody else who doesn't have a clear conflict of interest to investigate the lab if we want to have any sense that we actually gave it the old college try to doesn't mean it's gonna be easy.
It doesn't mean we're gonna figure it out. It means we have to try [00:55:00] and we have to, uh, you know, realize that we've been tricked as a sort of a media environment and in large ways as a country into thinking that, oh, there's no evidence for the lab, but there's a ton of evidence for the market theory when actually there's No proof of either and the circumstantial evidence is much higher on the lab side You know if you would have thought if the if this pangolin theory was true that they would have had some pangolin They would have found some you know, how many pangolins they found to tie to the outbreak?
Zero they tested thousands of pangolins and and raccoon dogs and minks and and and All over China they found zero that were connected to the outbreak. That's zero evidence. Okay. All right. Lastly the legacy of Can I say one more thing about the origin? Sure. Yes. It's not about blaming China. It's about solving the origin so that we can prevent the next pandemic.
We can't prevent the next one if we don't know how this one started. That's how serious [00:56:00] it is. And the current plan to respond to this pandemic is to take that research, that gain of function research, and throw another 1. 2 billion dollars into it. In other words, to times Six fold the dangerous research that might have caused the pandemic and to dig up literally 500, 000 new dangerous viruses and bring them to a bunch of labs and play around with them and see what happens We could be spending that kind of money on monitoring and surveillance in Exactly in the event of that's exactly right.
So the public health authorities and and The post corona international public health authorities, their post corona reputation. Will we listen to them next time? I'm pulling up a tweet here from January 14th. January 14th, the World Health Organization tweets out preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found And I quote, no clear evidence of human to human transmission of the novel coronavirus.
So preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear [00:57:00] evidence of human to human transmission of the novel coronavirus identified in Wuhan. January 14th, World Health Organization. Right, I mean their, their continuing error, their original sin and their continuing error was to accept Chinese government claims at face value, and then regurgitate them, giving them more credibility, to assign the WHO's credibility to the Chinese government's information, and they're, in, in doing so, You know, helping the Chinese government cover up their own crimes and destroying the WHO's credibility in the process.
Now, I was not a fan of how the Trump administration reacted to that. I think that these multilateral organizations are flawed, but should be engaged and fixed, not nixed. Okay, that's how, that's what I think. And, you know, when we yield the playing field, that vacuum is just filled by more Chinese corruption and et cetera.
So, that's, so, again, we have to have two ideas in our head. That the W, the multilateral. Organizations are useful, but flawed, and, you know, with Russia, Reagan said trust, but verify, but with China, we have to [00:58:00] distrust, but verify. We have to first assume that they're probably bullshitting us, but it's not always, you know what I mean?
And, and so we have to, you know, follow the facts, but we have to realize what we're dealing with. Josh. Thank you for joining this conversation. I encourage everyone to buy and read Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. There's a ton in here about this emerging consensus, political consensus, on U.
S. China policy and I think I think Josh would argue that we're not we know we turned a corner on how we approach China And we're probably not going back in some way for a long time Sorry, it's the end of the beginning. It's the end of the beginning, right? So read the book read Josh at the Washington Post and thanks for Spirited, albeit somewhat depressing, but frank conversation.
That's my, that's my [00:59:00] specialty. Depressing but frank. Depressing but frank. Alright, take care Josh, thanks a lot. You too, thank you my friend.
That's our show for today. If you want to follow Josh Rogan's work, go to the Washington Post Global Opinion section. He has a regular column there. And you can also follow him at Twitter, at Josh Rogan. J O S H R O G I N. And again, I highly recommend his book, Chaos Under Heaven, which you can order wherever you buy books, especially Barnes Noble.
If you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me, at Dan Senor. Today's episode is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm Dan Senor.