Welcome to this special live edition of Sinica Podcast coming here today from the 2018 Harvard College China Forum in Boston, Massachusetts.

Let's hear you folks make a little noise.

All right, all right.

I am Kaiser Guo, and I am honored to have been asked to moderate the International Relations panel at the forum this year.

The cynical podcast, of course, is a weekly discussion of current affairs in China,

and we are produced in partnership with SubChina, the best way to keep on top of the latest news from China

through our free daily email newsletter or with our premium SubChina Access membership.

SubChina is a feast of business political and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world.

We are today at a fascinating moment in China's international relations. For the first three decades that

followed Dong Xiaoping's assent supremacy in the Chinese leadership, China hewed to his famous

dictum, Tauguan Yang Hui, to hide your power and bide your time, as it's frequently, if not

been literally translated, at least from the time that Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Chinese

Communist Party in 2013. And arguably, really a few years earlier, inarguably by the time of the

19th Party Congress last fall, we've seen a much more assertive China, one that has backed up

its controversial claims in the South China Sea,

has pursued the very broad, very far-reaching Belt and Road initiative,

and more recently has taken up the banner of economic globalization.

So this advance is coming at a time of retrenchment or even withdrawal by the current U.S. administration, of course,

but also at a time when vital security problems

remain far from resolved, maybe most notably, on the Korean peninsula. And if we look at the

broader global context, the New World Order, which was proclaimed by George H.W. Bush after the

end of the Cold War, is now itself over and done. And in many parts of the world, we've seen

...