00:00This week on Wu says, we examine US President Donald Trump's recently released National Security Strategy.
00:07Professor Emeritus Datuk-Datuk Wu Wingtai and Melissa Idris unpacked what this worldview signals and its implications for the global order.
00:15Now, here's a segment from the conversation.
00:19The first one is that we have the right to be imperialistic over our neighbours.
00:27That is what we just talked about.
00:31The Western Hemisphere exists to support US interests.
00:39The second part of the worldview is that the United States wants to continue to be the biggest economy in the world.
00:51If you look at the US economy right now, it's 30 trillion US dollars.
00:59And China's GDP in US dollars is roughly 19.5 trillion.
01:09So the US is 30, China is 19.5, so the US is a lot larger.
01:14But that is largely because China is still a developing economy, so the prices of services is very low.
01:27Like the price of having servants in China is a lot lower than having servants in the United States.
01:34If you were to price the Chinese GDP using US prices, that means that China is the same size as the United States.
01:49In fact, larger.
01:50The China will be 40 billion.
01:52But the important thing to note is that in order for the United States to continue to be the largest economy in the world,
02:05China would always need to be seven times poorer per person than the United States.
02:13What that denies is the phenomena of catching up.
02:20What we have learned from the Japanese and Korean growth experiences is that it is possible for countries to learn the latest technology that the US is using
02:35and hence reach the same standard of living as the United States.
02:40And if China is able to do that, China would be four times larger than the United States.
02:50So in order to prevent China from becoming larger than the United States, China would somehow be unable to catch up.
03:00So there lies the strategy, a strategy of somehow the United States is able to prevent China from catching up.
03:09That is a very big assumption and a very dangerous assumption.
03:14Catch the full conversation on Awani International and across our social media platforms.
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