00:00For those who might not follow Chinese politics very closely, what exactly is this fourth plenum
00:05meeting? And what do we expect to see out of it? You know, when you were in the Biden administration
00:08or the CIA, is this the kind of meeting that you would watch very closely?
00:12Yeah, absolutely. And a big part of the reason that we will watch it so closely is that it's
00:16really the most important political meeting of the year. And what the plenum is, is it's the
00:20entire central committee of the Chinese Communist Party. And so what that means is, it's the top
00:25200 or so officials from across China, right? Provincial officials, heads of various provinces,
00:33key military leaders. For this particular plenum, I think it's going to be especially consequential
00:39for two reasons. Number one, on the policy side, the party will kind of endorse the next five-year
00:46plan and won't be fully finalized until next spring. But we'll get an outline of the next
00:50five-year plan, which will lay the groundwork for China's development in the coming five years from
00:542026 to 2030, which of course would bleed over into Xi Jinping's fourth term.
00:59The other big piece of the equation here is the personnel side of the equation. We just saw this
01:04last week where a number of members of the military high command were purged, including the Central
01:10Military Commission vice chairman, the number three officer in the military, was purged. And that's
01:17the first time that's happened since the start of the Cultural Revolution under Mao. So what's going on
01:21on the personnel side with the purges, and especially within the military, is really quite
01:26dramatic. And it's something that we've seldom seen in the post-Mao era.
01:29You mentioned that the five-year plan won't be finished until next spring, but there will
01:33be a communique coming out of the fourth plenum on Thursday. What do we expect to see in that
01:38communique? Will we find out what was said behind closed doors?
01:42Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because as important as this meeting is, this is not a debating society,
01:48right? They've already, to a fair extent, already pre-cooked the outcomes of this, right? So I think
01:55that the documents are important because it is the most authoritative document that you're going to get
02:00from the party in a given year. I fully expect since Xi Jinping is this far along in his tenure,
02:06I think he feels very confident in the trajectory of his economic policy and his industrial policy that
02:11this focus on advancing China's techno-industrial prowess, advancing its manufacturing prowess.
02:17I think he sees it as being on the right path, even with the problems that it's causing.
02:21This plenum comes just a week before Xi Jinping is scheduled to meet with US President Donald Trump
02:26at the APEC Summit in South Korea. Do you see any significance there?
02:30I think it's no accident that Xi Jinping scheduled the plenum to occur just before he's supposed to meet
02:35with Trump, right? There's no fixed date for the plenum, right? So that he can have this big meeting
02:41at home that would enhance his R of authority going into this summit with President Trump.
02:47And what's striking to me as an American and disconcerting is the juxtaposition, right?
02:52Xi is going to walk in this meeting having just put his imprimatur on the next five-year plan for
02:56China. And meanwhile, the US government here in Washington may or may not still be shut down.
03:02What about cross-trade relations? Is anything coming out of this fourth plenum meeting or the
03:06five-year plan expected to change China's cross-trade policy or the relations between
03:12Beijing and Taipei?
03:13So I don't see the plenum itself having a big impact. One of the things that I am still on the
03:20lookout for as we get to the end of the year, though, is that they did a big cross-trade exercise,
03:27straight thunder, back in April of this year. But it was a straight thunder A, which means that they
03:31will probably do like they did last year, a straight thunder B at some point. I think the other point
03:36of discussion on cross-trade issues that's been more consequential here in Washington, at least,
03:42is this discussion about, is Taiwan going to come up in the conversation or in subsequent
03:45conversations between President Trump and President Xi? Switching from not supporting Taiwan
03:52independence to actually opposing it, the kind of distinction that might be lost on a leader like
03:57Trump, who's not necessarily immersed in these issues. But what I've been hearing more recently
04:02is actually the Chinese don't want to set the precedent that this is up for negotiation,
04:07right? They don't want to introduce this into the equation because they want to be able to say,
04:11we have a principled approach to Taiwan, and so we're not going to talk about it,
04:14talk about this at all with the Americans right now, especially since they don't have
04:18that kind of trust in Trump that whatever they agree to, he'll actually stick to it.
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