This is CBSI on the World. I'm John Bachelor and I welcome Tom

Sandwich, the editor of the World ahead, 2022, from the Economist magazine. We're

looking at 10 items to anticipate what we will know completely. 365, 166 days

from now. Tom, a very good day to you in the fall of 2022, two events, a midterm

election in the United States. The president's party historically has not

fared well in the first midterm following the win of the White House. At the same

time, there will be a choice in the People's Republic of China, the gathering

October and November for the next five years. And to my understanding, the general

secretary of the party Xi Jinping is standing for what will be common on precedent

in third term. What do these two events tell us about the world ahead for day

to come? Hello, it's good to be here. Yes, absolutely. I think that this rivalry

between you and the US and China, but more broadly, between democracy and

autocracy, is one of the prisms through which to understand not just the coming

year, but in fact, the coming couple of decades. And I think this is one of the

sort of longer term trends re-asserting itself in the wake of the pandemic. And

it's going to be a particularly acute contrast in the fall of 2022, because

you're going to have democracy in America looking like a bit of a mess. I mean,

it looks like a bit of a mess already, but Joe Biden is trying to rally

democracies and say, look, we need to make the case for democracy. Democracy

needs to do more than just survive. It has to show that it's a better way of

delivering prosperity and stability and economic growth and innovation and

all those sorts of things. At the moment, it's quite difficult to make a lot of

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