America's chief adversary.

The US-China relationship affects our national security and pocketbooks, The world's two most advanced militaries, largest economies, and now China's increasingly authoritarian leadership is purging its most senior military officials, while portraying itself as more reliable than the US.

What's next for Beijing and Washington?

tonight on "Compass Points".

♪ Announcer: Support for "Compass Points" has been provided by... the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, the Dorney Koppel Foundation, the Gruber Family Foundation, and Cap and Margaret Ann Eschenroeder.

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Thank you.

Once again, from the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, moderator Nick Schifrin.

Hello, and welcome to "Compass Points".

US and China are in a new era of confrontation, and no other relationship can help determine everything from the prices we pay, the apps we use, and the future of our alliances.

Today, Xi Jinping has concentrated power to a degree not seen in China in a half-century.

He's more authoritarian, purging his most senior military officials, as President Trump ditches talk of great power competition to emphasize a grand US-China deal.

So, what's the future of the relationship?

And how much do we really understand about Xi Jinping's decisions and motivations?

To help answer those questions, I'm joined by Kurt Campbell, the chairman and co-founder of the Asia Group and former deputy secretary of state.

Randall Schriver is the former assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security during the first Trump term, and now is chairman of the Institute for Indo-Pacific Security.

Yun Sun is the director of the China program at the Stimson Center.

And Michael Swaine is the senior research fellow in the East Asia program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Thank you very much, all of you.

Welcome to "Compass Points".

Really appreciate your being here.

Where I want to start is with something that, even for China, is an unprecedented announcement.

And that is the firing of the equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking officer in the Chinese military.

You see him there.

General Zhang Youxia was fired.

It's been said there's been nothing like this purge in the People's Liberation Army since the 1970s.

Kurt Campbell, how much do we know about why this might have happened?

And what does this say about how Xi Jinping runs the army and the country?

Campbell: The truth is, we know very little about the inner workings of how President Xi and the party makes decisions on really anything at the very top, but particularly military affairs.

I think there have been theories of the case about why he has moved against some senior military people in the CMC, but also among the senior military more generally.

Some have believed it is about going against corruption and efficiency, military leaders who are not prepared for really getting China fighting ready.

I think there is more a belief that this time that there may be political motivations behind it.

The CMC had gained some... Schifrin: The Chinese military.

Campbell: Yeah.

Schifrin: The chief military body that oversees... Campbell: Had gained some more profile.

I think there is a view that President Xi doesn't want any personalities or groups that are larger than him.

And I think there are probably some dimensions here that motivated him.

Schifrin: And, Yun, explain that a little bit more.

What about the politics here?

What about Xi Jinping's plans to run for another term?

How does that play into this?

Sun: Absolutely.

When we look at the senior leadership in The Chinese government or in the PLA, it's very rare that people are removed for professional reasons.

So professional disagreements, policy disagreements are usually not a cause.

And the most important factor that has led to the purges of previous leaders that we have seen is politics.

China is looking at the 21st Party Congress in 2027.

And the essential questions that will be raised and answered during this Party Congress is whether Xi Jinping is going to stay on for a fourth term.

And if he is going to, which 3 positions or which ones of the 3 positions he will retain among the party, the government and the military?

So we know that there have been elite oppositions or resistance to the concept that Xi Jinping will stay on for the full 3 positions for another 5 years.

So thinking about the intra-party politics that are ongoing in China today, it raises a lot of questions as for whether this purge is related to that.

Randy Schriver, this is really hard, but how could this affect Chinese military abilities, readiness planning, including, of course, possibly to be ready to invade Taiwan?

Schriver: Yeah.

Well, first of all, I do lean more in the direction of this is politically motivated.

And I think if you look at the broader set of purges, 3 defense ministers, many flag officers, this definitely looks as though it's motivated to secure Xi Jinping's position.

I don't think there's any question that he stays on longer.

Particularly, I think he sealed the deal with how he treated his predecessors, right?

So I think he knows what would be in store for him if he gave up all his titles.

So it may be some mix of titles, but there's no doubt in my mind he remains supreme leader.

I think on the military, um, you know, it was once said, you go to war with the army, you have.

So the PLA is certainly... Schifrin: [Indistinct] Schriver: Yeah.

Uh, the PLA has certainly been the beneficiary of a lot of investment, better training, not to our quality yet, and certainly an operational environment with a... with a tempo that they're getting a lot of experience.

But look, when you relieve so many people, and it's so unpredictable, a military leadership that is already known for caution and not risk taking, they're going to get even more risk averse.

So I think on the margins, this diminishes readiness.

It's a hard thing to measure, but this is not a military where a leader is going to be imaginative or entrepreneurial on the battlefield.

And we know that that's necessary to prevail in modern warfare, so.

The US intelligence community, of course, very publicly has said that Xi Jinping has asked the People's Liberation Army, the PLA, to be ready to invade Taiwan by next year.

They're not necessarily to make that decision, just to be ready.

Michael Swaine, I want you to answer a fundamental question.

Do you believe right now it is in US interests to be willing, if it comes to that, to go to war over Taiwan, even as soon as next year?

No.

I don't think it's ultimately in the US interest to go to a war which would be a major war, unlike anything we've seen since the Korean War with China over Taiwan.

I don't think Taiwan meets the bar as a vital enough US interest, either strategically or in terms of overall US credibility with formal American allies, which Taiwan is not, or in terms even of a moral argument.

Even though the defense of a democracy with close ties to the United States is an important issue for the United States, it doesn't rise to the level of going to war, where you're going to end up killing many, many people, many American soldiers.

Schifrin: Randy?

Schriver: Well, no matter what Michael thinks or I might think, there is a law that says we must maintain the capacity to resist force.

So it's actually a legal requirement to be prepared to defend Taiwan.

Schifrin: Be prepared to defend Taiwan, not necessarily to go to war for Taiwan.

Schriver: That's right.

But I think if Taiwan doesn't make the bar across the threshold, our seventh largest trading partner in total volume, sixth largest destination for agricultural products, we all know the semiconductor story.

We know the geography around other things of interest to us, like treaty allies, like the South China Sea, out to the second island chain.

I mean, you pull this thread a little further, and none of our defense commitments rise to a level of importance where we'd risk war.

Nobody wants war with China.

But I think given our legal obligations and our interests, we need to be prepared for the purposes of deterrence, which is what our policy says right now.

Schifrin: Kurt, you're shaking your head.

Campbell: I would agree with that.

And look, the way that you ask the question is so bold and provocative.

And I understand that's what you're trying to do here.

But I do believe it is an American strategic interest to concentrate our diplomacy and our defense capabilities to deter conflict and to make a broader argument and a more persuasive case for the maintenance of peace and stability.

And the truth is we have been able to do that for now 60 or 70 years in a very complex environment.

If it just... But I would just say one thing, Nick, like US generations are incredibly complicated.

It's been very difficult.

But one of the greatest achievements has been the maintenance of peace and stability, even though it's been hard and probably not to China's favor.

That is something that we should not just jettison quickly.

Swaine: I just think that... the problem is that the conditions under which we first established relations with Taiwan and China back in 1970s have changed radically.

The Chinese military today has a much greater capability.

Never had any real capability in 1970s to be able to take Taiwan.

So we could easily say we're going to build up our defense capabilities.

We're going to possibly, possibly defend Taiwan.

We weren't obligated to, but possibly.

Chinese have got far, far better capabilities now.

And they're continuing to build those capabilities.

And from the analysis I've looked at, in relative terms, the United States is losing in that competition.

So the question really becomes, can you have enough deterrence there to really stop the Chinese from considering using force or coercion?

Plus, do you have, because military deterrence alone will not, will not avoid a war if our diplomatic and our political messaging and the actions and messaging of our close allies like Japan undermine the very notion of the one China policy, which is the basis of our policy towards China and Taiwan, and for China, peaceful unification?

Schifrin: I started this debate, which we could have for hours, frankly.

I want to bring in President Trump's belief on this, because he has said he's confident that Xi Jinping would not invade Taiwan while the president, at least, is in office.

So take a listen to President Trump on "60 Minutes" talking about Xi Jinping.

And then what Taiwan's deputy foreign minister said to me in response.

He has openly said, and his people have openly said at meetings, we would never do anything while President Trump is president, because they know the consequences.

President Trump has said repeatedly that Xi Jinping has promised not to invade Taiwan during Trump's term.

Has the US ever communicated that to Taipei formally?

Empty promise.

Yun, is it an empty promise that Xi Jinping has made, apparently, to President Trump?

If you look at the track record of what Xi Jinping has done to US president.

Remember back in 2015, when he visited Washington and he looked at President Obama in the eyes and promised China was not going to militarize the South China Sea, and he went back to China and did exactly that.

So, I mean, at this level, I would take his words with... at least with a question mark.

Schifrin: A very big grain of salt.

Swaine: Just a technical point.

He did not promise to not militarize the South China Sea.

He said he had no intention... Schifrin: Yeah.

No intention of doing that, which is quite different.

Schifrin: All right.

Well, let me move to the April visit, because this is what's going to get to whether there's any concessions and how far Xi Jinping goes.

So I recently asked a senior US official what concessions Xi Jinping will get out of President Trump, perhaps about Taiwan.

And this official got mad at me and said, "Well, why are you asking me "about the concessions they're going to get?

"What are the concessions we're going to get?"

But the question is, is Beijing willing to make any concessions on trade, which is what we believe the president will be prioritizing, if the president makes any concessions on Taiwan?

Kurt.

Campbell: So if you look at how this is shaping up, what we're seeing from the United States, President Trump's interested in some very short-term things.

Wants major increases in agricultural purchases... Schifrin: In Boeing, engines.

Campbell: We'll get... but those states are very important with respect to upcoming elections.

He'd like possibly to sell more Boeing planes.

I think that would be good.

There's a big debate inside the administration about accepting Chinese investment in the United States.

I think the president is more inclined to go in that direction.

And I give him credit for this.

He's very focused on trying to end fentanyl coming into the United States.

A series of administrations that's been focused on that.

What China wants, I think, in exchange, they'd like, they're going to say, "Hey, look, if we're going to buy all this stuff, "you've got to lift some of these tariffs.

"We can't operate like that."

Second, they're going to say, "Look, all these technology restrictions "put in place in the Biden administration, "you've lifted many of them, "but you've got to lift all of them."

And I think we have indications, many people on the technology side around President Trump are probably inclined to go in that direction.

Third, I think the Chinese are going to say, "We'd like some adjustments "on your Taiwan policy."

And that might be with respect to how the president talks about Taiwan, what our views about independence are.

We would go from not supporting to opposing.

I think if you look at the balance of that, what's on offer and what the Chinese would ask, I don't think that's a particularly good deal.

Randy, how do you rate the president's trade policies, tariffs?

You know, it's been such a focus of his combined national economic security.

You dealt with this during the first Trump administration.

The bottom line, have the tariffs been effective at getting China to lower trade barriers?

Well, I guess I'm a bit of a throwback Republican.

I prefer more free trade and less industrial policy, less tariffs.

But I do think we've landed at a spot where what they're calling a trade truce from the Busan meeting between President Xi and President Trump, where we've got a temporary landing spot for tariffs.

We've agreed not to impose the additional tariffs on fentanyl.

We've agreed to halt the correcting measures that were associated with the 301 investigation on Chinese shipbuilding.

Schifrin: The 301 US trade representative investigation.

Schriver: Yes.

So we're sort of at this truce part.

So really, the important thing is where we go forward from here.

And I think Kurt is right in terms of laying out what the Chinese want.

They'll go in with a maximalist position on a lot of these things, as they often do.

But the playbook is generally we'll get from them some agreement to buy things, some agreement on process.

Yeah, we'll create a dialogue on fentanyl or whatever it may be.

And then we go into a period of dashed expectations.

The Chinese rarely live up to these things.

And so, um, the hope is that the meeting itself provides some ballast and gives us a little bit of space and brings tensions down.

But I think we're in a period of long-term strategic competition defined by the fundamentals and the structural issues associated with our relationship.

And it's going to require deft management well beyond this meeting.

Campbell: Yeah, but Nick, one thing I would just simply say, if you ask right now who is the dominant sort of action officer for China policy inside the US government, it's President Trump.

Schriver: He's the China desk officer.

And if you ask who are his key advisors that really understand China or Asia, there are no Randy Schrivers in this administration.

They really do not have a very deep reservoir of people that they consult.

So you've rarely seen this much confidence in the ability to manage a relationship matched with not as much experience.

Schifrin: Although, regardless of the experience, I would argue that the policymaking apparatus that we've been used to for decades has obviously moved much toward a policymaker apparatus with President Trump, not only on China, but much of the world.

Sorry, Michael.

Swaine: Well, I was just going to say, I think the interesting question really is whether, and I agree with what Randy and Kurt have been saying, whether or not Taiwan really does come up in this meeting.

I think Trump would rather just not even talk about it, more or less.

But in Busan, they never talked about it.

But in this meeting, I think it's possible that Xi Jinping could very well say, "Okay, all kinds of things we're willing to do.

"We'd like you to do some things too on trade.

"But there's a few small things here "that are really important to us "because of what's going on on Taiwan, "because it's so destabilizing, because it's undermining our interest and your interest."

So you need to say something that's much more clear to the DPP, to the splitists on Taiwan as a whole.

Schifrin: The current government in Taiwan.

Swaine: Head of the current government, Democratic Progressive Party.

Correct.

Schifrin: Right.

- Like, you need to oppose Taiwan independence, which is not the position of the United States.

You need to really push back on the DPP.

We know how, oh, sorry.

Schriver: I was going to say, their goal is to return to some form of co-management.

They want the US at the highest levels locked into a process where China and the United States are co-managing Taiwan.

And I've heard some troubling things from a senior official, who I won't name, has said, "Do not support independence, oppose independence."

It's the same thing.

Schifrin: Right, exactly.

Schriver: Well, it's not the same thing.

Campbell: The hard thing that we don't really talk about very much is that it is absolutely clear.

President Trump has a unusual attraction to authoritarians.

The leaders that animate him are President Trump, Kim Jong-un, and President Xi.

And to the extent he has a global philosophy, he's indicated that really big powers should have a little bit more sway over their immediate neighbors.

You see that playing out a little bit in Ukraine.

And so I do think the Chinese are going to try to pressure him to indicate, "Look, you've got to change, adjust US policy."

And I think it may go even beyond what Michael's indicating here.

Schifrin: One of the main friction points has been over technology and chips.

Randy, during your administration, during the Trump, first Trump administration, there was the creation of these, what we call export controls, believing that American technology was being funneled into the Chinese military in order to make the Chinese military better.

Kurt, as you know, you continued that effort.

But recently, in the last year, President Trump has allowed some of the more advanced NVIDIA chips, the more advanced semiconductors to be sent to China, not the most advanced, but still, again, he has removed the language of great power competition.

And this is a real shift.

So, Yun, is President Trump, you think, more interested in selling chips to China or trade with China than he is holding the line, as they did in both administrations, on national security?

I think President Trump has made his agenda very clear, is to address the trade imbalance with China.

And if you want to address the trade imbalance with China, a key question is what the US is willing to sell to China that can boost our export to China, right?

And I'm afraid if that is our priority, then selling some semiconductor chips to China will be inevitable.

Schifrin: Because we're more advanced on semiconductors.

Sun: That's our comparative advantage.

That's what we can sell, because, well, it will require a lot of soybeans to make up a fraction of the trade imbalance that we currently have with China.

So as long as trade imbalance is going to be the national priority, I'm afraid that this door is going to be pushed open.

Schifrin: Michael, does this concern you, these sales?

Swaine: Yes, it concerns me, because I don't think there's a good enough yet definition, certainly within this administration, of what constitutes a national security-related high-tech product to sell to China, and what doesn't.

And I think the absence of that means that you get all kinds of vagaries about selling this chip, selling that chip, and you just really don't know where you are ultimately.

And if you have a broad-based, you know, like restriction, well, there's two sides.

If you have a broad-based restriction on chips, then it looks like you're trying to contain China's development.

It's nothing to do with military.

The Chinese see it as containment.

But then if you have something that's very, very selective, you can influence, I think, China's military development, but only temporarily.

Most people that I know, I'm not an expert in the tech area, but most of the guys I talk to and the ladies who are involved in that, say, "Anything we do is a delay issue."

It's not a reversal or it's not a stop.

Campbell: Look, I respect Michael.

I tend to disagree.

I think there are clear areas, certain kinds of AI chips, certain kinds of lithography for semiconductor design, that there is bipartisan agreement that these are areas of strategic advantage.

I think what is missing here, though, Nick, is a theory of people in the Trump administration about why to sell these chips.

Their idea, if you can sell them, then you can addict the Chinese to our technology stack.

Schifrin: Get them in the stack.

But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of where Xi Jinping is.

When he came to power, he made clear tech supremacy is his ultimate goal.

And so the idea that we're somehow going to get China to just buy US chips for the next 20 years, that's a mistaken understanding of Chinese strategy.

Schriver: I also want to make a comment on just slowing or thwarting them.

There are particular areas of convergence, for example, quantum with AI, that if China gets first mover advantage, it is extremely consequential.

So even if it's just slowing them, I would take that.

Let me save the biggest proverbial explosion for last, and that is nuclear weapons.

And I'm going to bring up a bar graph.

I'm not afraid of bar graphs on television, even though it's pretty rare, to show the number of nuclear warheads by country, Russia, 5459, United States, over 5200, China, 600.

Now, that alone is actually a lot higher than they used to be just a few years ago.

China has long maintained what it calls the minimal deterrent.

But the Department of Defense says they're accelerating.

They're going to have over 1000 by 2030.

And they're racing to parity, especially 1550.

That's what the US and Russia deploy.

And what we saw recently from Christopher Yeaw, the assistant secretary of state, he recently described China's nuclear growth as, quote, beyond breathtaking.

Randy Schriver, to you first.

Is there any sign that China is willing to negotiate its number of nuclear weapons, as the US wants it to today?

Schriver: We haven't seen any sign of that.

And I think the ending of the New START, combined with some testing, we haven't tested since the early 90s, since the test ban treaty.

But our undersecretary of state for security has revealed publicly that China has conducted some low-threshold, low-yield tests, a combination of all these things.

And you could bring in India into this equation.

You could bring in powers that are contemplating weapons systems.

I think the popularity now in South Korea is over 70% want an end to nuclear proliferation.

So we're really entering into a stage of both horizontal proliferation as a potential, but really, the great powers who are already nuclear powers are really accelerating things.

And the Chinese have expressed no interest.

Just the opposite.

They have continued to cling to this position that it's between the great powers.

Schifrin: Yun, no interest?

Sun: Well, I think the Chinese calculation, or their calculus, their formula about their minimum deterrence is based on not just the size of the nuclear arsenal, but also the missile defense capability of other great states, right?

Great powers.

So for the Chinese, when they calculate how many they need, they're not only looking at how big the American arsenal is, they're also looking at the US missile defense capability.

Because for them to have credible second-strike capability, what they want to achieve, which is the mutual vulnerability, as they have stated many, many times in Track 1 and Track 2 dialogues, I think until they see that they have credible second-strike capability, they are not going to negotiate.

Schifrin: Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Unfortunately, we're out of time, Kurt.

Sorry, Yun Sun, Michael Swaine, Kurt Campbell, and Randy Schriver, thanks so much very much.

And thank you for joining us.

That's all the time we have.

I'm Nick Schifrin.

We'll see you here again next week on "Compass Points".

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Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

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