Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues

Eleanor M. Albert: Today we are joined by Dennis Wilder and Rachel Ann Hulvey. 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. Rachel Ann Hulvey is an incoming assistant professor at Indiana University. During academic year 2024-2025, she is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Belfer International Security and Columbia-Harvard China and the World programs. She researches China’s influence on international order with an empirical focus on cyberspace. Dennis, Rachel, it's a pleasure to have you today.

Rachel Ann Hulvey: Thanks for having us.

Eleanor M. Albert: We're going to be talking about cybercrime in the U.S.-China context, but I think before we do that, we should start by talking about how prevalent cybercrime is. What forms does it take? This can be both in the U[nited] S[tates] and in China. I'll turn first to Dennis and then we will bring Rachel in.

Dennis Wilder: Well, I'm sure people understand that cybercrime is enormous and ubiquitous. In fact, I was in Rome in October (2024) and attended a conference run by the Italian government on cybercrime in which there were judges, prosecutors, law enforcement officials from around Europe, and I must say I had no idea how difficult it is to organize against cybercrime internationally. This knows no boundaries. The perpetrators can be anywhere. They hide in the cloud, they hide anywhere, and in terms of the kinds of things, and Rachel probably has a better sense than I do, but obviously ransomware is a huge problem for companies in such industries as health care, higher education, manufacturing, government, energy. 317 million attempts last year alone in ransomware. And frankly, I have the impression that a lot of companies simply pay off because they don't want the damage to their reputation—of it being known that they were attacked successfully. Then you have the other areas, the whole area of pornography with minors, which is an enormous problem these days. And there are other areas, and Rachel, you want to fill in on some of the others?

Rachel Ann Hulvey: I can jump in and explain a little bit more, and I think you did a great job of just highlighting the global scale of this issue. This is something that's of concern to all countries, not just the countries with the most number of internet users, but it impacts developing countries, it impacts the United States and China.

One example that I wanted to bring in is the example of Costa Rica. In June 2022, a Russian-linked ransomware group attacked the Costa Rican government. This led to a major national crisis, sent Costa Rica's health care system into a spiral. The group had a history of targeting health care organizations and perpetrating over a thousand ransomware attacks, extorting over $180 million from its victims. This is something that we hear countries speak about a lot, that it's a growing problem.

In China, of course, cybercrime has been going on for quite some time. Some of the early instances of this include some patriotic hacking, a political demonstration on the internet. And it really evolved from these phone-based scams into something much larger. Now you have these criminal networks. This is something that's organized across borders. So we see the Chinese government making statements that this is not something that one country can address on their own, it's something that all countries need to come together. It requires a lot of evidence-sharing, a lot of different cross-border cooperation in order to investigate.

There's of course spamming and malware production that we've seen within the United States, but I think a lot of us noticed cybercrime during the pandemic too—the severe threat to life from these criminal networks targeting health care and holding them hostage until a ransom was actually received. So it's really not just targeting individuals and extracting payments, but reached a level where there is danger to human life just due to the nature of the organizations that these criminal networks will target.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely, and I think top of mind, of course, there's the relatively recent Salt Typhoon attack on critical infrastructure. We've been talking about health care systems being targeted. We now also have telecoms networks, and of course there's the added layer in the U.S.-China context for that, in that the actor who perpetrated this might have some pretty solid ties to a government bureaucracy. It complicates things.

Dennis Wilder: First of all, the U.S. government is very convinced: it's either the [Chinese] Ministry of State Security or the People's Liberation Army. They haven't absolutely identified it, but it's pretty clear where it comes from. But a point I wanted to make because this is a very difficult fine line that frankly I don't think is very well-defined: there is espionage in cyber, which ever since Hu Jintao and [Barack] Obama met in 2016, we have acknowledged on both sides that espionage in cyber is, if you will, legitimate or a norm that everybody participates in.

The question then becomes where does it move from being espionage to criminal behavior? I would argue, although I don't think this line has been set yet, that attacks on infrastructure are criminal in nature, and also war fighting, frankly. If you bring down the infrastructure of Guam at the beginning of a Taiwan Strait crisis, that's a pretty good feat and something that the Chinese, as an adversary, would probably want to do, but it's also criminal to go after infrastructure.

And the consequences of a mistake in hacking in infrastructure… Imagine if the entire electrical network of Washington, DC one evening went down. The consequences could be quite catastrophic. I just wanted to get in this idea that we do have a problem because there is what has been legitimized as cyber espionage versus criminal activity.

Eleanor M. Albert: Absolutely. I think what's so interesting about this is we're starting to talk about the challenges and the biggest obstacles, but one of the big impetuses for bringing both of you together was that late in the summer [of 2024], the U[nited] N[ations] General Assembly approved a draft of a recent UN convention on cybercrime, which was backed by major players. I'm curious from your vantage point, how significant is this? How long has it been in the works? How did it come to be? Clearly, cybercrime is a problem both within national boundaries, but then because of the transnational nature of it, it becomes a challenge for everyone and requires some degree of cooperation. So Rachel, do you want to give us a little rundown of how this came to be? Tell us a little bit more about the convention.

Rachel Ann Hulvey: This has actually been in the works for quite some time. I think it's important to note the Budapest Convention was actually one of the first efforts. It was open for signature in 2001. This was to address the rise of cybercrime. So very early in being something and being an international effort. It's by the Council of Europe. It grew to be ratified though by 76 countries.

It's important to note that China and Russia are not members—they did not ratify. They criticized the Budapest Convention for the lack of inclusivity. They argued that they were not part of the drafting process, and they argue that due to this, the rules really reflect Western priorities on cybercrime. They also have concerns about sovereignty.

This is one of the big pushes that China makes within this space. They criticize Article 32 for allowing cross border access to data without the consent of the territorial state, and they want to make a broader push for other crimes. They want to include crimes like misinformation, cyberterrorism, and state-sponsored attacks. So those were many of the rationale that China and Russia had offered for why they did not ratify the Budapest Convention.

Russia had led a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly alongside China, and this was done in 2019 as a way of starting an alternative process to the Budapest Convention. The Council of Europe had really wanted to make the Budapest Convention something that could be open to any country in the world, not just members within that specific Council of Europe organization, and so this was really seen as an effort to shift and create some reforms in the way that international governance was addressing cybercrime.

And it's important to place this into context that it followed really long-standing efforts by China and Russia to base this type of collaboration within the United Nations system. China and Russia have long been calling for a lot of the governance that takes place in cyberspace to shift away from regional efforts to move into more of an international system based at the United Nations, which they describe as more multilateral and democratic.

Also, the way that they frame this is something to keep in mind. It builds off of the International Code of Conduct [for Information Security] that was submitted to the General Assembly in 2011 and 2015, reaffirming that the policy authority for internet-related issues is the sovereign rights of states, and taking some of this language within the resolution to say that this Cybercrime Convention should underscore the need to respect the principles of sovereign equality of states and non-interference in their internal affairs. We see this language of sovereignty being critical within the resolution.

China itself, during the negotiation for this resolution, was pushing to argue that this is going to fill important gaps in an existing system that's largely been defined by the West. And importantly to developing countries, China argued for greater equality, “It's going to address the needs of all countries.”

Analyzing the votes, this ends up being highly polarized. The United States and the European Union did not vote to support this resolution. They voted no. However, other countries, particularly non-democracies, developing countries, supported the process. And it passes with the margin of 19 votes despite the United States and its partners arguing that this was not necessary, it would duplicate existing processes and so we move forward into negotiations.

The negotiations are highly tense, highly fraught. We even have them breaking down at one point. This was in the ad hoc committee, and this is in the Third Committee of the United Nations—Third Committee has been working on issues of transnational crime, human trafficking, et cetera. So that's where we're basing the negotiations. The purpose is to prevent and combat cybercrime, of course, and so they're really focusing on the international cooperation piece and combating cybercrime, and they're also focusing on supporting technical assistance and capacity building to prevent cybercrime. The negotiations are beginning in February 2022, and they're going to alternate between New York and Vienna.

One thing that's notable here is that Russia is the lead on the resolution, and at this time, Russia also invades Ukraine. All of the push that China and Russia have been making, especially to emphasize sovereignty, now faces backlash during these negotiations. A lot of the countries are coming to the negotiations and they're not talking about cybercrime, they're actually talking about Russia's violation of territorial sovereignty. So while China really wanted to make this push for cyber sovereignty, actually a lot of the negotiations end up being focused on the violations of territorial sovereignty and many states saying that they don't want to participate in this process, they can't trust that Russia is going to be coming to the table and actually respecting the norms that are negotiated.

There's really a lot of debate during the negotiations around the definition of crimes, which crimes to include. Russia and China really wanted more of an expansive list, especially Russia. Russia submitted a draft convention that included a long list of crimes, whereas the United States wanted a really narrow scope and wanted it to really follow more of the Budapest Convention.

But through this process, the countries were able to actually pass a draft convention a little later than they originally anticipated. But in August of 2024. The U[nited] S[tates] joins the consensus vote and the United Nations General Assembly agrees on the texts, and the entry into force will take place in 2025, and under the final agreement, it will take 40 ratifications for the treaty to enter into force.

So this is where we're at in the process. We now have this United Nations Cybercrime Convention. We'll wait to see exactly what happens in terms of the entry into force, but it's been a very tense process filled with a lot of different dynamics, and we'll wait to see exactly how it comes into force.

Eleanor M. Albert: That was an incredible overview. I want to pull out a few of the elements that you laid out for us. First of all, thinking about how to define cybercrime, what falls under that? We've alluded to some examples already, including ransomware, but also crimes including using certain forms of technology. As the convention text language stands now, what is its scope? How does it conceptualize cybercrime and how does that perhaps differ from the Budapest Convention?

Rachel Ann Hulvey: Many of them actually do follow the Budapest Convention, and that is something that we even saw in China and Russia's submissions. They would include the Budapest Convention crimes and then build on it, include a litany of other crimes that the United States and European Union states actually contested.

They landed at outlawing illegal access to an ICT system, and so this is something you can think of a hacker reaching an ecommerce company's database to extract credit card information and sell it on an illegal online marketplace, possibly on the dark web. There's also illegal interception, which is criminalized. This would be the interception of data. You can think about corporate espionage where an employee is installing tools on their company's network to intercept sensitive communications between executives, or a hacker using software to intercept encrypted messages.

There's Article 9, interference with electronic data—damaging, deleting, deteriorating. This could be something like an attacker corrupting files or injecting malicious code, ransomware, to render the data unusable. There's also Article 11, the misuse of devices. This could include a hacker group overwhelming a government website with automated requests. There's system forgery. Articles 14 to 15 are child pornography. Article 16, and I think this is important, is the non-consensual sharing of intimate images was criminalized.

And Article 17 is laundering the proceeds of a crime, and this is more of a cyber-enabled crime, which is important. This was really what the United States and the European Union were pushing back on through most of the negotiations. They didn't want to have a long list of cyber-enabled crimes. So the one that was actually made it into the convention is money laundering. You can think about this as the typical hacking into businesses and then making some income appear as if it's being transferred through a shell company and then reporting it as business profits.

The comparison to the Budapest Convention is that many of the definitions from the Budapest Convention have been replicated in the UN Convention. There are some differences. One is actually that the UN convention is omitting offenses related to copyright infringement, but those are included in the Budapest Convention, but the UN Convention is broader in scope compared to the Budapest Convention, and it's criminalizing additional forms of conduct. This is specifically beyond these cyber-dependent crimes that are covered by the Budapest Convention. There would be more of the cyber-enabled such as this money laundering.

I encourage listeners to look at some of the draft conventions and the submissions by China and Russia to see that they really wanted to have a lot of crimes included, including extremism, cyber-terrorism, a lot of things that other countries were pushing back on. Through the negotiations, we really saw that countries needed to reach a middle ground and the middle ground was largely based off of the Budapest Convention with some new additions.

Eleanor M. Albert: That's great. Dennis, I want to bring you back in here in terms of how do we read this convention? Is this a new potential avenue for dialogue and cooperation, or consultation even, in the cyber realm? This does not particularly tend to be an area for positive exchanges in the U.S.-China dynamic, but perhaps that's not what's important here. Perhaps it's the progress made on the international front so that players in the developing world might have more tools at their disposal. How do you read this?

Dennis Wilder: First of all, if you're going to have real live understandings and norms between the great powers, at some point they're going to have to sit down together and work this out. In lieu of that, this is a step forward. We are bringing the world together to try and deal with the issue. It is under the United Nations, I think that's very positive  And Rachel can also add on this point, I think there are human rights groups who are concerned about how China and Russia may try to use this in terms of dissidents in their own countries. What is disinformation is in the mind and eye of the beholder obviously. But I think on balance, it's a step forward.

Eleanor M. Albert: Rachel, your thoughts on how to read this? What are the positive takeaways, and then what are the concerns?

Rachel Ann Hulvey: This convention means different things to different regions of the world. In my interviews with some of the delegates that are at these meetings, you do hear a lot of variation in terms of how they see the convention and whether this is going to be something that will be a positive force.

I'll start with the developing countries. A lot of the developing countries in my conversations are saying that they're just starting to pass cybercrime laws into their domestic legislation. They do have a lot of need to address cybercrime, especially as it impacts the public, as it impacts their companies and economic growth, and one of the things that they really feel is positive about the convention is these evidence sharing provisions.

For most countries, they're sharing evidence through mutual legal assistance treaties, and a lot of times this can be a very lengthy process, something that can also be amongst friends or amongst countries with good relations. So for the developing countries, they feel that this is actually a step forward and this is something that is going to take evidence sharing to the international level, put them on more of an even playing field. A lot of my conversations with these countries were saying that they really appreciate the United Nations Cybercrime Convention.

However, I think for Western countries, there is some concern. There's been concerns from the beginning with this being a Russian-led process. There are concerns about human rights, as Dennis alluded to. Of course, there are safeguards that Western countries pushed for in the convention that were included, however, as Dennis also mentioned, a lot of human rights groups have been very vocally denouncing the convention, saying that this doesn't go far enough, that there could still be significant human rights concerns that will result from this convention, especially in the way that the crimes are elaborated, the need to store data and compel internet service providers to do so, and concerns about extradition.

So the Western world definitely has some concerns. They chose to participate though because they feel that they can still impact the process, impact additional protocols, and the United States has been saying that for ratification, it really wants to see countries implementing domestically some protections for human rights, and that would be something that's held up as a condition for the United States actually moving forward.

Now, for China and Russia. Russia really sees this as a huge win. It's been speaking about it domestically as such, and when I spoke with the developing countries, they were also saying this is something that for Russia to lead on that is rather topical, that a lot of the world is really seeing as a major issue, and Russia was the country that really advanced this. It's more of a diplomatic win for Russia, especially at a time when it is facing a lot of criticism for its actions in Ukraine.

Eleanor M. Albert: Almost remarkable that it was able to get that diplomatic victory with that whole context.

Rachel Ann Hulvey: A lot of the context that I had in my interviews were saying in the negotiations, this means that a lot of Russia's proposals were not listened to. What we don't know is if this wasn't occurring during Russia's invasion and war in Ukraine, then would Russia have been able to actually codify even stronger provisions? We don't know. But nonetheless, Russia is talking about it as a diplomatic victory.

Dennis Wilder: I assume that getting 40 countries to ratify will not be a problem?

Rachel Ann Hulvey: Shouldn't be a problem.

Eleanor M. Albert: I'm curious how China gets placed in this. I assume it was a partner with Russia in advancing this. It fits within their whole ethos at the UN system to try and be a player at the table, be a part of the rules that are being crafted, wanting to write those rules in ways that it feels like it had previously been excluded from in the past within the broader multilateral architecture. So how is China portraying itself?

Rachel Ann Hulvey: China and Russia are, of course, partners in a lot of the cyber efforts, and China has taken the lead on some things, especially China's Global Data Security Initiative and some of the norms that it's advancing within other processes, particularly the United Nations open-ended working group that deals with cybersecurity.

In cybercrime, China was also advancing different proposals. Russia was the lead on the United Nations resolution, but of course, China was a partner within that. And I was speaking with some developing countries.

I was interested in one quote actually about the negotiation as a lot of the crimes Russia wanted to see codified were actually quite extreme in terms of their nature, and many officials from developing countries saw that as such. Then many developing countries were saying the U[nited] S[tates] has been extreme at times in their opinion on pushing for human rights or different provisions that they think would be quite onerous or really isn't focused on some of the concerns they have about development. Then, they said this fairly poignant thing, which is they saw China as being in the middle and they saw China as being this country that was putting forward these ideas about sovereignty, putting forward the need for the Cybercrime Convention to focus on the needs of developing countries.

So you see that China was able to actually really thread the needle quite carefully in this debate. This is something that I study quite closely China's use of language and the way that China tries to appeal to different coalitions. So on the basis of these interviews, it does seem that China was seen as an important player. It wasn't seen as the leader per se, but it was seen as this country that was advancing different proposals that were very much aligned and very much resonating with the interests of the developing world.

Eleanor M. Albert: Fascinating. Dennis, I want to turn back to you. You brought up earlier this presence of state sponsored backing for cybercrime, and at the same time hearing insight from Rachel's interviews about the China's diplomatic mission [and] the role to get this convention passed. How does China balance this coexistence? There's a degree where it needs to have some responsibility to protect its citizens, and at the same time it is also perhaps playing a hand in supporting groups committing some of these crimes. At the same time it's helping to push forward a convention to try and combat this. That's a messy dynamic, and how do you see China trying to thread this role moving forward?

Dennis Wilder: You do have the public position of the Chinese and then you have the clandestine position of the Chinese, and of course they are incompatible in many ways. Let's be clear here though, we don't think China is a state sponsor of ransomware. The North Korean government, yes, very much so, but no one's accusing the Chinese of having a state-sponsored system to extract funds and extort funds from anybody. That's not what they are doing.

What we do see is an incredibly large Chinese effort on the state-sponsored side of breaking into firewalls. For example, the FBI recently cited a company called Sichuan Silence Information Technology. They broke into 81,000 network firewalls around the world. Thirty-six involved breaches of firewalls used to protect U.S. critical infrastructure.

Then we have Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon. Now, people need to understand these are just words that the FBI uses as code names. They have nothing to do with the Chinese. The Chinese have not named these things. But Volt Typhoon is very much again about attacks on key U.S. infrastructure—electrical grids, water grids, all kinds of infrastructure. And then Salt Typhoon, which is the most recent one, is the one that has gotten into your phone system—eight major telecommunications firms. In fact, the one piece of advice that the U.S. government is giving people is start using Signal or other encrypted systems if you don't want the Chinese listening to you, which I find extraordinary as advice.

One of the most concerning parts is that they've gotten into the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) system. Now, the FISA system is the system that the U.S. government uses when it wants to tap into a phone in the United States. You nominate a particular phone line that you want to listen to. You have to give a very good justification to a judge in order to do that, and if a judge approves, then you're allowed to tap that phone. Well, you can imagine if the Chinese now know all of the numbers that the United States intelligence community is trying to tap into, they will get a very good sense of [which] of their operatives in the United States are being monitored and which ones aren't being monitored. So it's a tremendously useful thing to the Chinese, but it is tremendously dangerous to American national security.

Now, while the FBI and others love to say the word state-sponsor of terror because they don't have the ability to attribute this to individuals, we know the big players. In the PLA, there are two units, 61398 is the military unit cover designator of the unit in Pudong, which is under the Central Military Commission's Information Support Force. We have satellite photography of the facility. We know exactly where these guys sit. And similarly, the PLA unit 61486, which is also located in Shanghai and goes after satellite communications. So we're not in the dark. We know the players on the Chinese side. Also, the U.S. government hasn't really revealed as much information on the Ministry of State security actors, but of course they are very involved.

Now, we haven't found a way to stop this. Naming and shaming has done no good. Biden apparently brought this up with Xi Jinping at the G20 and the Chinese simply denied they have anything to do with any of this. We've banned China Telecom from operating in the United States, but they never were a big player anyway. So the cost imposition, as people like to call it, has not occurred by the U.S. side.

At this point, we haven't decided to use our tools. There are several kinds of ways to go. One is denial of Chinese attacks, which just means building our defenses. The trouble with this is you have to constantly work on building your defenses. It's not a one-time shot. Very expensive. If you think about the telecommunications firms and the amount of money they will have to put out, that will be passed along to the consumer. So the cost factor is very real to the average American in this situation. Some areas of the U[nited] S[tates] actually have good cybersecurity. Los Angeles, New York City, my state of Virginia are all examples, but there's a whole lot more of the United States that has no real capability on their own to defend.

We can also work with our allies, but again, this is naming and shaming, maybe a few sanctions on the Chinese, but the people doing this, they don't have money overseas. They don't travel overseas.

Then we get to the much more, shall we say, politically and ethically questionable practice, which is cost and position on the Chinese by counter-attack. We have problems with that on the U.S. side. For one thing, we would have to consult with private firms before we did counter-attacks in order to make sure we weren't hurting them. Also, this now enters the field of mutual assured destruction. How far do we all go with attacking each other's systems and where does that end us up? So the U.S. response has been lame so far in many ways because it's so hard to figure out how you're going to attack this problem.

Eleanor M. Albert: It seems from your overview that this still lives a bit in the realm of the cyber espionage world and hasn't really transitioned into the criminality world, and it lives in this gray area where the larger the scope of the penetration, it could perhaps veer into the criminal space, but hasn't quite necessarily crossed that threshold in a black and white form.

Dennis Wilder: That's right. And it is hard. I'm sure an electrical company would find this a criminal activity against them, right? Somebody intruding into their systems and trying to take over their systems sounds like a crime to me. So definitionally, this is very problematic.

Eleanor M. Albert: I want to bring us back to a final concluding question and think about how these questions about cybercrime and the convention might impact the broader tech policy in both the U[nited] S[tates] and China, because technology is really at the core of enabling cybercrime to happen. We talked about the positives of this convention, but I fear that there might be also medium-term negatives that might fuel certain types of investment in technology capabilities. So how should we think about the future of tech policy, which really is a point of contention between Washington and Beijing right now? Should we feel optimistic about efforts at combating cybercrime?

Rachel Ann Hulvey: One of my major conclusions on these efforts in terms of broader implications for tech policy is the need for the United States to really lead on these issues. We've seen this being something that Russia, in partnership with China, is leading on, and I would recommend to the United States administration, especially those that are working closely on these cyber issues, to think about the spaces that the United States can be a leading voice on and specifically formulating strategies for these multilateral negotiations. A lot of times, the United States does like to work through either regional groupings or through like-minded groupings with democracies, but I would encourage the administration to really think about how can the United States advance a human rights position that's respecting internet freedom within these spaces, especially since cybercrime is involving protection of individuals, their data.

So, I would say my major recommendation to the U.S. government is to begin to formulate positions so that in the future, as there are additional issues that are naturally going to arise, especially as we see technology rapidly evolving, artificial intelligence, that the United States is really the one to lead and to formulate positions that are going to advance human rights and also stand a chance against China's position on sovereignty and respecting developing countries.

Those would be my two key recommendations for the long term. I know that in the short term, we do have the Cybercrime Convention, and many of these human rights groups have been advocating for the United States to do more, and so to work within these processes to ensure that for the countries that don't have strong human rights protections within their domestic legislation, that the United States is working with them so that these concerns that have been raised about the exchange of data or criminalizing certain aspects that could be dangerous, that the United States is going to also play a leadership role on really championing this issue moving forward within the cybercrime process.

Eleanor M. Albert: Wonderful. How about you, Dennis? Concluding thoughts?

Dennis Wilder: A couple things. Number one, the UN's open-ended working group has been chaired by Switzerland…

Rachel Ann Hulvey: Switzerland and then Singapore.

Dennis Wilder: It’s a place that people think progress can be made, and again, the U[nited] S[tates] could be more proactive. I would also say that we should look creatively at the FBI in liaison activities with Third World countries. The FBI has tremendous cyber understanding these days. They may not be able to switch it off, but they certainly understand the broad nature. They have techniques, they have a lot of expertise. Now, they could be overwhelmed by the demand side of this, but I think it's something we should think about. We have FBI liaisons all over the world, and I hope that this could be part of their activity to provide information, to provide expert support.

On the U.S.-China side, I think someone made a very good point recently, which is until each side sees real danger in the situation we're in, we're not going to make any progress. For example, we've reached agreements on nuclear issues. The recent one was keeping the human in the loop in the AI era, but we really haven't both decided that this is dangerous enough that we have to reach an agreement yet. So until we reach a threshold where the dangers become obvious—maybe you need a crisis of some sort to bring this about—I'm not optimistic yet because I don't see either side believing we're at that juncture yet.

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.