On this episode of Newtz World, China's president, Xi Jinping, is in Moscow this week in a

three-day visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Many believe the intention of the

visit would be to begin peace discussions with Ukraine. Xi Jinping is expected to present

an agreement on economic cooperation between the two countries worth billions of dollars.

Xi's visit comes just days after the International Criminal Court accused Putin of war crimes

on Friday. The alleged Putin was complicit in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children from

Russian occupied areas of Ukraine. The year to talk about the Putin's G meeting and Xi's long-term

plans, I'm really pleased to welcome back two guests, George Mebe, Director of Grand Strategy

at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Wai-Fang-Zhong, Senior Research Fellow

at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

This

and I want to thank both of you for joining me again. You're both so knowledgeable about this area.

It's going to be very, very helpful. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Now, I want to start with something that precedes the visit to Russia, and that is there were reports

that there were four different speeches last week in which Secretary General Xi Jinping

talked about the need to prepare for war. Is this just an effort to sort of get the PLA mobilized

or, in your sense, does he really sense that things are that dangerous and he really wants the

to understand how close they are to be engaged in combat? I'll let you two decide who would like

to jump in first. I had an ongoing machine learning project that the policy change index that

tries to gauge what Beijing is going to do based on what it's printing on its national newspaper.

And what we detected about two years ago was already the effort to talk up the Chinese

military has already started. And it's never really clear what the target is because the people's

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