美中全球议题对话项目

这次采访是用英语进行的。

Eleanor M. Albert: Today we are joined by Shanshan Mei and Dennis Wilder. Shanshan Mei is a political scientist at RAND specializing in Chinese defense policy and Indo‑Pacific security. She previously served as special assistant to the 22nd chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, was a member of the Secretary of the Air Force Advisory Group, and advised commanders of Pacific Air Forces on strategic competition with China. She has also taught at the Air War College.

Dennis Wilder is a senior fellow for the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, where he previously served as the managing director. Wilder holds a B.A. from Kalamazoo College and an M.S. in foreign service from Georgetown University.

Shanshan, Dennis, welcome to the show!

Dennis Wilder: Thank you. Great to be here.

Shanshan Mei: Thanks for having me.

Eleanor M. Albert: We're here today to talk about the state of the PRC's [People’s Republic of China] military. Before we get a little bit into the deeper conversation, we have to start with some news as it relates to this recent purge, particularly of Zhang Youxia, who was a vice chair of the Central Military Commission, and he was just placed under investigation. If you had to speculate some of the reasoning behind the move, were you surprised by it? Shanshan Mei: What do you make of it?

Shanshan Mei: This almost feels like the emperor-has-no-clothes moment because, as people who follow the PLA or follow China's military modernization over the past two, three decades, one general observation is that the PLA is becoming stronger. The modernization has been going well despite some setbacks and different issues, but overall, the trendline is that the PLA is getting more modern. They're becoming more combat-ready, and they have all these fancy missiles, fancy weapon systems and all sorts of positive news. But this incident definitely caught me by surprise. I assume many China observers and PLA observers were probably shocked by this breaking news.

The reason why I say it's showing us some of the huge vulnerabilities is that no matter what is the reason—I don't want to speculate because I really don't know—but no matter what the reason, the fact that Chairman Xi Jinping has to make a move and make an announcement very publicly to announce that “my number-one uniformed military leader is now under investigation for some wrongdoing,” something is wrong. Something is wrong with the PLA leadership; something is wrong with the PLA's overall image. That is my key takeaway: the military is far from being all good.

Eleanor M. Albert: This comes across as a major housekeeping issue that your number-one person has done something so egregious. I'm curious about Zhang Youxia's background. He has been the face of the military for a long time under Xi Jinping. What is his background? How did he rise through the ranks?

Dennis Wilder: I wrote a top-secret report for the president of the United States in 1984 that highlighted the fact that he was one of the young officers that Deng Xiaoping tested on the Vietnamese border. This was a[n] unknown war to many people. This was after the '79 invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese continued in what was called the Battle of 1,000 Thorns at the time. I loved that and made it the title of my paper.

They decided that they needed to keep pressure on the Vietnamese. In battles that resembled Pork Chop Hill in the Korean War, the Vietnamese and the Chinese would fight over these hilltops in hand-to-hand combat, terribly expensive in terms of casualties, but what Deng Xiaoping was doing was finding the new generation of leaders for the PLA. Units were rotated in and then they would evaluate the officers. Zhang Youxia was one of those young officers. He was a deputy division commander in the 14th Group Army. He was publicized as a hero.

We at the CIA started following him all the way back in 1984. We knew that he was an up-and-comer. The other thing was, he is the son of a revolutionary leader who frankly was on par with Xi Jinping's father. They were political commissar and commander in the same unit in the Northwest Field Army. So Zhang Youxia has had an illustrious PLA career. He has served in many different commands. He served in equipment procurement and other areas of the PLA. He was the top uniform general, a war hero, looked up to by many, many officers within the PLA. That is why this is bizarre.

If I can add one very big curiosity for me is it would've been so easy, with Zhang Youxia already being in his 70s, for Xi Jinping to simply retire him. He could have had a political illness, for example, which is not uncommon in communist countries. So the big question is, why do you have to publicly humiliate this man? What is the necessity that Xi Jinping sees in making sure that the whole PLA knows that this man was disloyal? The key line for me on this was that he had violated the chairman responsibility system in the PLA. That is a charge of disloyalty to Xi Jinping personally. What would lead that kind of charge? As was said earlier, we just don't know. This is really a total black box.

Shanshan Mei: I do want to add two things related to Zhang Youxia. One is that, as Dennis mentioned, no doubt, Zhang Youxia served the role as a war hero and he literally was, leading his small unit and guarding one of the mountaintops. In many ways, we can assume that he actually witnessed or was actually willing to kill and risk himself being killed, in many ways is being tested by real combat. But I think also that gave him a perspective—as many American soldiers, airmen, sailors know—that in real combat, life and death, this is real. This is not just propaganda; this is not some movie. This is real. I think that is a very important perspective that Zhang Youxia has. I assume that he has been talking about it and trying to propagate or preach that spirit of combat, but also at the same time about the brutality of war.

That may have represented people like Zhang Youxia and his affiliates', proteges' perspective, including General Liu Zhenli. Liu is about, what, 13 years younger or junior than Zhang? They probably have not really served together, but publicly available information also tells us that Liu Zhenli also was involved in the Sino-Vietnamese border skirmishes during the 1980s.

That gave me a sense of these two men that are being investigated represent sort of an ideal military man, which is a very rare commodity in today's PLA. You just don't have people like that. This really not answers the question about the mystery of why Xi Jinping needs to publicly humiliate them in a way that he chose to do almost intentionally to send certain messages to his own troops, perhaps also to the entire Communist Party political establishments, but also to the world. This adds to the layers of mystery of the situation.

I do also want to address the issue of the CMC chairman responsibility system that Dennis raised. The wording we saw in the editorial published by the PLA Daily a day after they announced the investigation, including one line that says that Zhang and Liu Zhenli had trampled upon and undermined the CMC chairman responsibility system. I actually went back to the October editorial that the Chinese Communist Party officially published on PLA Daily, about the other nine PLA military members that were either expelled or probed. Similar wording was used in the previous editorial, except that this one for Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, they added one more Chinese character, trampled upon, versus just saying undermined.

These words are very carefully crafted. I don't want to overread or over-interpret into these words, but in many ways, adding those “trampled upon” is obviously purposeful. I can see that, number one, because Zhang Youxia's stature. He is the number-one uniformed leader, but when you use words like trampled upon, you are really showing someone is demonstrating some sort of a defiance over something. Again, interestingly, at the time of the editorial was published, there were only a handful of men left on the CMC. As of today, I think Xi Jinping is sitting on top, but also Zhang Youxia, Liu Zhenli, and Zhang Shengmin, they were still there because they were being investigated. They were not officially removed, but we know what's most likely going to happen.

This is very personal. Again, as Dennis suggested, that almost Xi Jinping is trying to say, "You have trampled upon my authority." Now, for what? We don't know. We may never know, but something is definitely personal there.

On the CMC chairman responsibility system, I do want to add also, it's a very important political item that we should take it quite seriously because as we read the PRC's 1982 Constitution, that was when [the] CMC chairman responsibility system was first written into the Constitution, but curiously and interestingly, Xi Jinping was the one who added this into the Communist Party's Constitution in 2016, I believe. There's some Chinese explanations for that. They were saying, "Oh, this is Xi Jinping's effort to align the party constitution with our PRC constitution," but some also said “this is absolutely necessary because this is important for us to, again, align the party and the state.” As we can see, this fits in perfectly under Xi Jinping's agenda that he's really increasingly consolidate his own power, but also the Communist Party's leading role.

Dennis Wilder: What I want to point out is what you have just heard is what we refer to as Pekingology. There are very few people today, and most of the commentators [that] have written on this subject do not have that skill. Shanshan grew up in the system. She has command of the Chinese language in a way that I will never have. She understands the fact that every word counts in Chinese party language. The fact that they change one character and that she can find meaning in that is exactly what analysts and our students at Georgetown need to be doing.

I wanted to highlight that because there is a great concern today that we are losing that, that far too few Americans really study Chinese, really study Chinese propaganda and use of media. People like Shanshan are real treasure. Unfortunately, we have far too few of them in our intelligence community and in our think tanks.

Eleanor M. Albert: I also think it's super important because we're in a time that, politically, I think a lot of students have concerns. They don't want to be too close because it might affect their careers down the road. The reality is if we don't have deep knowledge, how to understand China, then our country's intelligence, and even just analytical capability in trying to navigate in the world, will be weakened because we won't have that deep knowledge.

With this investigation, this leaves only one member of the 20th Military Commission intact. The person remaining is Zhang Shengmin. What do we know about him and the role that he now plays in the military?

Shanshan Mei: Zhang Shengmin, to us PLA analysts, he is we call a political commissar, a political type. When we say that, really we're saying his entire career, he was in the political officer track, not a commanding officer track. These are some PLA jargons. We're saying that as the Communist Party's armed wing, very similar to the former Soviet Union's Red Army in many ways, Zhang was trained and excelled in his career field as a political officer—not to dismiss their role, it's very important actually in the PLA—but the political officer's role generally involves personnel issues, promotions, morale issues, but most importantly, the indoctrination of the Communist Party's ideology and quite a wide range of tasks.

Also, Zhang Shengmin, his entire career was spent in the PLA's second artillery. Now we know it as the rocket force, but that matters a little less perhaps than the fact that his job was in the discipline inspection and political affairs, which makes it a little bit curious as of right now if you look at the CMC. I sometimes wonder what is a CMC meeting looks like today? Is it Xi Jinping sitting there giving Zhang Shengmin orders? Or perhaps those meetings are not happening now?

One last thing I want to add about Zhang Shengmin is perhaps also, what is his role in the investigation of Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli and others? Again, I don't know, but I would assume he likely played a role, perhaps, given that he still remains in the seat and he was having the portfolio of discipline inspections. But, I also have serious doubts about that, given how the PLA functions and Zhang Shengmin is one of their own. I don't know if Xi had that kind of trust in him.

Eleanor M. Albert: Interesting. Dennis, any thoughts on Zhang Shengmin?

Dennis Wilder: Another of the big questions for me in this situation is, has Xi Jinping, before he took this action, worked out a list of new candidates? Has he identified officers that he thinks are loyal to him, or not?

One group I'm looking at closely are officers he has sent to Russia in the last few years to go for a year or two to Russian military academies. Obviously those generals would learn about modern warfare on the Ukraine border, so that may be a group that he picks from. It may also be that he turns to the air force and navy because the army has failed him. Again, it's a question of, has he moved precipitously here or does he have a real plan?

The one thing that leads me to believe he may not be able to do this easily is the fact that he hasn't been able to pick a foreign minister. That job has been vacant for quite some time. Wang Yi has had to do two jobs. The question becomes, is Xi Jinping, in his authoritarian overreach, now running out of people who he thinks he can trust? Again, we really don't have the answer.

Shanshan Mei: On that point, if you just follow the PLA's hierarchy, you go to the next echelon of potential commanders who had joint experience and the stature and the degree of proficiency in skills that they need to do this job. I look at the theater command levels, and then you look at the five theater commands and you look at their commanding officers and their political commissars. What interests me is the Southern Theater Command. When we think about the Southern Theater Command, we're thinking about the vast South China Sea, we're thinking about China's southern border, and then you realize, that commanding officer is actually a PLA army officer…

To Dennis' earlier point about maybe he now doesn't trust enough of the army, given Zhang Youxia's huge influence, and Liu Zhenli's influence, of course, then will he really turn to air force and navy to find his loyal followers? I don't know. On paper, when you really look closely of the personnel as of today in 2026 of senior leaders of the PLA, you realize the army remains a dominating force. That's very natural just given how big the PLA is and also given the land borders and all issues related and also the historic army dominance of the PLA. Change happens very slowly.

Despite all the talk about [the] PLA getting better at joint operations, joint is difficult. Even for the U.S. military, this is very difficult. Despite we've practiced that, trained for it and exercised that for so many years, it is still difficult. For the PLA, without real combat testing, and we've seen some pretty impressive improvement, but I think the progress remains limited. So then you really need modern commanders to lead a modernizing military. I just don't really think Xi Jinping has a lot of choice but to rely on some army officers, a mix of maybe air force and navy.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's really important and gets to my question in terms of thinking about the domestic implications of the status of the leadership of the PLA. You mentioned that the military has been modernizing under the reforms of Xi, at least on the surface level, as far as we can tell, but if you don't have new generations of personnel who have combat experience… Where do you go from here in terms of what that next generation of leadership looks like?

I also think the bigger question ends up being what Xi cares about here more. Do we care about the readiness and effectiveness of the military, or does he care about the party having a stronghold over the military? What is the current relationship between the party and the military? I know that technically the PLA is the military branch of the party, but how does that live in practice, and then how has that maybe changed under Xi?

Dennis Wilder: My favorite theoretical framework is something that people have labeled conditional compliance within the military. I can't remember who coined this phrase, but the notion that the army is subordinate to the party, obviously, but the PLA also brought the party to power. So the relationship is complicated between the two organizations. They are the two pillars of Chinese communism. Over the years, as I have studied the PLA, there are moments when the PLA demands of the party.

For example, when Zhu Rongji and others told the military, "You may no longer engage in private enterprise," at that point in time, the PLA was running hotels; they were using their motor transport for private activities. In fact, at one point, I will tell you, I got a satellite photo from one of my analysts that showed 4,000 Hondas on an airfield. These were being smuggled into China and sold by the military. Zhu Rongji got very angry because the military was importing ore from Australia without the knowledge of the Chinese leadership.

So they cracked down on the military, but the military officers basically said, "If you're going to do this, where's the budget?" You can see a direct correlation between the divestment by the military of their private enterprises and dramatic increases in the military budget. That is a case where the military internally, without any public display, said to the Chinese government, "We demand some things."

This is very complicated, and of course it goes on behind closed doors. In the United States, when the military wants to advocate, they leak things to the press. This is a tried-and-true tradition in the United States. That isn't the way it happens in China. So when you ask, how does this change the army-party relationship? Eleanor, I have to admit that I'm not even sure I can describe today's party-army relationship enough to say how it's changed. This is a very subtle, complex thing between military leaders and civilian leaders in China. Remember that Zhang Youxia, by the way—we tend to forget this—was a Politburo member. He wasn't just a military figure, he was also a member of the party central leadership, which gives him an additional voice within the system, or he had within the system.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. Shanshan, anything you want to add?

Shanshan Mei: I wanted to mention the more rebellious side of the PLA that I think is also interesting to know and also important for us to be cognizant of. For instance, in the, a PLA Air Force officer, General Liu Yazhou, he was, again, also purged. General Liu Yazhou was jailed, punished by the PLA for being outspoken and writing about or advocating about the nationalization of the PLA (or jundui guojiahua) in a way, meaning that they want the PLA become more like U.S. military, or any other Western military, to serve the interest of the country or the state rather than just the party.

To be honest, most of the time the Communist Party represents the PRC's interest, of course, as the vanguard party of the state, but also there are times that people would challenge and say maintaining the Communist Party's regime security is not exactly the same as promoting the national interest of the PRC and the Chinese people. Generals like Liu Yazhou was known as very outspoken and very patriotic. In fact, that's a long lineage of tradition in Chinese intellectual history people would say a true loyalist to the nationalist ideal is the one who speak truth to power. But that has become a big no-no and taboo in China when you talk about nationalizing the military.

The reason why I bring this up is trying to complete the picture, as complete as possible, to add that there were different strands of thoughts within the PLA. But also different aspects of the party-military relationship. That the party is corrupted, as we know, and there are many works actually talking about how corrupt the PLA is, or really how corrupt the Communist Party's system is, not just the military. The entire apparatus is built that way. When you have a top-down system, it is very difficult to truly eradicate corruption.

But there are good ones. I guess that's what I meant. In fact, in my past career, I had some interactions with some senior-level PLA leadership, and my impression at a personal level, albeit very limited and oftentimes supposed to be very staged, yet I was exposed to some true leadership characters that we often see in American generals, admirals, and flag officers, but you see more similarities sometimes when you actually interact with them as human beings. They're not always reading and just repeating the party's indoctrination. I hope that completes our picture.

Eleanor M. Albert: We've talked about the news; we've talked about personnel and the relationship between the party and the military. I want to talk now about more concrete military posture and how there might be some international implications for this. How do you assess the strength of China's military now in 2026, and what are those national security priorities that it prepares for?

Shanshan Mei: I don't think they're invading Taiwan tomorrow or maybe next week, but that being said, the unification agenda—that's on everyone's mind—has not changed. By all means, the existence for the People's Liberation Army is to finish this unfinished civil war, and Taiwan is almost the fundamental reason why the PLA exists, if I exaggerate a little bit. That is to say, the end goal of achieving unification with Taiwan from China's perspective has not changed.

Also, to be fair, in terms of hardware modernization upgrades and all the things that happened over the past 20 years, despite occasional scandals coming out of the processes, China's hardware has improved and the arsenal has been expanded and the troops have been trained better. It's hard to measure, but things have been ongoing for a while, and I don't think that shakeup at the very top will really fundamentally change the direction of the military modernization process.

Eleanor M. Albert: I just wanted to ask a quick question. You framed the role of the PLA as having this reunification agenda as being its lifeblood. In some respects, one could argue that you would just want to prepare for it forever, but not actually achieve it, because once you achieve it, does that then mean that the PLA has to have a new, defining, motivating entity?

Shanshan Mei: It's an important point because, in fact, all deadlines in Communist Party's language can change. This also is, I think, one of the advantages of the Chinese language because the language itself is so vague. I sometimes say Chinese language is made for poetry, but English language is made for science. These are different things. Sometimes Westerners, when we interpret the Chinese speeches, writings, and texts, we tend to use or look at it through the Western lens. We like black and white. We like math because it is so accurate and tells us, "Okay, is that the date you're going to go to invade?" Well, I don't think any military in the world would tell you that is the date I'm going to go.

For Chinese, all the setup of 100 years, that centenary goals, objectives, and 50 years achieving certain status and things like that, the 2035, 2049, these things, in my view, are moving targets because they can always justify. It's just like the five-year plans. Have we ever heard that the Communist Party come out and tell you, "I'm very sorry that we have not achieved the goals that we set out five years ago"? It's always check, check, check. Reality on the ground is always more complex, and then you will see some very subtle ways of the communist propaganda to walk things back and keep working on it.

This is my way to address your observation about, are they going to just forever strive for a goal so that they could keep getting the resources that they needed, keep their mandate, and also the reason, motivation, all things; it's very reasonable, actually. That observation is very reasonable.

I do want to also mention that it's also very important to acknowledge that the PLA's existence or the core missions, Taiwan obviously is one of it, but also at the same time, the fundamental role of the PLA, just like all military in the world, is homeland defense, is preserving China's sovereignty and territory integrity, and that has not changed and will not change. Taiwan is important piece of that puzzle, but if you look at China's neighborhood, China does not live in a very happy, comfortable, peaceful neighborhood. You've got the Korean Peninsula, you've got the South China Sea, you then look at the land border, you have the China-India border skirmish, and you also have China-Inner Mongolia, China-Russia, all sorts of things that would worry a PLA commander, I think, more so than sometimes when we look at them from outside.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. Dennis, your thoughts?

Dennis Wilder: I often remind my students that the United States lives in a particularly unbelievably advantageous position. We have two big oceans separating us from foreign powers. We have Canadian neighbors who, in my view, could not be nicer people and have no land army to speak of. We have Mexican neighbors who have to get their internal house in order. We live in a pretty good neighborhood, but as was just said, the Chinese, if you look geographically, they have huge land borders, and the PLA’s primary mission is to guard those borders. The responsibilities of the PLA are huge in this regard.

One issue I think you were trying to get to, Eleanor, that I want to address, and here we've been very hard on Xi Jinping, but maybe I'll say something positive. It is possible that one of the reasons he wants to clean out the command structure of the PLA is that people like Zhang Youxia, I doubt that if you sat Zhang Youxia down at a computer, he would know what to do with it, to be very frank with you. I think there is this old blood in the PLA that is not conversant in modern warfare, is not conversant in joint
operations.

In some ways, cleaning out the old guard and finding younger, more tech-savvy commanders—remember that a lot of the old guard really didn't have very good educations, whereas the younger officers have had better educations—it is possible that at the end of the day, we will have a better PLA out of all of this, one that has a command structure that is more modern, that understands twenty-first century warfare. I'm not one who wants to commit to the idea that the PLA will now fall into some sort of disarray. It could be quite the opposite.

Shanshan Mei: That's a very important point.  I t reminds me of some sort of theory that I was developing. When we look at and analyze the PLA's modernization process and you read the PLA Daily every day and watch as much PLA TV as you can, you then realize every single episode and articles often generally talking about “we're fielding new modern equipment,” “we have a new type of missile,” “we have a new jet that we need to train our people to fly, to maintain.” But then you realize, it is actually easier to pour money and buy stuff. Upgrading your hardware is a lot easier than actually training and preparing your people to use them, maintain them and do them, and fly them well.

That gets to my little theory, but Dennis already alluded to that point, is how does the PLA find a shortcut to upgrade their leadership? Because you can buy equipment, things like that could happen within one generation, perhaps just a decade or so, I guess that's what I meant by one generation. But when you want to upgrade your leadership, if you follow the current PLA leadership transition and retirement and all sorts of personnel policies, they won't be able to really upgrade and bring young blood in as fast as they would have wanted.

Important point to note is Zhang Youxia's generation: he's 75 years old and he's I think two years older than Xi Jinping—roughly the same generation. If you look at the Politburo Standing Committee, folks are generally born in late '50s and early '60s. Now that is a very sad generation if you look at China's history, and also very unique. Unique in the sense that this generation had been really deprived of formal education because of [the] Cultural Revolution, and also, as we know, the Chinese college entrance exam system was completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and didn't really get resumed until 1978. This is the sad generation in the sense that they really missed out, not really by their own choice, but they weren't able to learn how to learn.

Now, this generation today is in their late 60s and early 70s. Even you push one more generation in, folks who are in their 50s and early 60s today, I would argue they also were negatively impacted by the turmoil and a lot of the tragic experiences of modern China. So you really want to bring in folks that are in their 40s, I would say, early 50s, perhaps to be your backbone of a modern PLA, as Dennis was suggesting. How do they do that? Really they can't if they just gradually change and gradually retire and promote. So I wonder if this also creates opportunity for the PLA or for the Communist Party to actually select an accelerated way to put modern commanders in position.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. This leads to my last question, which points us to some recent crises that we've seen that are both farther away from China's borders, but are no less learning opportunities where they witness certain types of military engagements and interventions taking place. We've had the resurfacing of the Israel-Palestinian crisis, the war in Ukraine, where you've had simultaneously what we might describe as traditional trench warfare, but also the rise in technology with use of drones. Again, these don't have direct bearing on China's national security, especially as we've talked about the homeland defense mandate of the PLA, but are there any lessons that may have been taken from how these conflicts and incidents have played out?

Shanshan Mei: My first reaction to that question is, actually, all of these military activities and operations that the U.S. military has put on in the recent two years-ish timeline, I think, has huge deterrence value in terms of signaling to the PLA to not mess with us. I think that's a very important message, because let's not talk about the actual implications and political side of things, but really purely focusing on the operational side of things, the [Operation] Midnight Hammer [airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites] and the recent capture of [Venezuela President Nicolás] Maduro. These are very well-executed military operations per se, and it demonstrates our military service members' supreme qualities and dedication, but also the capability to execute under stress in real combat conditions.

I quote this "real combat" because this is a PLA propaganda term that they have been trying to highlight over the past decade in terms of trying to train under realistic conditions, but we actually are fighting real wars and these are things that are real-time deterrence in my view that the Chinese are clearly, almost no doubt, taking notes, of course, analyzing and learning how these things were executed. We will probably soon start seeing these things appearing on a lot of PLA textbooks about how the American military did this and did that. That's really one key point I want to emphasize is the deterrence value.

Eleanor M. Albert: Dennis?

Dennis Wilder: I am going to add a final point that you didn't ask about, and that is U.S.-China relations. It is very interesting that Xi Jinping called Donald Trump, and the readouts I understand are saying that Xi Jinping dominated that conversation, which, when you think about Donald Trump is fairly unusual. The analysis is, and I think this is accurate, that Xi Jinping called to reassure Trump that in all of this turbulence, he's still in charge, he still wants the April visit of Trump to Beijing. He wants to move forward, particularly on the economic agenda.

I find it fascinating that Xi Jinping would want to do that at this moment. He also talked to Putin the same day. This may be an element that we need to watch in terms of Xi Jinping's interaction with the United States. Does this make him more eager to improve the relationship with the United States because he needs to demonstrate competence capability that everything's normal? I think this is one to watch.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the position of Georgetown University.

Outro

The U.S.-China Nexus is created, produced, and edited by me, Eleanor M. Albert. Our music is from Universal Production Music. Special thanks to Shimeng Tong, Tuoya Wulan, and Amy Vander Vliet. For more initiative programming, videos, and links to events, visit our website at uschinadialogue.georgetown.edu. And don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.