On March 29, 2021, CCG hosted a discussion between CCG President Huiyao Wang and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of seven New York Times bestsellers—From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Longitudes and Attitudes (2002), The World Is Flat (2005), Hot, Flat, and Crowded (2008), That Used to Be Us (with Michael Mandelbaum, 2011) and most recently, Thank You for Being Late (2016).

Friedman has become known as a leading commentator on globalization, particularly since the publication of The World Is Flat, which has been widely read around the world and in China. When Wang Yang, now Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, was party secretary of Chongqing, he made the book recommended reading for officials in the city.

Originally a Middle East specialist, Friedman is a frequent visitor to China and has written many insightful articles about China’s development. He previously came to speak at CCG in 2017 and also participated in a webinar as part of CCG’s annual China and Globalization Forum in November 2020. I first met Thomas during my time as a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute in 2010 and we have kept up frequent contact since then.

By March 2021 when this dialogue took place, the impact of the pandemic on various trends shaping globalization was increasingly evident. On one hand, technological innovations had allowed many workers and industries to adopt new ways of working and trade had bounced back after severe disruption in 2020. At the same time, the continued rise of populism and anti-globalization sentiment had seen some countries revert to unilateral policies and protectionism, while heated accusations over COVID-19 had exacerbated geopolitical tensions, notably between China and the US. Despite the transition to a new administration, the US remained in a period of political tumult and polarization.

Friedman was an ideal thinker to help make sense of these developments in a broader context and link them to structural shifts in society and the global economy. In our discussion, Friedman shared his latest views on topics such as the changing dimensions and drivers of globalization, how new forms of global coalitions are needed to deal with our shared challenges, underlying factors influencing China–US relations, and the ongoing impact of technological change on societies around the world. (Since this book is being published over one year later, I also asked him to add or expand on any points he made back then for this published version.) We started the dialogue by revisiting Friedman’s famous claim that “the world is flat” and how globalization is changing in the post-pandemic era.

Huiyao Wang: Thomas, you’ve become something of an icon and symbol of globalization because of your famous book The World Is Flat, which is a long-time bestseller in China that has influenced many people. In that book, you talked about globalization as divided into three phases: the globalization of countries, the globalization of companies, and then the globalization of individuals. Countries have competed for thousands of years, making the world “flat” in the process. Companies have also played a great role. Since the 2000s and the Internet revolution, we see individuals playing a major role.

Today, we see globalization facing more challenges. There is more “deglobalization” and populism. So, what is your current take on globalization? How do we look at the new trends shaping globalization?

Thomas Friedman: That’s a good place to start. Whenever I do webinars like this, often the first question people have is, is the world still flat? And I always start to laugh a little and say, wait a minute; I’m sitting in my office in Bethesda, Maryland, and my friend Henry is sitting in his office in Beijing, and we’re having a conversation as two individuals as if we are sitting across the desk from each other. Is the world still flat? Are you crazy? It’s flatter than ever. Remember, when I wrote The World Is Flat in 2004, Facebook didn’t exist, “Twitter” was still a sound, the “cloud” was still in the sky, “4G” was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, Big Data was a Rap star, SKYPE was a typo and an “application” was what you sent to college, […] All of those things came after I wrote The World Is Flat.

The world today is flatter than ever. We have never connected more different nodes than we have today, and we’ve never greased and sped up those connections more than we have today. But we’ve also done a third thing. We’ve removed a lot of the buffers that managed the flow between those nodes. Between December 2019 and March 2020, just as the Coronavirus was emerging, there were 3200 direct flights from China to America. There were 50 direct flights from Wuhan to America, and most Americans had never even heard of Wuhan.

Think about what’s going on in the Suez Canal today. There’s a ship stuck in the Suez Canal and there is some company in Europe waiting for its supply from China because of just-in-time inventory delivery. When we take the buffers out, the system just gets faster and faster. So, the world isn’t just flat now, it’s fragile. It’s fragile because when you connect so many nodes and then you speed up the connection between those nodes and you take the buffers out, you get fragility. Because now I can transmit instability from my node to your node faster than ever. Since I wrote The World Is Flat, many people wrote books saying the world is not flat, that it’s spiky, it’s lumpy, it’s curved, or it’s bumpy. All of those books are wrong. The world is flatter than ever.

Huiyao Wang: I think that’s absolutely correct, globalization is accelerating with technology. Also, the movement of capital, goods, and talent—all of these flows have become denser and faster than before.

So how do you see the future, will we see new development trends? Of course, we’ve seen the rise of the digital economy. And as you said, before the pandemic we had over 3000 direct flights between China and the US and there were 400,000 Chinese students in the US. Before the pandemic, China had about 150 million outbound tourists each year, with 10 million people going to Japan, another 10 million people going to Thailand, and 3 million people going to the US. So, what will we see in the future?

Thomas Friedman: The book I’m working on now, if I gave it a name and it doesn’t have a name yet, is the world is not just “flat” anymore. The world is fast, fused, deep, and open. So, let’s go through all four of those.

When I say the world is “fast,” what I mean is that there’s been a change in the pace of change. The speed of technological change now just gets faster and faster—as microchips improve and telecommunications improve—so the world is really getting “fast.”

Second, the world isn’t just flat now, it’s “fused.” We’re not just interconnected, we’re now interdependent. A ship gets stuck in the Suez Canal and something that Tom is waiting for in Bethesda and something that Henry is waiting for in Beijing are both affected. So, we’re not just connected; we’re fused together. We’re also fused together by climate. What America does with its air affects Canada. What China does with its air can affect Thailand. What Australia does with its forest fires affects New Zealand. So, we’re fused by technology and by climate.

Third, the world’s gotten deep. “Deep” is the most important word of this era because we have now put sensors everywhere. For many years, for millennia, the world has been speaking to us, but we just couldn’t hear it. IBM did a study a few years ago. They took a lake—Lake George—in New York state and put sensors from the surface all the way to the bottom, from one edge to the other. Suddenly, a lake that was just there—it was beautiful, we drove by it—started to “speak,” started to tell us what was going on at the bottom, the middle, the next level, fish, fauna, all kinds of things. Now our knowledge of that [lake] is “deep,” very deep. John Kelly, who ran IBM research at the time, told me: “Tom, the world has been speaking to us all these years—we just couldn’t hear it. Now we can.”

So, that’s why this word “deep” is both so much more prevalent now—and so important. We had to coin a new set of adjectives—deep state, deep mind, deep medicine, deep research, deep fake, to describe the fact that this is going deep inside of me and so many other places—to depths we have never plumbed before. I can sit here right now in Washington and look at publicly available satellite pictures of different parts of China from Google Earth, from the European space satellite. I can look “deep” and I could probably find your office and see if you’re coming to work. I can do that as an individual—little Tom Friedman can now go on to Google Earth and see [your] office. But I can also see into Xinjiang and China can see into Minneapolis, my hometown. So, the world is getting “deep.”

Lastly, the world is getting radically open. With a smartphone, every citizen is now a paparazzi, a filmmaker, a journalist, publisher—with no editor and no filter. With a smartphone, a citizen in my hometown in Minneapolis took a video of a policeman with his knee on the neck of a man named George Floyd. One person did that with this device and George Floyd became a name that went all over the world. People in China know the name George Floyd because an individual with only a smartphone in an open world was able to tell that story. The same is true for China—we’ve seen that in Hong Kong and we’ve seen that in other areas. So, the world is getting fast, fused, deep, and open. That is the central governing challenge today. How do you govern a world that is that fast, fused, deep and, open? That is our challenge.

Huiyao Wang: Yes, this world that is faster, deeper, fused, and more open—these seem to be the new trends you’re identifying for the next phase of globalization. The world is no longer just “flat,” there are many other layers now. You pose a very profound question; with the world changing so fast, is [our current form of global governance] based on the Bretton Woods system built up after the Second World War equipped to cope with our new challenges?

Thomas Friedman: When the world gets this fast, fused, deep, and open, there’s only one way to govern it effectively, whether that be at the national, local, or international level, and that’s with what I call complex adaptive coalitions.

I take that term from nature. I think that entering a fast, fused, deep, and open world is like a big climate change. We’re going through a big change in our climate; not just the “climate of the climate”, but the climate of everything, of technology and globalization, etc. In nature, when an ecosystem goes through a climate change, which ecosystems thrive and survive? Those that forge complex, adaptive networks where all the parts of the system network together to maximize their resilience and their “propulsion,” their ability to go forward.

This is true of the world as well. When the world gets this fast, fused, deep, and open, the only way we can govern it effectively is with global complex adaptive coalitions. We cannot manage climate change unless America, China, and Europe in particular—also India, Japan, and Korea—the big economies are all working together. Who can manage global trade now, unless all the big economies are working together? So, it’s only complex adaptive coalitions that can effectively get the best out of this world and cushion us from the worst.

The problem is that right when there is a need for complex adaptive coalitions, governments are becoming more nationalistic. China’s government is becoming more nationalistic. Under President Trump, America became more nationalistic. Russia, more nationalistic. Britain with Brexit, more nationalistic. Countries are becoming more nationalistic, right when we need global coalitions more than ever. Even inside countries, political parties are becoming more tribal, right when they need to be more open and collaborative. So, the world is fighting with this trend—because it challenges the old left–right binary parties in the West and the single, president-for-life strongman systems in Russia and China.

There’s a whole set of issues now that can only be managed effectively with global governance: cyber, financial flows, trade, climate, and labor flows. They require global governance, but there’s no global government. So, what do we do when we need global governance but there is no global government? This is the problem. And when the US and China, the two biggest countries, start fighting in the middle, the situation gets even worse.

Huiyao Wang: Exactly, I think that’s a challenge we are facing. There is a lack of global governance because there’s no global government. After the Second World War, we formed the UN and the Bretton Woods system, with the World Bank, IMF, and the WTO. That system has served us for 75 years. But we have seen this system is no longer sufficient, particularly given the fast pace of globalization.

It has now been 50 years since Dr. Kissinger visited China, which later led to normalized relations between China and the US. Since China joined the WTO 20 years ago, China’s GDP has increased by 10–12 times. China has been able to prosper as it embraced globalization and lifted 800 million people out of poverty. But China is still often criticized in Western countries. Isn’t it the case that every country has its own problems, and China also has to tackle its own problems just like the US does?

In one of your [recent columns], you wrote about how in the US, it is “Socialism for the rich” and “Capitalism for the rest.” It surprised me that just 10 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of stock wealth and have seen their wealth triple in 30 years, while the bottom wage earners have seen no gain. President Trump [liked to] blame China for this widening gap, though China actually managed to lift 800 million people out of poverty. So, do you think it is time to forge a new global consensus or some new global narratives?

Thomas Friedman: US–China relations have become very complicated, so I’ll give you my view of that […] I think the four decades of US–China relations from 1979 to 2019 will go down as an epoch in US–China relations. Unfortunately, that epoch is over. So, what was that epoch about?

That epoch was a period of what I call “unconscious integration.” “Unconscious” not because we weren’t thinking about it, but because it was so easy. As an American company, I could say I want to have a supply chain that starts in China. As an American parent, I could say that I want my son or daughter to go to university in China to study Mandarin. As an employer, I could say I want to hire the best Chinese technologist or student living in America. On the Chinese side, any Chinese could say over time, I want my company listed on the Nasdaq, I want to have an American partner, or I want my kid to go to school in America.

Over those 40 years, China and America became in some ways, the real “one country, two systems.” We really got fused together. Now, that era, unfortunately, is over. Why is it over? Well, I come back to the word “deep” because for most of those 30–40 years, China sold us mostly “shallow” goods—clothes we wore on our shoulders, shoes we wore on our feet, solar panels we put on our roof. I call those “shallow” goods. At the same time, we sold China “deep goods”—things like computers, software, things that went right inside your office. So, for the most part, the US sold China “deep” things and China sold the US “shallow” things. And China had to buy our deep goods because for many years it could not make its own.

When China sold the US only “shallow” things, politically speaking, we didn’t care whether China was authoritarian, communist, libertarian, or vegetarian. It didn’t matter, because you were just selling us shallow goods. But China, by its own technological development, over the last 10 years is now able to make deep goods such as Huawei with 5G. Now, Chinese firms come to America and want to sell deep goods, just like the US sold China deep goods. They want to sell Tom Friedman Huawei products that will go in his house, answer his telephone.

When China was just selling the US shallow goods, we didn’t care about your political system. But if China wants to sell deep goods to me here in Bethesda, if you want Huawei to answer my phone, suddenly the difference in values matters. That’s where the absence of shared trust between our two countries now really matters. China’s central value is the stability of the collective. So, if the collective is advancing, if more people are coming out of poverty, that is a central Chinese value; that is valued more than the right to religious and cultural expression for the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and it is valued more than a relatively small number of people getting super-rich. China’s focus has always been on the collective and stability because China has 1.4 billion people. I wish there was more tolerance in China for individual and group cultural and ideological differences—and the right to express them. I believe that China would be enriched by embracing that diversity.

In America, we put much more primacy on the individual: the right of the individual to express themselves, the right of the individual to start a company, the right of the individual to thrive and do better—or worse. So, when a nation values the right of the individual, that means the primacy of human rights and individual rights.

So, suddenly, in a deep world, Americans can look into Google Earth and see what look like forced labor camps in Xinjiang, and say—wait a minute, I can see deep inside of China now—and how you are treating your Muslim population, that bothers me. And China can say—wait a minute, I’m looking at what’s going on in Minnesota or Minneapolis, and how you have large numbers of poor people—maybe that bothers me too? Now, we can look inside Hong Kong. From my office, I can see if China is not living up to its obligations to allow more democracy in Hong Kong.

Now, we’re having a clash on values in a way we didn’t during that 40-year epoch. That’s going to be a problem because our difference in values is now making things very complicated. Because China is now wealthier and more powerful, it’s also able to assert itself and its values more powerfully at home and abroad. So, we have a lot of work to do. The big question is, can we get back to a joint project, a shared project? Because for the relative peace and prosperity of the world for those 40 years from 1979 to 2019, at the core was China–US relations, that US–China “one country, two systems.” If we rip that apart, the world will not be as prosperous and it will not be as peaceful. And as the world gets fast, fused, deep, and open, it won’t be governed the way it needs to be.

So, we need to have some very deep conversations. China needs to understand that in a deep world, I can see inside Xinjiang. If I think that there’s forced labor there, I may boycott your cotton. Americans need to understand that a country of 1.4 billion people needs to maintain stability, that’s a high priority, and that it’s going to come at this in a different way. We have to have an honest conversation on this.

Huiyao Wang: Absolutely, I agree that we need deep dialogue. That’s the purpose of this conversation as well. You are right, we have to look at values. But we also should also forge some new narratives. In the last 40 years, China has opened up and changed beyond recognition. Any foreigner that came to China 30 or 40 years ago would recognize these great changes. This year, the Chinese government has announced that they have lifted 800 million people out of poverty, completed the 13th Five-Year Plan, and the CPC’s first centennial goal of becoming a “moderately prosperous society.” China is now launching the 14th Five-Year Plan and by 2035 China will double its GDP, working one five-year plan after another.

I remember when the former US Ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, invited me to his farewell cocktail event, he said that he thought that the success of China can be attributed to three factors. One is that the Chinese are really hard-working, because any time you come to China, it’s not “24/7” but probably more like “9/9/6” [the practice of working from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m., 6 days a week]. The second factor is that Chinese people attach great importance to family values and have great respect for seniors and collectivism. The third factor is education; in China, a family often has only one child, and the whole family values education.

China’s success is not really built on a traditional orthodox system as some Americans may understand it. It is a system that now combines technology, consultative democracy, the market economy, and meritocracy. China has delivered when it comes to actual performance. As Deng Xiaoping said, it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. So, if China can lift 800 million people out of poverty and minimize casualties from COVID-19, those are also major human rights achievements, given the situation. As you said, China has 1.4 billion people, so stability has always been important. China has also built two-thirds of the world’s high-speed rail network, has seven out of the top 10 largest ports in the world, has become the largest trading partner of 130 countries, and contributes over one-third to global GDP growth.

In terms of “KPIs,” China is doing well. So, maybe we should be a little more tolerant of different systems. As President Biden said, we can have competition between the US and China, even fierce competition, but we should also cooperate. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at the National People’s Congress, we should have peaceful competition and cooperation. Shouldn’t we treat each other as equals and avoid getting into a Cold War-type situation? I think this is the way that a lot of people in China think.

Thomas Friedman: It’s a very good point. People said to me, if you’re going on a webinar in China, they must be censoring. I said, no—I’ll bring up human rights violations Xinjiang, I’ll bring up democracy in Hong Kong. Nobody’s going to censor me.

We’re having a valuable dialogue—you’re giving me China’s perspective and I’m giving you the concerns of America. Having a respectful dialogue is so important. What worries me most is that there are only around three American journalists left in China. China has basically thrown out almost all the Western journalists. America has asked some Chinese journalists to leave too, though not as many as China. So, we’re not having this respectful dialogue.

You’ve got your perspective, which is not illegitimate from my point of view. The points you raise about bringing people out of poverty and providing stability—these things also really do affect the human condition. You listen respectfully to my perspective when I raise questions about how a whole culture is treated in Xinjiang or democracy in Hong Kong. Then maybe you’ll come back and say, Tom’s got a point, and I come back and say, Henry’s got a point.

In a respectful dialogue, I can say to you: if China did this particular thing on Hong Kong, or in Xinjiang, it would really help. And you could say: Tom, if America did this particular thing regarding how the US talks about China, how the US treats China in the world, it would really help. Maybe then we could start to take confidence-building measures where each of us does something to lower the temperature. Unfortunately, what happened in Alaska in the US–China talks in March 2021 was more like mutual name-calling which just left everybody feeling kind of raw and angry.

So, I want to say that I appreciate the respectful dialogue that you’re hosting. I wish we could broaden this because there are legitimate concerns that America and the West have, and I’m afraid that those legitimate concerns aren’t even listened to. What I fear, though I don’t hope for this, is that we’ll end up in something like a boycott of the 2022 Olympics, and then the whole relationship will blow up.

That’s why I think it’s so important that we have a dialogue [in which] China says, I hear you, I will take this gesture, and America says I hear you, I will take this gesture. And we find ways to work together. Because in a fused world, as my friend Graham Allison always says, we now have mutually assured destruction. The US and China can destroy each other, we can destroy the global economy, we can destroy the global climate. So, we are doomed to work together. What bothers me right now is that we’re not having the kind of frank but respectful dialogue that we need and then walking away from that dialogue with a to-do list, so that [Henry thinks] “I’ve heard what Tom says about the situation of the Uighurs or Hong Kong, I don’t agree with all of it, but I’m going to try to work on something.” And I come away and say, “I hear what Henry is saying, that this country brought 800 million people out of poverty. Do you know how much more stable the world is because China did that? That’s also a huge thing. So, I’m going to work on things that are of your concern.”

We need to get back to that dialogue because going back to my central point, the 40 years from 1979 to 2019 will be seen as a golden era of relative global prosperity and peace, and the core of it was the US and China. If you rip out that core, China’s diplomats may have a good day putting America down, and US diplomats may have one good day putting China down. But the world will have a bad year, year after year, if we don’t find a way for the US and China to work together.

Huiyao Wang: Yes, I think as the largest two economies in the world, China and the US have a moral responsibility to work together. I agree that journalism should be resumed. The consulates that have been shut down should be reopened and we should expand [people-to-people] exchanges. China has about 400,000 students in the US, but the US has only about 10,000 in China, so I hope that we can attract more US students to China. On the social and civil society level, we could have more exchange.

You raised issues such as Xinjiang and Hong Kong. The feeling here is that we often hear international voices say, [China] has 1, 2, or even 3 million Uighurs locked up, but we don’t know where that number is coming from. Where is the source of these statistics? Or [outside observers] say they have identified so many buildings via satellite. But many of these buildings are empty, they aren’t really housing many people. Another thing is that there are only 10–12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang, so it is [difficult to claim] there are really 1–3 million Uighurs locked up. The Chinese government stated in its white paper last year that all of the trainees in education school have graduated already. The Xinjiang government has said that again this year. The Chinese Foreign Ministry’s spokesperson has welcomed foreign ambassadors and journalists to [visit Xinjiang]. I think the best way, as you said, is to have more dialogue and exchange, rather than talking about each other and not talking to each other.

The same is true with Hong Kong. Hong Kong is no longer in a chaotic situation—the stock market has [bounced] back, multinationals have come back. The Legislature Council is safe now. We really need a lot of dialogue on these issues and need to welcome all journalists on both sides to promote this dialogue.

Thomas Friedman: I think it’d be very important, from my point of view, if a team of New York Times reporters was allowed into Xinjiang. Let them go, let them write, let them see. Then we can draw an independent conclusion. I think that’s very important. And from the Chinese side too—anywhere you want to come in America, I think you should be allowed to go.

Huiyao Wang: I think that could be a good idea. It can be open and I think openness is a great way to solve all these questions. At the China Development Forum [in March 2021] you also mentioned decoupling. I think it is very hard to decouple. You talked about Huawei and how maybe we should let Huawei experiment in some more remote US states, so as to build up trust like you said. Trust building between us should be given a new start during the new Biden administration.

Thomas Friedman: I feel very strongly about that because if we go to a tech cold war, I believe that will be bad not only for the world but also bad for America. If there is a Chinese tech ecosystem and an American tech ecosystem, I’m not sure the majority of the world will come to the American tech ecosystem, either for financial reasons or technological reasons.

I don’t think decoupling is a healthy thing, I think the best thing in the world is mutual interdependence. I want China dependent on Intel chips and I’m totally comfortable if America is dependent on Chinese supply chains. I think the more interdependent we become, the more the politics will follow. As I’ve said before, I’ve been going to China now since 1989. China is so much more open than it was 30–40 years ago and I would say it’s more closed than it was 5–6 years ago. But I also believe the trend line is for China to develop and build a bigger and bigger middle class. People don’t just come out of poverty but enter the middle class. How many Chinese tourists now are coming out into the world? Tens of millions every year. So, people say to me sometimes, “Friedman, you said China would become more open, but in the last five or six years, it’s become more closed.” I said, well, who declared the year 2021 the end of history? Countries move at different paces, like three steps forward and half a step back. I am confident that as China develops—not just out of poverty, but also grows a middle class that wants to travel—and as Chinese students go all over the world, the trend line toward openness will continue. We should have a little confidence in that, too. I think the more we integrate, the more that will happen. But we do have this core trust problem.

One of the things I often ask myself is “what are we fighting about?” It’s surely not ideology, because in many ways China is more capitalist than we are. Does China want to take over Chinatown in San Francisco? I don’t think so. Does America want to occupy Shanghai or Nanjing? I don’t think so. I’m not even sure what we’re fighting about. In the deepest sense, yes there’s a clash of values, I get that. Obviously, it’s two great powers who have influence, but this all should be manageable.

It does require each of us to do something hard. Like China undertaking confidence-building measures on Xinjiang or on Hong Kong. Or the West taking hard confidence-building measures on something like Huawei, where America can give a test like allowing China to install 5G in Texas, and we’ll see how you do. And if you do better, then you can go to Oklahoma, if you behave in accordance with our laws.

To get each other’s attention, China and the US each have to do something hard. When China does something hard in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, that will really get Americans’ attention. And when we do something hard on something like Huawei, that will get China’s attention. That’s something we can then build on. Right now, neither side wants to really do anything hard, because for us, to let Huawei in now would politically be hard. For China to take the kind of steps to respect human rights that we’ve been talking about in Xinjiang or Hong Kong will be hard. But if we each do something hard now, that would have a huge impact to build confidence. That would be the thing that would really change the direction of the relationship right now.

Huiyao Wang: I think the trust and confidence-building that you talked about are absolutely important. You really hit the point with that question, “what are we fighting for?” What is the point of fighting when our two countries are so intertwined? The US–China Business Council issued a report not too long ago which estimated that the trade war could cause a drop of 0.5 percent in America’s GDP and the loss of 2–300,000 jobs in the US. Many Western automobile companies sell more cars in China than in their own countries and Tesla has maintained full production and had a very profitable year in China despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Walmart purchases many goods from China and China is the second-largest market for Apple after the US, so the two countries are very much intertwined.

Thomas Friedman: Absolutely. China is the second-largest book market for me, I sold more copies of The World Is Flat in China than in any other country other than America. So, I know the benefits of our integration. There will be trade issues and questions of fairness that are very serious and which we need to address, but we need to get away from the kind of meeting, which took place in Alaska, get away from public name-calling, and get down to some hard “doing” rather than just “hard talk.” That’s what will actually change the dynamic in the relationship.

Huiyao Wang: That’s right. I saw that at the recent Munich Security Conference [in February 2021]. President Biden didn’t talk about US–China “rivalry” but rather “competition.” He said the US doesn’t seek confrontation with China. And China always emphasizes peaceful coexistence.

Thomas Friedman: I must point out the fact that President Xi and President Biden have a personal relationship, which is very unusual. I was actually at the State Department lunch and got to sit at the table when both of them were vice presidents and got to see that personal relationship. We must not waste that. But it has been under a lot of stress lately.

Huiyao Wang: Absolutely […] Recently, the Ford Foundation and quite a few US foundations have restarted their US–China scholar exchange programs. We hope that the Fulbright Scholarship Program, the US Consulate in Chengdu, and other student exchange programs can resume operations too. I notice there are some changes in tone with the Biden administration. They are not attacking the CPC on a daily basis anymore and they are more pragmatic. They are not arresting people and charging them with espionage or labeling Chinese students as spies. As you said, there is a lot both sides can do. If we all value certain things, such as the peace and prosperity of the world, then we should be able to abandon certain outdated mindsets, look at the facts, and focus on how to run our own countries effectively.

At present, it seems like there are two main points of bipartisan consensus in the US Congress. One is on China and the other is on infrastructure. The US needs to renovate its infrastructure and China is a world leader in infrastructure development. It has the longest high-speed rail network, the longest highway system, and 80 percent of the world’s tallest bridges. So, maybe the US and China can collaborate on infrastructure. You mentioned Texas; the cost of exporting energy from inland Texas to China is double compared to importing from the coastal areas of Texas because of inadequate infrastructure in the state. China and the US could work together to fill infrastructure gaps such as this. In addition, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) could be elevated into a “World” Infrastructure Investment Bank, in which the US and Japan could participate.

Your recent column in The New York Times, “China doesn’t respect us anymore—for good reason,” drew a lot of attention. But I want to ask, if the shoe doesn’t fit China, how could China have made such great achievements? Of course, globalization is a factor, but with its 5,000-year history, China has its own culture and logic of development. For example, amidst a situation like the pandemic, it’s a society where people are willing to sacrifice a certain amount of individual freedom for collective benefits. But these are more cultural differences rather than ideological differences and we probably need to be more careful when we consider the nature of our differences and not overstate them.

Thomas Friedman: For me, 90 percent of US’ China policy is about making America stronger. That is, if we invest in our infrastructure, if we invest in our education, if we invest in government-funded research, if we take advantage of immigration, which is one of the great advantages we’ve always had over every other country, namely that we can attract the world’s best brains to our shores, including Chinese, we will be much more self-confident in how we deal with China; we will be able to negotiate from a position of strength.

So, we need to get our own act together. I believe we have some legitimate differences—moral, diplomatic, and ethical differences—that have informed our critiques of China over how it has dealt with Hong Kong’s democracy, Xinjiang’s Muslims, and cyberattacks on US institutions. I make no apologies for those. We must always raise those issues from our side. But we have got to get our act together at home. That’s what I was saying in that article. China has a formula for success. We had a formula for success, but we’ve gotten away from our formula for success. If we are the most dynamic, attractive, and compelling economy and society in the world, to me, that’s the best China policy and the best Russia policy, because their people will look at us and say, “we want more of that.” One good example is worth a thousand theories.

I get criticized a lot because when I point out how well China is doing on education, infrastructure, or science, people say, “Friedman, you love China.”

But actually, I’m not really thinking about China, I’m thinking about America. Very frankly, I’m trying to use China’s success on infrastructure, on education, on science, and on anti-poverty as a way to stimulate and challenge Americans. During the Cold War, why did we build a highway system? Because we thought we needed it to win the Cold War against the Russians. Why did we race to the moon? Because we thought we needed to race with the Russians. When we lost that foreign challenger, frankly, we got a little lazy at home and we were ready to settle—as I said in that article, to be “dumb as we wanna be.” So, I’m not at all ashamed of taking China’s successes and saying to Americans—they’re going to be the leading and most powerful country in the world if we don’t get back to our formula for success. So that is my very unapologetic strategy of pointing out that China is succeeding. I don’t want China to fail. I think the world will be better if China succeeds and the US succeeds at the same time. Being the best example is the most powerful human rights policy, the most powerful democracy-promotion policy, the most powerful economic policy, and the most powerful diplomatic policy. Believe me, the world will respond.

Huiyao Wang: That is very stimulating. You mentioned that one of the core advantages of the US is the ability to attract talent. Perhaps the Biden administration will do more on that front, such as welcoming foreign students. Graham Allison told me how the former prime minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew said to him, the US is picking talent from 7 billion people and China is picking talent from 1.3 billion people. So, [China] really has to learn from the US as well and perhaps attract more US students to come to China. We need to do more to increase mutual understanding and trust. At the moment, there are not many people in the US that really understand China well. You are an exception as you know so much about China, and we hope that we can hold more dialogues like this.

The US and China, as the two largest countries in the world, have to work together. We should work to ensure that the bilateral relationship is one of peaceful competition rather than confrontation and rivalry. China and the US have their differences, but it is important that we build up a more transparent rules-based system to manage the competition. For example, China and the US should work together to reform the World Trade Organization (WTO). CCG is also promoting the idea that China should join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and Chinese leaders have said that China is willing to join CPTPP, which is a high-standard trade pact designed by the US. So, rather than fighting through trade and tariffs, we could instead discuss and negotiate through multilateral mechanisms such as the WTO and CPTPP or through the bilateral investment treaty that the US and China almost concluded during the Obama administration.

Thomas Friedman: I have visited CCG many times and have always appreciated the forum that you have given me, where I can be very frank. Whenever I’ve spoken, I’ve spoken my mind. I have benefited from you speaking your mind very honestly in defending your system and I do the same.

This is my message. You only get one chance to make a second impression. Not the first impression; you only have one chance to make a second impression. China and America really need to make a second impression on each other right now. We both need to give each other a second look. I think that will only happen if we each do something a little hard, so that people say, “Wow, that was hard for China to do” and “that was hard for America to do.” We need to get each other’s attention again.

I want to give this friendly advice to Chinese diplomats. You don’t want to be seen as a bully. When a country like Australia just asks China to investigate where Covid-19 came and Beijing’s response is to impose economic sanctions on Australia for just asking, that’s bullying. Nobody likes a bully, and you know how I know that? Because nobody liked America to be a bully. After the Cold War, we thought we were the “hyperpower” and could go anywhere and tell anyone to do anything. Some people in Latin America and Southeast Asia thought we were kind of a big bully and nobody likes a bully. What people like and what people really respond to is when they see you do something hard. We need to do that and China needs to do that, and then we can both have a second impression.

Huiyao Wang: There is a better way to tell the story of China, absolutely. I was glad to see that US Secretary of State Blinken said that the US no longer needs to topple other governments. This paves the way for more peaceful coexistence. China and the US need each other to maintain global stability.

Thomas Friedman: I think what happened in Alaska was a necessary throat-clearing for both sides. Both sides needed to clear their throats. Joe Biden is a good man, he’s a stable president, he is not like Trump. He’s a partner for serious dialogue and I’m still hopeful that now both sides have got everything off their chest, they can sit down and have the kind of dialogue that you and I are having, which is honest, frank, and respectful, but also a dialogue where we actually agree to do something and bring the relationship where it needs to be.

Huiyao Wang: You are right. We needed to clear our throats and then we can really calm down and talk about important matters.

To finish off, I have a question for you referring back to globalization. Due to the pandemic, people in different countries are isolated from each other. Many companies and organizations are stagnating. Do you think these factors will slow down globalization or do you think globalization will have a new start after COVID-19?

Thomas Friedman: A very good question and a good place to end. I think we are on the verge of an incredible explosion of globalization because of what the pandemic has done. Before the pandemic, McKinsey estimated that about 20 percent of American companies had digitized their business. After the pandemic, so many more companies have digitized their business. Look what CCG has done—you’ve digitized your forums. Now, you and I are acting globally as individuals more easily, more cheaply, and more efficiently than ever. It’s not as good as when I’m in your auditorium but it’s about 90 percent as good. When I’m in your auditorium, we just have the people in the auditorium, but now we have 800,000 people around China watching.

So, you see that the pandemic has forced us to digitize many things and is also going to allow us to globalize in so many more ways, such as tele-medicine, tele-education, and tele-business. What will come out of this is a new hybrid. So next time you and we meet, maybe it’ll be on Zoom, or maybe it’ll be in your office in Beijing, or maybe it’ll be in your office in Beijing with Zoom. I think when this is over, we will have so many more ways to globalize. But the world is going to continue going from size “large” to “medium” to “small.” Thanks to the pandemic, this is going to happen faster than ever.

Huiyao Wang: Yes, the pandemic has probably brought people closer through technology.

Thomas Friedman: I have done more webinars and have reached more people in China during the year of the pandemic than in the previous 30 years combined.

Huiyao Wang: Glad to see the positive side of it. I was also glad to see that during the Alaska meeting, both US and Chinese government officials talked about the prospect of relaxing visas and opening borders. So, we hope we can invite you again to talk with us at CCG. This kind of constructive dialogue can help to forge a better narrative as we seek common ground and try to minimize our differences. China and US, as the world’s two largest economies, have a great responsibility to work together to fight climate change and the pandemic, resolve debt issues, and so many other things.

Thomas Friedman: That’s absolutely correct and I have great respect for the fact that you invite me, you let me say (and I say) whatever I want, even if that includes some hard things for Chinese officials to hear, but I think it’s said out of respect and a desire to see the relationship get on a healthier track. I appreciate you giving me this opportunity to reach your audience and reach so many friends and readers in China. I look forward to doing it again as I really respect and appreciate this opportunity.

Huiyao Wang: Thank you very much, Tom, for spending your time with us and we hope to see you again.