The death of U.S.-China engagement and the political future of China — with Susan Shirk
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Hello listeners, welcome to a new episode of Peking Hotel. I'm your host Leo. Before

Before I begin, I just want to give a quick shout out. The Lunar New Year is coming and Peking Hotel is hosting our first community live streaming in the evening of January 29th. We invite all of you to come and share your stories with Lunar New Year and your wishes for the coming year. This will be a wholesome chance to connect with other fellow listeners and readers and given the state of the world right now, we can all do with a little festive moment with each other.

And so if you're free and interested, please check out the details in description. Today is the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. I didn't particularly time this piece to today, but it seems like a fitting timing nonetheless. This is the third episode of Professor Susan Shirk's oral history. We previously touched on her life as a senior State Department official under the Clinton administration, and today is about her life after government.

and especially her research on Chinese politics under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. And in case you didn't listen to our previous episodes,

Professor Susan Shirk is a research professor at UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, Director Emeritus of the 21st Century China Center and Director Emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. She is one of the West's foremost thinkers on Chinese elite politics and political institutions.

and who, having first traveled to China in the early 70s, has witnessed the country from the Mao to the Xi periods. Between 1997 and 2000, Susan served in the Clinton administration as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, overseeing U.S. relations with China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia.

Today, we talk about her reflections on the turning points of US-China relations, her personal friendship and unfriendship with key figures of Chinese foreign policy, her projections of a post-Xi China, and the possibility of re-engagement under Trump. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Professor Sherk.

It seems that there is a pattern in US politics whereby presidential candidates are always hard on China, but once they're in power, they turn around and work with China. I mean, that's what happened after the second Clinton administration. The Bush government came in rejecting the whole Clintonian thesis of treating China as a strategic partner. And Bush called China an enemy when he was running for president. Well, that's always the case.

You know, when you're running for office, you renounce and differentiate yourself from the policies of the other party that had been in power. So that's typical. The only, I'd say Obama did less of beating up on China and differentiating himself in his campaign.

than other presidential candidates had. But typically, that's the dynamic. Why do you think that is? And why do you think they inevitably reverse their stance towards the end and become basically partner with China? Because it's a political football. And Americans, up until recently, have been very proud of American leadership in the world. And they...

There's always a search for external scapegoats. And yet, up until recently, American public opinion, despite that pendulum swing back and forth in political campaigns, American people were kind of roughly divided between positive and negative on China. It was very stable for a very long time.

So, you know, that's just the dynamic of competitive politics here. Yeah. And then what changed? Trump. Well, the Trump administration, the fact that the Trump administration was followed by the Biden administration, which and the Biden administration, even though I think it originally intended to differentiate itself more from Trump,

the Trump hawkishness, trade protectionism, tariffs. I think they originally intended to do that. But the Chinese side failed to take advantage of a new administration to get a reset in relations with the United States. So if you look at Chinese foreign policy and domestic behavior in the first year or two,

of the Biden administration. They really pushed around America's allies in Asia, Australia, when Australia called for an investigation of the source of COVID, scientific investigation. They increased their pressure on

Korea, Japan, Taiwan. They provoked a war on the border with India. You know, they just didn't really pursue that kind of reassurance policy that in the past had always been pretty effective. Instead, they...

you know, took a more provocative approach. And I saw myself, my friends in the Biden administration, their perspective toward China hardened over those early few years. So I think that was a lost opportunity. And then the Biden administration also, rather than investing heavily in bilateral diplomacy with China, they

put their energies into restoring relations with our allies, which the Trump administration had trashed. So AUKUS, the Quad, you know, all of these balancing coalitions, that was with the Biden administration. They thought they'd put their energies into shaping the environment to balance against China.

But in my view, there was not enough effort put into bilateral diplomacy with China. But also China was not making it easy by its own behavior. How would you describe the process, the key points where new consensus got formed and people realized, oh, this is not working?

You know, I can tell you, you ask about maybe the Obama administration, things changed. And I guess you're right, they did. Because I remember going to the State Department during the Obama administration, and I started hearing from my friends and colleagues that when China did something bad that the rest of the world didn't like,

They were feeling, they were sort of saying, yeah, you know, like we're two different teams. You know, they did something bad and we look better and they look worse. You know, it was a competitive framework. They were like high-fiving one another. Oh, really? Whereas when I was in government, when China did something right, we were high-fiving one another. We felt our policy...

is inducing China to act in a more responsible manner. So I felt the change in attitude, but I can't attribute it to a particular thing. And it wasn't the Obama administration per se. Certainly wasn't Jeff Bader, or Emmons, Medeiros, or any of the people in the Obama administration. Certainly not. But, you know, Jim Steinberg,

went with Jeff Bader to China and the Obama administration and talked about strategic reassurance, core interests. We should respect your core interests. You should respect our core interests. Jim did not get approval for the things he was saying. And he really got slapped down when he came back because the rest of the administration felt that was, you know, we're not going to just...

acquiesce to whatever China describes as its core interests. So the limitations to our open-mindedness on China and our generous attitude started becoming clearer. But remember, this was also in reaction to China's behavior in the South China Sea and the cyber hacking, things like that. So

China's behavior changed. Our reaction also changed. In my book, "Overreach," I argue that China's policies changed pretty dramatically in 2006, '07, '08. But American policy didn't really become so competitive. You know, this strategic competition and a very hostile competition

didn't really become that way until the Trump administration and even in the Trump administration and even after Xi Jinping came to power. It really was maybe when Xi Jinping went for his third term or it was, well, one of the turning points in U.S. policy was putting Huawei on the entity list. Right.

That was a huge shift in our use of sanctions and our suspicion of China's companies as well as its government. I think that was a major turning point. Business has been frustrated with China for a long time actually. Intellectual property, access to markets,

whole sectors have been pretty close to America. So that really wasn't so new, but it got worse and worse, probably. And of course, the Chinese side, or the Chinese government thinks or says

that, well, it's just the US attempt to put down China because it's rising, because it's world number two, because it's a realist, Seuss-Sissidian trap. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's obvious to me that was not the case. And even the Obama administration pivot to Asia, the Hillary Clinton, Kurt Campbell notion

that we should invest more attention, more resources to our role in Asia. That was not just or primarily about balancing against the rise of Chinese military power, but it was to sustain an active economic role in this, you know, fast-growing part of the world. And

And because there's always a question in Asia about American commitment to Asia, because we're on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean. So any actual military defense that America would do of its allies or Taiwan is kind of optional. And so there's always, even among our closest allies, there's always...

a certain insecurity, lack of complete confidence that we would be there. So the idea was to increase their confidence by making our priority on Asia Pacific clearer. China-US cooperated in financial crisis in 1998. They cooperated in 2008.

But if we were to have an economic crisis today, I find it very difficult to imagine the same things happening. Yeah. But I mean, one good thing is that typically our macroeconomic senior officials in Treasury especially, and maybe it's because these people go in and out of Wall Street often too, they have had a lot of mutual respect.

with the macroeconomic officials in China. And a lot of this was also due to the fact that China's senior most macroeconomic official was Zhou Shi Huang, the head of the People's Bank of China. Very sophisticated guy, very smart. And he was the main interlocutor

for our macroeconomic officials. He was a student of Wu Jinglian's, and he actually did become a personal friend of mine too. When I was writing my book, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China, he actually read my manuscript and gave me feedback, you know, like a colleague. So he, and he has trained a huge number of younger people

financial economists in China, many of whom then went on to get PhDs at Stanford and other universities in the United States. So that whole crowd, I think, has served China very, very well for decades. Now, unfortunately, in recent years,

they've become targeted by the anti-corruption purge. And that those agencies, including the PBOC, have become politicized by, you know, appointing people who are loyal to Xi Jinping, but are not necessarily the most capable. For you personally, have your stance, has your stance on China hardened over the years? Absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, I've been surprised by this U-turn back under Xi Jinping, back to more dictatorial leadership. I mean, the abandonment of the peaceful turnover of power at the top, all of these, you know, I was in the school of people who believe that

Chinese domestic politics had been significantly institutionalized in a way that would be long lasting. Alice Miller and I did a lot of work on this, much of it which, alas, we never published. But, you know, I'd say I was at that end of the spectrum and the scholars of Chinese politics, some people thought that

Chinese politics remain focused on informal, personal, guanxi ties, factions, things like that. I thought that Deng Xiaoping and his successors had really institutionalized the party and the party-government relationship so that it would last for a long time and it would

constrain the dictatorial tendencies of Communist Party politics. But I obviously was wrong. And so I, you know, so that's been very disappointing, obviously. I mean, it's a personal disappointment, not just an intellectual one or a policy one. Because I

For so much of the whole time I studied China from the 1960s, but especially in the post-Mao era, it's been such a positive story and positive for the people in China. Their lives got a lot better and relations with other countries, including the United States, got a lot better. So

You know, it's a lot more fun to study a situation that's improving than one that's deteriorating. So I think it's fair to say that in the China field, disappointment and critical views of China have grown. It is very difficult to find anybody who's really extremely optimistic. I would probably be considered optimistic.

again, at the more optimistic end of the continuum, because I do believe it's not a stable situation now. I believe that the lack of power sharing is, you know, ultimately going to lead to a split in the leadership and that no matter how high tech China's surveillance system is and how much

the security agencies, the promotion system based on loyalty, virtuocracy, and the purges, the permanent purge has kind of terrorized Chinese officials, people dependent on the government and the party in some way. That doesn't mean, I just don't think it's airtight. I think things can happen.

Now, one of the moments when something might have happened and it didn't happen was the end of the lockdown, COVID. You know, that is a moment that because, but in the aftermath of that, so it didn't happen then, but in the aftermath, it's pretty obvious that there's a much higher level of dissatisfaction

with the Chinese Communist Party and with Xi Jinping, among the elite and certainly among the urban middle class than there was previously. And I think you personally met a lot of Chinese communist officials over the years, some prominent ones as well. Could you talk about your experience with some of them, Bo Xilai and others? Well, Bo Xilai, I met a few times when he was

party secretary of Dalian, came to the United States and I was at some meals and things with him then. I went with Madeline Albright to see him when he was minister of Moftak Foreign Trade and Commerce.

So I had those kinds of, I mean, we had no real personal relationship, but I got to observe him. Very smooth, very good looking. Reminds me a little of Ming Zhou and, you know, a real politician. You know, I like to call Chinese officials politicians. Right.

not just say cadre or something, because they're making political careers. They're politicians. And certainly Bo Xilai was that kind of politician. And then the crisis with Bo Xilai, I mean, it was fascinating to see him campaign for power when he was in Chongqing. I never went to Chongqing when he was there. But watching the way...

Other Chinese politicians would go visit him, watching the way academics, including people I knew, were so attracted by his charisma, his populism. I mean, some of his ideas in Chongqing were very creative.

about breaking down the barrier between suburban, rural, hukou people and urban hukou. I mean, smart guy. But of course, his neo-Maoist bent, singing Red Song, sending text messages of Mao Zedong, Sishan, you know, was kind of, really kind of crazy. Who knew that there was this kind of nostalgia there?

for the Mao era. But frankly, we all thought that this was only in Chongqing. I did visit Dalian later after he'd left and discovered how much they loved him in Dalian. So it wasn't just Chongqing, it was Dalian too. But then who knew that Xi Jinping could tap into that

kind of Maoist nostalgia himself. So all of these things were very unexpected. And, you know, the putting Bo Xilai on trial, the whole thing. I mean, look at what Wen Jiabao said at the National People's Congress right before they rounded up Bo Xilai.

And he talked about how the kind of practices of the Cultural Revolution are still around in China and need to be rooted out. Through political reforms. I mean, so you had all these different voices during the Hu Jintao era. It was not one unified thing.

And that's, of course, part of the inspiration of me writing the book Overreach, in which I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the Hu Jintao era operated. But anyway, very, very interesting to see the different points of view. And, you know, I'm absolutely sure that

that there remain all these different perspectives. I mean, I have done interviewing in the Xi Jinping period about the Hu Jintao era. And also, as people started realizing that Xi Jinping was not going to be the kind of just somewhat stronger, more competent reformer that people hoped he would be. So,

You know, a lot of the party, I guess it's fair to say party elders, you know, were, you know, very perturbed by this U-turn. And they were particularly upset by the destruction of the Deng Xiaoping legacy. And yet we could not, I don't see, and I haven't seen in all this time,

Any individual politician who isn't in jail, who is still young enough to matter, who could be the focal point for a resistance against Xi Jinping. That's why I have a chapter in my book called Dung's Ghost, because it's really the Dung legacy, the image of Dung and what he is.

his positions, his policies that are the focal point. But that's not enough. We need a live politician. Did you ever meet Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, Li Keqiang, even Xi Jinping himself? I mean, I met Xi Jinping himself when he was vice president and he came to the U.S. But, you know, I shook his hand in a receiving line at lunch in the State Department and stuff like that. Nothing.

and speech, you know, various speeches he gave, but I never really met him. I met similarly with Wen Jiabao and who else did you ask me about? Hu Jintao. Hu Jintao, more meetings, you know, accompanying people. He was very boring. You know, he read talking points. He showed no personality, certainly compared to Jiang Zemin or Zhu Rongji. Or just about anyone. Yeah. Yeah.

And Li Keqiang, did you ever meet him? Yeah. I mean, I went to the Bloomberg New Economy Forum and I went with all the CEOs and stuff when Li Keqiang tried to charm them. Well, not really very charming, but try to compare to so many other Chinese politicians.

wasn't really charming, but he tried to persuade them that China was really open for business. They should come. Yeah. But, you know, I didn't really gain a strong impression of him. Yeah. Who are the most charming among the Chinese politicians? Well, Zhou Enlai. Start with Zhou Enlai. Zhu Renji. The people who show some individual personality.

And what do you really learn from those official trips, actually? Because, I mean, I've never been on to one of them. I don't know what you mean, official trip. When you're in government? Well, just about any official events. Like when Xi Jinping comes and there's a big dinner and lots of people gather and listen to him. I mean, you don't... Well, nowadays, many influential people in China...

university presidents, government officials, academics, of course. When I have the opportunity to meet with them and talk with them, especially outside of China, but even inside China, I'm struck by how eager they are to spill their guts about how unhappy they are with the situation. It's shocking.

That's why I say it's a very unusual time in China. And I may have already said this, but when I was at a conference in another country and I met a dean, a university dean, who I didn't know. I'd never met him before. And he, like within three minutes of the start of a conversation, he starts pouring out his guts about

how bad things are and how frustrated he is. And it's very emotional expression on his side. And he didn't, we didn't know each other. We weren't old friends. Maybe that's why he could do it. No, but here's the point. I'm feeling there's an emotional tenor to this conversation that felt very familiar to me. And I was trying to figure out what it was.

And then I realized what it was. It was what it felt like when these refugees from the mainland I'd interviewed for my first research in Hong Kong. In the 70s. In the 70s, spilled their guts. And it was like people, it's like you weren't just a scholar or a social scientist. You were kind of... A therapist. Therapist.

Exactly. And so the emotional tenor of the conversation felt the same. And I thought, wow, that is really amazing that at least some people in China feel that same dismay, personal dismay. Probably more than some, I would say. So that's why I'm something. It can't last forever. Yeah.

What are some of the frustration you're getting, you're hearing? Well, of the barriers in international activities. Of course, many retired officials, retired who, my friends, people I've known for a long time, they're not allowed to go abroad. If you're at a senior enough level, very strict controls on your freedom of movement.

And we're going back to the Mao era where people can't leave China. Then for so many years, people just came back and forth freely. But that's not the case anymore. So some of these retired officials have been very effective spokespeople for China at academic meetings, track two, track 1.5 things. They can't go now.

which is very counterproductive from the standpoint of China's interests. What other frustrations? It's not so much the economy is bad. I mean, obviously, people in the private sector are very frustrated with the preferential treatment of state-owned enterprises and the erratic regulation of the private sector.

the difficulty getting it listing your company in Shanghai or Hong Kong. Um, the, um, you know, what they did to the tutoring businesses suddenly overnight wipe out the business, private business. And many of those companies were big companies that had, were already listed abroad. Um,

So this kind of prejudice against private business as being a group of people, capitalists. Well, first of all, talking about, what did they talk about? Capital, what was it? Some of the expressions used under Xi Jinping, which is using the term capital again, sort of anti-capitalist expression.

slogans and, of course, pressure on private business to contribute to public goods, charities, because the government is running out of money because they haven't done any fiscal reform. The tax system is totally broken. And so what they do is try to twist the arms of private business to cover the costs of public goods.

One saying that's floating around the Chinese internet is that we've entered the garbage time of history because no meaningful changes will happen as long as Xi Jinping is there. Politics won't be freer, the economy won't be freer. What's the Chinese word? 历史的垃圾时间

垃圾时间。 Oh, it's borrowed term from basketball, actually. When one team wins with such a huge gap, the leftover 10 minutes, it's not going to make any difference. Is that 垃圾时间? 垃圾时间, yeah. Is that time? Well, garbage means... Garbage is 垃圾, 时间 is time. So 垃圾时间 means garbage time. And so I wonder... You mean you've lost so badly that there's no chance of winning? No, it's more like...

The game is still playing, but the game is over, but the score is, yeah, the game is over, but there's still time that you have to play. And so people are just waiting it out that we just have to finish the 10 minutes and then see what happens next. But in those 10 minutes, nothing's going to happen. The game is scored. It's so pessimistic. Quite pessimistic.

And I wonder about your view. Because I just heard this from a friend yesterday. Yeah, well, it's floating around everywhere. I think it's a notion that began a year ago and now it's quite popular. Because I think it strikes a chord that people just feel helpless. That's not Xi Jinping's day. No meaningful political economic change will just take place. I mean, what's your view? Well, that has not been my view. I still believe there's some...

So when I was in China in February, March, you know, I would talk to people. I'd say, you know, well, who might Xi Jinping listen to? Which advisor might he listen to? You know, who might have some influence in persuading him to moderate his foreign policy or moderate his control over the media or something? Or...

recognize that he should, that this love affair with Putin is damaging China. So, and everybody I talked to, they said, forget it, Susan. Nothing, as long as Xi Jinping's there, nothing's going to happen. So they were much more pessimistic than I was. And obviously they know a lot more than I do. So then I felt, you know...

Am I really just so naive? But on the other hand, I look back and unexpected stuff has happened all the time. And I know that the level of dissatisfaction is high. So I don't think it's stable. But, you know, as I think I said to you, I can't predict what will happen. But when it happens, I won't be surprised. No.

And does diplomacy still have a role to play today? I'm given structural conflicts, given Hu Xi Jinping is given a new Cold War, decoupling, all that. Absolutely. Absolutely. I believe in diplomacy more than ever. I think what's really important is that we speak the audience for our diplomatic, our public statements, our rhetoric, and our...

diplomatic efforts is not just Xi Jinping, but all these other influential people in China, as well as the Lao Bai Qing, the ordinary folks. And we need to preserve some goodwill in this relationship, because eventually there are going to be compromises that need to be made. And if there's no goodwill, people think

that no matter what we do, the Americans are always going to be hostile to us, then there's no motivation to revise your policy. I really believe that. I believe that we need to think about sustaining the motivation of people in China to revise their policies so that they can restore a decent relationship with the United States and other Western countries. Mm-hmm.

And while Xi Jinping is still there. Yeah. But let's think about China after Xi Jinping. I mean, I think most of my queries to people when I was in China recently was about, well, who might persuade Xi Jinping to moderate his policies? Then they said, give it up. It's not going to happen as long as Xi's there. Okay, Xi's not going to be there forever.

And so we need to preserve the possibilities for the future. What possibilities? The possibilities for a more normal relationship between the US and China, and obviously for progress inside China, including political progress. Because these things are related.

political reform inside China and relations with other countries are related to one another. What do you think will happen after Xi Jinping? I really don't know. I really don't know. I assume, let's assume that maybe he dies in office peacefully without any open resistance. Then I still think there will be an effort to

go back to a more normal collective leadership, more power sharing, at a minimum. It could be even bolder, but at a minimum to do that. Am I right to say that you're assuming the Communist Party will still be there after Xi Jinping is gone? Yeah, I am assuming it'll be there unless there's a more, you know, I think the chances of a bottom-up bringing down the Communist Party...

from mass level are pretty small. Organizing a revolution from below is hard and there's no space for any organization to make that happen. You know, you'd have to be so far underground, oh my gosh. You know, it's just really hard to imagine. I see, I don't even see signs in the diaspora of anything like that happening. Now we have a much bigger, more vibrant

I would expect to see some activity like that. I haven't heard about anything, but maybe that's good. I don't know. But I do think the odds are much greater on a split in the leadership. I think that could still very well happen.

And I mean, a lot of what we're doing here is gathering the evidence, the history to really speak to the future, to have a takeaway, to have lessons prepared for the future, for the post-C world. And I mean, how my question would be something like, how should we act in this time and in that time? And given your experience in the old Cold War,

What can we learn from the old Cold War to teach us about a new Cold War? And eventually it will end. And how should the world respond to that uncertainty? I'm not sure I understand. I mean, the whole question of how the old Cold War gives us lessons for the new Cold War...

is a very interesting set of questions, which is kind of more than we probably can get into here. I love to, I've been, several times I've organized discussions of Cold War historians to try to do that. And now I'm interested in organizing one. We started organizing one on the nuclear side.

of Cold War, arms control, and are there lessons for contemporary nuclear issues. But as to the larger... I mean, my main approach is to recognize that there's a lot of human agency in both China and the United States. This is not about...

Thucydides trap and just power and growth rates and things like that. Second, unexpected things happen. You can't predict. And well, domestic politics matters, dominates in both countries. And then unexpected things can happen. So what do you do to lay the groundwork for

positive developments in the future in a post-Xi world now. You know, I was talking with these young teenagers from China. One of them said, well, what can we do now? And I said, well, I've always, I've thought that when China democratizes, which I believe ultimately will happen, and of course, pretty much everybody

I talked to in China over the years has at least said that they believed it would happen too. It might be too slow, but ultimately it'll happen. So I said, how do we, I want that democracy to be a stable, healthy democracy that will have staying power, you know? So recognizing that democracy is not right around the corner in China.

What do we focus on now to lay a foundation for a healthy democracy in the future? And I said, I've always thought there are three things. Civil society, promote opportunities for all sorts of organizations, not political organizations necessarily, but try to strengthen organizations.

the non-governmental side of society in whatever ways possible. Second, free information, press, media. That is really important for a stable, successful democracy in the future. And third is legal system. One of the students said that he would add

a really vibrant market economy. I said that I agree with that. So that's kind of an agenda that in whatever way you can, even nibbling around at the margins, whatever you can do to contribute in those areas, I think that will really help China's political progress in the future. And then in terms of

preventing war between China and the United States and a healthy, stable relationship between the two countries. I think, you know, we need to pursue democracy, I mean pursue diplomacy and show goodwill in order to motivate the decision makers in China to make the compromises they ultimately will have to have and make

and to prevent the public from believing that America is so hostile to China that nothing they do will make any difference. One last question, I promise. Last question and then we're done. What do you expect if Trump were to come into power? Oh, I think this is, it's really hard to predict because he, view on China is really,

kind of incoherent. So it's not clear how much he cares about anything other than the trade deficit. Because in his first term, he didn't seem to care in the beginning much about anything beyond the trade deficit. Then when he didn't do well in the midterm, he unleashed the more hawkish

in different executive branch agencies. And the whole approach became a lot more hawkish, especially in tech restrictions and to a certain extent on Taiwan policy, but not really. So, you know, what does he end up going back to? Since that was then. But now we have this whole big...

ecosystem built around technology decoupling. So is he just going to roll it back? It'd be hard to do. Is he going to just go along with it out of a kind of security hawkish orientation? I mean, there's a lot of, you know, Republican Party is generally more, and Trump himself, more sympathetic to Russia and Putin. But even Xi Jinping,

He didn't really have a problem with Xi Jinping. So I think he might believe that he can fix U.S.-China relations. He might end up being more... Pro-engagement? It's not impossible. You heard what he said last week about Taiwan. Taiwan should... He seemed to have no commitment to the defense of Taiwan. So it's really hard to say.

All right. Well, on that note. Okay. We conclude our marathon. Let's hope for the best. Let's hope for the best. As we always should. And let's hope that he doesn't win.

This is the end of my conversation with Professor Susan Shirk. If you enjoyed this, you may want to subscribe to our podcast and follow our sub stack. And once again, we're hosting a Lunar New Year community live streaming event on January 29th. If you have time, I would love to see you there and hear your stories with Lunar New Year. Until then, it's goodbye from me.