From Chimerica to Cold War II: how US-China relations soured
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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I’ll be talking to journalists, experts, and long-time China watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society, and more. There’ll be a smattering of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How do the Chinese see these issues?
It’s easy to forget that, as recently as the start of this century, the US was China’s biggest ally. Washington saw Beijing as a necessary counter against Moscow and consistently supported China’s entry into the world economy ever since rapprochement in the 1970s, including China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. These days, the relationship couldn’t be more different. So why have they called quite so fast? When was the turning point? And can we now say that American rapprochement was a strategic mistake?
Bob Davis is a former senior editor at the Wall Street Journal, who has posted to China between 2011 and 2014. In recent years, he has been conducting a long-running series of interviews with dozens of high-level officials over successive American administrations for the online magazine The Wire China. He has interviewed defence secretaries, ambassadors, national security advisers, treasury secretaries, and more. And now, these interviews have been collated into a new e-book, Broken Engagement. Through these interviews, we can see the changing direction of US-China relations through the eyes and words of those at the very heart of America’s decisions. Bob joins the podcast now to tell us all about it. Bob Davis, welcome to Chinese Whispers.
Thank you for having me.
So tell me about these interviews that you’ve been doing. What is the project with The Wire China?
So over the past two years, I have interviewed former officials and current officials of administrations going back to the first Bush administration, so 40-some-odd years. And the idea was to try to track the arc of the US-China relationship as it was improving and as it has been declining and turning into a pretty hostile environment at the moment. But to sort of take a look at what were the major points? Who were the major players? What were they thinking at the time? And going back to them and asking them a series of questions.
And that’s given you a brilliant bird’s eye view of the direction of US-China relations over these decades. I thought it was interesting that you always asked your interviewees this question, is a prosperous China in America’s interest? And you framed it as how the answer to that question from your interviewees changed over the years. In the early years, it was always a yes.
No, that’s true. It was always yes until the Trump administration. The idea had been that a more prosperous China would be a bigger export market, a bigger place to invest for US companies, more jobs in the US, and equally important, not an ally militarily, but certainly not an enemy, a country you could count on in emergencies. So it was seen as a lot of pluses. And then on the off chance that perhaps, maybe the tighter engagement would also mean more freedom for individual Chinese people living in the mainland.
But primarily, was it an agenda driven by the national security concern rather than by reforming China?
Oh, certainly. In the beginning, it was all about national security. If you go back to the first Bush administration, China was a tiny economic player, although always had been an important military player. After all, the US and China had fought a war, kind of a proxy war in Korea to a stalemate. So clearly, China always was an issue and a possible threat for the United States. But by the first Bush administration, it was pretty clear that the Chinese government and the Russian government were moving further apart.
And the whole idea was to engage in China to try to drive a wedge even further between China and Russia and to enlist China in helping to deal with, I keep saying Russia, but it was then the Soviet Union.
Yeah. And as you note in your book that’s coming out, collecting all of these interviews that even the Tiananmen Square protests and the subsequent crackdown weren’t enough to kind of waver that agenda. But 2016 was a turning point and things clearly now are not what they used to be. So why did you mark 2016 as a turning point?
Well, I mean, because it really was. I mean, you know, Trump came into office campaigning against China, saying China was raping the US economically, brought into office a lot of China hawks who had wanted to target China as the biggest threat to the United States. It didn’t absolutely start with Trump. I mean, at the end of the Obama administration, they were thinking that they had gotten too close to the Chinese, hadn’t pushed back hard enough, and were starting to distance themselves. For instance, there were a number of efforts to buy US semiconductor companies and the US blocked them.
But certainly, Trump was a gigantic, gigantic change. And also, on the other hand, so was China. China under Xi Jinping was a very different place than China under his predecessors. Much more aggressive, much more seeing itself as a major force in the world. So, I mean, you have the two of them. You have Xi Jinping gaining more power. You have Donald Trump coming in, talking about China as a not just a competitor, but as an adversary. And I think what really was the frosting on the cake was COVID.
I mean, you know, if you look at the early part of the Trump administration, for all I said about the tough rhetoric and the hawks that he had in his cabinet, and in his senior leadership, I mean, what he did, the first thing he did was sign a trade deal, which is a very traditional thing for an American president and a Chinese government to do, dating back to the Clinton administration, if not before that. So, very traditional. But COVID was something entirely different. Trump blamed COVID for spoiling his chances for re-election, probably rightly.
However you think the virus originated, it certainly spread from China to the rest of the world. People talk about Trump won and now this is Trump two. I think that’s wrong. I think it was Trump one until COVID. COVID was Trump two, where he really did unleash all his hawks. And now we’re in Trump three, which is a somewhat different manifestation of the same guy.
Right. And I want to talk more about Trump in just a bit, but just focusing on a bit about China. When did the American foreign policy establishment, as you spoke to them, start to feel or really truly understand that Xi was a different kind of leader?
It took them a while. It took them a couple of years. I was in China for the Wall Street Journal from 2011 to 2014. In 2012 or 13, I forget which one, there was this meeting, the third plenum they called it, and they talked then about their plans, economic plans for the future. And the clear message from that document that they put out was market determination, you know, reliance on market forces.
I mean, even Xinhua in English put out the headlines about market forces. Also in that document was the leading role of the Communist Party. But people slipped over that part. And it was also, as I say, a clear intention of the Chinese government to send signals about reform.
And Xi Jinping also had been in charge of provinces that were known, coastal provinces that were known for inviting in foreign investment. So he was seen as someone who cared about markets, was comfortable with foreigners, and also his family had been persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Another idea that would give you a sense that he wouldn’t want to go back to a past style of rule. So it took a while. It took a couple of years before people realized he was a different kind of Chinese leader that they were used to in the last several of them.
Yeah, I thought it was fascinating what Gary Locke, the ambassador to China under Obama, told you about, you know, how did we misread this guy? You know, I actually thought he was a bit of a liberal.
Right. Also, I mean, a person I didn’t get to interview, at least so far, Hank Paulson, who is the Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, had been a China specialist for Goldman Sachs for years, had cut deals with China, helped to reorganize their banking system. He was fooled also, entirely fooled, you know, thought of Xi as a reformer and he just isn’t. He’s just a different sort of leader.
I often wonder, and this is kind of slightly digressing a little bit, Bob, but I often wonder whether when the West sees reformers in these kind of autocratic places or places with massive cultural and language gaps, if it’s not a projection of what we Western democracies we see as leaders, we want them to be that. It’s almost kind of a wishful thinking projection going on there rather than actually what they are actually saying.
No, I agree with that 100%. I mean, in the Clinton administration, at the time of the Clinton administration, where China wanted to get into the World Trade Organization, the Chinese president was Zhu Rongji, clearly a person who was an economic reformer and who was using the carrot of joining the WTO as a way to push economic reforms that were difficult for the Chinese people to swallow. Well, he wound up to be very unpopular. I mean, his reforms led to lots of state-owned enterprises being shut down, millions of people thrown out of work.
And I think for years, people were looking, including into the Trump administration for the next Zhu Rongji, and the Chinese were very adept at providing people who the West were very comfortable with. People who spoke English, you know, were educated at least partly, you know, in the finest Western universities, and I think genuinely believed in reform. It didn’t mean that they were political reformers. It didn’t mean that they were people who wanted greater democracy in China, although some of them, I think, probably did.
But I always thought when I was there, and again, I was there 2011 or 14, that you could take people from the Chinese Central Bank and put them in the Federal Reserve, or vice versa, and you wouldn’t see much of a difference in terms of their outlook on what’s important economically.
And of course, one moment that happened as well was Xi Jinping abolishing the term limits for the president of China role.
Yeah, no, that was a clear, if you didn’t see the signal before that, which you should have, that was a clear signal. How was that received amongst your interviewees, as they recalled back to that time?
You know, I think it was at that point, not a surprise, right? I mean, he had been clearly accumulating more and more power. And also remember, the position of president is kind of, you know, almost a ceremonial position.
Yeah, it is ceremonial, like being the Queen of England or something. You know, I mean, you know, and the leader of the Communist Party, that never had term limits. But still, it was, I mean, one of the great things, one of the really impressive reforms that Deng Xiaoping put in was term limits. You know, I mean, term limits in an autocratic system is a very unusual, very unusual thing.
Because the way autocratic systems go bad is you get a leader in there that makes mistakes. Nobody wants to challenge him. And, you know, it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse.
Yeah, I just want to explain that briefly for listeners who may not know about the difference between general secretary as a role and president as a role. In the sense that Xi holds both of those roles, but it is by virtue of his position as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party that he has the power that he does.
President is a role that had term limits on it that he abolished. But as you say, Bob, that is a head of state role rather than the de facto source of his power. Speaking of Deng, Bob, one thing that your interviewees told you, which I thought was really interesting, was that they thought Deng Xiaoping had a better way of handling foreigners in the sense of, you know, this slogan of hiding your strength, biding your time.
And that Xi actually revealed his hand a bit too soon and spooked the American administration, such as the Trump administration. What do you make of that position?
Oh, I think it’s correct. I think one of the most interesting parts of the interviews I did was with Robert Gates, who is the CIA director under a Republican administration and the defense secretary under a Democratic administration. So, about as hard-headed a realist as you possibly can get in the American system. And he was the one, of all the people I interviewed, he was the one who thought that engagement might have been working.
That really what was happening here was that Xi Jinping was a bit freaked out, you know, and that the embrace of the West economically was actually having an impact on China, according to him. Could have been one of the motivations for Xi and his enormous, endless anti-corruption crackdown, which is to purify the party and get it back to its roots.
So, that leads me quite nicely, Bob, to my next question, which is this debate that’s going on in the China-watching world of just how much the changes that have happened in China are down to Xi as an individual agent or down to the system, the structure of Chinese politics, or the global forces at play.
So, the question is, could someone else, another leader, have also got freaked out, or could the party as a whole have got, quote-unquote, freaked out, and therefore taken China down this road, even without him anyway?
There are those who say that he is not the cause of China’s closing down, that actually this is a long-running trend of which he is merely an actor in it. I don’t think anything’s inevitable in history.
I mean, so look before Xi Jinping, you had Hu Jintao, a weaker leader, but it was collective leadership, which is, again, the structure that Deng Xiaoping put in place. So, I don’t think it was inevitable that the next leader would be a far more solitary leader.
I mean, he still has a pull-up here standing committee of six, including himself, which is the ruling body, but he clearly dominates that and puts all his allies in those positions. Certainly, I agree that the leadership was entirely upended, I mean, freaked out by Glasnost, 100%.
But in the same way, just like Tiananmen, I think, maybe naively on my part, I always thought of the Chinese leadership as the worst worry warts you can imagine, that these little movements toward independence of some sort.
I mean, I did a story once on a city in China called Kaifeng, where there’s a tiny, maybe a thousand people, who are descendants of Jewish merchants from a thousand years ago, and consider themselves Jewish. And by the end of the time I left, they cracked down on that organization.
I said to myself, really? They think everybody’s moved to China? I mean, they moved to Israel? But, you know, I think it’s anything that is not under their control. And so, yeah, I mean, Glasnost certainly did.
And they were worried about the lessons of Tiananmen. I think, you know, if those troops hadn’t fired on the protesters, that government would have fallen, right? And I don’t think they ever, ever, ever want to get to a position where they’re dependent on the loyalty of recruits to suppress popular sentiment.
And so, what lesson should we be taking from that turning point and where we are now in terms of whether the U.S. should or could have seen all of this kind of change that happened around 2016? Who should have seen it coming in a sense of, you know, arguably China was never going to liberalize politically.
And if that is the case, as China got richer, you were always aiding a rival country with a different political system than you to get stronger. You know, does it write off the early U.S.-China policy? Well, I mean, clearly it took too long to recognize what was going on.
I think I spoke to a number of people who were in the Obama administration who then wound up in the Biden administration. And it was clear they thought that they should have acted more forcefully much earlier when it came to the South China Sea.
I mean, one of the most important moments, I think, even for Trump, who is as partisan as you can possibly be, it was when Xi Jinping was in the Rose Garden with President Obama in 2015 and promised not to militarize the South China Sea and promised to end cyber spying of companies, commercial cyber spying for commercial purposes.
And I had an interview with Mike Rogers, who was then the head of the National Security Agency. The NSA is the premier spy institution in the United States. It’s responsible for all the electronic intercepts.
And he said that the Chinese backed off on cyber spying for six months. That was it, six months. A promise to the president in the Rose Garden couldn’t be more public and it worked for six months. I asked him, so what did Obama do?
Now, again, the NSA chief may not tell me everything they’re doing, obviously. But he basically said, well, Obama thought that back-of-the-stage negotiations worked. We had him, you know, worked before and we should go back to that.
And Rogers was very diplomatic about it, but he clearly thought they should have had a more forceful response. It’s fascinating.
And let’s talk about the Trump presidency then, because, as you say, he is now back in the White House. What is your read on their China policy in this term compared to, let’s say, Biden or even Trump’s first term?
So Biden, I think, was largely a continuation of Trump, although he, much differently than Trump, tried to work with allies, certainly tried to rebuild the alliances and work together more effectively on dealing with China.
I think, though, relations were so bad, basically, that the best they could do was trying to keep two countries from war, which would be the worst possible outcome. So they didn’t accomplish a hell of a lot, but at least kept things stable.
In the first Trump administration, economically, clearly China was the target. In this Trump administration, it’s not clear at all that China is the target. Everyone’s the target.
I mean, this is Trump at his most basic, and Trump at his most basic does not see China as the singular existential threat to the United States. He looks at the world economically as any country with a persistent, large, persistent trade surplus is ripping off the United States and taking advantage of the United States.
So his economic policy is geared to all of them. And I think it’s also possible, you know, he’ll look for, not an alliance, but, you know, work to try to work more closely with Xi Jinping on their joint efforts on carving up the world, basically.
So it’s a different take on the same guy. I mean, he had those same views in the first Trump administration, but he didn’t have his footing. And he also had advisors there who had different points of view.
This time, he has what seemed to be a bunch of yes-men who are just saying, you know, how high you want to go, we’ll jump higher. Now, maybe in the end, it won’t work out that way because in his national security people, he has hired people who are very hawkish on China.
So, I mean, we’re only in, I mean, it’s just, it’s been so much news. I have to remember, it’s still not even two months since we’re taping this thing. So, again, things may change and you might have the same splits as you did in the first Trump administration.
One person from the first Trump administration told me he thought the split would be over trying to do a deal with China, that you’d have a number of people there who think it’s impossible, you know, not worth your time.
And then you would have more of the economic types, the Commerce Secretary, the Treasury Secretary, who would be urging him to try. And, you know, Trump is always a guy who thinks he can cut a deal.
But that might be the vision point as opposed to how hard to push on China. And one aspect I want to draw out is also the role of the Russian negotiations that are happening as we speak.
Because a curious thing that’s sometimes floated by the MAGA camp, both in the first term and in the second term, is the idea of doing a reverse Kissinger. Now, I know some of your interviewees talked to you about that as well.
So first of all, Bob, just explain for listeners what the MAGA camp means by reverse Kissinger. OK, so in the same way that Kissinger worked on the splits between China and Russia to pull China more into the Western orbit and use China against Russia, I had an interview with Robert O’Brien, who was one of the last national security advisers to President Trump in his first term, who said that they were trying to do the reverse, had started to try to do the reverse, to talk to the Russians and say,
you know, the czars took a lot of territory from the Chinese. Don’t think the Chinese forgot about that. And you don’t want to be too close to the Chinese because ultimately they will want that land back.
And ultimately, there are divisions between you, Russia and China. And your lot might be better off working more closely with us. Now, they just started on that. They didn’t get very far.
And clearly, the Russia-Ukraine war put a kibosh on all that in the Biden administration to the extent they even thought about it. So this time, I think there’s much more public talk about it. When he mentioned it, I found it fascinating and totally surprising.
But now you hear about it all the time. I’ve done some interviews subsequent to that with, now, these are former Biden people, I must say, but also China experts who just kind of think it’s not bad to try.
I mean, if you could settle the Russia-Ukraine war, not bad to try to see if there’s some wiggle room between the two of them, but think that it’s a pipe dream. You know, unlike the first time with China and Russia, there was already an enormous split between the two countries.
This time, there doesn’t seem to be any split between them. And certainly during the war, the Chinese have given a lot of economic support, not weapons per se, but the innards of weapons, the electronics that go into weapons.
So you don’t see the split. And I think Xi Jinping, both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are quite wise to what he’s trying to do. And every time you see one of them talking to Trump, you see pretty close afterwards, they talk to each other in their statements about how we’re tied tightly together.
Yeah, Bob, I think those Biden administration people, I would agree with them in terms of it’s not quite the same historical parallels today that would make that kind of rapprochement work with Russia and therefore end this kind of competition.
With China, if China is now the new USSR. And the thing that Robert O’Brien said that really stood out to me is this idea of going on territory.
Because actually, in the Chinese century of humiliation narrative, the Russian stuff doesn’t feature very heavily at all. You know, the idea that the city of Vladivostok used to be a Chinese city is barely mentioned.
You know, those anniversaries are barely remembered nationally, at least. Obviously, in the northeast of China, it’s still a bit more raw. Instead, the next century of humiliation is much more about the Americans, about the Brits, about the West in general, rather than about the Russians.
So it raised a question for me in my head when I read that from Robert O’Brien talking to you of just how well they read the Chinese situation domestically in general.
And by they, I don’t just mean the Trump administration. I mean, all the U.S. officials that you’ve spoken to so far, you know, do they understand how the Chinese see the world and see themselves?
Well, Kirk Campbell, who was the main China person in the Biden administration, who’s worked on China issues since the Clinton administration for years and years, said that one of the biggest weaknesses in the United States, no matter what the administration, is the lack of information, the lack of knowledge within the government about China, that they don’t read China well.
You know, to your question, again, should they have recognized earlier that Xi Jinping was a different kind of leader? Yeah, they should have. So, yeah, I think that’s an issue. I think it’s probably an issue for the Chinese, too.
I mean, you could see it’s not just China, right? I mean, you look back, I mean, the United States thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, right? Kind of missed that one.
You know, I mean, one of the worst foreign policy mistakes the United States has ever made. It’s hard for other, and I should say Saddam Hussein misunderstood the United States in terms of what it would be willing to do to defend Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
So, I mean, it’s not an unusual thing, but it’s, you know, it can be quite deadly. Anyway, yeah. And also, I would think within the United States, the focus has been so much on the Middle East and so much on the Soviet Union for so long that administrations talk about pivots to Asia, focusing on Asia, but it’s hard to do.
I always thought one of the things I’ve always been wondering about with Chinese foreign policy is, are they incredibly brilliant or are they just incredibly lucky? The issues that China brings forward, yeah, there are things that you should be concerned about.
So, when China cuts off imports from one of the Baltic countries because the Baltic country had the audacity to do something with Taiwan. Lithuania. With Lithuania, yeah, yeah. That’s bad, right? When they put pressure on Australia because they’re unhappy that Australia is pushing them on COVID, that’s bad. That’s economic coercion.
On the other hand, Russia sends in 100,000 troops over the border to Ukraine. Well, where’s your focus going to be, right? Or the Houthis send missiles into Israel or into American ships. So, where are you going to spend most of your time? And the Chinese seem to manage to do that, to stay somewhat, they’re in the news, but somewhat never like the top news, right? I mean, an invasion of Taiwan, I hope it never comes, but would be that sort of move. But they haven’t done that.
Or if they’re ramming boats in the ships in the Philippines, it’s bad. That’s really bad. But again, it’s not like they haven’t invaded the Philippines, right? Well, I wonder if the operative part of all of those things is that they push as far as they think can be accepted. Slice away in kind of this gray area rather than do anything that is literally an invasion.
And even in the Taiwan question, it’s unlikely that an invasion will happen, but what’s more likely is kind of a slow encroachment of what is the acceptable window of action. And that’s probably quite smart.
Yeah. No, it is. I mean, in terms of lucky or smart, they’ve acted, not saying again that I approve of what they’re doing, but I mean, for their purposes, they seem to have dealt with the West pretty well. So, for all that, though, I mean, the relations between China and the West are really deteriorating and that is hurting them economically, certainly.
Yes, exactly, exactly. And you have to really wonder if wolf warrior diplomacy is that smart or, as we’ve already talked about, this idea of Xi showing his hand and his strength before really he was strong enough to do so. One thing that your interviewees often agreed on was on Taiwan, in fact, and often saying that Taiwanese government have been too complacent.
Tell us about that. Yeah, I think that is a feeling across the board. Republican, Democrat, Trump, non-Trump. Taiwan is the biggest target for China. And, Taiwan is a country of 23, 24 million people, the leader in semiconductor manufacturing in the world, a lot of really smart, technologically advanced workers and academics and all that sort of thing.
And you think of the example of Israel, right? I mean, it feels that it’s threatened. Well, it is threatened, you know, by large countries, not on the scale of China, certainly, but threatened by missiles. So, they invent a missile defense that seems to work pretty well. Well, China, you know, is threatened by missiles, is threatened by ships. You would think that they would be the leader in defense electronics because they have such capabilities, but they don’t seem to be.
They don’t seem to be putting much work into that at all. And plus, I mean, as I understand it, the draft is essentially kind of a joke, I mean, six months playing soldier and then you’re gone. So, it’s a lot to expect the United States Navy to come to your defense and lose thousands and thousands, and the potential to lose thousands and thousands of sailors and soldiers when you’re not doing your share.
And it is a big frustration for American planners. And I think for the Taiwanese, they should realize that, yeah, it’s true that everybody wants to defend their semiconductor manufacturing capabilities. But when you’re talking about, again, hope it never gets to it, but if you’re talking about the possibility of an actual war, the country itself, whatever country it is, is most responsible for its defense.
It’s so fascinating that that’s been a source of frustration over successive administrations. But just in a final calculation, then, with this kind of, now that you’ve collated all of these interviews spanning this period of history, do you think that there are lessons that we can draw in terms of, specifically, has the US ever been able to make China do anything that it doesn’t want to do?
You know, it feels like the alignment in this century has been good, at least at the beginning part, but it was something that China wanted anyway. And now you look at something like human rights, and China doesn’t really seem to have given much way, at least because of American pressure on that. So, I guess my question is almost, does US-China policy even matter? Does it work?
I think it works to some degree. You know, China, talking about human rights, is clearly not a democracy. You can’t imagine it’s going to be a democracy. People have more individual freedom than they did back when Deng Xiaoping came into office, right? They can marry who they want. They can choose the occupations they want.
When poorer people move to the cities, they aren’t welcome there. They don’t have the right papers, the so-called hukou, but they aren’t arrested either. I mean, so there is more individual freedom. I think the engagement with the West probably had something to do with that. The Chinese don’t engage in missile proliferation as they used to. I think engagement probably had something to do with that.
I mean, I think the most likely way in which you’ll influence China is with allies if you have a united front. I mean, China does need its economic vibrancy is based on exports and investment and so on. A united front that way could help. But, I mean, you have to recognize limits and certainly what you say is true. I mean, no country really wants to do something against its interests.
I mean, Trump is kind of interesting. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens. I mean, he thinks clearly in Trump 2 or Trump 3 that the power of tariffs are going to force countries to do things they don’t want to do that are not in their interest. We’ll see.
I mean, China is a big, powerful country. You know, it’s different than dealing with, you know, Mexico. Mexico is 100% dependent, not 100%. Mexico is very, very greatly dependent on the United States. And many Mexicans both love the United States and hate the United States. There’s a famous quote, I forget who said it, but it was Mexico so far from God, so close to the United States. And that’s the way they feel.
But China is not in that position. So it’s difficult. I mean, you have to try to figure out a way to position things that China will see in its interest. The book ends with Biden administration officials. Will you be doing more interviews with the new Trump presidency as well? I’ll try. I’ll certainly try.
I mean, it’s hard. You know, it’s a new administration. They really don’t have a China policy. There’s nothing clearly defined yet. So it will take some time. I’m hoping that some of the senior people in the Biden administration, now that they are out of office, might be willing to talk also. So I’ll try that.
And I’ll do my best. But it’s tough. It was always hard to get the current Biden administration people to talk. My interview with Kirk Campbell, who was, as I say, the most senior China person, helped really a lot on that. And so if I can make a breakthrough with someone in a similar position, maybe it’ll open some others too.
Well, Bob Davis, thank you so much for doing all of this work for us. Thank you for joining Chinese Whispers.
All right. Thanks very much. And thank you for listening, especially if you’ve been a fan of Chinese Whispers over the years. We’ve had 119 episodes and millions of downloads. And I’m so proud of what the show has achieved, which I couldn’t have done without the tens of thousands of you loyal listeners out there.
I’m sad to say now, though, however, that the show is coming to an end. Later this year, I will be joining the Times and the Sunday Times to write a regular column on China for them and interviewing interesting China watchers for Times Radio. I hope you will continue to follow my journalism there.
But that does mean that Chinese Whispers, as you and I know it, will be taking a hiatus. I may be able to bring it back in some form in the future, and I’d love to be able to do so. If you want to be the first to know about it, I’ve started a Substack, which will be regular updates on my latest articles and interviews. Go to chinesewhispers.substack.com to sign up for free.
Thank you again for your enthusiasm in learning about China. And I hope you tune in to the next episode and dive back into the archive to catch up on all the ones that you’ve missed so far. Thank you. Thank you.