A Conversation with Dr. Xi

As many of you know, I usually write a newsletter only once a month. This is an exception. My last one, distributed on January 20 and titled "AI, Musk, and Oligarchy," was an imagined conversation with Thomas Paine. It generated a slurry of positive responses. With that as a model, I wanted to consider the impact of President Trump's first days in the White House as might be seen from China's perspective. 

My latest book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 3rd Edition: China's EHM Strategy, is highly critical of many aspects of China's policies and actions around the globe. Although the first two books in the economic hit man trilogy (which do not focus on China) were published by a major publishing house there, my US publishers and I were convinced that this third one would not be – and that the English version would probably be banned in China. 

Yet, it was just published in China, almost entirely unchanged. The fact that we were wrong suggests that we may need to reconsider our ideas about Chinese censorship. In any case, while writing this third edition, during the pandemic, I conducted a lot of research about China and interviewed many people in China and other countries, mostly over the internet. Those experiences, plus lecturing at an MBA program in China, gave me insights into the way people in China and around the world view the changing dynamics of global politics.