YouSaid · the spoken record

Nigel Inkster

lines on the record: 44
first: 2021-02-02
most recent: 2021-02-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“power much greater than would traditionally have been the case. So we're going to have to look at a very different global distribution of power, of which China is a key component but not the only one and think about how we deal with that. We don't have that template yet. We don't have that blueprint. But hopefully in the next few years we can start to develop one.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“as well is kind of use China as a mirror to hold up to ourselves and ask ourselves what China is doing right from which we might take the odd lesson. I fantasize about an era in which Western politicians understand China as well as they understand America and dare I venture to suggest even have some facility in the Chinese language but I don't think that's about to happen anytime soon regrettably. But I think that as I said it's not going to be a Cold War like the Cold War was. This is not a realistic option. Power has shifted. Power has shifted from east to west but power has also dispersed. We're seeing actually quite a lot of medium-sized countries showing a capacity to exercise”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there is any realistic alternative to that. And the kind of rather crude tactics that we used in the Cold War are not going to cut it. I think we need in the West to have a much more nuanced and sophisticated strategy for dealing with China. And a recent conference involving US military, I made the point that if the USA wants to engage with like-minded countries to consider how to deal with the China challenge, they're going to have to accept a degree of variable geometry. And therefore, we're going to have to look at this in a very different way. And I think actually what we need to do”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China could not be more different in that regard. Firstly, its economic impact and its level of economic engagement with the world is a magnitude different, but also from an ideological perspective, it's not quite the same. The Soviet Union, at least on paper, was dedicated to making the world communist in effect, whereas I think the kind of Leninist nationalism that we're seeing the Chinese Communist Party now espousing doesn't really aspire to do that. There's certainly the language of the party state is Marxist-Leninist language and the sort of methodology of thinking, dialectic materialism, all that sort of thing is very recognizable. But it's also borne up with a kind of nationalism. Almost more reminiscent.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I think a Cold War is a very poor analogy for what is happening now because, I mean, I lived through the Cold War. It was a defining element in my earlier professional career. And back then, the Soviet Union, I mean, we used to talk about the Soviet Union as very politically incorrect terms, upper volta with the bomb. A third world economy that just happened to have nuclear sufficient nuclear missiles to destroy the planet. It was cut off from the rest of the world. It was largely a sealed system. And its economic impact on the world, economic engagement with the world was minimal to non-existent.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My worst fears, I don't know whether they'll be realized, is that China may again turn in on itself when all is said and done in China, security always trumps everything else when life gets difficult. But I also worry about whether the United States will be able to continue its recent spurt of inventiveness in some of these technologies, not least when we see the prevalence of anti-science mindsets in the US political class. I mean, I think what happened to China in the 19th century should be an object lesson for all of us. Here was a country that was kind of on top of the world and saw itself as on top of the world. All of a sudden went from hero to zero, literally overnight. We shouldn't think it can't happen to us.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we all know that when it comes to the United States, when the tanker has turned through one hundred eighty degrees, it has turned and you tend to get a very quick national consensus developing which is then very hard to shift in the absence of dramatic events. So my sense is that for the foreseeable future, we're going to see a United States that is looking to disengage at least partially from China in various ways. And a China that will try to prevent this but will ultimately have to accept it and how far it goes and what the implications are. My sense is that when it comes to technology and human progress, the likely outcome is that everybody loses.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of different things, including being a strategic competitor. And so I think that that will happen quite how far it goes is ultimately I think going to be driven by politics, geopolitics, but also domestic politics. We've seen in the last year that the Trump administration has really piled on the pressure on China in many ways, really trying to constrain China and also, so to speak, poke them in the eye over matters like Taiwan. But also in ways that seek to box in the incoming administration and limit its room for manoeuvre in relation to China. Now, you know, it's far too early to tell how that is going to play out.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed. Well, I mean, I think, as I say in the book, decoupling is not going to be a smooth process with clearly defined binary outcomes. It's something that's going to happen in a very sort of piecemeal and rather jagged way. And it's interesting in China now the term decoupling to our goal is almost a dirty word. It almost has connotations of like”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a country like the United Kingdom, for example, the intelligence service has no ability to compel ordinary British citizens to work for it. They can ask, but if the answer is no, then they have to accept that and move on. In China, what we've got is a situation where China has become a kind of techno-security state, but also an intelligent state, a bit like the Venetian Republic was around the 16th and 17th century, when intelligence, collection of covert information and the practice of covert activity was bound into the fabric of the state. It was integral to the state's functioning in any Venetian citizen could potentially and might well find themselves being involved in some aspect of co- designed to assist the Venetian Republic. And so it is now, I think, with China. It's an intelligent state. It's a different phenomenon”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any Western country that has information of potential use to China is vulnerable to this. Yes, I mean, if you like, to use old-style Cold War terminology. For China, the USA is the main enemy. That is where the key focus of intelligence effort is directed. But there's plenty else to go around. The Ministry of State Security is a big organization, probably about 100,000 employees. And China still also has its own separate military intelligence capabilities. But the point I also make in the book is that we kind of need to think about China differently from ordinary states. In Western democracies, intelligence services do operate, but they operate in some ways at the margins of the state.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so, yes, indeed. And as with so much else about China, the scale on which it's being done is qualitatively different from anything that we've ever seen before.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's being mixed together with all sorts of other information travel data, credit data, stolen from Experian, etc., in ways that enable the Chinese state to build very granular pictures of individual Americans, which they can potentially use for the purposes of espionage, political pressure, detecting U.S. intelligence officers, etc., etc. And not just that, of course, but in today's world, things about your adversary in terms of vulnerabilities that they themselves aren't aware of.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in essence. I mean, that was always in private, never made public, of course. But we did get a sort of brief kind of tactical pause. But it didn't last very long, and we're now seeing that data extraction is a huge undertaking for China now. We've seen massive attacks not just against private sector companies, but against government when I reference in the book is the theft of the US government's operation of personal management database, that information is now being analyzed and triaged in a data center somewhere in Kebe, I can't remember where. I did know where it was.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually China didn't really, I mean, the US said, look, you know, there's a difference between what in my business we used to call ordinary decent espionage, sort of collecting national security secrets versus collecting information for economic gain. Well, for China, this was a distinction that they did not recognize. Because for China, national security is seen as far more comprehensive in scope than typically it is in the West. As well as many of all the traditional areas. China was never really persuaded of this. And in private, they would say, well, you know what, this is basically condined punishment for the hundred years of national humiliation that you guys subjected us to. So, you know, get over.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My Chinese colleagues, when I go there, there are two types of espionage. There's good espionage and there's bad espionage. And you guys are doing too much of the bad variety and not enough of the good. What I mean by that is good espionage is really getting under the skin of the other guy, understanding where he's coming from, why he does, what he does, because that way you can actually mitigate risks and avoid accidents. But what you're doing is actually creating problems. And this was certainly true for the United States.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“retaliation by the Chinese state, and they were right because there were plenty of examples of that happening when companies like Cisco and Intel raised complaints, all of a sudden these companies found themselves being investigated for all sorts of alleged offences in China. So it was actually very difficult for the US or indeed any other Western government to start to mount an effective response because there weren't enough plaintiffs around to kind of do it. But the volume of this data extraction reached such levels, or I think people had to address it. It had become, particularly with the United States, a strategic issue in its own right. It's happening all the time, even as we speak. And in the main, it's not doing that much harm.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“began to see in the mid two thousand the Chinese intelligence services waking up to the realization that in the West there were huge volumes of data stored on servers that were either poorly protected or not protected at all and were more or less there for the taking and at that point we began to see terabytes of data being extracted from US corporations and other Western corporations around the world massive volumes of data initially a lot of the companies who were being attacked either were not aware that this was happening or were aware that it was happening but didn't want anybody to do anything about it because they feared that if they did complain they would be subject to”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, it's very interesting because for a long time after liberation, China's intelligence services didn't really amount to much. They had a reputation that really wasn't supported by any particular performance that began to change in the 1980s as China opened up and the world became more accessible. And in particular, the intelligence services were able to leverage the benefits that came from a Chinese diaspora community in the United States that was disproportionately represented in a lot of high-end government technology programs. So that was relatively successful.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China 25 have disappeared down the memory hole because they're seen as neuralgic in terms of relations with the USA. But the push is on for indigenous manufacture. And nowhere is this more evident than in the area of high-end microprocessors, microchips, which the USA is now denying China access to many of the things that China wants to see achieved. So we're seeing huge amounts of money being thrown at this particular problem. I don't know how successful it's going to be, but also we're seeing huge amounts of money being thrown at artificial intelligence, quantum computing, etc.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has been cut off from access to Google and Android, and so they've developed their own system. But that system looks suspiciously like Android. Indeed, I don't think you can probably tell much difference in terms of functionality. So it's been a very interesting process. But as the vulnerabilities of dependence on US technology have become more evident, and of course this was dramatically illustrated by the Snowden revelations in 2012, so the push has been as far as possible to move in the direction of indigenous manufacture. We've seen the emergence of made in China 2025, though latterly I think the references to made in”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“course, China was very heavily dependent upon US technology and pirated Windows software was kind of the default setting pervasive in government departments among the PLA everybody else and Microsoft said that they were no longer going to support a particular version of Microsoft. This was potentially devastating for China and in the event Microsoft had to give ground and say, okay, we'll give free upgrades to everybody who was using this. We know it's pirated software and that's what they had to do. And the interesting thing is, of course, that Microsoft is still very heavily involved in providing services to the Chinese market. And we see it also with Google. I mean, Huawei.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've seen this very interesting process and every time digitalization looked like flagging, losing momentum, we saw another top-level push to move it forward. What are the problems? What are the things we've got to do? Do we need more regulation? Do we need better control of data? What is it that we need to do? They kind of got on and done it. And we saw this particularly when Xi Jinping took office in 2012. One of the first things he did was to set up a leading small group since become a commission on information security and digitalization. And this is one of the sort of seven commissions that Xi Jinping personally chairs where he's really sort of driving the system to deliver better and faster results. And yes, initially, of course,”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To leapfrog the credit card and move to a world of electronic payments now so pervasive that as I mentioned even in the book even beggars in the street have notices around their necks with QR codes so you can give them a digital donation and Chinese entrepreneurs have not been particularly innovative in terms of the foundational science of this thing but what they've been really good at is developing applications that help smooth out all the frictions of daily life in urban China and the extent to which they've been good at this is demonstrated by the way in which for example eBay was comprehensively run out of town by Chinese competitors you know eBay thought that they could just deal with China as another country in a worldwide”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interesting situation in which the government was driving the development of the internet through a series of top-down initiatives, but at the same time creating an enabling environment in which Chinese entrepreneurs and engineers, many of whom had kind of served some kind of apprenticeship in Silicon Valley, were able to come back to China with the skills that they had acquired and adapt them in ways that were uniquely suited to China's particular circumstances. So, for example, we've seen nobody in China has ever really had credit cards, nor now is there any need because people like Jack Ma and Alibaba earn Tencent developed mobile banking systems that essentially enabled people”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed. Well, I mean, China joined the Internet in 1996, which, relatively speaking, was late on. And to start with, there was relatively limited uptake. Only a couple of million people amongst this huge population. And at a time when nobody had computers, smartphones were still a distant dream, and even ordinary telephone lines were in relatively short supply. But things moved very quickly, and particularly once smartphones arrived. Most people in China didn't have their own laptops, their own computers. They used internet cafes.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this, I think, is why we see this prickliness in Chinese as you put it glass hat boli Xian and the emergence of the famed wolf warrior diplomats communicating with the world in very undiplomatic terms. I think it is all about this desire for internally for stability externally for recognition. And as I said, the respect which China feels that its achievements entitle it to enjoy.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To any kind of electoral process, it regards itself as having won the right to rule China, if you like, by right of conquest almost. But in order to do this, they need to keep the people on their side, and they need to do this firstly by enhancing their standards of living, but also by demonstrating that the party and the party alone can defend China's interests and honour internationally. And this is really not about, I mean, this is not a process that's been driven by China's diplomats. It's really driven by China's party apparatchiks, whose knowledge of international affairs is minimal to non-existent, and they don't really care because what this is really all about in the final analysis is keeping their own people on side.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That as long as China is being run by a communist party with its own very distinctive blend of sort of Leninist nationalism, one can coin all sorts of phrases to try and describe it, that they're never going to really afford China the respect that China feels that it deserves. And I think this has given rise to a kind of, I say in the book almost adolescent prickliness. Why weren't people give us the respect that we think we're due? Why weren't they accept us on equal footing with themselves? But I think it's also a reflection of the Chinese party state's own inherent insecurities. This is an organization that is not prepared to submit itself.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, well, I think that China has come a remarkable distance in a remarkably short time. No other country has done anything like this in the timescale in which China has achieved it. And I don't think any other country could. China was very fortunate to be positioned in a unique conjunction of circumstances that probably aren't going to be replicated by anybody else. But the fact is they've done it. They have their opportunity. They took it, and the results have unquestionably been impressive. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear to China that although people recognize their achievements, they don't seem ready to recognize China as a kind of peer in the international system. And I think this is a particularly true of the United States and to a lesser degree other developed Western countries.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is approaching it from a very different perspective. In China, everything is state-driven, top down. In the United States, all these technologies are being developed by a private sector which is very jealous of its independence from government and far from amenable to government direction. And you look at the big US tech companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. These are organizations and entities which in effect have foreign policies more consequential in some respects than those of the US government. And China's finding this too, actually, at the moment, which is why they're trying to clip Jack Mars' wings somewhat at the moment. But no, and I think technology is clearly, or domination of technology, Is seen now as the key differentiator which is going to make the difference between success and failure and relative.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of technologies like fifth generation mobile technology like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, quantum encryption, etc. Whoever dominates those capabilities effectively holds the key to the future. And this has been made abundantly clear in speech after speech after speech by Xi Jinping, basically urging everyone on saying, you know, guys, we've got to, you know, we've got to, the message is, we've got a narrow window of opportunity to pull this off. We have missed the boat so many times in the past we can't afford to do it again. Whereas the United States as the incumbent power still very much dominant in all these technologies I think is”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To give them lots of copies of Alvin Toffler's books, third wave and future shock. But Toffler was on the money on this, and the Chinese leadership worked out very quickly that digitalization was going to be critical to modernization and competitiveness. And I think that China's embrace of digitalization, although it did cause them quite serious political and security problems to start with, has resulted in outcomes which exceeded our expectations, but almost certainly also exceeded the expectations of China's own leadership in terms of how far and how far China could go. And now I think it's quite clear to everybody that control of domination”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think it's a function of the way in which digitalization has changed quite fundamentally the way in which we do so much. It really has changed the terms of trade. Obviously, China was working hard and relatively successfully to modernize its economy using, shall we say, pre-information era capabilities. But even back in the 1980s, China's leaders were well aware of how digitalization was going to change everything. They compulsively read the works of Alvin Toffler. And I remember when I was in Beijing in the mid-1980s as think tanks and university departments were slowly reopening after the Cultural Revolution. That's the one thing they always wanted you to do for them.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“champion that was the driver for 5G technology, that Ericsson, the competitor of Huawei, the CEO of Ericsson, has spent most of 2020 lobbying the Swedish government not to exclude Huawei from Sweden's five G network because, of course, Ericsson is heavily dependent upon Chinese inputs, Chinese components, and doesn't want to get on the wrong side of the Chinese government, which I think kind of illustrates the complexity and the sort of wickedness of the problem that we're now facing.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and they get a lot of benefit from it. And of course we're also now seeing Wall Street barreling in to the China market as China opens its capital account to foreign investment, which may prove to be a relatively short and temporary thing. My sense is that having got the capital and got the risk management expertise that they need, the message from China is likely to be, in the words of Douglas Adams, goodbye and thanks for all the fish. But for the time being, everybody wants to be in there. So we've got a situation in which the US government for geopolitical and strategic reasons is pulling in one direction. Silicon Valley and Wall Street, to some extent, pulling in the other direction. And it's very amusing. It doesn't come in the book, but it's interesting to note that one of Huawei, the Chinese technology”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that is now in China's hands. So you've got this very, very complex nexus between the United States and China, driven by the desire of Wall Street and big tech to achieve high levels of efficiency at the expense of resilience and redundancy. And people are now starting to recognize the vulnerabilities associated with that and are having to try and address them. We're seeing now in the United States, the US government is putting pressure on US technology companies to move away from China, to cease their collaboration with China. Silicon Valley is not keen to do this. They value very highly the business that they do with China. They make a lot of money.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reluctantly, but out of necessity, embarked on digitization, development of digital capabilities and the digital economy, initially heavily reliant upon U.S. technology, but very rapidly moving to become the kind of world's workshop in the lower end technology to the point where now the United States”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“evolving between the United States and China in both economy and technology. Mervyn King referred to the late period in the late 1990s to 2008, the financial crisis as the nice decade by which he meant non-inflationary constantly expansionary. He wasn't extolling this as something to be carried on. His point was that it was unsustainable. But for a while we saw this kind of symbiotic relationship. China made everything, the USA bought it, China put all its savings in US treasuries, enabling US consumers to buy things on credit which was cheap and available until, of course, the party had to end. It ran out. Meanwhile, China, which had somewhat”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and so called US-China tech war that came out of that has been an effort by the United States both to slow down China's technology progress and to seek to disengage from what has become a very high level of interdependence and that interdependence goes back a long way it really does go back to the late 1970s early 1980s when Deng Xiaoping initiated China's period of economic reform and this mission to kind of catch up with and by implication in due course overtake the West in Chinese Gan Chao and we've seen during the 1990s and early 2000s an almost symbiotic relationship”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's actually a phrase that I borrowed from a colleague of my and one of the other things I do is work for a small economic consultancy called Enodo Economics run by a lady called Diana Schoileva and she has actually coined the term the great decoupling and I shamelessly purloined it with her approval and what I mean by it is essentially a kind of parting of a fundamental parting of the ways between the United States as the incumbent hegemon and China as the rising power that, whether by accident or design is in practice starting to challenge US claims to hegemony and what we've seen starting in 2018 with the US-China trade war”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncontested technology superpower of the planet responsible for about half of all pre-industrial revolution era inventions and really kind of the head of the pack and start from there then look at the dramatic decline that China underwent in the 19th century and see if that could explain why China is now behaving in the way that it is and why the race for technology supremacy matters so much”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It coincided with a period when it was obvious that attitudes in the United States toward China had undergone a sea change. I'd been at a conference at the beginning of the year of 2018 when it became absolutely clear to me that the prevailing consensus in the USA was starting to be that engagement with China had been a failure, that things needed to change, the United States was in danger of being overwhelmed because they'd failed to recognize how fast China's technological progress would be and they needed to do something about it. And I thought at that point there was probably a need to set all these issues in context and to kind of look back through history”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, thanks very much, Linda. I had written a book about China before for Double ILS called China's Cyber Power, which came out in 2016. And I thought at that point that I'd said everything I had to say on the subject. But when Michael Dwyer, the editor of Hearst, got in touch with me and asked if I'd be interested in doing something, that coincided with the beginning of a year when I'd made a New Year's resolution not to write any more bad and unnecessary books by Western commentators about China. But having thought about it, I concluded that the situation had moved on sufficiently, both in terms of geopolitics and technology and the nexus between the two, that there probably was the need for something to set all of this in context.”
2021-02-02 · Intelligence Squared · The Great Decoupling, with Nigel Inkster and Linda Yueh · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source