Time magazine on Eileen Gu and U.S.-China geopolitics

Questions about Gu’s citizenship status, rather than the dramatic victory [in the freestyle skiing big air competition at the 2022 Beijing Olympics], dominated the post-event press conference.  Olympians must be citizens of the country they represent, and China does not allow dual citizenship.  But no evidence suggests that Gu has renounced her American citizenship.  So did China make an exception for Gu?  During an hours-long interview in the Scharnitz rental house she’s sharing with [her mother] Yan, Gu declines to engage on the citizenship question.  “I don’t really see how that’s relevant,” she says.  (The Chinese Olympic Committee did not respond to a request for comment.) 

She tried not to take the backlash personally.  “There are geopolitical factors at play, and people just hate China generally.  So it’s kind of difficult when I’m lumped in with this evil monolith that people want to dislike,” says Gu.  “It’s never really about me and my skiing.”  In late 2024, the Chinese government announced that around 313 million people had taken up ice and snow sports, or related leisure activities, since the 2022 Olympics.  “I’ve made a lot of positive impact at nobody’s expense,” says Gu.  “And I genuinely mean this without a hint of sardonic humor: use the time and creativity that it takes to craft some of these insults to think about what your talents are, and how you can use them to make the world better.” 

She doesn’t believe it’s her place to comment on, say, China’s checkered human-rights record.  For example, the U.S. government has accused China of abuses against its majority-Muslim Uighur population.  “I’m not an expert on this,” she says.  “I haven’t done the research.  I don’t think it’s my business.  I’m not going to make big claims on my social media.”  But as a Stanford international-relations major, she could surely do her homework on this issue, no?  “I’m just more of a skeptic when it comes to data in general,” says Gu.  “So it’s not like I can read an article and be like, ‘Oh, well, this must be the truth.’  I need to have a ton of evidence.  I need to maybe go to the place, maybe talk to 10 primary-source people who are in a location and have experienced life there.  Then I need to go see images.  I need to listen to recordings.  I need to think about how history affects it.  Then I need to read books on how politics affects it.  This is a lifelong search.” 

So if she’s asked about Donald Trump’s China tariffs during an Olympic press conference in Italy, don’t expect a weighty answer.  “I would just say, ‘I didn’t know I got promoted to trade minister,’” says Gu.  “It’s irresponsible to ask me to be the mouthpiece for any agenda.”

~ Sean Gregory, "‘I Don’t Believe in Limits.’ How Eileen Gu Became Freestyle Skiing’s Biggest Star," Time magazine, January 22, 2026

February 9, 2026

 

Eunice Yoon on Xi Jinping's willingness to negotiate on trade

I think that the Chinese have shown that they are willing to negotiate, that they do eventually want to have some sort of meeting... The rhetoric from the Chinese perspective out of the White House is not actually that helpful because the way things are being set up is that President Trump is the kingmaker and that all these countries around the world are going over there and groveling and asking for deals.  From the Chinese perspective, this cannot happen because for President Xi Jinping it is so politically dangerous for him to be seen as crawling over to the United States asking for a deal.

~ Eunice Yoon, CNBC's Beijing Bureau Chief, "China’s Xi Jinping Sends Trump a Message as His Trade War Spirals," 3:30 mark, The Daily Beast, April 14, 2025

Kevin Duffy on the trade war with China

Trade is win-win. This is Econ 101. If you understand that, you don't mess with trade. 

I don't understand all the anti-China sentiment in this country. What did they ever do besides ship us inexpensive goods in return for our government bonds which will end up worthless? They raised our standard of living and financed our deficits. We should be sending them thank you notes. The attack on China started a long time ago in the '90s. In fact, in 1996 a younger Nancy Pelosi warned about rising trade deficits with the Chinese. She sounded like Donald Trump. Feel free to fact check me on this.

The Chinese are smart and resilient. When they were targeted by Trump's first trade war in 2018, they adapted and de-risked from the US economy. That's why they're one of the few countries that is standing up to the bully. Bravo. I applaud them.

When Biden took office, many expected him to back away from Trump's trade war and anti-China rhetoric. Instead, he amped them both up.

Btw, US multinationals (Starbucks, Apple, Tesla, Shake Shack, etc.) do about $500 billion a year of business in China. That doesn't show up in the trade deficit. China's BYD is the biggest producer of EVs in the world, but it's locked out of the US market by 100% tariffs imposed by the Biden administration. But you don't hear that because it doesn't fit the narrative.

As a result of Trump's first trade war, trade with China has declined. So has the trade deficit. In fact, it's the lowest it's been since 2010. Doesn't fit the narrative.

This trade war risks blowing up the global economy and taking our 401Ks with it. Who is to blame? Both parties, but honestly, we're all to blame.

~ Kevin Duffy, Facebook post, April 10, 2025

Cyrus Janssen: "I don't believe that China is the biggest threat to the United States"

One fundamental belief that has really guided me a lot is be the change you want to see in the world.  It's very simple...  So I want to see a change between the U.S. and China.  Maybe I'm too small.  Maybe I'm just one person.  Maybe I can't really influence this, but I'm going to go try.  I'm going to try to be that change that I want to see in the world.

I don't believe that China is the biggest threat to the United States.  That is something that I'm going to die on.  It's a fundamental belief of mine that's something that I'm going to continue to preach on.  So when I talk to people, when I speak in conferences around the world, when I speak to anybody, from the side of the street to...  I went to a local pharmacy and there were two guys talking about China.  "Oh, China's taking all our jobs, there's no manufacturing anymore in America because of China.  China's the problem!"  And I thought, "What's interesting is that, what phone do you have?"  

"Oh, I have an iPhone."  

"Okay, well, if we bring that factory back to America, we're going to have to hire Americans for about $50 to $60 an hour because they won't work for less than that in a factory.  They don't want to do that job.  So are you willing to pay $5,000 to $6,000 for an iPhone?"  

"$5,000 to $6,000?  That's insane."

"Exactly, that's why we need China, because there's also a fundamental reason why Apple's gone to China, is because they're able to produce the best quality phones, at the best prices and they do so because it's China...  And as a result, Apple's become one of the most valuable companies in the world.  So if anything, just go buy some Apple stock and enjoy the tangible benefits that come from dealing with China,"

~ Cyrus Janssen, "Shocking Truth About China Told by an American," Max Chernov, 38:15 mark, October 14, 2024

Marcus Stanley on $1.6 billion House bill to deliver anti-China propaganda overseas

Since at least 2016, foreign interference in American elections and civil society have become central to American political discourse. The issue is taken extremely seriously by the U.S. government, which has levied sanctions and called out foreign adversaries for sowing “discord and chaos” through their propaganda efforts. 

But apparently Washington takes a different view when it comes to American propaganda operations in foreign countries. On Monday, the House passed HR 1157, the “Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund,” by a bipartisan 351-36 majority. This legislation authorizes more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years to, among other purposes, subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese “malign influence” globally. 

That’s a massive spend — about twice, for example, the annual operating expenditure of CNN. If passed into law it would also represent a large increase in federal spending on international influence operations.

~ Marcus Stanley, "House passes $1.6 billion to deliver anti-China propaganda overseas," Responsible Statecraft, September 11, 2024

Brendan Ahern on the false China narrative

In general, Western media is a source of disinformation.  It’s not a good source for what’s going on [in China]…  Business people and investors have been getting along just fine and the diplomats from both sides have not.  I think the media plays with what DC wants.

~ Brendan Ahern, "Don't Believe the China Boogeyman Narrative," Stansberry Investor Hour, October 7, 2024

Jacob Gershman on the sell-or-ban TikTok law

The litigants have asked the D.C. Circuit to rule by Dec. 6 so there is enough time for the Supreme Court to potentially review the case before the law takes effect. 

The law doesn’t make it a crime to use TikTok, but it does prohibit mobile app stores from letting users download or update it. 

The sell-or-ban law gained bipartisan support after lawmakers received warnings from the intelligence community about China’s ability to exploit the app used by some 170 million Americans, roughly half of the population. ByteDance has said it can’t and won’t sell its U.S. operations by the deadline. The Chinese government has also signaled that it won’t allow a forced sale of TikTok to go through. 

Much of the government’s evidence is classified and shielded not just from the public but from TikTok’s lawyers. They said in court papers that the U.S. government hasn’t shown them any evidence that China has manipulated the content that Americans see on TikTok or that China has accessed U.S. user data.

The U.S. government has shown the judges statements from senior intelligence officials about the dangers posed by TikTok and a transcript of a classified House committee hearing from March that fueled the legislation’s passage. Publicly viewable portions of the filings intimate that the government’s national-security concerns are more than hypothetical. 

Casey Blackburn, a senior U.S. intelligence official, wrote in a heavily redacted filing that TikTok’s parent company has a “demonstrated history of manipulating the content on their platforms, including at the direction of the PRC [People’s Republic of China].”

TikTok says it has spent $2 billion walling off U.S. user data on Oracle-owned U.S.-based servers—measures that the U.S. government says fail to adequately insulate TikTok from Chinese influence or prevent user data from being accessed by ByteDance employees located in China. 

~ Jacob Gershman, "Court Appears Skeptical of TikTok’s Challenge to U.S. Ban: Judges are considering the validity of legislation that could shut down Chinese-backed app used by half of Americans," The Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2024

Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s CEO, in Washington in March

Kevin Duffy on the cold war with China

The collapse of the Soviet Union thirty years ago ushered in a very unusual, unipolar world in which the US dominated geopolitically.  That world is over.  From 2020 to 2025 the increase in interest on the public debt alone will exceed the entire U.S. military budget.  So being at war with Russia, China and Islam at the same time – 44% of the world’s population – isn’t sustainable.  The U.S. is going to have to start getting along with people, which I believe means that chilled relations with China will thaw over time.

~ Kevin Duffy, "The Stock Market is Quite Complacent," The Market, December 1, 2023

Jacob Hornberger on how China got into the crosshairs of the American empire

For decades after the Communist Party took control over China, the Party established and maintained a strict socialist system, one in which the government owned and controlled most everything. The result was massive poverty across the land, which, of course, meant a Chinese communist government with relatively few resources. 

Then a few decades ago, China began liberalizing its economy, permitting the Chinese people to engage in economic enterprise, engage in trade, open businesses, and accumulate large amounts of wealth. The result was a tremendous increase in economic prosperity. 

For a time, Americans celebrated this economic phenomenon. And why not? For decades, many Americans had criticized China’s socialist system precisely because it generated so much poverty among the Chinese people. Now the standard of living of people was soaring. Why wouldn’t everyone celebrate the fact that people in other parts of the world are escaping poverty? 

Moreover, the rising prosperity in China meant that the Chinese people were increasingly able to purchase goods and services from Americans. The resulting trade made everyone better off. 

But the U.S. Empire — specifically, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — saw trouble in all this. That’s because China’s economic prosperity meant vast new tax revenues for the Chinese communist regime — resources that enabled the regime to increase the size of its military and also to increase its influence around the world. 

During the 20 years that the U.S. government was waging war against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, China had no such burden. Rather than using its tax revenues to kill large numbers of people, as the U.S. Empire was doing, China was using them to expand its influence around the world by helping countries with big, grandiose socialist projects. 

Thus, in the eyes of the U.S. national-security establishment, China’s rise posed a grave threat to its post-Cold War role as the world’s sole remaining empire. Something had to be done to bring China down, even if it harmed the American people at the same time. By suppressing China’s economic prosperity, the empire aimed to diminish the amount of tax revenues flowing into the Chinese government’s coffers, thereby limiting its ability to expand its military and its influence around the world.

~ Jacob G. Hornberger, "Xi Jinping is Right About the U.S. Empire," The Future of Freedom Foundation, November 20, 2023

Eric Boehm on the Chinese balloon incident

On Saturday, the F-22 [which officially entered military service in 2005] scored its first-ever victory against an airborne adversary when it shot down…a balloon.  There may not be a better metaphor for the costly grandiosity of the American military than the use of a multi-million-dollar fighter jet to dispatch an unarmed, unmaneuverable opponent.  But the fact that the F-22 had never won a dogfight before its decisive victory over what may or may not have been a Chinese spy balloon is a nice illustration of why the United States has the world's most expensive military by a massive margin.

~ Eric Boehm, "By Shooting Down Balloon, the Expensive, Useless F-22 Fighter Finally Won a Dogfight," Reason.com, February 6, 2023

Peter Zeihan on China: "they are going away"

There's no version of this where China comes through looking good.  And the challenge for the rest of us is to figure out figure out "how do we, in as smooth and quick as a process as possible, figure out how we can get along without them?"  Because they are going away.  And they're going away this decade, for certain.

~ Peter Zeihan, interview with Joe Rogan, The Joe Rogan Experience, January 7, 2023

My comment: 

The big reveal with Peter Zeihan is that he has an agenda: decouple with China.  If you press him on this, I'm pretty sure he welcomes US government policy to expedite the process.  There are several problems with this line of reasoning: 

1) If Zeihan is correct, the decoupling will happen naturally. 

2) Trade is mutually beneficial, i.e. cutting off the second largest economy in the world will inflict massive pain on the US economy, not just China's. 

3) Interfering in trade leads to conflict. 

I'm not suggesting China doesn't have its flaws (as do we), but if Zeihan actually cared about the Chinese people, he would encourage diplomacy and trade, not vilification and ostracism.

Marko Papic on price inflation and supply problems

Why do we have inflation?  "Oh, it's Biden's stimulus."  Well, no.  False.  False.  First of all, it's Biden-Trump's stimulus.  Second of all, forget stimulus.  Forget that, that's easy.  You raise rates, done.  Demand gone.  The problem is, we have this plethora of idiosyncratic supply problems that seem idiosyncratic; they seem separate from each other.  But actually there are a cacophony of evidence that's telling you that we have completely dismantled the well-functioning, well-oiled machine.  Supply chain, just-in-time, all this stuff.  And why did we do it?  We decided that global warming was going to kill us tomorrow.  Not in 10 or 100 years.  No, no, tomorrow.  So we need to deal with it right now.  And the problem with that is what we've done is we've starved fossil fuel industry of capital.  We've turned off the capex tap at the same time that we didn't turn off the demand tap.  Like we're not all driving Teslas.  Sorry.  Some of us drive F150s.  So the problem with that is that we have an energy crisis, which is of our own making.  We have a supply chain crisis because five years ago we all thought China was cool; now we all think China is going to kill us.  So now we have to also fight a war with China tomorrow, we have to solve climate change tomorrow, and then finally, of course, Covid... disruptions also created supply chain problems.

~ Marko Papic, interview with Dan Ferris, Stansberry Investor Hour, 37:50 mark, October 31, 2022

Vitaliy Katsenelson on the forced sale of TikTok

Then there is the TikTok fiasco, which is still unravelling. The US government fears TikTok’s unchecked presence in the US, the data it may collect about US consumers, and what it will do with it. This is understandable. However, the way the US has dealt with the issue will be perceived as unconscionable by both China and, more importantly, the rest of the world. 

The US government gave an ultimatum to TikTok get out of the US or be sold to a US-based company. But then President Trump demanded that whoever buys TikTok must pay the US government “key money” (a commission). In other words, since this “key money” will lower TikTok’s purchase price, TikTok is basically paying the US government for… I’m not sure what. This is extortion. Mobsters do this, not the US government. 

Actually, other countries, including China, do this. Apparently, it is done in commercial real estate, as well. But we are the shining beacon of democracy; we are the United States of America. We should be doing the opposite; we should make sure that this sale process is fair and above board.

~ Vitaliy Katsenelson, "U.S. and China: In the Foothills of Cold War," ContrarianEdge, October 29, 2020

Robert Spalding on the U.S.-China cold war

What oil is for Saudi Arabia, data is to China. 

~ Robert Spalding, retired US Air Force brigadier general, served as US Defense Attaché to China and is the author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept

(As quoted by Vitaliy Katsenelson, "U.S. and China: In the Foothills of Cold War," ContrarianEdge, October 29, 2020)

Fred Reed on the U.S. cold war with China

In pondering Washington’s new toy, a cold war against China, one sees a pattern.  China’s approach to influence and prosperity is commercial and longsighted.  This does not mean that the Chinese are warm and fuzzy, only intelligent.  They advance their interests while turning a profit, which wars don’t.  China invests heavily in the infrastructure, both physical and educational, that makes for current and future competitiveness.  They are fast, agile, innovative, and imperfectly scrupulous...  Washington’s approach is military, coercive, shortsighted, and commercially dimwitted.

[...]

China’s major capital expenditures, as gleaned as best I can from pubs covering these: highways, dams, bridges, very-high-voltage power lines, airports, rail, new high-tech 360 mph rail, five-g implementation, reactors, and semiconductor catchup.  America’s major capital expenditures: the B-21, F-35, Virginia-class subs, Ford-class aircraft carriers, SSN (x) attack submarine.

[...]

What is a Ford-class carrier good for?  The Fords are versatile ships, having a three-fold purpose: Funneling lots of money into military industry, killing defenseless peasants, and sticking the Pentagon’s tongue out at China. Killing peasants and soldiers in third-rate armies of bedraggled third-world countries is what the American military does.  Think Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Somalia. Getting into big wars with real countries is no longer practical despite the opportunities for profits because big countries depend on each other too much commercially.  Even killing peasants begins to lose cache, as witness the comic opera defeat in Afghanistan..

~ Fred Reed, "A Military Solution to a Commercial Problem: It Probably Ain't Gonna Work Much Longer," The Unz Review, September 13, 2021