An interview with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, we're going to talk about the origins of COVID and also about American foreign policy.

This is the Dineshtis who's the podcast.

America needs this voice. The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division and lies. We need a brave voice of reason, understanding and truth. This is the Dineshtis Sousa podcast.

At a time when the United States is bitterly divided, they're talks about these kind of unbridgeable chasm of values, not just of political parties in the United States.

How does China hold itself together? The Chinese have launched a massive new campaign to create solidarity among the Chinese to make them truly one nation.

Now, they're not after true solidarity, they're not trying to include everyone. In fact, every now and then the Chinese will launch an extermination campaign against the Muslims over here or the Falun Gong over there. They want nevertheless to create a unified China.

According to one source, kind of a credible source, they're succeeding. The source is a guy named Joe Sy, TSAI. He is one of the founders of the Chinese e-commerce giant called Ali Baba, a very successful company that has helped to make Joe Sy into a multi-billionaire.

He was interviewed recently on CNBC and he was asked about China. He said, look, stop complaining about China. The Chinese people are happy, very striking statement, the Chinese people are happy.

Not only that, but because they're happy, they support the government that is making them happy. When he was asked about what is the basis for this happiness, he said the following. He says, the China that I see, the large numbers of the population, I'm talking about 80% to 90% are very happy with the fact that their lives are improving every year.

He goes on to say when I started Ali Baba in 1999, the gross domestic product, the poor capita GDP, was $800. That's per Chinese family. Per year, he says today it's over $10,000.

He says if you talk to Chinese parents, I go, children are going to have a better life than you, he goes, most of them will say, absolutely yes, they're going to be educated, they're going to find good jobs, China is getting better.

The argument here from Joe Sy is based on economics, based on the idea that if a country can offer its citizens and improving economic prospects, they're going to support the country and they're going to support the government that's in power even if it is a communist government.

Now, this argument runs flatly a thwart, an argument made by the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in fact my colleague at the Hoover Institution also teaches at Stanford, and Fukuyama about 20 years ago in his book The End of History, said that regimes like China abound to, if not collapse, feel the tension that arises because once you give people economic success,

once you give them economic freedom and they have, you may say, more stuff, they begin to ask for other things.

Hey, now I've got a refrigerator, now I've got a microwave oven, now I've got a cell phone, okay, but now I want the right to free speech.

Now I want to be able to say what I think, I want artistic expression, I want to be able to not only espouse my religious faith at home, I want to be able to talk about it, I want to be able to meet in a group.

So in other words, economic rights leads to pressure for civil rights and civil liberties. Now that has in fact not happened in China, while the Chinese have liberalized on the economic front, they have tightened on the political front.

And I've taken to myself, why is it that the Chinese people, I mean yes, we had Tiananmen Square in 1989, ruthlessly crushed, and since then no mass movement in China demanding civil rights, demanding the ability to speak any of that.

But you have to remember historically that China never had this kind of freedom. China has always been an autocracy of one form or another.

Now the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, and then you had the Maoist regime for about 25 years, very repressive. Now there was economic liberalization under Deng Xiaoping, but that economic liberalization didn't bring any other type of liberalization.

But going even further back, before the Communist Party, China was under repressive dynasties, one after the other. I mean if you go to ancient times you have of course the Han dynasty, the Ming dynasty, but then onto the Manchu dynasty.

And then even in the early years before the Communists take over, there was repression all over China. Now the one force that is very powerful in China, and the Chinese know it, and they're encouraging it, is the force of nationalism.

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