Shownotes Transcript
How are radical moves in D.C. affecting Sino-U.S. relations? Welcome to The Bridge, enlightening conversations on world cultures, life, and everything in between. Hey everyone, this is Jason Smith, host of The Bridge podcast from sunny California. If you like this show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. Oh yeah!
Hey, everyone. My name is Jason Smith. I'm originally from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Today's guest is SL Kanthan, a geopolitical analyst, columnist, writer, podcaster, and host of Geopolitics Demystified, based out of Bangalore, India. He writes articles and does interviews for the Global Times, CGTN, DD Politics, Xinhua, and others. You can find his writing on Substack, slkanthan.substack.com. Welcome back
to the Bridge to China SL canthon. Thank you, Jason. It's always a pleasure to chat with you. Likewise, my friend. You wrote an article on your substack a while back. I went combing through your substack. I think this is 2022. Six reasons why the US attacks China every day.
Yeah. Wow. So when you said that, I had to actually go back and look at the article because I forgot. So I looked at the article. So I've now added one more reason. So it's seven reasons why the U.S. attacks China every day. The big picture is if you watched or read George Orwell's Netflix,
1984, they have this concept called two minutes of hate. So people wake up and then they go to the movie theater and it's two minutes of pure hatred on the opposition or the geopolitical enemy. They screen and then they feel better and then they go home, you know. And this actually works in real life.
And these people, they actually follow, you know, like, well, if you read George Orwell's book, oh my God. Oh yeah. A couple of times. Yeah. You'd be like, this is the manual that we are following in this world.
Whether it's propaganda, mind control, the deception, how the mainstream media works. It's all like taken right out of George Orwell. And the two minutes of hate is also straight out of that. And it really works, you know. So they have to keep that hatred alive. And they did that with Russia for many years. Oh, yeah.
I grew up in that, yeah. Yeah. Hide under your desk, kids. That'll save you from the blast. Yeah.
But why China now? So the number one reason is that China is the geopolitical competitor. It's the peer competitor. And it's like so comprehensive. You know, so it's even like, I would say, 10 times bigger than what the Soviet Union was. Because China is like so comprehensive, 360 degree competition in terms of
the economy, technology, military, diplomacy, and now even a soft power. Like we see in Asia too, it's now the number five movie in the history of movies in the world. And it's gained like $2 billion in just a matter of two months, not even two months.
It's quite good. Have you seen it? No, I have not. I would like to. They're not showing it in India, which is so sad. I'm so mad. So hopefully they will change their mind. I will talk about it later. There needs to be a lot done for the relationship between these two countries with 1.5 and 1.4 billion people. We need to get together and be friends.
So China is competing with the U.S. in all the areas. So they have to badmouth. So that's number one. And number two is the reason if you watch the show Hong Shui, the red note, and you see a lot of Americans are getting very mad, very angry at the U.S. government for
for lying about China all these years. They're like, hold on.
I'm making friends with China and they have amazing streets. They have amazing infrastructure, like world-class metro systems, and they don't have any homeless people. And their food is so cheap. And most of the people, they own homes and they don't have property tax.
And it costs like less than $1,000 a year to go to the best university in China. You know, so there is this like one woman who's so funny. She's like, what the heck, America? I just learned from my Chinese friend. And then she lists all the things that she learned about China that are so much better than the U.S.,
And that's exactly the sort of thing that the elites in the U.S. do not want to happen because they've been screwing the American public for like at least 50 years, you know.
the neoliberalism project that started in the 1970s. And it's been terrible for at least half of the American workers have been screwed. So they don't want Americans to know that, hey,
You can have a system where you can actually graduate from Stanford University with no student debt. It's like a wild concept, you know? And they don't want people to know that. It's like they want to put like, shield them from the truth. So people just accept that, yeah, homelessness. Yeah, of course homelessness happens. You know, we have a lot of homeless people. Yeah.
Yeah, well, of course I will get mugged if I go out at night. Duh, I shouldn't leave my home after 9 p.m. I cannot go jogging as a woman.
And all these things. And then these people, they go to Shaohongshu and they see like an American woman saying, "I have never felt so safe in my entire life when I live in Shanghai." And they're like, "Yeah, you know, I have a nine-year-old daughter. She takes the subway.
She goes to the piano lessons in the evening and she's safe. So all these things are, why shouldn't people in the U.S. have all these benefits, right? So they don't want people to know that.
So number three is the China model is really bad for the oligarchs who run America. Because in China, the government controls the corporations. In the U.S., it is the reverse model. The corporations, they fund all the politicians.
They have like thousands of lobbyists who totally control the politicians, what policies they support. So if you look at the U.S. Congress, a majority of the politicians are millionaires.
And you look at the NPC, the CPCC in China, you find a worker, regular doctor from like a rural area who makes like maybe $20,000 a year. And she has a lot of say, you know, she comes to Beijing and she says, hey, guys, you know, so let's do this to help.
the rural areas. So that kind of a very participatory democracy is very scary for the billionaires, you know, who run America. So that's number three. And then number four is to discourage all the other countries and the investors
from making deals with or making deals in China. So if you are a person, like say you're president of some country and then you love to watch CNN and read the Wall Street journals, and then you see the news all the time that China's economy is slowing down, it's going to collapse, blah, blah, blah.
Then you start getting second thoughts. You know, you're like, yeah, maybe I shouldn't join the Belton Road Initiative because who knows the future, you know? And foreigners can buy stocks and bonds in China. So Wall Street firms from the U.S. have bought at least $1 trillion of Chinese stocks and bonds.
Then they start to believe their own mythologies and they're like, yeah, let's withdraw some money because China is going to slow down.
And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like they withdraw $500 billion and then the Chinese stock market goes down. And then they're like, yeah, see, we told you so. So that's one reason. And then is to justify all the immoral activities. So the U.S. breaks all
all the norms, the international norms and rules. Like they place tariffs on Chinese goods. They place sanctions on Chinese companies.
Those are against the international laws that the U.S. wrote. The U.S. was the champion of all these free trade rules. The WTO was basically a brainchild of the U.S.,
The UN was basically created by the US. And if you look at the world's biggest institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, the headquarters are in Washington, D.C. So the US wrote these rules. These are very good rules about free trade, about treating all the countries equal, about
But those were all fine as long as the U.S. was winning. And then the moment it started to lose, it didn't want to learn from others. So it didn't want the people in Washington, D.C. and New York did not want to think, hey, why are we losing? What is China doing better? No, that's not possible.
We're the best. We're the greatest. And we know what's best. And so they're breaking their own rules and laws, breaking WTO laws, sanctions. Like, why should Huawei be sanctioned? So crazy.
I mean, I don't see other countries sanctioning Google, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, right? I mean, people accept, you know, in my life, you know, like in India, I look at all the software I use, it's all from the U.S., you know? So nobody has sanctions on American products. So why should the U.S. have sanctions on Chinese products? So...
But if you demonize China, then no American is going to ask, hey, why can I not drive a BYD? Why can I not use a Xiaomi phone? Why can I not use DeepSeek?
Because you turn China into a bad thing and then nobody questions. Oh my God, it's the CCP. BYD will probably spy on me and send to Beijing what I had for lunch yesterday. So just like an insane paranoia, right? Like the whole, the spy balloon incident. My God. Oh yeah.
You're listening to The Bridge.
You know, what's really funny about that to me is that the whole time it was over the U.S., they practically guaranteed all the time, all the networks, all the newspapers, this was spying. The moment it touches down and the Pentagon investigates and finds out that it was not actually recording anything, you could see a blip in the media and it disappears. They did not attempt to undo any of the damage that they had been causing for weeks up until that night.
knowledge came out. It's just ludicrous. Yeah. So that line about that the balloon was not spying was like buried in like the 15th paragraph in the article. So most people now will not believe that there was not a spy balloon.
So that kind of paranoia, it comes from the two minutes of hate. You know, like you hear something bad every day and then you just like totally believe it. But, you know, the Americans, they do it to themselves, which is kind of sad. You know, like you see how polarized the
country is. So the number six is actually very important. It was to turn the Muslims against China because the U.S., the deep state, had successfully turned Americans against China and a lot of the Europeans are also sort of against China.
So China's sort of the saving route or the fallback is the global south, the developing nation. And like in India, the U.S. has done a very good job in driving a wedge between India and China and to flame the problems, you know, like the border problems. There was no reason for the border problems to become such huge issue.
The Indian media is like basically like 99% they just regurgitate the American media. Like we have CNN India, CNBC-India, Bloomberg-India.
Oh, that can't be good. Yeah. It's like totally. And then the non, like the so-called the Indian media, they literally copy paste Reuters article and they don't even like change the headlines. Wow. They don't even change like one paragraph, like one word just to add some creativity, you know, just to add something.
I mean, the Indian flavor. No, it's like copy, click, paste. So they had turned India against China. And then the big thing was to turn the Muslim countries against China because that would really hurt, right? So just imagine if like the entire Middle East is brainwashed to hate China.
And they are a huge supplier of the oil and gas. So that would really wreck China's economy and geopolitical power.
And the same thing in Central Asia, which is very, very crucial for China's security. So what if, say, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, they all turned against China because they believed, oh,
the lies about Uyghur genocide, whatever nonsense that the CIA spread. So that could be very dangerous for national security as well.
And then if you look at Southeast Asia and if you look at, say, Malaysia, Indonesia, like they're all very, very strategic nations. And China needs to have really good relations with them for security in South China Sea and for trade.
All of that. So what if all the Muslims in Indonesia, they are propagandized to hate China? So that would be very bad. So that's one of the reasons that the U.S., the deep state, it spread rapidly.
So now it's kind of died down. For me, kind of the United States saying, no, we're going to continue to keep the heat up on China. Yeah. So Colby is like a decent guy. You know, he's kind of smart. And at least like the way he says it is like a little bit diplomatic and logical. And then like one Republican guy, he now wants to ban all...
All the students from China. I know. I really don't think that's going to pass. If that passes, it'll destroy the American university system. They're dependent on income from international students who often pay between three and six times as much as a local American student. Yeah. These days...
What the world needs most is like the people to people exchange. I mean, I saw some articles in the New York Times and they were crying fake tears about how the Mongolian language was being erased. What are you guys talking about? Crazy nuts. And then, of course, there is a famous, I mean, like their favorite, the Tibet Shazam, right? So it's
You know, they still dream about stirring up some trouble in Tibet. What if they didn't have this negative propaganda? Right. And then I just imagine what would happen in, say, with Taiwan. You know, people would be like, wow, we love China. They are brothers and sisters. We don't mind reunification.
So that would be like terrible for people like Kobe. So this, the two minutes of hatred is to make sure that the Taiwanese people
But the majority of the Taiwanese people would be scared about reunification. Let's pivot a little bit. I know you do geopolitics. You also like to talk about technology, human rights, all kinds of things. The United States under Biden, with Gina Raimondo as the Commerce Secretary, attempted to begin kind of a technological war against China by
blocking out Chinese companies and sanctioning Chinese companies. And the idea was to, quote, build a small yard with a high fence to keep American technology protected from, I guess, China taking that technology. I'm not sure what the plan really was. Based on your assessment of how things are going in the world, has that worked out? Yes and no. So, you know, like we talked about how the U.S. banned Huawei.
Say for example, if you go back to say 2018, Huawei at the beginning of 2018 had surpassed the Apple as the second most popular or selling smartphone. And then by the end of 2018,
Huawei had actually surpassed Samsung. So just imagine if there were no US sanctions, if we really had a free trade, you know, Huawei would have been the number one smartphone for the last five years, you know? So it's so sad that sanction, it crippled Huawei's smartphone market share, right? So similarly, if...
If the US had not had any sanctions on all these other companies, we would see Chinese companies doing, you know, being a lot more successful. So to give credit, China has survived and surpassed all the expectations that people had. You know, even people like me who are pro-China,
were very worried about the U.S. sanctions because they are brutal sanctions. It's like you cannot sell hardware, you cannot sell software, you cannot, China cannot request the chips to be made by, say, Samsung or TSMC. And China could not even buy the machines that could make the chips.
This is like so ruthless, so mean, so petty. So just imagine how the Chinese semiconductor sector would have been in the last six, seven years if there were no sanctions. Like they would be super successful all over the world. So that's the bad news. The good news is that it made China very self-sufficient. It made China even smarter.
And it made China say, OK, so now we have to master every single step in the semiconductor industry.
And there are like 1,000 steps. Mastering the semiconductor supply chain is like nobody has done it in the world. The U.S. and its friends, like if you look at, say, what does the U.S. do? What does Japan do? South Korea do? Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, blah, blah, blah. So they all have some role. And together, they are able to master the semiconductor supply chain.
And now China is going, is on the path of doing that all by itself. So when China releases its own lithography machine, it's going to be like earth shattering. And then all these people will totally regret all these sanctions. You're listening to The Bridge.
Well, let's switch up again. I want to talk about multipolarity. It's a word that gets thrown around a lot. And a lot of people say we're already living in a multipolar world. I'm kind of on the fence about this. So BRICS, BRI, Belt and Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other international bodies seem to be moving in that direction. But as long as the U.S. can invade countries, sovereign nations without security council resolutions, then
or bomb other countries without asking for international law, not following international law. It doesn't seem like we're there yet. So in what ways, in your opinion, are we multipolar? And are we moving towards multipolarity in your perspective? You know, it's sad. They're not being as bold and they're not moving fast enough. When the U.S. and...
Europe seized something like $400 billion worth of Russia's foreign exchange reserves. That's when a whole bunch of people said, oh my God, you know, we realize that this is like a mafia system. Like there's no guarantee that our money is going to be safe in the American banks. At whatever time the U.S. can just seize all our foreign exchange money.
because some US president is not happy with our foreign policy. So there was a huge movement towards BRICS. A lot of countries wanted to join BRICS. And if you like, go back to 2023,
de-dollarization was like the word of the day, you know, like Brazil's president Lula, he came to Beijing and he's like, you know, I wake up every day and I ask myself, why do I use the U.S. dollar to buy goods from other countries?
So I was like, wow, this is awesome. You know, the world is getting democratized. And then it's like two years later, hold on, where is the progress card?
So people are not very well organized. So like somebody has to study how the U.S. did what it did these decades. So, well, you can say a lot of bad things about the U.S. foreign policy, but the people are also very, very smart people.
very well organized, and they make things happen. So it's been like three years of sanctioning Russia, which had like 2,000 sanctions. Russia became the most sanctioned country in the history of geopolitics. So this should have been a wake-up call for all the developing nations, and they should have a
developed their own SWIFT system, their own financial transaction system. They should have figured out some blockchain system thing for doing business with each other without the US dollar. The US, it created the SWIFT system back in the 1970s or so, right?
The U.S. created World Bank and the IMF in the 1940s.
when we didn't have a whole bunch of technology. So what is the excuse? Like they don't even have like a BRICS office, okay? They don't even have a BRICS website. They don't even have a BRICS social media. So what is the vision? You know, like why would somebody want to join a multipolar world? What does it mean? What is the vision? What is the plan?
So how is the multiple world going to make me richer, safer? So like these are all the things they should have. Think tanks, they should have media, they should have websites, they should have like 50 smartest engineers from China, 50 smartest engineers from India, 50 smartest engineers from Russia and Brazil, blah, blah.
They all should be like living in Shanghai in a five-story building, and they should be like writing programs, right? People like...
you and me should be discussing the architecture of a multipolar world. So the US does a very good job in selling a vision, right? So the marketing vision from the US is just amazing in whatever, right? Like whether they're selling Nike shoes or freedom and democracy, right?
or make America great again, Tesla guy, SpaceX wanting to go to Mars. I mean, it seems to me like a stupid idea, but people love that. So you have to have a bold vision, you have to have like an optimistic, positive vision, a plan,
And so sadly, I don't see that happening a lot in the global south. Now, China has done a very good job in de-dollarization, right? Like 10 years ago or so, if you look at China's foreign trade, basically 0% was done in the yuan or the renminbi. And now it's like 55%.
Like more than half of China's trade with the rest of the world is actually happening in the Chinese yuan. I think almost part of that is China has three and a half trillion dollars in foreign exchange. Most of that's in U.S. dollars. And it has nowhere to put it.
Because the trade imbalance, so it tries to buy UST bills or puts it in the AIIB or it invests it in Africa or, you know, Pakistan or South America. It's investing in all these projects, but it still has so much money, it doesn't even know what to do with it. So I think they needed to just to stop having just piles of dollars sitting around.
I want to switch, though, to India. You know, I really do want to understand this. I don't understand. It's very confusing. I think most people outside of India don't know what India is doing. It's like the mysterious...
power in the world. What's going on? What is India's international foreign policy? And also, what would it take to create better Sino-Indian relations? Well, there are multiple factors in play. So the first is the enormous influence of the West, and especially the U.S.,
Right. Like, you know, so if you ask a smart Indian, hey, wow, you graduated valedictorian in your college. What is your goal? You know, so it's like in the U.S., people say, well, I'm going to Disneyland. So like in India, they say, I'm going to America. Yeah.
So that is the default. So you have all these smartest people. The first thing they want to do is to go to the U.S. And then what happens? These people, they go to the U.S., they study at Harvard, and then they become
the head of the World Bank, some big shot at the IMF, and they get totally brainwashed by capitalism, by neoliberalism. They hate manufacturing. They hate China. They love Wall Street.
stock buybacks. So all of this like bad stuff. And then, you know, they become like puppets of America, you know, whether they consciously do it or not. It's like they become so like friends with the U.S. They start to think like the U.S.,
They bond with Henry Kissinger. He's not there anymore, but you get the message. So it's very hard. And then when they come back, they view geopolitics through the American perspective. So then they're like, yeah, China is trying to contain India.
What are you talking about? China doesn't want to contain India. But there are some spheres of influence struggle. But I think that every country should be allowed to be friends with everyone. So just like we cannot force, say, Ukraine to hate Russia and to be friends only with Europe and the U.S.,
That leads to the destruction of small countries. So small countries should be friends with everyone. So if you have, say, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Maldives, and all these small islands and small countries in the Indian Ocean are under heavy pressure from the U.S. and others not to be friends with China.
And then India becomes the geopolitical proxy. So rather than the U.S. having a military base in Maldives, they will tell the Indian government, hey, why don't you set up a military base in Maldives? And we will support you and we will help you in other ways. Why don't you set up...
the Indian military base in the Andaman. So like if there is a war between the US and China, you can bomb all the Chinese ships that go through Singapore, Malaysia, through the Malacca Strait.
So it's like the proxy war. So they do a very good job. And if you look at the elites in India, their children study in the U.S., they have families living in the U.S. So it's very easy for them to be bought into the American narrative.
So that's the main problem. That said, I think that China is doing a great job in building people-to-people exchanges. China is able to invite Indian students, Indian journalists.
So, you know, hopefully China can do more. You know, like, for example, like, "Narsha 2." I'm sure that the Indian people would love the movie, both "Narsha" and "Narsha 2." So I'm not a fan of, I mean, the cartoons and the animation. So I was very, very hesitant to watch "Narsha 1."
And somebody from the Chinese media, they wanted to know what I thought of Nezha. So I'm like, okay, all right, I'll force myself to watch Nezha. And I found it online. I was like, wow, this is actually really good. During the Chinese New Year, I watched the first one. It was okay. But then my wife brought me to the movie theater and without English subtitles. And my Chinese isn't that good. It's just okay. Okay.
So I was mostly just looking at the pictures and the intonations and body language. Part two was so much better. It was so amazing. Wow. Okay. So I loved the first one. I was so surprised. You know, I thought it would be like for children, but there was like very profound messages and really good, wholesome values and also good, you know, CGI fighting scene and
humor and all that. So yeah, what is standing between India and China? It's just blockades that are there for no reason. So, but India has to look at the future because 10 years from now, okay, China is going to be number one in like pretty much every sector, right? Whether it's going to be electric cars, solar panels, robots, humanoids, AI, you know,
China is going to be number one and we need to be friends with the number one. I mean, we should be friends with both, right? Like, be friends with the US. And also now there's a lot of backlash in the US against the H1B visa. A lot of Americans are very, very mad at the Indians for coming and stealing their jobs.
So this paradise of flying to America at the drop of a hat is not going to work much longer. So the smart Indians need to stay in India, make India great again, sacrifice for one generation. Like maybe you don't have the opportunity to live in India.
Santa Clara or Santa Cruz or what is the wine place above San Francisco? Napa Valley. Yeah. Okay. So maybe you don't have the opportunity to like have wonderful wine in Napa Valley and you have to be stuck in Bangalore with the potholes and, you know, but it's a sacrifice.
If they make India great again, they can get rid of potholes. You know, I just realized you could sell hats, you know, M-I-G-A hats, like make a fortune. But you have to sacrifice for one generation, right? You know, you cannot create the Napa Valley in your lifetime. But if you work hard and then your sons and daughters are going to have the same status.
Think about China, right? How many people sacrificed in the 1990s and the 2000s? They had to work for 50 cents an hour in factories making Nike shoes.
And they had to live in polluted cities, right? Like if you go to Beijing 25 years ago, it was very, very polluted. But that's the sacrifice they did. And now Beijing is beautiful.
But do the Chinese kids these days, you know, like, do they fully understand what their parents and grandparents sacrificed? Hopefully they do. I doubt it. They look so happy. I grew up in America, in the suburbs in the 1980s, and I had a good life. Baseball cards and...
bicycling and everything was great, you know, blue skies and kites. But looking at these Chinese kids here in Beijing, oh, I'm jealous. They got every kind of toy you can imagine. The toy stores look like you get robot dogs in there and like flying toys and that you can control. This is amazing, man. I wish I had grown up right now in China because it's just amazing here. I want to switch gears, though, to democracy.
The two sessions just happened recently, and everyone in America thinks that China has no democracy. Of course, I think rightly, people look at India and they think, oh, wow, there's democracy. So my question is this.
Is China democratic or is it not? What is the NPC? What is the two socials? So this is another thing that the U.S. influence. They determine the words. So just like the U.S. can determine what is a man, what is a woman. Well, you know, a woman can have...
The mail parts, whatever. So it's all about the definition, the narrative control. So if you look at Lincoln's definition of democracy, and he said it's of the people, by the people, for the people.
So if you use that definition, yes, China has democracy. Xi Jinping is Chinese. All the CPC members are Chinese. They're not from Korea. They're not from Germany. They're all Chinese. So the government is made of the people. And in the second part is where one can
debate a little bit. One can say, I mean, were all the CPC members selected by the Chinese people? So for the outsider, it may seem like no, because if you don't have fancy the elections, then how can you say that the government was elected by the people? But it is elected by the people, but in a more meritocratic way.
It works like a giant corporation of 100 million people, the CPC, and you have to work your way up slowly. You start at a village level, blah, blah, blah, and then you become a city level. I just read how Xi Jinping became the president and
But compare that with how, say, George Bush, George W. Bush became the president, and you'll see a huge difference. So that's very democratic. And for the people, you know, for me, that's the most important, right? So who does more for the people?
If you ask the Americans, they would say 75% of Americans would say that the Congress does not do anything for people like me. So Congress has an approval rate of 12%.
because people understand that the U.S. politicians are there to represent the lobbyists, okay? So they don't wake up every day and say, what can I do to help the person in the Rust Belt? You know, those people in Kentucky, they've been suffering for 40 years. What can I do to help the people in West Virginia?
No, they don't care about the poor Americans. They don't care about, you know, so they blame the poor Americans, you know. They're like, ah, you don't contribute to the GDP. So we don't care about people like in Iowa.
Kansas, Tennessee, we don't care about them because you're not as highly productive as the people in the Silicon Valley. But in Beijing, they care about everybody. They care about the poorest, poorest people. You have shared
you know, photos of how Beijing builds, you know, homes for people in poorest region. And you look at the province like Guizhou,
How do you say that? Yeah, it's Guizhou. So that's supposed to be the poorest province in China. And then you look at these like amazing bridges and amazing infrastructure. You go, hold on. How is this the poorest province in China? Looks better than like most of the cities in India and in the U.S.,
And even like in Europe, there was a time when like, you know, you want to like fantasize about beautiful places. You think of Italy, France, you know, some like romantic areas. And now you look at
Those places, they're like, you know, they have floods and all these, you know, they look so sad. So who takes care of the people better? It's the CPC. You know, they lifted like 750, 80 million people out of the extreme poverty. But every year, Beijing releases a document. And it's the first document they release.
And it's called the number one document. That's the name. And the number one document that Beijing releases once a year in January, you know, like in the first week of January or so, is all about farmers, about rural China. So how beautiful is that?
Does it ever happen in the U.S. or in Germany, France, U.K., where their number one priority is the rural people, the poor people who may not have a college education, who may not be driving a BMW?
So that to me is so beautiful. Like the best thing is you can, you don't have to guess what Xi Jinping plans to do next year. You know, they put that down in these work reports that come out of the two sessions. And it's like so detailed. It's like, I'm going to do this, A, B, C, D, E. And they, you know, and they will tell you everything they want to do.
And then you say, OK, does that look like a democracy to me? Yes. So, by the way, I will. I have never. Wow. OK, well, everyone always says India is the world's largest democracy. It's one of those phrases you hear all the time. But we only have time for one more question because your answers are so thorough. How does the developing world and by developing world, I mean the entire developing world, you know,
Southeast Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, the rest of the developing world, see China. Are Chinese development projects better? Yes or no? Why or why not? I would say...
to some extent, they should do more is my point. They should be like really studying China, the China model. They should be sending professors and bureaucrats to Beijing. They should study how the NPC works, the CPCC works, how they get feedbacks, and how China gets things accomplished. So the
So there are two things in life. First, you have to plan. Somebody said nobody plans to fail, but they fail to plan. And that works for the countries, too. So like if you go to France and you ask Macron, Monsieur Macron, what are you planning to do in 2025? He's not going to give you an answer.
You know, like there's no there's no website. There's no document. There's no paper. There's no cheat sheet. You know, there's no post-it notes. There's nothing. They just like wing it. So the planning part, especially if you are a developing nation. OK, so if you are poor, you have to work much harder than the rich people. That's the first lesson in life.
I mean, the image froze for a few seconds. Okay, so the planning part, the poor countries have to learn. That's the first step. And then comes the execution, because you can write down all the plans. You can say, I'm going to go to the gym, you know, seven times a week. That's a good plan, but you have to make it happen.
So most people, at least on social media, do not understand how China succeeded. Like I saw this woman on Bill Maher's show, and she's like, China succeeded because of cheap labor.
Man, if that is the only thing you need to succeed in life, all the developing nations would be successful. So they tried to do like the outsourcing, right? They tried to do the China plus, the reshore, friendshore, offshore for five years. Nothing happened.
They could not move manufacturing from China to India, for example.
It's very, very hard. And finally, people are understanding manufacturing is like rocket science. It's like, I mean, as difficult as rocket science. So people should learn. I think some countries are doing a good job, but overall, they should do a lot more. Kind of already answered it, but I want to go back to Sino-Indian relations. What, beyond the United States, beyond...
treasured academics moving to the United States, what other things can be done by India or China, people who want to deepen the relationship, to improve relationships between these two great nations? Yeah. Like you look at 2,000 years of history, 99.9% were like wonderful relations.
very warm relations, and both cultures are very similar in many ways. And we have the same values, you know, like family, education, working hard. Like, those are all the foundations of a society.
From a practical point of view, there's a lot of win-win opportunities. India has a lot of young people. The wages are much lower than in China. Those are good reasons for China to offshore some of its manual labor.
or labor intensive manufacturing to India. The middle class in India is growing very rapidly. So this is a wonderful opportunity for the Chinese companies to grab the market share. Because right now, if you see the US companies, they have monopoly in like everything in India.
from software, hardware, products. And this is a great opportunity for China. So for example, if you look at smartphones, 70% of the smartphones in India are Chinese brands. So why cannot China do the same thing for, say, cars, for washing machines, for the home appliances?
And even software, you know, going into software. So they're, you know, and in luxury brands, why should Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Starbucks monopolize the Indian market? I would like to see, like, say, the Heidi Lau, the hot pot chain. You know, I love hot pot. So why can't we have hot pot chains all over India? Yeah.
So there are lots of opportunities. Only sky is the limit. And you just need people in both countries need to be creative.
and to get over the sort of the win-lose or the zero-sum mentality and not let borders and geopolitical issues be in the way. You know, like the borders, I would say, just freeze the border issue for like 50 years, okay? So,
Both countries should say, let's fight with each other in 2075. Let's set a date, you know, 2075, January 1st, we start bombing one another. But for the next 50 years, let's focus on friendship and cooperation and
Because those borders are not going to go away, right? Those mountains, those rivers, they're going to stay there forever. Nobody really lives there in a lot of those areas in dispute. So just focus on cooperation. And then, you know, once you build trust, then the border issues become very easy to solve. So trust and friendship can solve all the problems.
And that's what we need to focus on. Thank you so much for your time. SL Kantham. Thank you, Jason. It's always a pleasure chatting with you. Hey, you know, I would like to do spaces and I would love to have you if you have some time. I would be delighted. Thank you so much. Wonderful. Okay.