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Why Netanyahu relented to protests in Israel, but France's Macron didn't
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Why did Netanyahu end up backing down to protests in Israel, but not Macron in France?
Well, they are two different countries. But really, in Israel, they hadn't yet pushed the reform through. At this point, Netanyahu hasn't said he is given up on it. He said he's waiting for 30 days. Now, he might not be able to get it through, but still, it wasn't like it was passed and then he said, "Too much. Now, I've got to undo it." Where in the case of Macron, he had already gotten the vote in the upper house. He'd already forced it through, avoiding the lower house through a constitutional measure, which meant that essentially he had already gotten the agreement and then he was dealing with massive demonstrations. Which, by the way, the demonstrations themselves not super popular in France, even though the pension reform is strongly opposed, so I'm not surprised by that.
Should the West be worried about North Korea developing tactical nuclear weapons?
We got two of these complicated questions. Well, I think that the fact that North Korea continues to expand its nuclear program is a deep concern, because they are an enormously impoverished rogue state, and there's no information on what really goes on inside that country, and there's no real effective diplomatic relations that any countries and certainly their adversaries have with them. So the increasing tests of ballistic missiles that we see going on is a concern, is a worry. In fact, the only thing that calmed them down recently was when Trump met with Kim Jong-Un, and then they did the freeze-for-freeze informally. So you didn't have US military exercises with South Korea, with Japan, and you didn't have tests of ballistic missiles from North Korea. Of course, that's gone and now the tensions are greater. Frankly, there should be more engagement between the two sides.
China is going to break up Alibaba into six parts. What does this tell us about the state of Xi's tech crackdown?
I think more importantly is the fact that Jack Ma is back in China and was clearly told by the Chinese, "Hey, we're not going to arrest you. This would be a really good time to come back." So too, the fact that someone who had been under arrest, involved in the semiconductor program has now been released to start working again. This is the Chinese government saying, "Yes, there's state control, but we want to focus on growth and we want effective response to US and allied export controls on semiconductors, so we have to really empower the private sector with state restrictions, but also with state investment. Whether that's going to be effective or not, very open question, but the Chinese are clearly trying to pile all in on their own national champions in this advanced technology space.
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2022 showed Xi Jinping is not invincible; 2023 will be "rocky year" for him
What a year 2022 has been for Xi Jinping.
On the one hand, China's leader made clear he's the big boss after the 20th Communist Party Congress. On the other, he's been forced to roll back his zero-COVID policy following protests and the damage to the economy.
What will 2023 hold for Xi?
“It will be a rocky year for China,” former US State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. Moving away from lockdowns was long overdue, but the big problem now is that a large part of the elderly population is unvaccinated.
And it's very striking, she adds, that Xi had to reverse course when he realized he couldn't stop the protests.
For international relations expert Tom Nichols, the experience humbled Xi, whose "regime has been cut down to size." China, he points out, is no longer 10 feet tall like in the early days of COVID but just another government facing the same problems they all did during the pandemic.
Watch the GZERO World episode: On Russia’s reckoning, China’s vulnerability & US democracy’s Dunkirk
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China isn't budging on zero-COVID
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here. And yes, we are seven weeks into the war, but we also have real problems in containing COVID in China.
In the United States and the rest of the developed world, everyone's saying, "We're done with COVID. We don't want to wear masks anymore. We want to get our lives back." But in China, the zero-COVID policy means that they've got still major lockdowns. In particular, in Shanghai, the largest city in China, which is now entering a second week of lockdown. And record numbers of cases in Shanghai, nothing close to the numbers of cases you were seeing in the United States or in Europe, but in China -- where very few people have gotten COVID, and so there's no natural immunity, vaccines don't work very well and the hospitals would get overwhelmed very quickly if they were just going to let COVID rip -- understandable that they are extremely nervous about these small numbers and as a consequence, they're locking down the entire city.
Now, one thing I can say is that the Chinese government is very effective in terms of lockdown. So the province of Jilin, which had also significant outbreak, and they started locking down a month ago, that looks like those cases are almost down to zero. So the lockdown with four weeks has been almost completely effective and they'll be able to reopen completely in relatively short order. Shanghai, very far from that. Also, Shanghai is not only the largest, but also the wealthiest city in China. Their per capita income is higher than a lot of European countries, very well educated. And people in Shanghai are not at all happy with the idea that they have to sit in their apartments for weeks on end, they're having difficulty getting food, that their pets are being rounded up and destroyed, that at the beginning that their kids, if their kids were COVID positive and the parents weren't, the children were separated from the parents. There was a very significant outcry over that. The Chinese government actually changed that policy guidance within just a few days as consequence.
But still, I will say from the perspective of the Chinese government, they are not going to change this policy. They think it's a success, the inconveniencing of dozens of millions of Chinese being forced to live in their homes. I mean, even from the American perspective, the idea that they'll take your pets away and they'll kill them, in the case of China, culling pets is seen to be a very small downside for avoiding major hospitalizations and deaths across the country. The Chinese government looks at the US and sees a million people that have died from COVID so far. They look in Europe and see comparative numbers across the European Union in terms of deaths per capita. And they say, "These are countries that aren't actually valuing the lives of their citizens. They're not willing to make any sacrifices for the good of the, for the people, and we are going to do this very, very differently."
And I am sympathetic to that perspective, but I'm not sympathetic to patriotism that says that we are not going to accept Western vaccines because we have to do it all in China. That's stupid. And indeed it's really dangerous for the Chinese people. The fact is that we have massive surplus in terms of vaccines globally, at this point, very different from where we were a year ago or six months ago. The Chinese vaccines work very poorly in stopping spread, especially of these new omicron variants. The Western-made mRNA vaccines are much more effective. The Chinese are working on their own, but they're not ready yet and they won't be until the end of the year at large number.
And in Africa, you couldn't get the vaccines because you didn't have the distribution capability, so a lot of them were actually spoiling before they could get to the citizens on the ground. And so everyone in Africa ended up getting COVID and now they've got natural immunity. It's a much younger population. They're getting back to normal lives as well. In the case of China, the population is much older. A lot of the oldest people haven't been willing to have vaccines. And the Chinese government is unwilling to license Pfizer and Moderna. They say, "Nope, we don't trust it. We're only going to do our own." And when you put that together, well, that's one of the reasons why they're going to be forced to do all of these continual lockdowns.
And I don't see it changing. I think it's going to get worse because this omicron variant and the new variants that are coming are more and more and more transmissible. And that means that in a Chinese population where no one's gotten COVID and the vaccines don't really work, if you were to just let the disease go and not have massive quarantines, as the Chinese government says, you could have five million Chinese citizens die, and I think that's probably right. And they're simply not willing to tolerate that possibility, nor are they willing to accept Western vaccines. Put those things together, means a lot of Chinese citizens are going to get angry. And we have seen some of that. You've seen the yelling and the screaming, for example, from the apartments late night in Shanghai. That's very different from saying there's going to be mass violence. I don't expect that at all because the surveillance system that the Chinese have and their ability to punish non-compliance is so incredibly strong that the average Chinese citizen knows better than to overtly come out and engage in civil disobedience in the country.
But it does mean that their economy is going to have serious problems this year. They're nowhere close to 5% growth. They will need to engage in more fiscal stimulus. They won't be able to deal with a lot of the regulatory responses that they were hoping for in dealing with, for example, the bubble of the real estate sector and other bad debt that's in the corporate sector. And that kicks those issues down the road longer, which means the pain that the Chinese economy will eventually suffer will be much greater as a consequence of this.
One piece of good news is that lower Chinese growth and demand in this environment when you have so much commodity inflation explosion, in terms of oil, and gas and energy, also in terms of food, does help to take some of the air out of that. And so right now, oil prices are a little lower than a hundred. A piece of that is expectation that the world's second largest economy is going to significantly underperform this year. Always silver linings in these sorts of things.
Anyway, something we have to watch very carefully. You'll remember back in January, we thought the number one risk for the world in 2022 was "No zero-COVID", that this policy would fail. The Chinese government came out and was pretty critical. They said, "How can you Americans criticize us? Look at how badly you got it wrong." Well, I mean, we did get it wrong and we have gotten wrong. We still get it wrong. But that doesn't mean that the Chinese government is going to be flexible in responding to their big challenges, and we see that playing out right now.
So we'll watch it carefully and we'll talk to you all real soon. Be good.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
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The Winter Olympics in a divided world
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here, and a happy start of the week to you. Got your Quick Take to get you going on a Monday, and why not talk about the Olympics, the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, so different from the Summer Olympics that they hosted back in 2008, when the American president was there, and was enormously impressed, and this was China coming out onto the world stage, and seen as a global leader. Though the presumption in the West was still as they got wealthier and more powerful, and we let them into global leadership roles, including hosting the Olympics, they would eventually become more of a free market and more democratic. And of course, that was wrong.
In fact, that was probably the single most wrong thing, most wrong view that was held over the past couple of decades by the foreign policy establishment of the West, irrespective of what side of the aisle you're on. But anyway, here we are in 2022, and it is a much more divided world. It is a much more geopolitically fractious world, and it's a world where a lot of people are saying and saying things that are pretty unhappy about Beijing hosting this Winter Olympics. People thought it was going to be very geopolitically fraught. So far, that's not been the case. It's been more or less Olympics as pandemic usual, which means no crowds kind of lockdown, but also means not a lot really happening on the political front.
So there have been a handful of diplomatic boycotts of the Olympics by the United States and a few allies. Most Europeans chose not to go along. The Japanese chose not to go along. Countries like Australia, for example, the UK have. And then the surprise on that front, India, but this was really self-inflicted by the Chinese government. The Indians were planning on sending a delegation, and then the Chinese government decided to include among the torchbearers a Chinese soldier that had been injured in the territorial dispute up in the Himalayas between India and China, and actual fighting between the two sides, which the Indian see as overwhelmingly having been precipitated by the Chinese. So once that happened, the Indians said, "We're out."
But I mean, frankly, the fact that the Chinese felt confident enough to do that, the fact that the Chinese felt confident enough to have an ethnic Uyghur lighting the Olympic flame, I mean, these are signs of confidence, signs of, we don't care what you say or do, the West. And frankly, no athletes decided to boycott, and no corporate sponsoring decided to boycott. And so you put all of that together, and well over 90% of the countries of the world did not join in a diplomatic boycott. So I think the Chinese government feels pretty comfortable in all that. Where they feel much less comfortable is how this closed-loop Olympics is going to work, and whether or not they can ensure, first of all, minimum case spread inside the Olympics itself, therefore minimum disruption of the Olympic events. So far, reasonably good marks on that. Probably B+, A-.
And also most importantly, can they ensure that there is no spread from the Olympics into the Chinese population at large? So far, that looks good. Certainly no reported cases. If it was a very small number of cases, I doubt we would find out about it. The Chinese government would have high incentive not to make that known. But nonetheless, so far, if you are the Chinese leadership, you're feeling pretty good about the way all of this is going on.
I will say, by the way, I've watched a little bit of the Olympics. I'm not one of these people that says, "Oh, there's a diplomatic boycott, and so we should cut everything off." First of all, I don't believe in punishing the athletes who have spent their entire lives training for this moment, in most cases, and taking it away because we are politically unhappy with the Chinese government. Seems like they should not be the people that suffer. I mean, if the average American isn't willing to do without Chinese goods on their table because they're a little bit cheaper, then I'm sure as hell, I'm not willing to talk to hundreds of American athletes and say, "Sorry, you've got no shot at what you've prepared your entire life for." So I don't think that's fair.
And I also like to believe that sports are international sports, et cetera, one of those places where we try to put politics as much aside as possible. That doesn't mean I'd be in favor of the North Koreans hosting the Olympics, for example. It doesn't mean, I think none of this stuff matters. Of course, it does. But when it comes to China, it's such an important relationship, and of course, is a relationship that is among close to economic and technological equals, which in reality limits the ability of the Americans to dictate how the Chinese should behave very different than the US-Mexico relationship, for example, or others. And that's just reality, irrespective of whether or not I'm happy about it. But I mean, you still can't deny reality.
And I also think that it's important, given the interdependence in the relationship, to focus areas of conflict on those that we need to have, like on Chinese theft of intellectual property, or like on massive human rights abuses like with the Uyghurs, which the Americans consider to be act of genocide. I'm all in favor of the sanctions against those companies that are engaged in slave labor, or otherwise benefiting from that unconscionable series of decisions that the Chinese government had taken against their own citizens. But that's very different from saying, "I want to see the Olympics get boycotted."
I haven't watched all that much, in part because I'm busy, but I did see a little bit of the opening ceremony because I wanted to see how the international media was covering it. And I would say it's been a difficult needle to thread, but they've mostly given the fact that they're there. They certainly aren't just saying things the Chinese government would like. I mean, whether I saw NBC coverage, and I've seen some international coverage, and generally, I would say they're doing a reasonably down the straight and narrow job of, "We're not politics correspondents, we're sports correspondents, we're entertainment correspondent, but we are going to present the honest reality around the controversy here.” And the controversy is real.
And then beyond that, I watched the curling between the US and Canada, the mixed curling. The Americans got smoked. I was a little sad about that. I like curling. I was very disappointed with the uniforms. Usually, the uniform is very good. I also like curling because it feels to me like the one Olympic sport that if I just stopped being a political scientist and dedicated five years of my life at nothing but curling, I would have a shot of being on an Olympics team somewhere. Maybe not the US. I might need dual citizenship, but I mean, Honduras doesn't have a curling team. This feels like an opportunity. Furthermore, I don't know why I came up with Honduras. Just felt like a place that wouldn't necessarily have a curling team watch. I'm going to check it out, and they're going to have one. I'm going to seriously embarrassed, but I'm feeling good about it, feeling good about it.
And finally, I just say that the big story, of course, that's come out the Olympics so far, if you're a political scientist who is watching the news, was Putin at the opening ceremony. And here, I do feel pretty strongly that the Russia-China relationship is increasingly becoming an alliance, because the Chinese see American behavior in Asia, diplomatic, economic security, the creation of the Quad, AUKUS, the rest as very analogous to the way the Russians have for decades now perceived the United States and behavior with NATO in Eastern Europe. And so I do think that as the Chinese, we're unhappy with Russia's revisionism. With Russia, "I want to blow up and undermine the global order," China is increasingly aligning with that Russian perspective. Long term, it's a dangerous thing for the world. It's certainly not a good thing for the Americans and American allies, whether in the Atlantic or across the Pacific. But it is meaningful. It is real, and the joint statement between the Chinese and the Russians on Ukraine certainly implied a level of Chinese alignment with Russian demands about Ukraine and the European security system.
I will caveat that with saying that China has never recognized Crimea as part of Russia, and China still favors a diplomatic resolution through the Minsk dialogues of the occupied territory of the Donbas. So they're only going so far. They don't want to fight. They want a diplomatic resolution, but they're putting their finger on the scale of the Russians, and this certainly helps Putin to a degree, as well as willingness of China to invest more, trade more with the Russians and the like in the run up to a couple of very critical weeks of negotiations between the Russians, the Americans, the French, the Germans, and the rest of NATO.
So that's where we are, and I am glad that the athletes are able to participate in their life dream. And for those of you that are watching, I hope you find it all entertaining. And for the rest of us, let's get on with the week. Talk to you all soon. Be good.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com
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Beating China at AI
The US and China compete on many fronts, and one of them is artificial intelligence.
But China has a different set of values, which former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is not a big fan of — especially when those values shape the AI on apps his children use.
"You may not care where your kids are, and TikTok may know where your teenagers are, and that may not bother you," he says. "But you certainly don't want them to be affected by algorithms that are inspired by the Chinese and not by Western values."
For Schmidt, the Chinese government is ensuring that the internet reflects the priorities of the ruling Communist Party.
Watch his interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World:Be more worried about artificial intelligence
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Omicron & the undoing of China's COVID strategy
Omicron is here. The bad news is that it's more contagious. The good news is that mRNA vaccines work against death and hospitalization. COVID may soon become endemic in some parts of the world.
Not in China, where Xi Jinping's zero-COVID approach faces its toughest test to date with omicron. Why? Because China lacks mRNA jabs, and so few Chinese people have gotten COVID that overall protection is very low.
Get ready for a wave of lockdowns that'll severely disrupt the world's second-largest economy — just a month out from the Beijing Winter Olympics.
That could spell disaster for Beijing, Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells Ian Bremmer on this week's episode of GZERO World.
Still, he says zero COVID remains popular with most Chinese people.
If things get really bad, though, Huang believes China will pivot to living with the virus, especially as the cost of keeping zero COVID in the age of omicron becomes too high. He thinks that's the right move for Xi.
Indeed, Huang expects China to start reversing course soon after the Games, and when the pandemic becomes endemic in other parts of the world. Beijing will throw in the towel on zero tolerance in 1-2 years, max.
Also, a look at vaccine incentives around the world. Do prizes like cows and brothel visits actually convince holdouts to get the jab?
Subscribe to GZERO Media's YouTube channel to get notifications when new episodes are published.
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Nicholas Thompson on China's tech U-turn
Six months ago, China's tech giants were champions of the state, working with the government to conquer US Big Tech. But then Xi Jinping started cracking down, and a trillion dollars in their market value is gone. Huh? For Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic and former editor-in-chief of WIRED, it makes sense for Xi to go after cryptocurrencies to ensure they don't replace the yuan. But going after national tech champions, he says, could be fool's errand because it's inevitable they'll someday become more powerful than the state itself.
Watch this episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Big Tech: Global sovereignty, unintended consequences
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LinkedIn right to shut down in China, says journalist Nick Thompson
The Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson believes in tech firms doing business in China because connecting with people there is a huge social good for the world. But in demanding LinkedIn de-platform certain people, he says, the Chinese government crossed a line, and "you can't justify that."
Watch Ian Bremmer's interview with Nicholas Thompson in an upcoming episode of GZERO World, airing on US public television.
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