Hello everyone and welcome to E-Syp's Global Economy podcast. My name is Frederick Erickson and today I am speaking to Frank Lavin.

Frank has been on this podcast before and he is an old friend.

He has had a long career in American administrations.

He was the political director in Reagan's White House.

And during the second Bush administration in the Nauties, He was the Deputy Secretary of Commerce leading many

of the negotiations that United States had with China on different type of economic matters.

And the subject for today is China. Frank, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Frederick. Glad to be here with you.

So I want us to talk about China and of course the obvious theme for a conversation about China is that a few days ago when we're recording this. China ended its party Congress and President

Xi Jinping was again appointed to a new period as being chairman of the Communist Party

and of course leading China in the next five years. So, Frank, I mean, you are a close China

watcher. You have business interests

connected to China as well. When you followed the party Congress, did you learn anything new

about China's overall direction? No, Frederick. In fact, I think the goal of the party Congress

is no surprises. I think what they're doing is they're reaffirming or restating their policies.

They're applauding themselves and taking credit for the good news that there might be in China.

But there's not really any surprises that are unveiled at these kind of events.

I think a lot of people were closely following the extent to which there was going to be any signal coming from

Xi Jinping or from others about China's relation to Taiwan.

We have seen over the past couple of years that Chinese sensitivities around these issues have grown.

Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan a couple of months ago, and that led to a pretty furious reaction

from China itself.

What's the cause on these matters, do you think, from the Chinese viewpoints?

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