Shadowing Practice: The 50-Year Lie About China - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Alrighty folks, today we're going to talk about how the United States

and China ended up in the situation that we currently find ourselves, where China is supposedly a rising power with this burgeoning global economy,

and how they went from a backwater into the chief geopolitical enemy of the United States.

So if you go back a couple of decades, we were told this comforting fairy tale about China.

We were told that if we welcomed China into the global economy, that if we invested in their factories and handed them our technology and opened our university and gave them capital

And if they, you know, integrated into that, rules -based international order.

That China would eventually become more like us.

It would become more democratic, more free.

It would follow the Soviet path.

It would open up economically, and then it would open up politically.

Some people were calling this approach constructive engagement.

Others were calling it democratic peace.

Again, the idea was sort of that if a McDonald's was in a country, then it would turn somehow non -authoritarian.

That prosperity would bring moderation, and that wealth would eventually bring about peace.

Well, not so much.

Not so much.

Communist Party never accepted the idea of American hegemony.

They viewed America as an enemy.

In fact, they viewed and view American might as a symbol of Chinese surrender and a form of national embarrassment.

America, creating what the economic historian Neil Ferguson has called Chimerica, was not actually welcomed by China in the name of peace or democracy or liberalism.

It was an opportunity that China could exploit.

China used its increased wealth to build the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history, expand military power, terrorize their own population, ingest populations like Hong Kong,

and unleash a novel coronavirus that shut down the world and killed several million people.

As we all saw during President Trump's latest visit to Beijing, the history of that relationship is still being written today.

But we should go back in time and figure out exactly how he got here.

So to answer that question, we have to go back about a century before Mao, before Nixon, before the Cold War, to a China that was weak and fractured and humiliated.

So before World War II, China was extremely impoverished, very unstable, definitely not a sort of unitary country.

And it was reeling from a century of what the CCP now calls an era of humiliation.

Dominant European powers that had carved up some territory.

Japan had invaded, taken over Manchuria.

Warlords fighting for control.

in the middle of China that was basically between Shanghai Sheck, who was the leader of the Nationalist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong.

So Mao Zedong was a Western -educated elite who came back to China as a communist

and decided he was going to impose communism top -down by force.

Now, during World War II, Shanghai Sheck and Mao Zedong, they were supposed to get together and form a unified front against the Japanese.

They didn't do that.

Basically, Mao Zedong ran off into the wilderness with his buddies, Zetong watched all of that happen.

He had already been largely defeated by Chiang Kai -shek, so he was out in the hinterlands.

And then after World War II, the West decided that Mao had to be treated with care by Chiang Kai -shek.

And the United States backed Chiang during the fight against the Japanese.

But as conflict began to rise between Chiang and the Maoist communists, the United States and the West basically backed off and decided that Chiang couldn't win.

So Mao's communists eventually seized control of mainland China in 1949.

went over to Taiwan and the Taiwanese island became an independent government.

The United States basically accepted that.

This was called the loss of China by critics of Harry Truman.

The suggestion was that there should have been a harder push for Chang and against Mao under Truman's tutelage, which is probably true.

It's probably true, especially because China then proceeded to fund the communist takeover of North Korea and the invasion of South Korea.

China ended up obviously supporting the Viet Cong.

China was a nefarious communist force in the region for decades, and they continue to be a nefarious authoritarian force in the region today.

Meanwhile, inside China, Mao Zedong, having taken total control of the Chinese territory, decided it was time to kill several tens of millions of people.

See, here's the thing.

Mao is not just another authoritarian ruler.

He wasn't like Ceausescu in Romania or something.

He was one of the greatest mass murderers in all of human history.

Maybe the greatest mass murderer in all of human history.

It is astonishing that Mao is not treated with significantly more disdain than he has been treated.

It is still considered totally okay to carry around Mao's little red book which truly should be treated.

Like Mein Kampf in the public mind.

Mal is responsible for the death of legitimately somewhere between 30 and 60 million people.

After the Chinese Communist Party seized power in 1949, following that Chinese Civil War, Mao transformed China into a full -blown Marxist dictatorship.

It was modeled largely on the Soviet Union.

There were sort of Chinese characteristics that would later lead to conflict with the Soviet Union.

Private property was abolished.

Industry was nationalized.

Political dissent was totally crushed.

Religion was persecuted.

The press became totally state propaganda.

Millions of people were swallowed up by the machinery of communist terror.

That was just at the beginning.

And then about 10 years in, Mao decided it was time to modernize.

Just as Lenin and Stalin decided in the Soviet Union, that this meant heavy industry, Mao decided the same.

The problem, of course, is that China was a largely agrarian country.

And so Mao decided that it was time to centralize all property, and it was time for everyone to be forced into the future.

And when we say forced, I mean at point of gun, at point of starvation.

Mao told people, that because they had raw quotas of things like steel production, they should take their household implements and melt them down into lumps of useless iron.

The result was that between 1958 and 1962, Mao's regime was responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 30 and 45 million people.

That is not a typo.

Tens of millions of people starved to death because of communist central planning.

One of the worst catastrophes in all of human history, a man -made famine designed by the Maoist government.

It was a centrally planned economic campaign so catastrophically stupid that it triggered one of the deadliest famines in recorded human history.

Not because of the climate, not because there were problems with agriculture, but because of the collectivization.

Because he forced peasants at point of gun into giant communes,

and then again demanded absurd steel production quotas in farms that turned entire villages into useless backyard smelting operations.

Literally, people were taking their plows and melting them down to make lumps of ore.

We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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But Mao wasn't done.

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In 1966, he launched the so -called Cultural Revolution.

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Again, he was a devotee of the idea of perpetual revolution.

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that the communist revolution could never cease.

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The Cultural Revolution was a decade long campaign of ideological fanaticism and political terror designed to purge China of supposedly impure influences.

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If you watch the beginning of the three body problem, there are a couple of scenes that are happening during the Cultural Revolution.

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Students formed what were called red guard mobs, in which teachers were humiliated, beaten, sometimes killed in public.

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Historical artifacts were destroyed.

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Families were incentivized to turn on one another.

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Intellectuals were sent to labor camps.

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The CCP was not a normal government that liked communism.

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It was an ideologically revolutionary regime that was built on murder and censorship and nationalism and total state control.

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And that has not changed.

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The thing that changed was that American elites convinced themselves that China had changed.

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So, let's try to figure out why that happened.

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Well, while Mao was running roughshod over China during this period, the United States was busy securing freedom of the seas, rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan,

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and stationing troops across the rest of Asia to prevent the Communists from taking over.

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By the 1960s, America had basically underwritten the entire security architecture of the free world.

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Because the United States was so economically and militarily dominant, our foreign policy establishment came to believe

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that hostile countries could gradually be folded into this rules based international world order through diplomacy and trade and cooperation.

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I solemnly declare on behalf of the United States

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that we are prepared to submit to any international inspection provided only that it is effective and truly reciprocal.

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And then in the post -World War order, the idea was: that the United States could bring China along.

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But the first sort of move, toward the Chinese, the first real move toward the Chinese, who were considered correctly our enemies, in Korea, in Vietnam.

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The first move toward the Chinese came because Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, was trying to split the Chinese from the Soviets.

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So over time, Mao had his own model of communism.

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The Soviets had their model of communism, and they started to hate one another.

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Mao was jealous of the Soviet system.

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The Soviets wanted Mao to be less insane.

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And so they started creating conflict between themselves.

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Richard Nixon

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and Henry Kissinger decided this was a great time to undercut

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one of the pillars of the Eastern support for the Soviet Union.

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So again, the logic wasn't nuts.

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Nixon believed that if the United States could pry China away from the Soviet orbit, that that would weaken Moscow and strengthen America on the global stage.

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This is why, famously, Nixon went to China.

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Henry Kissinger in particular, the Secretary of State, viewed this through the lens of real politique.

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The idea was that the United States could stabilize the international system by creating new powers to balance one another out.

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Kissinger was a believer in a sort of global balance of power.

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And so instead of directly confronting every single communist regime simultaneously, you use China to counterbalance the Soviet Union.

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Now, this was successful.

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It separated off, Mal, from the Soviet Union.

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And that undercut a pillar of economic and military support for the Soviet Union.

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And eventually, of course, the Soviet Union would fall.

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But this also planted the seed of a stupid idea, which is that maybe communist China would moderate and become part of the rules -based international order.

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By the late 60s, the Nixon administration was pursuing what became known as the open door policy.

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As I have pointed out on a number of occasions over the past three years, There can be no stable and enduring peace.

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without the participation, of the People's Republic of China.

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and it's 750 million people.

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Bye.

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That is why I have undertaken initiatives in several areas.

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to open the door.

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for more normal relations.

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between our two countries.

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Again, The idea here was not that Richard Nixon was besties with Mao Tse -tung.

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In fact, Nixon despised him.

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But if the United States could seize on that Sino -Soviet split and isolate Moscow, It would strengthen its own position in the process.

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So in 1972, Nixon goes to Beijing, Images of Nixon shaking hands have now stunned the world.

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To many Americans, it felt like a new opening.

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And for a while, it was kind of working.

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Throughout the 70s and the 80s, the US and China maintained a cautious alignment against Moscow.

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And it seemed like it was going to get even better.

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After Mao Zedong's death, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping opened China's economy even further.

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Now, Deng did not liberalize China politically, but he welcomed foreign investment.

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And that, of course, turned China into a manufacturing powerhouse.

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And it appeared that maybe Deng was even going to allow some liberalization of politics.

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Of course, all of that ended in 1989, when there was an actual student uprising against the Chinese regime.

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And that is when tanks literally just ran students over in Tiananmen Square.

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Still, the United States was hopeful.

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When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the U .S.'s regard for China shifted as well.

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Slowly, that original Nixonian opening had been transformed into something really, really different.

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A bipartisan, stupid belief that communist China could be permanently folded into a US -led world order.

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Foreign policy experts on all sides, multinational corporations, who were looking for profit centers, businessmen, manufacturers, academia, the media, they all bought the same fantasy.

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that if China became wealthier, China would become freer.

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That was the central lie of that post -Cold War globalization.

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No president accelerated that lie more than President Bill Clinton.

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And American officials basically ignored that massacre of pro -democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square and continued to push for economic engagement.

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And throughout the 1990s, as a result, China exploded.

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They were engaging in essentially mercantilism, state -organized economic structures directed at foreign trade.

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American corporations, meanwhile, realized that they could move their manufacturing overseas for cheaper.

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That did lower prices.

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It also moved manufacturing jobs outside the United States.

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National security implications, however dire, were basically ignored.

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And then came the biggest moment, China entering the World Trade Organization in 2001.

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I believe the choice between economic rights and human rights, between economic security and national security, is a false one.

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Now, Bill Clinton aggressively pushed for this.

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Again, the theory was integrating China into global markets would liberalize the country politically.

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It did not work out that way.

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Nonetheless, it opened the United States to Chinese intervention.

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American universities deepened their partnerships with China.

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We started taking in huge numbers of foreign exchange students.

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Our IP was stolen at a rapid rate.

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American consumers became deeply dependent on Chinese supply chains.

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Meanwhile, over in China, they were taking all of those...

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gains, all those economic wins, and they were stacking those up behind an authoritarian regime.

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The regime built the most sophisticated surveillance state in all of human history.

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It expanded its military pressure throughout the South China Sea against states ranging from Taiwan to the Philippines.

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It accelerated its cyber warfare and industrial scale intellectual property theft.

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Some estimates suggest the Chinese IP theft costs the United States as much as $600 billion every single year.

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Because again, internally, it is not that China has embraced free markets.

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Not much.

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They're basically an economically fascist system.

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So that means they don't tend to innovate as well as the United States.

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But they are very good at stealing things and then reverse engineering them.

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America. was fleeced.

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Again, this was the fundamental asymmetry.

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We believed that economics would eventually override ideology.

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Beijing never did.

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They just took the money and they stacked it in their coffers, and then they used it to crack down on everybody else and victimize America's allies.

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Over time, American national security hawks, particularly on the right, Again, warning, the United States was not simply trading with China anymore.

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We're actually building a geopolitical competitor.

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Part and parcel of this, by the way, is China buying up enormous amounts of American debt.

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Truly astonishing, mind -boggling amounts of American debt.

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It was very convenient for America's politicians to continue to run up our debt

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when the Chinese were just buying it all up and stocking it and making us more dependent on them.

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Nonetheless, conservatives began to argue that the CCP viewed economic interdependence not as a pathway to cooperation, but as leverage to be used later against the United States.

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Again, the Chinese understood something that the West forgot.

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Economic power is geopolitical power, and the Chinese state then used globalization to expand its influence abroad.

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Again, foundational hostility toward the West.

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They never stopped viewing the U .S as their chief enemy.

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They never liberalized.

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They never democratized.

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They never became our friend.

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Instead, they began using the money to spread their tentacles outward through things like the Belt

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and Road Initiative by offering to kindly build ports all over the world under Chinese control.

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Eventually, under Xi Jinping, China became more dramatically centralized, nationalistic, and openly adversarial toward the United States.

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So it appeared before Xi that maybe, just maybe, there might be a little bit of liberalization, and Xi just shut that door tight.

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Xi rose through the Communist Party apparatus as a committed nationalist and true believer in centralized control.

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He was not the pragmatic reformer of Deng Xiaoping, who famously suggested that basically, if you could get the job done, how you got it done didn't matter.

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Xi instead moved almost immediately to consolidate authority around himself personally.

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He purged his rivals.

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He tightened censorship.

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He interned and killed Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

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He expanded state control over the economy even further.

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And as mentioned, he spread China's supposed values all over the world.

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In 2013, China launched the so -called Belt and Road Initiative, which was basically a to build a lot of stuff in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America,

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and finance it with debt.

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Foreign governments would be indebted to Beijing, and then China would use that debt as a way to hold them accountable geopolitically.

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While Barack Obama was particularly useful to the Chinese, His China policy was an apologetic continuation of that post -Cold War internationalist consensus.

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The belief that if we just talked nicely to the Chinese, then magically they would moderate.

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A cooperative relationship based on mutual interest and mutual respect is not only in the interests of the United States and China,

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but is also in the interests of the region and in the interests of the United States, in the interests of the world.

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Unsurprisingly, China took advantage and they accelerated many of those trends

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that American hawks had been warning about for years because it turns out China never stopped.

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Everything intensified.

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Confucius Institutes, which were Chinese propaganda institutes, popped up across America.

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Intellectual espionage heightened as Silicon Valley innovation exploded.

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Militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea were being built despite diplomatic assurances otherwise.

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Pro -democracy protests in Hong Kong were crushed.

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Hong Kong was just eaten wholesale.

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Anti -American dictatorships in Russia, Iran, North Korea, all made common cause under the banner of a new axis of global resistance.

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In contrast, Barack Obama continued to push this elitist confidence in globalization and multilateralism and managed to decline.

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Xi Jinping consolidated more power.

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than any Chinese leader since Mao.

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Matt Pottinger and Mike Gallagher have argued that China began positioning itself, not merely as an economic competitor, but a strategic challenger to the West.

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Eventually people wised up, particularly Donald Trump.

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Now, whatever else you think about President Trump, He totally upset the apple cart in a wonderful and necessary way here.

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He was the first president in decades to fundamentally challenge that Nixonian -Clintonian assumption toward American policy on China.

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Trump argued that we'd sold out to China.

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that basically prior administrations had been dumped, underestimated the strategic risks posed by the CCP, and had allowed the United States to become overly dependent on Chinese manufacturing and supply chains.

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So he imposed tariffs on Chinese goods.

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He restricted Chinese access to sensitive tech.

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He targeted companies like Huawei, which is their 5G network, which again, is rife with surveillance apparatus.

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He pressured American allies to reconsider reliance on Chinese telecom, and he pushed for broader economic decoupling in strategically important sectors.

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And more broadly, Trump reframed China not as a future partner, but as a geopolitical rival.

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Because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country, and that's what they're doing.

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It's the greatest theft in the history of the world.

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Now, his critics suggested that everything would have been hunky -dory if not for Trump.

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But his supporters correctly argue that all of these policies were a long overdue recognition of geopolitical reality.

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Increasingly, Trump won.

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Democrats and Republicans understood that China was in fact our opponent if not our enemy.

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One of the big shift moments was the COVID -19 pandemic.

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When a novel coronavirus emerged pretty obviously from a Wuhan lab and then killed millions of people worldwide, devastating the global economy and shutting down daily life for the entire planet.

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The modern world realized it couldn't depend on China.

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Even after that outbreak, the CCP was lying.

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They were punishing whistleblowers inside China while simultaneously sowing enormous social

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and political discord inside the United States with TikTok's algorithmically engineered cultural brain rot.

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Increasingly, large segments of the American left, people like Hassan Piker or Zoran Mondani, began to openly romanticize anti -Western authoritarianism altogether.

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Piker went to China and talked about how wonderful it was.

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Chinese nationals from all around this wonderful country.

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It's very, very exciting and you can sense it, you can feel it in the air.

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Mamdani treats the CCP as a decent country.

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At the same time, China is building the largest military expansion since World War II.

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They threaten Taiwan on a near daily basis.

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They use slave labor, concentration camps, censorship, surveillance, fentanyl trafficking, cyber warfare, and economic coercion as instruments of statecraft.

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So, no, China was never our friend.

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It wasn't, and it still isn't.

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The problem was that for 50 years, everyone refused to recognize that China was in fact our enemy.

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Are they going to win?

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Well, here's the thing.

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China does suffer from some pretty serious structural vulnerabilities.

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So their demographics are in serious trouble.

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Their debt burden is enormous, over 300 % of GDP by some estimates.

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Their economy is heavily dependent on exports and also state intervention, which means loans.

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And those loans are coming.

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from local and state actors.

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So basically they're just pillaging their people.

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Its real estate sector is massively unstable because essentially they just had their citizens.

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They forced them to buy ghost apartments.

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China increasingly resembles a declining power trying to stave off the darkness through IP theft and regional intimidation and a military buildup.

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Historically, rising in security inside authoritarian regimes can make them more aggressive abroad.

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And that brings us to Taiwan.

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So Taiwan is not merely a regional territorial dispute.

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As you recall, Taiwan was a part of China Shanghai Shack ended up there and founded the modern nation state of Taiwan.

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Now, Taiwan's history is long and complex.

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At times, it was independent.

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At times, it was occupied for literally decades by the Japanese.

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The reason it is geopolitically important is because Taiwan sits at the center of the global semiconductor economy.

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Roughly 90 percent of advanced semiconductor manufacturing comes from Taiwan.

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If China successfully seized Taiwan, the geopolitical consequences would be disastrous.

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American allies would question our credibility, and more importantly, if they got a hold of those chips, suddenly the balance of power in the entire Indo -Pacific would shift toward China.

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This is why deterrence matters.

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And this is why American leadership, peace through strength, continues to matter.

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Bottom line is this.

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Weakness invites aggression, it always has.

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Strength deters it.

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And for a regime, that censors speech and operates mass surveillance systems and threaten its democratic neighbors, and steals technology and supports hostile authoritarian governments all over the world,

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and facilitates fentanyl precursor flows into the Western Hemisphere, and openly seeks America's destruction, that is not just another trading partner.

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It is a strategic enemy.

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We should treat it as such.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C2 speaking lesson is built on the video “The 50-Year Lie About China”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: China, Chinese, Mao. This video has 325 sentences and 4202 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:47. The speaker talks fast, about 184 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 79% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
geopolitical adjective		Of or relating to geopolitics.
authoritarian adjective	/əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/	Of, or relating to, or exhibiting strict obedience to an authority; favoring authoritarianism over civic and individual liberties.
communism noun	/ˈkɒmjᵿnɪz(ə)m/	Any far-left political ideology or philosophy advocating holding the production of resources collectively, especially by seizing it through revolution.
globalization noun	/ˌɡloʊ.bə.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/	American and Oxford British English standard spelling of globalisation.
accelerate verb	/ɪkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪt/	To cause to move faster; to quicken the motion of; to add to the speed of.
seize verb	/ˈsiːz/	To deliberately take hold of; to grab or capture.
economically adverb	/ˌiː.kəˈnɒm.ɪ.kli/	In an economical manner; not wastefully; not extravagantly.
censorship noun	/ˈsɛnsɚʃɪp/	The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press, such as passing laws to prevent undesirable media from being published or propagated.
politically adverb		In a political manner.
astonish verb	/əˈstɑnɪʃ/	To surprise greatly.
centralize verb	/ˈsɛntɹəlaɪz/	To move things physically towards the centre; to consolidate or concentrate
coronavirus noun	/kəˈɹoʊnəˌvaɪɹəs/	A member of the family Coronaviridae, comprising viruses which infect animals and human beings, and the genome of which consists of a single strand of RNA.
famously adverb		In a celebrated manner.
fentanyl noun	/ˈfɛn.tə.nɑl/	A synthetic opioid narcotic analgesic, C₂₂H₂₈N₂O, with pharmacological action similar to morphine that is administered transdermally as a skin patch and in the…
geopolitically adverb		In terms of geopolitics.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
end up verb	To bring to a conclusion.
figure out verb	To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
open up verb	To open.
shut down verb	To close, terminate, or end; to stop operating, either permanently or temporarily.
take over verb	To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force.
back off verb	To move backwards away from something.
buy up verb	To buy the whole of; to purchase the entire stock of something.
get together verb	To meet, to gather together, to congregate.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if China became wealthier, China would become
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	were told · was not actually welcomed · being written
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has called · has been treated · you've built
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	tutelage, which is · idea, which is · Initiative, which was

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 25 contractions and reduced forms, such as they're, wasn't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: authoritarian /əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, strengthen /ˈstɹɛŋ(k)θən/, nonetheless /ˌnʌnðəˈlɛs/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: globalization /ˌɡloʊ.bə.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, censorship /ˈsɛnsɚʃɪp/, astonish /əˈstɑnɪʃ/, nationalist /ˈnæʃ.ə.nə.lɪst/
Long words — get the stress right: authoritarian /əˌθɑ.ɹəˈtɛɹ.i.ən/, globalization /ˌɡloʊ.bə.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, accelerate /ɪkˈsɛl.əˌɹeɪt/, economically /ˌiː.kəˈnɒm.ɪ.kli/, coronavirus /kəˈɹoʊnəˌvaɪɹəs/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like geopolitical, authoritarian, communism.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: The 50-Year Lie About China - Learn English Speaking with Video

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