And id like to first introduce our panelists including myself. Doctor Michael Pillsbury is one of the foremost china experts in the world. Hes currently a senior fellow and director of the chinese strategy at the hudson institution. Hes a distinguished defense and policy advisor, former highranking governorofficial and author of numerous books and reports on china. I can tell you definitively that mike has really changed the us militarys thinking back some number of years ago he was sent to china to collect Chinese Military writings and he was the First American official who revealed that what the chinese were telling themselves militarily behind the scenes was quite different than what they were saying in public about how they wanted to be friends with the world and it really had a tremendous impact on understanding the militaries view of the peoples republic ofchina. His book is a landmark book. His most recent mark is focused hundred year map marathon, chinas hundred year strategy to replace america as a global superpower. This book is a fascinating look and its one of the only places in public where you will findinformation about chinese defectors. People from within the Chinese Communist party system who revealed whats going on there. Before mike speaks i want to introduce general Robert Spalding retired of the u. S. Air force. Hes a seniorfellow at the Hudson Institute and he too is a distinguished china expert. He spent time as a bomber pilot and also has been inside of china as a defense attachc, being chased and tracking down the insidestory of china. His most recent book is called stealth war how china took over while americas elite slept. A little bit about myself. As was mentioned im National Security correspondent for the Washington Times, author of eight books. My most recent book is called seating the sky, inside, communist chinas drive for global supremacy and its a follow on to a book i wrote in 2020 years ago called the china threat and as a result of that ive gained quite a reputation. Back in 2006, xinoa described me as the greatest chinese antichinese activist in the world. Im very much proChinese People opposed to the communist party system in china. With that lets begin to our first panelist doctor Michael Pillsbury. Thank you bill. I thought id begin by revealing a new publication thats going to come out in about 2 weeks from the Hudson Institute. Youll be able toget it online. Its called a guide to the Trump Administrations china policy statements. And it has a link to everyone of about 200 statements or interviews or tweets by President Trump and the top members of his team. The reason i put this together as i believe theres been a lot of misunderstanding and the left has also attacked President Trumps time china policy in many ways to distort what hes done and what his team has said and done over the last 3 and a half years. As we begin the next hundred days of the Election Campaign i think were goingto hear more of this , more attacks on the president either that hes been who too soft on china. The buying team has already run several commercials where they imply that President Trump is soft on china and Vice President joe biden comes on and says if id been president i would have demanded xi jinping immediately tell us what happened in wuhan with the chinas the virus and ill save you against President Trump. I believe the president s policy towards china, i call it the three cs. Hes been clear, cohesive and cooperative so if you go through the documents which are organized according to subject matter although ive done a special section just for the president s tweets and his spontaneous interviews youll agree with me and ill give you some examples to make sure you understand the range of debate among conservatives on china is actually very wide. Not altogether clear where were going with china policy over the last three decades or whats going to happen in the next two decades. Ill give you one example. A conservative reporter who wrote a book called jesus in beijing. Came out about 10 years ago. He forecast christianity will take over china and the leading largest nation in the world with christians will be china. Totally wrong. He misunderstood some trends. Its a nice effort, its a positive thought. Completely false. Another book called the coming collapse of china. Vice president pence addressed this directly. The coming collapse of china for many months was the number one book in america on china. The coming collapse of china. Very popular author. I like him very much. His name is gordon chang. I said gordon, dont. The year china will collapse. Leave some flexibility. No, its going to be 2012 and he put 2012 in the book. The book came out in 2001. Vice president pence said since 2001 chinas gdp, chinas economic strength has grown by howmuch . 10 times. Was it coming collapse . No. So in 2012 Foreign Policy magazine asked gordon give us an article. When is china going to collapse . The feeling that china is going to collapse is very important because that means its not going to be a problem very long so gordon wrote the article. He said give us when it will collapse. I would have said general spalding, i dont know, could have said 2050 or who knows and gordon wrote 2013. One more year. This point of view infects a lot of thinking about china so looking at the Trump Administrations statements you begin to get an idea of what the president is saying. Number one, hes said at least 10 times, i wont repeat it 10 times but i want to make sure Everybody Knows hes either tweeted or said this. 10 times. If Hillary Clinton had won the election china would be surpassing us now. Thats extremely important. The president and his team see china as coming close to us. The rate of economic growth, their military growth and other indicators are not to be trifled with and thought of as this is an easy challenge. I want to mention my own book. I made some mistakes throughout my career. I was one of the original panda huggers. I thought china would align with us notonly against the soviet union but help us in the world as a whole. President next and thought that and bill in a recently declassified memorandum president nixon tells chairman mao and the premier, we need you to bear more of the burden of global governance. We need china to have more armaments so we can have less. Thats 1972. See how this thinking as consequences over the years . I very much believed that myself. So when you turn back to the Trump Administrations statements, one of the points theyre making is the scale of the challenge. This is not panama or even venezuela. This is not a smallcountry were dealing with. Nuclear weapons, a serious navy but most important of all a growth rate averaging more than 10 percent for 35 years and it now looks like, nobody has an exact number. It looks Like Technology theft was one part of that rapid growth but there were two otherparts that are very important for what we do next. Number one was american capital. We seem to have been the largest investor in china or 30 years. And no one seems to know how to undo that. Theres not even an exact number. Some people think its several trillion. Several trillion us dollars invested in china. Companies, private equity, general spalding begins his wonderful book with a story. He puts in the grants, wants to write a paper, hes fresh out ofthe air force and the grants turned down. He tells the story in the first few pages. The think tank president says we cant fund your projects. General spalding looks at the list of members of the board. Correct me if im wrong. Billionaires, various people whove made money from china. This is an enormous problem. If we arein some sense influenceddeeply about capital for china, how are we going to undo that . Its going to take legislation which leads to my second point about where chinas growth came from. Technology, restricting us capital, restricting us investmentstakes legislation. Ive counted more than 80 current examples of bills introduced by congressman or senators to impose costs on china. Including being able to sue china legally for damages for the china virus. Generally speaking all this legislation attracts four or six cosponsors. I was a Senate Staffer for 10 years. I know how to count. I know when senators cared about something they would tell staff come find me cosponsors. When i introduced this bill i want 50 cosponsors and if you want a raise next year doctor pillsbury i want 50 cosponsors for my legislation. These bills are being introduced sometimes with zero cosponsors other than the one who drafted and theyre going nowhere. There are no hearings. The leadership doesnt put them up for a vote. So were in deep trouble. Senators and congressmen come on television, they come on fox news. They see an audience of 4 million people. The host more and more the hosts are saying senator, how is your bill doing . Howmany cosponsors have you got . Thats extremely constructive that people dont get away with what is called sometimes virtue signaling. I dont like china, i want to stop them somehow, heres my bill. I wash my hands and work on something else. Thats another thing the chinese are laughing at us. I was last in china in august. Lots of people in chinahave phds from american universities and now advised the Chinese Government or theyre in it. Xi jinpings daughter, harvard graduate. They understand our system extremely well. My lastpoint would be how our american influenced operations inside china . To our ambassadors to china always speak mandarin fluently . Theres two who are somewhat good but i wouldnt call them Television Show fluent, neither with day. How about our programs inside china . Theyre blocked, theyre jammed. How about our magazines being passed out by usia . No more usia, no more magazine. If we made a list of what china does with influence operations inside the United States and said id like to do that inside china, it would be very difficult not to mention and by the way, some senators have proposed this. What happened to the legislation . Like i said, instead, it goes nowhere. It stays alive on fox news, ive got a plan and then nothing happens. I havent had time to promote my own book hundred year marathon but basically its a history based on declassified documents of how we got here. How nacve and delusional american president s and american policymakers including myself got here. And the book has now sold more than200,000 copies. Its been translated into eight languages, all of chinas neighbors. Its a bestseller so this is my challenge for general spalding, i read in a tweet his book has sold 30,000 copies so im six times more but that doesnt mean the quality of my book is higher. Maybe his book is better. Not to mention our moderator bills book, i dont know the sales figures but i hate to be delivering bad news but it seems to me we are in for a long kind of cold war with china. This is just the early phases and so far President Trump has turned things around. Its possible. Hes got a successful formula but we are a long way to go before china becomes the kind of china that we all thought would happen before. Hows thatfor an Opening Statements bill . I would point out you mentioned legislation. All the best things that have been done regarding china have been in legislations because policies can be changed but if you look at the record, theres the taiwan relations act which was passed basically after the us recognized beijing diplomatically. Theres also the tenement sanctions which remain in place. And the military power report so its important to codify these things and i think were beginning to see that with the Trump Administration. Lets turn out to general spalding for your remarks. Thank you bill. So its an interesting thing that Michael Pillsbury talks about. His book was the first one i read when i got to the pentagon in 2014 and what i would tell people is that just go read the concluding chapter and you get an understanding of a synopsis of what he was trying to say and essentially it was that we had bent over backwards to help the Chinese Communist party grow into the power that it already is. When i got to the pentagon in 2014 i was very much, what i would say a panda hugger. And in fact, Michael Pillsbury taught me how to be what he would now say a superhot. But i dont sell myself to be hawkish. I really focus on defending the american people, the american way of life. The constitution and in fact you look at in the current National Security strategy in addition to being clear, concise and comprehensive it is about how we turnthings around. And while its been noted and lauded it hasnt been widely understood and my book still war is about the background and context behind the National Security strategy and whatthe Trump Administration is attempting to do. If you want to know about how successful the president s Foreign Policy has been i would refer you to the uk decision to reverse its decision with regards to allowing huawei to build its 5g network. The media would have you believe that decision was made overnight or maybe over a couple of months during this year as a result of the coronavirus but in fact it really demonstrates the power of the diplomatic efforts undertaken by the department of state and the National Security council beginning in the first 1 45 thousand 18 after theNational Security strategy was released. Diplomatic effort is something that we described in the National Security council in 2017 as forging a new consensus. And really before you can address any problems or have a plan or have astrategy you really need to understand the problem. Though the main problem we were addressing was the inability of the United States to get its interests promoted within International Institutions and this lack of geopoliticalpower in those institutions. And the primary reason was because most of the nations in those institutions were beginning to look to china and chinas model, its economic and political and social model as more beneficial to its furthering their own interests and being aligned with the american view of the world. About democracy, human rights, civil liberties, rule of law and freetrade. And the fact that the United States needed to forge a new consensus similar to the western consensus that sought to really bring democracy together again in a very tight relationship economically, financially, through trade and information to match its already strong militaryalliances. And so that decision by the uk is emblematic of how successful that initiative and diplomacy has been. But weve also gotten a glimpse of chinas response to that Diplomatic Initiative through the coronavirus and the aftermath. With regard to the coronavirus many people talk about what is the origin of the virus . And i say disregard that. Really were not going to know because were not goingto be able to get investigators into china , into the lab to talk to the researchers that were working there to understand the line of effort of the research. To understand what happened. Was there any, even any relation between the lab and the coronavirus . Thats not something were going to know. But what we can know with certainty is that the Chinese Communist party presided over the spread of the virus and it wasnt that they accidentally presided over the spread of the virus or it was a manifestation or secondary effect of its institution. It was that they directly spread the virus. On january 7, xi jinping says hes in charge of the wuhan crisis. On 13 january theres reports about human to human transition that come out in china and in fact on 14 january the World Health Organization to about limited human to human transmission. What was going on during this critical time during 7 january when xi jinping was in charge ofthe crisis and 23 january when they shut down wuhan . What was happening is that not only was the Chinese Communist party putting pressure on the World Health Organization not to discuss human to human transmission, it was also locking down the spread of that information within china. And in fact at the same time, they were locking down ppe and masks in china and locking down masks outside of chinathrough their proxies. So over the course of a couple of weeks they began to turn into a net importer of masks where they had previously been a net exporter of ppe and masks. At the same time they shut down Domestic Travel from the wuhan allowed International Travel to go forth. So this essentially has a net effect of putting them into the lead position with regard to the spread of the pandemic. They knew it was going to impact the Chinese Society but they wanted to make sure it impacted other societies as well and that they had the means to really profit fromit and to have advantage from. So what were se