TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When it comes to the production of drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, solar cells and clinical trials of pharmaceuticals, China is ahead of the U.S. Beijing might also be benefiting from the war in Iran and from President Donald Trump's tariffs. So does this mean the era of America's global leadership is over?
My guest, Evan Osnos, addresses these and other issues in his latest article in The New Yorker titled "The Future, Made in China." He's a staff writer at the magazine, where he's written extensively about China, as well as American politics and the tech world. Before that, he was the Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune and was part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 and 2008. Osnos is also a host of the New Yorker podcast "The Political Scene." His first book, "Age Of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, And Faith In The New China," won the 2014 National Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is "The Haves And Have-Yachts: Dispatches On The Ultrarich." We recorded our interview yesterday.
Evan Osnos, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So the way the Chinese leadership sees it, as you describe it, is that China is winning the war in Iran. Can you explain why China believes that?
EVAN OSNOS: Well, in some sense, it is from their perspective always to China's benefit to see the United States drawn back into the Middle East. You know, this has been the place that has consumed so much American attention and blood and treasure, as it's known, over the last generation. And here, all of a sudden, just a couple of years after it seemed as if perhaps the United States was trying to get out of that region, it's now pulled back in.
And in quite literal terms, it has meant also that the U.S. has had to draw on assets - things like aircraft carriers and missiles and munitions that would otherwise have been put in Asia and have had to bring those to the Middle East. And so as a result, it has shifted all of the center of gravity of American national security away from focusing on China and, in fact, now focused on Iran.
GROSS: So does China now have an open door to Taiwan if we don't have as many ships and weapons there?
OSNOS: Well, it certainly sets up conditions that would make it easier. I mean, just as a functional matter, there are many people in Washington now who are concerned that if the United States found itself having to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion or trying to repel a blockade, that it would be, frankly, just short of the kinds of munitions that it would need to do so. The Trump administration denies that. They're saying that reporting doesn't capture the full universe of American supplies.
But the question of whether China is prepared to go and attack Taiwan is a question that is partly based on their assessment of us, the United States, and partly based on their own perception of themselves, whether or not they can actually pull off an attack of that kind and succeed. And the core of that, Terry, is about deterrence, meaning, does the United States project the message that we are both a credible and serious deterrent from China attacking? And at the moment, the level of our - call it what it is - distraction, consumption, preoccupation in the Middle East reduces that sense of deterrence to China.
GROSS: So we've depleted a lot of our weapons in Iran. The military, apparently, is worried about that. The Pentagon's worried about it. Would building new weapons require materials from China?
OSNOS: Yeah. Unfortunately, the irony here is that we are, in some ways, beholden right now to the Chinese factory in order to produce the munitions that we need to defend American interests from China. That's the exquisite problem that we've found ourselves in after generations of building more and more reliance on Chinese supply.
There is an effort in the United States now to say, we need to figure out ways of processing our own rare earths. These are these, you know, really important vital minerals or rare earth magnets, but that is a years-away problem to solve, meaning it can't be done overnight. So right now, a lot of what you hear from Washington is efforts to try to beat back the perception that the United States is overstretched. But you're beginning to hear more and more concern from within American agencies, talking to reporters saying, we are finding ourselves with one hand tied behind our backs.
GROSS: Has China taken sides in the war in Iran? I know, like, Trump was hoping that China would help open up the strait. That hasn't happened.
OSNOS: No, that hasn't happened. China, historically, in the last, you know, many years, has been very close to Iran. It's been a big customer of Iranian oil. According to intelligence reports, they have been giving information to Iran to help it target some of its own drone and missile attacks. But it has - this is an important point. It has come up to the edge of getting involved without getting overtly involved, meaning that it has tried to avoid antagonizing the United States one on one.
It knows, in a sense, that if China came out and said, OK, we are a full security partner of Iran. We're going to join the fight against the U.S., that that would produce a confrontation between the world's two most powerful countries. And China stays just back from that because their perception in Beijing is that the United States is - as they would say, they believe we are declining but very dangerous. We have the unique capacity to fight them in a way that other countries don't. So that's why they've tried to have it both ways. On the one hand, they want to be challenging the U.S. but not overtly antagonizing it.
GROSS: So when you say that China sees the U.S. as dangerous, do you mean in terms of nuclear weapons, or do you mean in terms of something else?
OSNOS: It's partly nuclear weapons, but it's also an attitude. It's a sensibility. They look at the U.S. over the course of the last 10 years, especially, and they think, and I know that this will be a controversial idea for Americans - for us to hear, their belief is that we have entered a kind of deep decline, and there are a lot of people who disagree with them on that, but that's their view. And so they believe that as we begin to lose influence around the world, as we get into greater fights with our allies and partners, that we'll lash out. So partly, that could be nuclear weapons. But actually, on a more functional level, day to day, it also means that we can use things like tariffs and trade.
They point to the fact that Donald Trump's second term has been characterized by these enormous tariffs. They see that as the kind of techniques that a country uses when it is beginning to feel that it is losing power. I also think China has watched over the course of the last 18 months as the U.S. has used force in places like Venezuela, for instance, going in and removing a head of state in a way that a previous American administration would have been warier of doing. They look at that and they see that there is real military power there.
I spoke to a retired People's Liberation Army colonel, a guy named Zhou Bo, who's now an analyst at a university, and he said, look, we know that the U.S. has extraordinary military power. There's just no question about that. The underlying issue from China's perspective, is whether the U.S. is making rational, smart choices about how it uses that power.
GROSS: Trump made it seem when he started raising tariffs and really raised tariffs a lot initially in China - he made it seem like he really hammered China. He gave it to them. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent predicted Beijing would quickly submit. That has not happened. The Supreme Court struck down many of Trump's tariffs, but he's testing ways around that. I think from how you describe it, China's leadership thinks it's winning in the tariff war, too. How is China taking advantage of the tariffs?
OSNOS: Well, one of the things was that they were prepared for it, partly because of the first Trump term. They anticipated that he would probably try to introduce big tariffs, so they've spent the years in between the first Trump term and the second Trump term trying to make themselves more self-reliant. Basically, they don't want to have to sell into the American market any more than they do 'cause they know that tariffs would make their goods less attractive.
So one of the things they did was begin to build out these markets in other countries, particularly in Latin America, in Africa and in Europe. So they built their companies now to be able to export even in the face of tariffs by reducing the cost of production. This is an important fact. One of the things they did is they said, you know what? If we bring AI into our factories, we'll be able to cut down on the cost of producing goods. Therefore, they'll be cheaper. And if we sell them into Europe, for instance, we'll probably be able to undercut not only European companies but also American companies.
So the net effect of this is, even now, more than a year after Trump introduced these tariffs, China has actually built a larger trade deficit with the rest of the world. It is actually now selling more to other countries than it was before, despite these tariffs. So it actually has had the reverse effect that Trump projected.
GROSS: Are countries also wary of trading with the U.S. 'cause Trump has been so unpredictable in his tariff and trade policies, and they're reverting to trading with China instead?
OSNOS: Yeah. There's been a feeling among a number of places that they, frankly, don't trust either the United States or China right now. They don't feel as if either one of these countries is particularly looking out for their interests. But they feel - and I talked to analysts and political leaders in a variety of places in preparing this kind of report for The New Yorker. And one of the things I heard over and over again was, we're caught between these two giants - essentially, these two elephants. And when these elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.
And I think that at the moment, they are looking to China because they say, all right. We know essentially what China wants. They want to build their economic relationship with us. They're not going to involve themselves in our politics. And if you're an authoritarian leader in one of these countries, that's a particularly attractive deal. And most of all, they say, we don't know where the United States is going. It's become almost impossible for us to predict what your politics and what your people at the top are going to do. So there's a kind of - people are almost reluctantly putting themselves into China's embrace.
GROSS: Do you have any clues what the Chinese leadership thinks of Trump himself?
OSNOS: Yeah. There are some indications. There was a think tank report that came out earlier this year, which doesn't come out accidentally. Something like that in China is only issued with approval from the authorities at the top. And the name of the report was "Thank Trump," by which they meant - and they spelled this out - that, in their view, he is hastening the twilight of an empire, as they put it, because he's attacking things like the independent civil service and America's scientific institutions, its leading universities. He's alienating allies like NATO and elsewhere.
So from Chinese leaders' perspective, this has been an unanticipated, unexpected opportunity, and they actually sometimes now say that. Xi Jinping, who's the president, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party - he describes this moment as a moment, as he says, that has been unseen in centuries. And that's a Chinese euphemism, in effect, for an opportunity that they haven't had in a very long time to try to build China's place in the world.
It's a strange moment, frankly, Terry, because the Chinese thought that they understood what the United States was going to do over the course of the next, you know, five or 10 years. They thought the U.S. would steadily build up its military presence in the Asia-Pacific region to try to hold China back. They thought the U.S. would invest in things like basic science and life sciences, biotech, because this would prevent China from filling in that space. And in fact, the U.S. has done the opposite. I mean, the U.S. has cut funding for basic science. We've seen a whole host of ways in which the Trump administration has gone to battle stations against places like Harvard University, which have been involved in, you know, trying to find the cure for cancer.
And I spoke to scientists in Beijing who said - with some puzzlement, to be perfectly honest, as one put it to me - he said, you know, the current world order was essentially created by the United States by investing in science and technology and alliances, and it benefited you for eight decades. And they find it baffling that the United States has walked away from that over the course of the last 18 months.
GROSS: Well, we need to take a break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled "The Future, Made In China." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JERRY GRANELLI'S "NEVER GONNA BREAK MY FAITH (FEAT. ROBBEN FORD, BILL FRISELL AND J. ANTHONY GRANELLI")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos. His latest article is titled "The Future, Made In China."
Well, let's get to the tech war, 'cause China and the U.S. are competing for the position of No. 1 in tech. What is China ahead on?
OSNOS: China has built a large lead when it comes to manufacturing a lot of the hardware of our technological lives. So things that you mentioned earlier - things like electric vehicles, which China now builds more of than anywhere else. The - a Chinese company called BYD has surpassed Tesla, for instance, as the world's largest maker of electric vehicles. You know, they also make solar cells and lithium-ion batteries, and it's really essentially a dominant lead. They make more than 70% of all that worldwide.
And what they're focused on now, and we know this 'cause they say it explicitly and we see it in the data around production, is they're essentially trying to do for AI and biotechnology and robotics what they did for that previous generation of technology. Meaning, take something that was basically invented in the United States and surge resources into it and build up a lead that is so substantial that other countries have no choice but to be reliant on China, while China doesn't have to be reliant on them.
GROSS: And just as China is investing all these resources into research - tech research, pharmaceutical research - it's, as we were saying, simultaneous with the Trump administration withdrawing funding from those very same things.
OSNOS: Yeah. There's a really acute demonstration of this when you look at the science around drug discovery and biotechnology. In Trump's first term, the Department of Justice launched something called the China Initiative, which was intended to root out espionage and trade theft. And as a result, there were a number of cases brought against scientists of Chinese origin. And over time, you began to see that many Chinese scientists in the United States were getting disenchanted. There was a study done by scholars in the U.S. that found that between 2010 and 2021, that 20,000 Chinese scientists left the United States, which is a substantial number.
And as one American executive said to me recently - he said, we are now concerned that China is going to do to biotech what it did to electric vehicles, meaning that all of this talent that has returned to China will be able to contribute to discovering the next generation of major drugs faster than the United States can do it. And we're already seeing that this shows up now in statistics around drug discovery. China is basically able to produce almost a third of the promising new compounds for new pharmaceuticals, which is nearly matching what had been the U.S. lead. And that gap has essentially closed.
GROSS: Well, in talking about how AI and robots are being used in China, give us an example of one of the most dramatic, surprising, kind of overwhelming amount of robots or AI you witnessed in one spot.
OSNOS: Probably the most dramatic demonstration of this is at a car factory. There's a place in Beijing run by a company called Xiaomi, which started out making smartphones and, you know, kind of household electronics. And they got into the car business about four or five years ago, and they built this enormous factory known as the Hyperfactory.
And when you go into the place, there are very few human beings. Honestly, it kind of feels like you're there on a national holiday or something. There are 200 robots, and they are giants. I mean, they kind of look like these prehistoric animals, and they're covered in wires. And there are these little carts that go around that deliver parts to the robots. And the carts, in Chinese, are telling humans to make way - they say - to kind of get out of the path. And the company, according to its own numbers, produces a finished car every 76 seconds.
I have to tell you something. There's a feeling, Terry, when you're there that you are very conscious of both the reality in front of you and the propaganda around you. These are two coexisting things. Because on the one hand, it's just indisputable that they're generating cars at a - in a sort of futuristic way. And that's not my assessment. That's according to the CEO of Ford Motor Company. When he visited China and factories like this, he came back and said it was the most humbling thing he had ever seen. And at the same time, you're very aware that this is a message China wants to send to the world. And so part of the challenge as a writer, as a journalist, is to say, OK. What is real and deep, and what is political messaging?
GROSS: How did you divide between the two?
OSNOS: Well, sometimes you get the very clear sense that these demonstrations of technology are perhaps not ready for prime time. I mean, I went to a convenience store that was downstairs from a robot company's offices, and there was a robot behind the counter. And the robot greets you when you walk in - says to you in Chinese, you know, what can I get for you? It offers you products. And I said, well, I'll have a sausage. They had this, like, kind of hot dog machine sitting next to it. And it reaches in, and it goes to grab the hot dog. And it pulls its arm out very confidently and says, be sure to check out on the left. But it had dropped the sausage into the machine.
And I had this feeling of - and it didn't realize it had done that. And I kind of had this feeling - like, slightly panicked, because you know you're on camera. There's cameras everywhere in China. And I looked to the human attendant, and I was sort of like, what do I do here? This thing is trying to charge me for a hot dog it didn't deliver. And she waved me off and said, basically, don't worry about it. But there's a moment where you get the feeling that that was there really for propaganda purposes, partly to say, look. This is where we're headed, but it's not quite there yet.
GROSS: Well, we need to take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled "The Future, Made In China." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERIC DOLPHY'S "JITTERBUG WALTZ")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos about his article "The Future, Made In China." It's about the tech competition between the U.S. and China and how who wins will have huge political implications. He describes how tech, especially AI, is changing China for better and for worse and the ways in which China may be benefiting from the war in Iran and President Trump's tariffs. He also considers whether the era of American global leadership is ending or already over. We recorded our interview yesterday.
Did you get a sense, and there are so many people in China, it's hard to generalize about, like, what people in China think. But nevertheless, did you get a sense of what has been seen as the advantages and disadvantages of China's, like, rapid progression with technology? You know, how robots and AI are advantageous to have. And also, what are some of the downsides on a day-to-day level for people in China?
OSNOS: Yeah. I think that generally speaking, and I agree, it's hard to generalize, but there are ways in which through enough conversations and with bits of surveys here and there, we can begin to form an impression of people's views. And one of the things you notice is that, by and large, people in China have experienced the last 50 years of the computing era - essentially, the period when computers have become a part of our lives - in a sort of more positive way than Americans have, because it's been accompanied by this dramatic gain in life outcomes. I mean, just as a practical matter, in - you know, in the late 1970s, more than three-quarters of the Chinese population worked on farms or in agriculture. And today, that's just way down. It's less than 25%. And so they associate the arrival of technology with longer lifespans, with better life outcomes, things like that. In the U.S., we have had a more complicated experience of it. I mean, we have had the social media era over the last 10 or 20 years, which has made people quite uneasy about the effect on our democracy, on pulling people apart, on our emotional health, our attention spans. And in China, partly that's been swamped by this improvement in life overall, but it's also a fact that there's a lot we don't know about Chinese attitudes because people aren't allowed to say it. You know, you're not able to, you know, write an op-ed in the Chinese newspaper that says, I'm concerned about the government's choices around technology.
And so it takes these other forms of what one scholar described as internalized civil disobedience - things like the decision not to have kids - as a way of registering unease about technology.
GROSS: It sounds like students in China are asking a lot of the same questions that American students are asking, which is, what jobs are out there? What jobs will be out there for me when I graduate? What should I study? Will there be a career in what I study, or will that all be, like, AI and robotics by the time I'm done?
OSNOS: Yeah. There's been a big change in the last few years that Chinese universities have, in some cases, gotten rid of some of their humanities departments. They say these are obsolete, and so there's been this big push into building artificial intelligence majors and related things. But there is a huge amount of unease among young people in China. We see this reflected in a variety of ways. I mean, one of the things is that in one of the few surveys that was done by outside scholars that really tries to capture the mood in China, they've found that the percentage of Chinese people who feel optimistic about the future has really sunk quite dramatically from about a decade ago. And you also see it among young people who are choosing not to get married or have kids. This is a really remarkable statistic.
I mean, we've had a drop-off in people having kids in the U.S., but in China, it's much more severe. And if you talk to specialists who study this kind of trend, they say, this is not because it's expensive to have kids. They're doing it because they're uneasy about the future.
And one writer named Sujer Yuan (ph) has written that it's the sort of combination of the advent of new technologies and the instability in the global scene. And then the slowdown in the Chinese economy has made young people feel really uneasy in a way that reminded me a lot of what we hear about here in the U.S..
GROSS: It's interesting that more people are deciding not to have children because China had enforced a one-child policy where you were legally not allowed to have more than one child. So now, the fact that a lot of people are choosing not to have any children after rebelling against the one-child policy. I find that really interesting. I don't know what it says.
OSNOS: I think that that experience of the one-child policy looms really heavily in people's minds. I mean, if you don't know what happened, it was kind of amazing. I mean, in the late 1970s, China's leaders said, we want to get rich faster. And as a result, they said, one of the ways to do that, to get more money into everybody's hands, is to have fewer people. And what they did is they tasked a group of engineers, led by a rocket scientist, a guy named Song Jian, and they said to him, look, figure out a way for us to be able to reduce the scale of the population. And his team decided that the solution was to reduce families to one child only. That was this decision to create a one-child policy. And there was a debate about it at the time. There were other scholars who said, you know, this is going to be hugely disruptive. In fact, it's going to be traumatizing for some people to go from being able to choose how many kids you have to being limited.
But Song Jian and his peers were very persuasive. I mean, they were the ones in charge of the new computing assets in China, the supercomputers at the time. And some of their opponents in this debate were still working with an abacus or a pocket calculator. And as a result, the engineers prevailed. China adopted the one-child policy, and it turned out to be traumatic, to be perfectly blunt about it. There were more than 200 million people who were sterilized over the course of this period, 300 million abortions. There was also an economic fiasco created as a result. Today, China has very clearly entered a period where it doesn't have enough workers to be able to support people who are retired. You can look out ahead in the decades to come - and China talks about this constantly - that it doesn't have enough workers to be able to fill its factories because of the effects of this one-child policy, that having told people that they couldn't have more than one child, they're now desperately trying to get people to have more kids. They're giving subsidies and incentives, but people aren't responding.
And in some ways, Terry, I think it's a bit of a protest against this kind of imagined idea of social engineering, of reaching into the family and twisting the dials and making things happen. And as a result, people are now saying, you know, this decision about whether to have kids is the one thing over which I can have total control, and they are resisting.
GROSS: Are robots filling in the gap of the lack of workers because of the one-child policy?
OSNOS: They are. It's one of the ways that the Chinese government imagines it's going to make up this shortfall. They've said it explicitly. They said, robots will help us with these human resource challenges. And I went to a firm that is working on how you get robots into factories. And they walked me over to a machine, for instance, that scans little tiny screws that go down a conveyor belt. And it used to be done by people. And now, of course, they have these cameras, high-resolution cameras that can find little tiny defects in these screws and chuck them out. And the guy who was showing me around says, you know, this is going to be much more efficient.
And then he walked me over to another example. If you go to a brewery today, the kind of place that makes beer, in Qingdao in China - and it used to be that you had to have people walking around and inspecting the machines. Nowadays, they can use AI to figure out, OK. What's gone wrong in that machine? He said to me this used to take three hours, half a day, for somebody to figure out what's gone wrong in a machine. Today they can do it now just with AI. And as a result, that means they need fewer people in the factory.
I will say, Terry, you know, that raises some hard questions about what happens if they are able to solve their shortfall in workers. But then they're also threatening whole categories of employment that today are important for giving people not just, you know, a paycheck but also a sense of purpose. That's a problem that China and the United States are both facing at the same time.
GROSS: Well, I'm going to reintroduce you again. My guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled "The Future, Made In China." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos. His latest article is titled "The Future, Made In China."
Let's describe another side of AI and tech in China, and that is surveillance. What are some of the ways that tech is being used to further surveil Chinese people at work, maybe at home? I don't know. Is this penetrating at home, too?
OSNOS: Yeah. It's sort of starting to be everywhere. This is one of the most noticeable changes over the last few years. I mean, there are parts of China today where there are cameras watching the trash bins in a neighborhood. And if you fail to separate your household waste from the recyclables, for instance, well, then you might find your face projected on an LED screen for the rest of the neighborhood to see. It's called the Exposure Station. And, you know, they pixelate the face, which made me wonder - well, then why are they putting it up there at all? And the answer is because you're supposed to feel shame internally and therefore then change your behavior.
There are other kinds of surveillance uses in other places. I spoke to a - an AI entrepreneur who's created software for his own office, which they're now going to start selling elsewhere, that records every office meeting and then tracks whenever you say that you'll do something - make a commitment. And it puts it in what's called the Promise Ledger. And then the Promise Ledger is used at the time of your performance review to basically assess whether you've fulfilled your commitments.
And I asked - I said, you know, is this honestly going to work? I mean, is this going to have a chilling effect? I - if I was in that meeting, I would just keep my mouth shut. And he said, well, I think it's true that in the U.S., that would have that effect. But here, he said, people have absorbed the idea that the boss has a right to listen to anything. And so it's self-selecting. If you don't want that, you won't work at that company. I think, frankly, he was overstating it a bit. I think some people will certainly be really put off by that. But it's also true that this kind of surveillance culture has really seeped into the groundwater in China and has become a fact of life.
GROSS: So something else that you were exposed to - I want you to talk about how you were graded in emotion recognition training enhancement system.
OSNOS: Yeah. This really stayed with me. I walked up to a kiosk at an AI expo, and it told me to stand in front of it for 30 seconds. And at the end of that period, it produced a report on the screen. And it said, we have assessed that you are 76.67% positive and something like 23.33% negative. And then the machine also told me that my negative emotions were made up of 13.33% fear and 6.67% rage.
GROSS: That is so bizarre. I'm glad my therapist doesn't speak to me that way.
(LAUGHTER)
OSNOS: And, you know, it really revealed something to me. It was - it made me aware of the idea that there is this kind of faith in scientific precision that is beyond, really, what is reliable. This idea that you can measure somebody's fear and rage down to two decimal points has been this fantasy in China for a long time. I mean, it goes back to the one-child policy we talked about. This sense that you could just move the levers of human affairs, of psychology and sort of deep emotion and that you could engineer the society you want - that's an illusion on some level.
And it's not unique to China. I mean, I came to believe from this research that this belief in a - not just science but scientism, the sense that science can solve everything - that in some ways, that's also a challenge that we're contending with in the United States because some of the companies that have produced these extraordinary technologies will tell us, don't worry. We're thinking about all of this to two decimal points, and we're going to solve these problems. And people are not coming away very reassured by that.
GROSS: And apparently you or it left out some of the negatives. You just focused on fear and rage. You got...
OSNOS: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Other negatives going there.
OSNOS: Yeah. Raised a lot of questions for me.
GROSS: I guess a question this raises for me is - if the government would like to assume that part of your rage is against the government itself, this kind of thing could really be used against you, also with fear. If you're afraid of the government, maybe that's 'cause you're a dissident. Maybe they need to check you out. Am I...
OSNOS: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Overexaggerating how this could be used?
OSNOS: No. You're not. I think that is one of the implications here. And they're using similar technology to try to assess people in police stations. I mean, one of the pieces of technology that was being sold at a police expo in Beijing was a camera that could - from a distance, it said - assess people's underlying motivations and behavioral tendencies.
I think - look. Any court of law in the United States would have a lot of problems. And somebody could say, how could you possibly bring a case based on that information? But in China, obviously, they're not contending with civil liberties as we define them in the U.S. So I think that, you know, part of the reason for going to see this technology, to try to experience it, is to understand, well, how is it being used already in parts of the world? And what should we be vigilant about in the United States?
GROSS: You compare how tech is being regulated in the U.S. versus China. And in China, tech is tightly regulated. And in the U.S., as you point out, Obama had a regulation plan. Trump threw that out and instead is leaving it to Silicon Valley to regulate itself. And you quote Trump as having said, we have to grow that baby and let that baby thrive. We can't stop it with foolish rules. So would you make that comparison?
OSNOS: Well, in the U.S., the Trump administration has made this very clear decision. And Trump says it explicitly - that he wants to go full speed on AI and the technologies associated with it. For instance, data centers, he says, are money machines, and he's opposed to efforts to try to prevent the construction of data centers.
In China, there is an opaque decision-making process, to put it mildly. You know, people don't have a hand in forming the agenda of the state. But the state has tried to figure out, well, what is the optimum level of AI to bring into people's lives, and where is it risky? So there's been a few indications that they're going to try to prevent companies from doing large layoffs by basically telling them, you can't do it.
But it's also hard to know, Terry, how much of that is a political message, frankly, intended for the West and also inside China, and how much of that is real. I say that because I think we really are at a point when China is trying to decide how much to put the brakes on AI in specific ways to prevent unrest among the workforce, and how much to go full speed ahead in police technology and things that would help them politically. So it's a work in progress right now.
GROSS: And then in the U.S., we have that recent story where, in the OpenAI lab, some of the AI models left the test environment and hacked into a different company's production systems.
OSNOS: Yeah. This is something that they're very worried about in China. The Chinese Communist Party, when it talks about AI, the single most important thing it cares about is making sure that it's under control. And, you know, that's not a selfless gesture. They mean under the control of the Communist Party. So, you know, on the one hand, that can be unsettling because it means, OK. Well, what are they going to do with it? On the other hand, it means that they're more inclined to regulate and impose guardrails to prevent it from running out of control and beginning to threaten systems that it doesn't want to be vulnerable.
GROSS: I need to reintroduce you again. If you're just joining us, my guest is Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker. And his latest article is titled "The Future, Made In China." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker. His latest article is titled "The Future, Made in China."
The subtitle of your article "The Future, Made in China" is "Beijing Is Competing With The U.S. For Tech Supremacy. Who Wins Will Have Huge Political Implications." What are those political implications, do you think?
OSNOS: One of the things we know from history is that a country that masters the technology of its time can make a big jump in its influence around the world. Take, for example - in the 18th century, you had the United Kingdom master steam technology, the idea that you could run factories from steam. And all of a sudden, that gave them a huge leg up. In the 19th and 20th century, the United States mastered things like the assembly line, and that gave the United States a big leg up against other countries.
Right now China, which is very aware of that history - they often talk very explicitly about it. They say, we missed out on that Industrial Revolution. And we missed out, in fact, on the information revolution, which was, you know, dreamt up in Silicon Valley. They said, we're not going to miss out on the AI revolution. And so they're trying very hard to master it. Xi Jinping calls technology one of the great battlefields of international relations. And I think in practical terms, what it means is we already see the effect.
If you go to a place like Nepal today - you know, a country that has its own domestic politics - there are activists there that are calling for things the government may not want. And there was a photo that was leaked from a police station in Nepal that showed this huge bank of screens of surveillance cameras. And beneath that big bank of screens, it said, courtesy of the Ministry of Public Security of China. So China is using its technology as a diplomatic instrument, going out around the world and saying, we will give you the technology to allow you to stay in power. And that's a form of power that it didn't have even a few years ago.
GROSS: You quote a retired senior colonel in the People's Liberation Army of China as telling you that common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles. But this colonel thinks Americans have lost that historical awareness. And he says Americans have been so strong for so long that every American believes, I'm a member of the strongest nation on Earth. Do you think that's an accurate observation - that Americans are so used to being, like, the global leader and the global dominant power that they're not noticing that America is losing its standing?
OSNOS: I think it was true until perhaps a few years ago. I do think there was a feeling for many years after the end of the Cold War that we had prevailed in that giant struggle - you know, what was sometimes called the end of history - that this had proved that the United States system was superior and that we would be able to govern and preside as long as we made smart choices.
I think that feeling has dissipated over the last decade or so. And now there is a much more active conversation in the United States about whether, in fact, we are able to be the most powerful country in the world and whether we want to be. I mean, the Trump administration has been very explicit about saying it does not want to have that role. I mean, in their national security strategy, they said that the days of the United States holding up the global order like Atlas are over. Now, they want on some level to say, but we'll still be able to use our military power when and how we choose. But that feeling that the United States was the unchallenged, unimpeded leader of the world - I think that has dissipated.
In China, they talk about these kinds of cycles of history a lot. This is a big part of China's sense of itself - the feeling that it was a leading civilization for thousands of years. And then it began to lose that in the 19th - in the 18th and 19th centuries. And so, from the party's perspective, they say, we are now regaining that moment. And that's where these two countries can sometimes seem as if they're on opposite trajectories, where China is kind of trying to bound ahead and gain influence. And the United States, according to the language of the Trump administration, is trying to take on fewer responsibilities, have fewer obligations. And that creates the feeling of two countries on very different trajectories.
GROSS: So I want to ask you one more thing. So I've really been enjoying "The Political Scene," your New Yorker podcast with Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. And you're three, like, incredibly smart, incredibly interesting-to-listen-to people, and you're sharing your thoughts on the latest in politics.
OSNOS: Thank you.
GROSS: Yeah. And I'm wondering - how do you like doing a podcast?
OSNOS: Yeah. I've found that there's something really useful about sitting in a room with some smart colleagues and trying to make sense of a period in our lives that can feel sometimes almost impossible to make sense of. And we come into the room with different preoccupations. And, you know, Jane Mayer will be studying the Supreme Court, and Susan Glasser is a specialist on Russia. And the three of us come in and try to hash it out. And then every once in a while, I can go off and really plunge into something long and deep, like an article on China's technology. That's a - it's a real privilege to be able to do both of them. I feel lucky to be able to do it.
GROSS: I feel lucky to be able to read and listen to what you're doing, so thank you very much.
OSNOS: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Terry.
GROSS: Evan Osnos is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest article is titled "The Future, Made In China." Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest'll be Colman Domingo. He spent decades in the theater, tending bar between shows. Now he's up for two Emmys for a comedy and a drama series. He'll talk about "Euphoria," playing Joe Jackson and working with a team of comedians in "The Four Seasons." I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair.
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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audi Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley.
I'm Terry Gross.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL FRISELL'S "BENNY'S BUGLE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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