How the US began believing its own disinformation
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Today, we ask geopolitical commentator Carl Jha about Sino-U.S. relations in the context of Trump's trade war on the world. 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 the show, don't forget to subscribe. We love The Bridge. Hi, everyone. My name is Jason Smith. I'm originally from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Carl Jha is a well-known media commentator in the China sphere. His YouTube and XR at...

Carl Zha, C-A-R-L-Z-H-A. He is the host of Silk and Steel podcast. Hi, how are you? Thanks for inviting me again, Jason. I'm great. Delighted to have you. Always delighted. You know, I was talking to someone and we honestly didn't kind of know we were talking about you and we didn't

really know how you got into this. So, you know, you're like raised in America and you end up somehow doing geopolitics and social media. I was wondering if you could give us some insights into your background. What got you started doing this? OK, so a little more extended background. I was born in China in 1976, one month after Mao died. So I'm the first post-cultural revolution generation that grew up in China. My dad,

came to study in United States in 1985 to get his PhD. So I joined my dad in 1990 when I was like 13, almost 14. And so I kind of spent the half of my formative years in China and the rest in the United States. And I, you know, like a typical Chinese immigrant kid, I did okay in school and I went to Caltech,

I went into a tech job because, you know, around 2000, 1999, the time I graduated, that was the height of the tech bubble, the dot-com bubble. Everybody went into tech. So that's just what I did. But one thing I noticed was, you know, ever since I came to U.S., I was very hungry for news of my homeland. So I would read pages in New York Times.

to try to find any news reporting on China. Back in 1990s, there were very few and far in between. The ones I managed to find, it paints like a completely different picture than the China I experienced. It's like reading about a bizarro world, like

This is not the China I left. Like if you read the New Pager New York Times, China is this dark place where human rights issue getting worse and worse every year. And that just totally did not match my experience growing up in China. You know, I had a very happy childhood.

And my experience in China in 1980 was, you know, life was getting better and better every year. I saw that, I witnessed that, I lived through it. I still remember in 1982, my mom used her savings to buy my grandparents a black and white television set. That was like the first TV set in the whole neighborhood. So all the kids would come to my grandma's house like around,

I write around seven o'clock and everybody like in the living room watch TV together. This was 1982. I mean, it's not really that long ago in the living memory. And at that time, you know, China almost function as in terms of global trade, almost act as any kind of developing country, which means China would send out raw commodities and receive manufactured goods. At the time, China was a net oil exporter. China would...

export crude oil to Japan and getting back refined petrochemicals because China didn't have enough refineries. They export the crude oil and then import, you know, fertilizers, which is derived from the, it was refined from the petrochemicals

China imported everything from fertilizer to transistor radio, color TV. My dad, he sent back money from United States. So we bought a imported Japanese, it might be a Panasonic. I forgot what the brand was, but it was a Japanese TV, a color TV. It's not Japanese.

because we're not patriotic. It's just back in 1984, 85, China didn't produce color TV. There's no domestic Chinese factory that made color TV. That's why my mom bought the black and white version for my grandparents. And then we also got a Japanese refrigerator because at that time, China did not produce refrigerator until 1986.

That kind of gives you an idea how far China has come. China has since opened up its market, you welcome foreign business, come to do business in China. So my experience in China growing up in 1980, I was experiencing a lot of growth, a lot of economic growth. Life for average Chinese citizens was getting better because I still remember

In the early part of the 80s, there were still rations. Everybody still had ration stamps. And me, as a growing teenager at that time, I actually was allotted more rice than everybody in my household. And my auntie would send me to go get rice from the government rice station. And so it's a whole different world back then.

And then, so you asked me what drove me to do what I do is I came to US and...

at the time I'm like really puzzled why the China reporting so bad, like it's, they're painting such a, like a China in their own imaginary world. And then at that time, at first I chalk it off as, you know, Westerners don't understand China, right? I mean, China is the mysterious Orient, the inscrutable Orientals, you can't, the Western just can't understand China.

And then I would start, by the way, at that time, when I was in high school, I delivered newspaper for New York Times. So I developed a habit reading New York Times every day. It kind of shaped my... So I grew up as a kind of liberal in my teenage years, up to early 20s. And then one

changed my mind. So I just thought, okay, yeah, New York Times, it's great. You know, they might be a little bit wrong about China because they really don't understand China. It's a cultural issue. It's a misunderstanding. And I remember in the early 2000s, I was starting to read this expat magazine coming out of Russia. It's an expat magazine called Exile. It's founded by a couple of American expats in Moscow.

including Matt Taibbi, before he went mainstream. It was Matt Taibbi, Mark Ames, and John Dolan. And they write about mainstream reporting on Russia, on post-Soviet Russia. And it was quite eye-opening. I remember Matt Taibbi, he would write, basically everyone writes from a template, and he would have the story ready

before he actually conducted his interview in Uzbekistan. You know, he would write the story on the plane. He would just basically have to fill in a couple of blanks, you know, the names of people he interviewed. So by the time he got to Uzbekistan, he already had the story ready. He just needed to, like, fill in a couple of names in the blanks. And I was like, wow. And another thing they talk about is how they will blame every problem on Soviet Union, even though

you know, in 2000, it was already like a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They're still trying to blame all the problems that occurred in the post-Soviet Russia back on the Soviet system. And that's when I started detecting a pattern. I'm like, okay, so this is actually propaganda. This is not cultural misunderstanding. This is the same template they used to report on all the countries in the world that, you know, Washington is not for... I mean,

Actually, back in 2000, Russia was actually considered like a friendly regime, you know. And, you know, so it's really like this is just how the Western media works. So that really opened my eyes. And then, you know, Iraq war happened. You know, I was totally shocked, you know, the chaos.

It totally shocked my liberal sensibility because at that time I thought, okay, U.S. was a benign hegemon. You know, I believe the New York Times narrative that U.S. was a benign hegemon. And then when the Iraq war happened, I'm like, this is total bullshit. How can people not see that? You know, they're trying to, at that time, they're trying to whip

fears in the U.S. in order to justify war. This was all these like anthrax attacks. They had on TV, they had the show of like simulated attacks

weapon of mass destruction attack in like Chicago. I mean, this is ridiculous. I lived in Chicago at the time. I'm like, this is ridiculous. This is, they're just trying to whip up the public into a war frenzy. And that's exactly what they did. So, so that, that's another eyeopening moment for me to see how the propaganda played out. And another moment for me was this during the Syrian coup.

That's when I opened my Twitter account. At that time, actually, because I don't trust the mainstream media news anymore. So I went to Twitter. I tried to follow everyone in order to understand what's going on. So I follow ISIS sympathizers. I follow supporters of the Syrian government. I have supporters of the Kurdish militia.

You know, I follow all the think tankers, all the mouthpiece of Washington. I follow everybody. And it's really educational to see how the story has been sparked.

in the media and that's why I realized, okay, the Western media, most of the time, they don't even have reporter on the ground. They just get their news direct feed directly from the so-called opposition, you know, the moderate jihadis. And that's then they take that and they publish it in mainstream news. And you mislead a lot of people in,

And so by then, I already realized, you know, the Western media reporting on China is just propaganda. And I think by the time, I think it's Trump's first term, it got really bad that I felt compelled to speak out.

And that's when I took to Twitter and to actually tweet out my own experiences. Growing up in China, traveling to China, having Chinese relatives, having talked to Chinese friends, explain what I saw, what I know. Yeah, especially around the time...

there was a big push to push the fake Uyghur genocide narrative on social media. And that's when I started speaking out. And somehow, I don't know how it happened, somehow I ended up with a large following. I would never imagine in my wildest dreams back then that I would end up with 180,000 followers on X or Twitter.

But here I am, I started out doing podcasting, talking about China as a hobby because I used to have a daytime job. But now this is what I do full time. I travel to Indonesia to surf and that's when I realized my kind of side gig podcasting actually is enough to support my surfing expenses. So this is what I do full time now. I talk about China.

I talk about everything, culture, politics, and news. And I think there's a great need for it too, because as China rises in the world stage, there's even more greater demand to understand about China. But right now, a lot of the

A lot of the information about China is so polluted, especially in the mainstream media. So this is a reason why I'm doing what I do, because I felt compelled to kind of counter the wave of anti-China propaganda that had been perpetuated on the citizens in the West for like decades. You're listening to The Bridge.

Certainly living in China and watching U.S. news is confusing because where does this even come from? Like, it's nothing like what China is like. I don't understand it either, actually. I mean, that talking points are made up beforehand. That's startling. But I mean, it makes sense because if you pick up any any media, practically any expert who lives in the United States, almost without exception,

they are not talking about what China is actually like, which is kind of why I wanted to bring you on to talk about the tariff war. Because I look around China, especially this May Day holiday, and you just see consumers everywhere buying things. Tourist places were rammed. My wife and I went on a vacation to Yunnan and Guizhou and all these different places all at the same time. And oh

Oh my gosh, the traffic just getting to any tourist location. Every restaurant's packed. You couldn't get into anywhere. Every store is packed. You...

you had to wait in a line to get into a store to shop and buy things. And then people in the U.S. are saying, oh, China's economy is doing terribly. Like, how are they going to survive? It doesn't make any sense. I'm so confused. So how would you characterize the Sino-U.S. relations under Trump so far in 2025? Well, I mean, right now it's

We're living in a twilight zone right now. I mean, Trump, you know, his claim is to make America great again, but he's actually doing

doing everything to sabotage the U.S. standing in the world and the U.S. economy. You know, there's a meme on the Chinese internet that called Trump the nation builder, except the nation in question is China, because Trump is making China great again, or even greater. And this is, I mean, this happened in the Trump first term, too, by the way. And, you know, that's when the

a lot of the hostility got started, especially in the aftermath of COVID when the US government was trying to shirk its responsibility by looking for an escape goal. China became very convenient for the incompetence of the US government through the pandemic. The

it only got worse since. And, you know, like you're right. When they talk about China, they're talking about this China in their head. I remember when I was still in high school, I read this book in my U.S. high school. This is a book by the original China hand, John Fairbanks.

he wrote about China as a mirror. The US sought a lot of the talking points in the West talking about China. They're not really talking about China. They're using China as a foil to talk about problem in their own society. So the fact that the real China actually existed somewhere, it's not that important. What's important is they use China as a foil to project their own fears.

And that's exactly what has been happening in the mainstream media for the last, I would say, 20 years, 10, 15 years. You know, you detected a real shift. There was a time when, you know, Clinton and Obama traveled to China to call China a strategic partner. You know, that's...

Today, if you say that, you'll be called a traitor, you know. You'll be called a traitor in the United States. That's how far the overtone window has shifted. And I think we can trace the shift to actually Obama years, to the pivot to Asia that was orchestrated by Hillary Clinton. And, you know, when they say pivot to Asia, they're not talking about pivot U.S. economic investment into Asia. They're talking about pivoting military assets.

send military hardware to Asia, and it was to contain China, of course. But this hasn't been, you know, the U.S. government is not exactly run by the brightest people. So, you know, with all the grand plans to contain China, the way they implement it fails spectacularly, I would say, in the last decade. Anything from tech sanctions,

to outright military provocation. I mean, China is just continuing to do what China always do, is focusing on its own internal development. Because what people don't understand, for the Chinese government, the top priority has always been China.

itself is to develop a better life for its citizens, because that's how the Chinese government derives its legitimacy is by providing better life and better future for the citizens. This is why the approval rating for the Chinese government is surprisingly high for people, especially for people coming from the West.

I don't even know what's Trump's approval reading nowadays. But in China, most people feel their life is on the right track. Surveys after surveys done by Pew or whatever, it shows that Chinese people are one of the most optimistic people in the world about their future. They believe their future will get better five years from now.

10 years from now. Whereas in the United States, when they want a quote-unquote China expert, they get Gordon Chan. This guy who has been selling the coming class of China since 2001, 24 years ago. That's nearly a half century. Yet somehow he has been failing upwards because he tells people

his audience what they like to hear. What the audience like to hear is, "Okay, you think the US is not doing good? Don't worry, China is doing even worse. The economy is collapsing, people are rioting in the streets." I mean, that's what Dorn Chan is literally tweeting nowadays. He says there's a riot on the street in China. When you and I both know that's not true because I just been to return from my trip from China in April and

And, you know, like you said, the streets are packed. I was in Shanghai. The Shanghai boom is packed full of tourists. And they're all like many of them are domestic tourists. And I don't most of them are not even thinking about tariff wars. They're thinking about what to get for their loved ones. They're thinking about snapping pictures for their for their Douyin account. And and

And I also have a sense that China is coming back. And like the people I talked to, a Beijing taxi driver, he said, yeah, economy wasn't doing so hot after COVID. You know, there was a bit of post-COVID hangover. And also after the burst of the real estate bubble. So that's what they consider real hardship, not just like,

Trump tariff stuff. And my trip to China recently gave me the impression that China is now actually at a stage that's moving beyond the post-COVID hangover. It's on its road to recovery. And this is

the thing that people like U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson don't understand. He keep on saying, oh, China needs us because we have the money. No,

China don't meet you. Money is fungible, right? I mean, China could potentially, the Chinese government can just start doing stimulus, which they have been holding off on since the birth of real estate bubble.

During the first real estate bubble, there's a lot of foreign investors were screaming at the Chinese government, you need to stimulate now, stimulus now. But the Chinese government held off. So that means they still have their powder dry. Now they have room to do stimulus. Whereas...

And China can find alternatives to their imports from US. We're talking about soybean, we're talking about beef, we're talking about corn. They can get soybean from Brazil, they can get beef from Australia, they can get liquefied natural gas from Canada. But where is US gonna find the substitute

for Chinese goods. You know, a lot of people think, oh, it's easy. We'll just import it from other countries. You know, we'll import from Vietnam. We'll import from India. Look, manufacturing in India actually depends on

industrial input from China. They need machine tools from China. Sometimes they even need power from China. And the reason a lot of businesses are choosing to relocate to Vietnam, one, is because of rising labor costs in China. Two, because the U.S. pushed to decouple from China. But they chose Vietnam precisely because Vietnam's proximity to China

So it's very easy to be integrated into the existing Chinese supply chain. So in essence, the Chinese supply chain just got extended to cover entire Southeast Asia now. So, you know, so now, you know, all the parts are still made in China. Maybe they arrive in Vietnam for the final assembly, you know, or, you know,

But the majority of the components still come from China. So the kind of thinking in the US about we could decouple from China is fantasy. Especially in a world where 80% of antibiotics used in the US come from China. The majority of the pharmaceutical ingredients come from China. All the medical plastics come from China.

How the heck are you going to find like a replacement on such a short notice? You can't because you can't replicate a supply chain in like a few years time. China's

spent 40 years to build the ecosystem of manufacturing, to build out the complete supply chain. So it takes decades to actually rebuild a supply chain that U.S. Wall Street type have willfully destroyed. And the whole tariffs...

People in the Trump administration, they think tariff is like a magical bullet, right? It's like a diet pill, you know, like how they advertise in U.S. Just takes a diet pill, then you will have washboard abs like Brad Pitt. But that's not how it works. You kind of put in the hard work. You actually have to exercise, right? But whereas U.S.,

is like a weightlifting champion, like maybe 50 years ago, who hasn't worked out in the last 50 years. And then now he's like, you know what? Okay. I'm going to go challenge the world, world record in powerlifting. Right. I mean, if that happened in real life, people will be like, whoa, whoa, hold up, hold on grandpa. You know, let's take it easy. Okay. Uh, but,

But this is exactly what the United States is trying to do right now. The tariffs could help your manufacturing if you have manufacturing in place. This is really foolhardy. And what Trump is doing is essentially he's placing an embargo on the United States. I mean, if China had done this before the tariff war, this would be called an act of war. But Trump...

intentionally brought this upon the American population. And so far, you know, the U.S. consumer hasn't even been directly hit yet. Yet the price is already rising because a lot of the companies have been trying to front

running the tariff by importing more from China just before the tariff hit. And in order to do that, they had to pay warehouse fees to host these goods. And guess what? Those warehouse fee gets passed down to consumers. And this is why we are already seeing a rise in prices. But what's really gonna get bad is when

in five to seven weeks time, because I saw various estimate that says, you know, right now the US businesses have about five to seven weeks of inventory in stock. So when you order from Amazon right now, you are actually receiving the goods from those, from their

from their warehouses that's been holding. But by the time that five to seven weeks supply runs out, we already know there's a sharp drop off in container ships coming from China to United States. The director of the Port of Los Angeles gave an interview a couple of days ago. He said the decline was about 35%.

And 35%, and that's the number of containers ship that's arriving in Port of LA and Long Beach in the first week of May. And there's only gonna be less ships coming because it takes more than two weeks to cross the Pacific. And even if they were to cancel the tariff today, the whole supply chains is still screwed up because

you know, even assuming the Chinese supplier would just say, okay, yeah, we understand, let bygones be bygones, we'll go back to do business as normal, and they start to load their ships, it will take another full month before the ship can arrive in the United States. In the meantime, you know, there's going to be shortages. And then, you know,

A lot of these ports and the logistic chain in the US is designed for a condition where all the goods are flowing smoothly. They can't handle this kind of sudden congestion, this pulse of goods suddenly coming in. So the whole logistic chain is going to be screwed up for at least a couple of months, even if they were to revert the decision on tariff today. So basically, the summer...

This summer, May, June, July is going to look bad no matter what. And what we're really talking about is whether they can reach a deal so at least there will be some goods for Christmas shopping season. And so, yeah, and this, again, this whole disruption is for what? It's for what? It's totally unnecessary. Trump brought this, you know, Trump brought this on himself. But this is,

Like I said again and again, a lot of the problem the U.S. empire faces today is self-inflicted. China did not initiate this. China didn't want this. But now it is what it is. We're going to have to see how it plays out. You're listening to The Bridge. You know, I want to go back to your point about the claims of riots and so forth, because

I thought that was really interesting. I had traveled through five provinces in 11 days, and we were driving by car, plane, train. I'd seen, I don't know, 20 cities over that time. And it was just, you know, at one point, someone sent me, DMed me a private message. Hey, are there any truth to this article on the Daily Caller? So I checked the Daily Caller. It's like, oh, riots in China. And I was standing in a field where there were, I don't know, 100,000 people spread out

over like several acres where I was watching hot air balloons go up and there were lines to get on the hot air balloons. And I, and usually I like to answer with nuance. Oh, this and that and whatever. And I was just, when his question was literally, are there any truces claim? I was just like, no,

because it was so patently obvious to me at that moment of having traveled through Trina so much and seen like people just having the time of their lives. It was just ridiculous that he would even ask. Like, I think this goes back to what you were talking to about the beginning of the show. Like,

I think there's an echo chamber in the US where there are all these BS articles, these BS media coming out about what life in China is really like. It doesn't seem like people in America have any real conception of how misled that they are. Even the experts are just reading this other content. They're producing similar content and there's a complete disconnect.

People have no clue how well China is doing. I want to point out one specific tweet where someone last month, I know who it is, I'm not going to say their hashtag. They said, by the end of this month, China's

China is going to take the knee or something like that. And I was like, what? And then, so of course this, this didn't happen, but my question, I guess in this context of all, I know exactly who you're talking about. I quoted, tweeted that person at end of April. I said, ask any updates. He didn't respond to me. Exactly. So my question is, does,

To the extent to which America thinks China is dependent on the U.S., does China really need the U.S.? Why isn't China calling? Why isn't China calling? Let's look at the trade figures, right? I mean, about 19% of China's economy is geared toward export. And out of that 19%,

about 14% is to United States. So if you do the math, you know, that comes to about 3% of China's GDP is geared toward export to United States. You know, it's not an insignificant figure, but it's also not a, you know, it's not a,

existential issue for China. What China did, the Trump's first term was a big wake-up call for China when all kinds of sanctions was being levied against China. And then Biden just doubled down on the Trump sanctions. So for the past seven years, China has learned to adapt. And they have learned

started a process to de-risk and decouple from the United States when they can see which way this wind is blowing. And they have been preparing for this moment since 2018, whereas there's no preparation at all in the U.S. Trump just snapped a finger and left

Liberation Day. Hallelujah. This is why it's kind of delusional to think that somehow China was going to be hit harder for this because China has

been foreseeing this as had been prepared laying the groundwork to prepare for the pivot from United States. This is why ASEAN, the collection of Southeast Asian nations have replaced United States as China's largest trading partner. You know, like I mentioned, U.S.,

14% of China's export go to U.S., now 16% goes to ASEAN. And this is why, rather than picking up a call to Trump, Xi Jinping traveled to Southeast Asia. He went to Vietnam, he went to Malaysia, where he was getting written

carpet treatment. You know, the Chinese PLA under guard were marching down the street in Vietnam, getting catcalled by women on the streets. I mean, this is Vietnam we're talking about. And there's a delusion of people in Washington still thinks that somehow they can use Vietnam as some sort of counterbalance to, you know, contain China. Whereas, you know, Vietnam has already made their stance very clear. ASEAN

nations actually met with China, South Korea and Japan. They made a joint statement where they oppose unilateral approach to the global trade. You know, they're talking about Trump, obviously. And they are talking about forming a large free trading zone in East Asia. This is going to be

This is going to be the biggest free trade block in the world. There's 1.4 billion people in China, 680 million people in ASEAN. There's more than 100 million people in Japan, 50 million people in Korea. Altogether, you have more than 2 billion people in this trade block.

This is huge. And this is all thanks to Trump, the great peacemaker for East Asia. And Trump, if anything, the Trump policy by slapping sanction on everybody has pushed people toward China even more.

I mean, even Europe just met with China. They're talking about they're going to come together to try to remove all the mutual restrictions. That means all the past EU sanctions on China, they might disappear when the European representative come to China next month. This is big news. This is Trump is, you know, by Trump's very action.

it made China kind of the responsible world leader. And this, as you said, this is because a lot of the Trump's advisors are getting really, really bad information. They're getting disinformation about China. And this is because

propaganda is great, but you should never imbibe your own propaganda. This is the first rule. You don't start believing your own propaganda. U.S. is very good at propaganda. Propaganda is essentially marketing. U.S. invented marketing. This is Madison Street. They got that pat. But the problem is then the elite...

start to believe in their own propaganda about China. All the talking heads, all their data points come from the same mainstream media that was spreading propaganda about China. So it's this kind of circular thing

Logic, as you say, echo chamber. There's no real China expertise anymore, you know, because the people who actually have spent significant time in China, like yourself, are saying, what the heck is going on here? But, you know, people like us, we don't get featured in New York

Times or Wall Street Journal or Waffle, unfortunately. And so the decision makers, like the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson, for example, he seems to get his information from likes of Gordon Chan. He thinks that China really needs U.S. because China is facing economic collapse, so China have to make a deal. No, China doesn't have to make a deal. China is prepared for this eventuality.

of a trade cut off on United States. So they have spent last seven years to diversify their markets. The Chinese diplomat has been very busy in the last few months. They're building ties and bridges to other countries, there's other markets. For United States, the Chinese position have been fair,

very clear from the very beginning and it's very consistent. They haven't really changed. They said, you know, we, if you want a war, if you want to trade war, then we'll fight you to the end. But we are always open to negotiation. We're always open to talks with the caveat that we must be based on mutual respect. And, and,

which means you need to get rid of the unilateral sanctions first. That's what the Chinese Commerce Ministry has said. Get rid of unilateral tariffs. That will be the basis for, that will be a starting point for a trade deal with China. And so we're going to have to see what happens. China has always said they're open to talk. So the U.S. is a site that

have been persistently pursuing China for a talk. And now the Chinese vice premier is on a trip to Switzerland. And this is where Scott Besant, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, he also proposed they meet, you know, while the vice premier. So they'll meet on the sidelines while both of them are in Switzerland. But we don't even know what's, you know, like a lot of

people, especially among the Trump supporting account, they're saying, oh, this is a, it's going to be a trade deal. Well, they haven't started talking yet. You know, even Scott Benson himself, he said like, well, we're going to start talking and then in a couple of days, we'll see, you know, what we can agree to talk about.

They don't even have agenda, like the agenda of having agreed to the talking agenda yet. So it's a little bit too early to celebrate. I think the market reaction was probably a little premature, but the Chinese position was consistent. Like we don't want a trade war. There's no winner in trade war, but first you need to make sure if you want to come to the table, make sure it's based on mutual respect.

And, you know, no more name calling. Get rid of your unilateral tariff. And then we can sit down and talk and see if we can come to some kind of agreement. We don't have a lot of time left, and I want to ask a few more questions. So my first question...

would be, what do you think about Chinese and US corporations that are interlinked, like Apple, for example? Apple not only does the mass of its manufacturing in China, but also China is the most important consumer market for Apple. How do you think that what

What kind of position does that put these corporations into? Well, Tim Cook already said Apple stands to lose $900 million from this tariff business. And, you know, currently Apple makes about 80% of its iPhones in China.

They have tried to source up to 20% of iPhone production to India. And now they said because to satisfy the tariff, they're going to off-source enough production to India, which means that they'll try to raise the Indian production to about 26%. So India will supply all the iPhones to Americans, whereas the rest of the world continues to get made in China iPhones.

And how is that a win for mating America? How is that a win for brain manufacturing back to the United States? And this goes to show also that the premise of Trump's curve is fundamentally flawed because it's based on 19th century mercantilistic

understanding of global trade. You know, in the 19th century, it's very easy to look at trade calculations. You just put the, look at the import and export numbers and custom. That's it. But in today's

interconnected globalized economy. Apple is a great example. Majority of Apple factories in China. Apple also consistently make about $70 billion in the Chinese market selling iPhone to the Chinese consumers. Now, that number is not reflected in the U.S.-China trade figure because those iPhones never left China. They went straight from the iPhone factories in China to China

to the iPhone store in China to the hands of Chinese consumers. So you never pass through the Chinese custom. So that Apple figure, trade figure, never gets entered. And also, when the iPhone leaves Chinese factory and exported to United States, that is registered as a Chinese product.

export to the United States, even though China only makes about $60 off each iPhone. And it's Apple that's captured the line. You know, when it sells, the iPhone 16 sells for like, what, $12,000 in U.S., Apple capture about $800 of value of that.

And, but when they look at the US China trade figures, they say China exported a $12,000 iPhone to US. So this itself kind of grossly distorts the actual trade figure. And US actually has a huge surplus in terms of exporting services.

to China. Again, that's not counted because they only count physical goods. And the way they count physical goods is flawed by citing my Apple. There's a lot of Western brands that do their manufacturing in China, but they command a huge premium because the brand and marketing. So the

the Chinese manufacturers actually don't make a lot of the money off that branded goods. It's the US companies that's making killing by bringing the goods into the US market and market up, and because they're charging people a high premium for their brand name. And this is what

Trump don't realize, you know, this is the trade figure. The so-called China's $1 trillion trade surplus don't actually reflect what's actually going on. And the U.S., you know, a lot of U.S. companies were making money hit, you know, fist-sized.

They were raking it in in China. For example, GM. GM up from 2009 to 2023, GMs were making and selling more cars in China than they do in United States because China is the world's largest auto market.

there's about 30 million cars being sold in China, twice the amount in the United States. China is number one, world number one auto market. It's twice the size of car market in the United States. And GM used to have a huge, a lion's share of that. And...

And again, those profit is not figured into the U.S. trade figures because when the GM cars come out of the factory in China and go into the hands of Chinese consumers, they never went through the Chinese custom. So the problem in the U.S.

economy is really a distribution problem. It's like all these multinationals are making billions in China, but a lot of that money went straight to the shareholders, to the top executives, to the 1%. And

And that kind of leaves the Joe six-packs back in Michigan and Iowa. They're out, hang out to dry. And that's a real problem. But again, this is the problem was created, designed, shaped by the Wall Street. And now the same Wall Street guys advising Trump.

Scott Besson, he works for George Sorrell. He worked in the George Sorrell Fund. And the U.S. Congress Secretary, Ludinick, another Wall Street guy. These are the same type of guys who hollow out U.S. manufacturing.

in the last four decades, shipped them to East Asia. And now you're gonna believe them, they're trying to bring the job back. I mean, this is ridiculous. This is very ill-thought-out,

I mean, I don't care. Like people are saying Trump is playing four dimensional chess or Scott Besson is playing four dimensional chess is because I heard that the bond argument they said, because, you know, U.S.,

has like $37 trillion national debts. And every year, a lot of the debt is come to mature and the US government have to pay. Of course, US government don't have the money to pay. So they take on more debt to pay down the old debt. They have to go to the bond market to issue more bonds to incur future debt to pay the old debt. So this year, I heard somewhere between six to $9 trillion of treasury bonds.

is going to be mature. So US is going to have to borrow that amount to pay off the old debt. So the idea is what Scott Besant was doing, he's intentionally cratering the US stock market by creating a market panic. So all the money that will flow out of the stock market, and traditionally they will flow into so-called safe haven asset, like

the U.S. Treasuries. And then when that happens, if everybody goes to buy U.S. Treasuries, that will push the interest rate down. So when U.S. government goes to borrow money from the bond market, they will pay less interest in the interest payment.

It's such a great plan, right? Except the bond market was broken when the panic selling started spread to the bond market because all the people they need to cover, they have to sell their best asset even though it's a safe US bond. And then there was a carrying trade with Japan. Japan was actually the largest holder of the US treasury, even more than China.

China did not sell the US bond. China just hold US bonds to maturity and they make sure they don't buy more US treasury. So this is why the Chinese holding of US treasury have declined from the high of 1.4 trillion a few years back to almost like 700 billion now. And

whereas Japan still have over a trillion U.S. treasury bonds. So what happened was because of the trade tensions, the Japanese, you know, one thing that U.S. want is they want

other government to appreciate their currency so to make their export less competitive. So the Japanese yen has been rising and the Japanese interest rate has been rising, but this is bad because for decades, since 1990, since the birth of the Japanese asset bubble, this Japanese government was the first to do quantitative easing by printing money. So the Japanese interest rate has

been low for decades. And what a lot of the hedge funds do, they thought, oh, this is a great arbitrage opportunity. We'll just borrow shit tons of Japanese yen, and then we'll invest it in higher return asset, like the US treasury bonds. Then we'll just eat the difference. And what happened recently was that suddenly when the Japanese yen goes up and the Japanese interest

rate goes up, these hedge funds realize, holy crap, now we owe a lot more than what we borrowed. So they have to cover. And when they cover, they start selling their U.S. Treasury bonds. And that created the pressure for more panic selling. And that led to the

the actual decline in price of US treasury bond and the spike in the interest rate. And that's when the Trump administration immediately backed off and they started to scale back on some of those tariffs that they have earlier put out. So, I mean,

The whole problem is you have guys like Scott Besson who is running the country like he was still running the hedge fund. I mean, he was literally gambling with a future of 360 million Americans. So instead of gambling with like the retirement fund of teachers, doctors, firefighters, like what he used to do before in the hedge fund, now he's gambling with life of everybody. And that's how we end up in this mess.

In case we drop, please don't close this. We need it to upload. We're having some internet issue. Are you still there? Okay, great. There's some internet issue. Just don't close the browser because we need it to upload to 100% under the software. I have one last question. And this, I think it's kind of two parts for me because a lot of Americans are falsely under the impression that China is stealing...

currently a bunch of U.S. technology. But when I look around China, it's clear to me that Chinese technology is more advanced than that in the U.S. The fastest high-speed rail trains are built and designed by engineers in China. We have robots in hotels. I just went to the world's first

The humanoid half marathon, and I watched these 20 or 30 humanoid robots racing down the street. Not all of them completed it, of course, but I mean, that's the point. That's the point is to push technology to the next level. And that was held here in Beijing. But at the same time, we have entered a red scare 2.0 in the United States.

And Chinese scientists are under the thumb of the FBI and they're being investigated under false allegations. And a lot of that pressure seems to be pushing some of the smartest scientists in the United States

to leave. And many of those scientists, not all, are Chinese, and they are going to surprise China. What do you think about scientists like Yi Shouliang, who was formerly at the U.S. Department of Energy, returning to China? What does this mean for the U.S.? I'm going to go back to my own personal anecdotal story, because when I first came to

to us in 1990, my dad was still working as a postdoc in University of Illinois. And when I go visit my dad in his research lab in University of Illinois, I notice it's all Chinese grad students working there.

So even in the 90s, I realized how dependent US scientific research institutions is depending on labors of Chinese grad students. And this is not because the native born Americans are dumb or anything. It's just because all the native born Americans, they realize finance is where the money is.

So the smartest quotient is the smartest guy that went to the Wall Street. And then, you know, only the immigrants who are willing to accept to grind for long hours in the research labs. And so with this

where we have a situation where, you know, like without immigrant labor in like Chinese, Russian, Indian, currently the U.S. science and research institutions will grind down to a halt. And this is why what a lot of people don't realize because a lot of people pop

never been to a US research lab like I have. And they think somehow Chinese is stealing all this, you know, the trade secret. But what really happened was China is asking for technology transfer when foreign companies came to China.

This is all above the table. This is part of the price of doing business in China. When foreign businesses come to China, Chinese government used to, this is back in the days, I'm talking about 80s, 90s, 2000. They're okay, you must form a joint venture with a local partner. You must provide training. You must

do technology transfer. That's just many of the Western businesses willingly enter this arrangement because they know there's so much more money to be made in China.

And so this is all mutually agree upon. Chinese government never held a gun to Western executives like move your factories to China and then give me your technology. No, that never happened. And then there are people like my dad's generation who came to United States and then

After working in the corporate world for 10, 20 years, they hit a bamboo ceiling where they realized they would not rise any further to the top management. And this is when they go to China where they can be the CEOs, the founder of companies. This is what happened to the founder of TSMC, Morris Chan. Morris Chan is American. He was born in China.

He grew up in United States and he was one of the top VPs in Texas Instruments. And when he finally realized Texas Instruments never going to give him the top job that he wanted, he left.

He went to Taiwan because the government of Taiwan offered him, you know what, we'll give you this whole industrial park tax-free. We will give you all the funding you need. Just build us a semiconductor industry. And that's what he did. That's how he built TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry.

And now, you know, it makes 90% of the world's advanced chips. And this is how real technology flows. You know, the people who have, who got the exposure to the US businesses and returned to China to work. And the reason they offered the return is precisely because China had become attractive.

In the 80s, everybody looked for ways to get out of China, to move to the U.S., to Europe. But by 2000, that kind of shifted because that's when they realized, wow, okay, if you are a talented Chinese person, you can go very far in China. There will be no bamboo ceiling placed on your career path.

And this is why many of my dad's old classmates, they returned to China around 2000 and continue to do so in 2010. But there are still many who decide to stay in U.S. like my dad, you know, like, but what the U.S. government has done in the past decade is making their life so difficult, you know, under the, you know, the witch hunt for Chinese spies that they just gave up. You know what? You know what?

I can just go back to China. I don't have to deal with this crap. And so, like I said, again, a lot of the problem of the U.S. empire self-inflicted. One of the things that U.S. used to pride itself upon is it can attract talent from all over the world.

today is trying to push them away as fast as possible. And people are just responding to the U.S. government actions. They're just, they're doing what they've been told, you know, go back to China. They've been told to go back to China for a long time. So now they have gone back to China. And we're

One reason is, of course, China itself has become a lot more attractive place to live. Even if the nominal salary in China might not reach the same level as the United States, but the quality of life in China is so much better. You know, if you have like a salary of $100,000, for example, your life in China is so...

the quality of life in China with $100,000 salary is so much higher than you would have say in California, in Silicon Valley, right? In Silicon Valley with $600,000 salary, you're just barely breaking even. You can't even afford a house, right? But in China, you can have a house, you can raise a family. And they're just so, yeah, I mean,

I highly recommend for the young people, for people who are young, who are starting out in their career path, I

I highly recommend check out China. I mean, Asia is the future. I mean, it doesn't even have to be Asia, just in the general neighborhood. Because when China rises, the tide lifts all boats. The whole Asia is rising right now. And we are living in the Asian century. Except when Trump saw that, he said, you know what? F that, F the Asian century. We are going to start the Asian millennium today. With my...

liberation day i mean this is what we are dealing with today that's all the time we have those answers were absolutely amazing i'm looking forward to getting this up uh as soon as possible thank you so much for your time carl jaw thank you anytime jason