My colleague Tom Friedman thinks we’re screwed.That’s the first thing he told me when recounting his recent trip to China. It’s not just because of the trade war that President Trump is escalating right now. Friedman believes the whole Washington consensus on China — that the country is a hostile adversary — is dangerous and based on an outdated understanding of what China now is. He saw how China’s manufacturing and technology have advanced so far that in many ways it now surpasses the United States’.In this conversation, Friedman walks me through the advancements he saw in some of the most critical fields of the coming decades — including A.I., E.V.s and clean energy. We discuss why he sees the current consensus as dangerous, what a different path might look like and what the United States should do to develop its domestic manufacturing so that we don’t “get steamrolled.”This episode contains strong language.Mentioned:“I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America.” by Thomas L. Friedman“China's overlapping tech-industrial ecosystems” by Kyle ChanGenesis by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie Book Recommendations:The works of Yuval Noah HarariThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Zoe Zongyuan Liu, Kyle Chan and Matt Sheehan. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the main concern regarding the U.S.-China relationship?
And I'm not going to tell you that all the Republicans and Democrats who believe it wanted Trump's trade war specifically. They didn't. But I will tell you that I've been surprised and alarmed for years now by how this new, much more hawkish and angry consensus has hardened, how hard it has become to question.
I get nervous when it comes clear to me that we've chosen a new foreign enemy in Washington and that the politics on both sides no longer really allow for contrary voices or understandings.
And so I've been concerned by the trends in China policy for a while, not because I think China is a pure or good actor, but because I think the politics have aligned around hostility and escalation in a way that can become self-reinforcing. And I worry about it because I think American policy is now outdated. It wants a redo of the 90s or the 2000s. It is focused on its mistakes in the past.
It is out of touch with what China is in the present. One person who I've seen questioning this consensus more and more loudly is my New York Times colleague, Tom Friedman. I talked to him after a recent trip he took to China. And I remember the first thing he said to me. He said, we're screwed. We are getting this wrong. And then he explained why.
And I thought it'd be good for everyone to hear what it was he told me. Not because everyone has to agree with Tom's take on this, but if the consensus politics is leading us where Trump has gone, maybe it's time to hear some voices that are questioning that consensus. As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nytimes.com. Tom Friedman, welcome to the show.
Great to be with you, Ezra.
So you said something in one of your recent columns that struck me, which is that the pandemic was bad for many things. But one of the things it was particularly bad for that is underrated is our ability to understand China.
Why? Well, basically, all the American business executives in China left China during COVID, virtually all of them. And then after COVID, we began this process of decoupling. So you basically had six years with very, very little American presence there. When I was in China last year, I felt like I was the only American in China. You just didn't see any other Americans.
Not tourists, not business people, not nobody. I wrote then that it was like America and China were two elephants looking at each other through a straw. Having just been there two weeks ago, I would say now they're like two elephants looking at each other through a needle. The aperture has just gotten tiny.
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Chapter 2: How did the pandemic affect American understanding of China?
That China wasn't just rising, that what they were doing was stealing from us and building on top of that. You have this quote from Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican influential on foreign affairs, that China can't really innovate. They could just steal from us. So I'm curious how you think that played into it.
Yeah, I can't speak to the espionage. I just don't know. And you get into these kind of Washington conversations with officials where it goes like, if only you knew what I knew, you would be more worried. And my reaction to that is, I wish I knew what you knew because it would put everything more in perspective.
But I also, part of my reaction to that too, Ezra, is that I hope we're doing the same to them. I hope we're spying and conducting whatever we need to do for our national security purposes.
But the notion that they can't innovate, what gives the lie to that, as if you talk to American businesses who operate in China or European businesses who operate in China, what they'll tell you is that we first came here for the market. And now we come here to be close to the innovation.
That we cannot basically be in touch with the cutting edge of our field, particularly in autos, unless you're here. So China realized it could not compete with combustion vehicles with America. And so it took the decision to leapfrog them right to EVs and ultimately autonomous driving cars. It did so by basically having its smartphone companies become car companies.
So when I came to China after COVID, I said, whoa. When I was last here, Xiaomi was a phone company. I came back, they were a car company. When I was here last, Huawei was a phone company. I came back, they were a car company. And so basically they put their cell phones on wheels. And the reason this is important is that when you get into a Didi, Didi's their Uber, and
It is a seamless digital experience from the rest of your life. It syncs up with your cell phone. I rode in a Huawei car when I was just there. I was riding with someone from Huawei. He took out his laptop, pulled down a screen that came out of the ceiling, and his laptop immediately synced with that screen, and he was working in the car. He says, what would you like to see?
Do you want to see anything? I said, yeah. Get me Paul Simon's concert in London's Hyde Park. I'd like to watch that on the way to your campus. It was up in, I'd say, about 30 seconds. The sound, Ezra, you know how you buy cars now every two years and they always say, it's got Dolby surround, yada, yada. I have never in my life heard sound like this in a moving vehicle.
it is just so far ahead of anything I've seen here. Volkswagen, for instance, I met with their China head when I was there. They've got a whole facility there, they call it, in China for China, that unless you're competing with the best, what my friend Jörg Wittke, the head of the European Union Chamber of Commerce calls the China Fitness Club, unless you're in the gym with them,
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Chapter 3: What is the bipartisan consensus on China?
Yeah, because what you see, Ezra, when you're there is the product of 30 years of being in the fitness gym. And it's a particularly Chinese fitness gym. And it kind of works like this. New industry comes along, let's call it solar panels. Every major city in China decides they need a solar panel factory.
And the local government subsidizes it, maybe domestically born, maybe a partnership with a foreign one, maybe a foreign one. And you end up in a very short period of time, I'm making the number up, but with 75 solar panel companies. They then compete like crazy against each other in the fitness gym, and five of them survive.
Those five are so fit that they can then go global at a price and level of innovation that is very hard for a foreign competitor to deal with, which is why China today basically controls the global solar panel market. But what you also don't see is that process of winnowing down from 100 of those solar panel companies to five.
produced a massive explosion of supply chains domestically to feed that industry. Same thing went on with cars. You know, the same thing goes on with robots. And so where you end up five years later is with interlocking set of supply chains that now if you're a young Chinese and say, I just got this idea.
I want to produce a shirt that has a pink polka dot button that can sing the Chinese national anthem backward. Someone will have it for you tomorrow.
So the process you're describing here, the Chinese government identifies solar panels as an industry. They, using a variety of mechanisms, absolutely flood the country with subsidized financing to become a solar panel company. And you get very strange things here.
Like there was an example a couple of years back where, you know, one of the big real estate firms there that was in crisis tried to become an EV firm because then they could get a bunch of finance. Yeah. China absorbs – the Chinese government absorbs a huge amount of waste, failure, and graft, cylindra times a thousand, things we would never accept in this country. Yes.
So a bunch of these firms just pocket money for nothing. A bunch of them fail. Right. But in that, on the other side of that process of failure, waste, graft, you get these very, very potent national champions, they're called, that then the Chinese government puts a huge amount of resources behind. And I want to add one other thing because it speaks to some of the trade fights we're having.
For China to have the money to do this – to not require more efficiency from their own companies and their own investments. Part of the way they're doing it is keeping wages suppressed in their country. Part of the way they're doing it is exporting much more than they consume. Part of the way they're doing it is maintaining a kind of imbalanced economy, highly focused on production.
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Chapter 4: How has China evolved in terms of technology and industry?
They can learn that painlessly or painfully. But my view is they're gonna have to learn that. And so for me, liking China, not liking China, it's just not in my equation. That is the world I think we're going into. I also think we're going into a world where I think of a kind of industrial ecosystem.
So I was born into the late industrial revolution where the ecosystem to thrive as a country was coal, steel, aluminum, combustion engines, and combustion-driven vehicles, and electricity. And you had to be playing in all of those industries to thrive.
I think the world we're going into, the ecosystem to thrive, is going to be robots, electric batteries, artificial intelligence, EVs, electric vehicles, and autonomous driving cars. That ecosystem will be the flywheel that's going to drive everything. And therefore, to me as an American...
It's essential that we play in that ecosystem and that we be able to compete head-to-head with China in that ecosystem. So that's how I'm coming at this problem. I'm not even thinking about Taiwan. I'm not thinking about communism or capitalism. I quoted a Trump official a while back who said China's goal in the world is to spread authoritarian Marxism. Oh my God.
China's got a lot of goals in the world, Ezra, but one of them is not spreading authoritarian Marxism, okay? They're trying to spread Muskism, not Marxism. That's the game they're trying to beat us at. They're trying to beat us at our game, not Karl Marx's game. And we need to understand that and be serious about it. And the last thing I'd say, given those are the industries we need to be in,
This China thing, this country, you can love them or hate them. And believe me, I do both every day. But these are serious people, okay? They're not messing around like you've just seen Donald Trump mess around for the last week. And they don't hire knuckleheads and put them into key positions for the most part. OK, so those are all the biases I'm coming to this story with.
Then I walk into the Washington debate, you know, and it's are you a panda hugger? Are you not a panda hugger? Did you say something nice about China or not nice about China? And. I just, I run away with my hair on fire because it's just not about the world I see us going into. A world I want America to thrive in and a world where I think to thrive, we need to be serious about these issues.
Let me try to steel man what I think happened in the Washington consensus, which is, and I've talked to many Democrats about this, but they would say Tom Friedman is naive. that there was a bill of goods sold. And the bill of goods had a couple parts to it.
One is that if we welcome China into the global trading order, they would trade more, they would get richer, they would consume more, and they would also liberalize. And they didn't do – I mean, they did get richer, but they have kept domestic consumption depressed through a bunch of different policies. And they become more authoritarian under Xi, which you mentioned, but it's a big deal here.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of high tariffs on China?
They say, no, if you really look into it and the way he rules and the kinds of study sessions he makes people go through, that this is very much an ideological expansionist power that The idea of the Thucydides trap becomes very common, right, that there are these two superpowers and there can be only one eventually, and we need to be prepared for that.
And that what we've ultimately been doing here is weakening ourselves and strengthening China. Our industrial base has moved too much to China. We're too dependent on them for supply. And I think this really all comes to a head after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when people see how the dependence on Russian natural gas weakened Europe and the world's response.
And the feeling becomes China's more dangerous than we've given it credit for. It has grown its industrial base at our expense without becoming the sort of good actor, both domestically and in the international political system we were promised.
And we cannot allow ourselves to be in a position in the future where we are in some kind of war or conflict with China, and yet we are looking to them to make all of the things we need to compete with them. And as such, what you need to do is decouple, and you need to understand them as an antagonistic power that we treat as a hostile enemy. That is my account of
Of how the center of gravity changed. And I think what I just told you would be the thing that many Democrats in Congress would tell you, not just Republicans. Yes. What is wrong with it?
Well, I would say I only can speak for myself. I actually supported Trump's tariffs the first time around. In fact, I wrote a column saying Donald Trump is not the American president Americans deserve, but he is the American president China deserve. Mm-hmm. Somebody had to call the game. So I have a lot of sympathy with that view at one level.
And the other thing I would say, Ezra, I will confess something here on your show. Whether I'm writing about China from Washington or whether I'm writing about China from China, I'm always just writing about America. My goal is to use China as my permanent Sputnik, helping people understand what a formidable engine this is, however they got there.
And that if we aren't serious, then we're going to get steamrolled.
Here's one of the things that I think deranges a bit the US debate on China, which is that two things are happening at the same time that we have trouble seeing at the same time. On the one hand, I feel like the conventional wisdom at the end of the Biden administration is China's doing quite badly. They are not escaping the middle income trap.
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Chapter 6: How does China's approach to innovation differ from the U.S.?
The thing that was missed in that is the thing that you're pointing out in some of these columns, that we sort of imagine, because this is how it has worked here, that the sophistication of the economy and what it can create and the living standards that that economy generates for its own people will be very tightly linked.
And so as their living standards have not advanced in the way we thought, I think a view took hold that the Chinese experiment was not working out. At the same time, if you go and look at what they are creating and their factories and their industrial base, they are at the forefront of a series of technologies that are competing with us within months on AI, right?
The AI timelines for the two countries are months apart, if that. And then, as you've mentioned, they're probably ahead of us at this point on batteries, on electric vehicles. Oh, not even close, yeah. And on the ability to spin up highly complex supply chains, right? I guess the question here is how can those two things coexist in this way?
It's a question I ask every trip and did on this one as well. And the answer is a combination of things, partly culture and partly just not understanding how the systems work. As a general rule, not in every case, but as a general rule, if you have an idea to start a company, there's actually not a lot standing in your way. The government's not going to interfere with that.
In fact, it may help you far more than any local or state or national government would do here. If you want to write an op-ed piece condemning Xi Jinping, that'll be the last op-ed piece you write. So those two things are very decoupled there. Not only that, China has a Mandarin tradition, going back a long way.
People who want to work in the government have to take a test, and it's a very meritocratic test. And the product of that is, on the whole, okay, as a generalization, the deep state there actually is pretty good, quite responsive when it comes to backing innovation. It's also very good at arresting you if you get out of line. But that's how these things go together.
So if Ezra does decide he wants to make shirts with that pink polka dot button that can sing the Chinese national anthem backwards, not only can he get that button overnight, but no one will stand in the way. In fact, you may find a lot of sources of capital locally to produce that button.
And at the same time, if you want that button to sing Tiananmen Square in 1989 over and again, you're going to get arrested. But those two things actually exist side by side.
I think people are used to thinking about the pink backpack with a button. I think they're not used to thinking about the dark factory or the new Huawei campus. Yeah. What is a dark factory and what is it like to be in one? And what was that Huawei campus that you went to like and what did you take away from that experience?
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Chapter 7: What role does espionage play in U.S.-China relations?
and says, we don't do EVs here. EVs are for girly men. We only do manly industries. Well, fuck that, okay? Because look what happens now to Ford. So you say, we want to bring this here. I don't want to have my kids screwing in parts, okay, into cars. I want them designing, okay, investing in and inventing the next generation of EVs. But let's go back to that ecosystem I talked about, Ezra.
EVs, robots, autonomous cars, batteries, clean energy. If you say, oh, we're not to do the EV part. Before I came over here, I read Trump wants to reopen coal plants, right? And he loves Drill Baby Drill. Okay, so it doesn't make any sense. You're building a wall against China. Great, I'm all for it, but what are you doing behind the wall?
So we catch up, you're taking your own companies out and shooting them in the back if they're not right-wing woke. What's the project, what's the Trump administration's focus on? How many billions can we take away from American universities of their research funds to punish them for DEI strategies? Now I'm here not to advocate DEI, but if I had a limited time in the world right now,
I sure wouldn't be focused on that. I'd be focused on doubling down on the research capacity of these universities. I'd be doubling down on NIH. What are they doing? They're cutting the budgets of our crown gem research facilities. So it's all just bullshit. They're not serious people. They're clowns.
But you are not all for building a wall with China. You're making an argument that even among Democrats, I think, is somewhat more subversive right now, which is that if you were a serious person, you would do with China what we did with Japan in the 90s, which is, by the way, when Donald Trump came up with all of his trade theories.
This guy's had the same opinions on everything for decades and decades now. What we did with Japan is we brought in their car companies here and we learned from them. What China did with us was they brought in our manufacturers and they learned from them.
And what you are saying is something that if you take seriously how good China has gotten at manufacturing, then what you would try to do is begin bringing in its factories here as the condition of access to our market to learn from them.
Exactly. You should do 50-50 joint ventures with Chame. You can build your cars here, 50-50 joint venture, number one and number two. You have to build your supply chain here as well. So you're not going to just bring all the parts in, you know, from China. You've got to build the supply chain and the factory here, joint owned exactly here. what you did to us.
I argued for this before with Huawei. And Huawei has a very dodgy past. And they've been involved in all kinds of lawsuits, you know, with different companies over IP. So what I said at one point was I would say to Huawei, here's the deal. We're going to let you wire Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. You can sell your technology in those three states. We're going to watch you for three years.
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Chapter 8: What future challenges do the U.S. and China face together?
We went to the design lab, watched a designer doing a 3D model of one of their new cars, putting it in different contexts, desert, rainforest, beach, different weather conditions. And we asked him, what software are you using? We thought it was just some traditional CAD design. He said, it's open source AI software. 3D design tool.
He said what used to take him three months, he now does in three hours. Three months to three hours. Because they have such a digital connected system, you just take that hypodermic needle, fill it with AI, and inject it into it, and it can optimize so many things. And it's for all these reasons that I'm worried about the bifurcated world. I'm worried about that.
That world is not going to be at all stable or at all prosperous in anywhere near the last 40 years. And so if I have a choice, my choice is to argue, and I don't care if I'm the only one arguing for it, that we and China are are going to have to get together and actually be the partners that create an architecture for this.
Otherwise, we're going to just keep racing each other in some kind of crazy AI version of nuclear, probably bankrupt ourselves in doing it. And this gets to my gut feeling about the whole world we're going into once we get to AGI, Ezra, which is that I think to manage this world, climate,
AI and disorder, we are going to have to learn to collaborate as a species to a degree that we have never collaborated before. I am a big believer in my friend Dov Seidman's argument that interdependence is no longer our choice, it's our condition. The only question is, will we have healthy interdependencies or unhealthy interdependencies?
But we are going to rise together or we're going to fall together. But baby, whatever we're doing, we're doing it together. That is my view.
I don't know if that's true, though. I mean, look, you're much more of a student of international relations and history than I am. But countries can rise and fall separately. Superpowers decline and others rise. You know, Japan was going to be the next great power. Now it's an aging society that is in much more trouble.
One of the ways of thinking about this that has been on my mind watching the Trump administration rise light the confidence the rest of the world has had in America on fire and call it greatness, is this idea that China's strength is manufacturing and America's strength, which we deride, is financial. One of the lessons of all history is he who controls the financing controls the world.
And what the Trump administration, I think, thinks it's doing is is taking back manufacturing from China. I don't think it's going to do it. But what they are definitely going to do, I think, is make it possible for China to take financial share from us. Because people are not going to trust us anymore.
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