9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23.

This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C., and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world.

Hello and welcome to Need to Know. I'm David Rothkof, your host.

And this week, like every week, we're going to talk to somebody who can help us make sense

of the news.

I am extremely happy that we have joining us, Jessica Chen Weiss, who is the David M. Lampton

Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the inaugural faculty director of the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs at SICE. She's worked for the U.S. government. She's written prolifically. She even has another book coming out next year called

what China wants and what it means for the world, and we want to talk about it. And I have been

hoping for a long time to have Jessica join us, because in a world of reflexive cold warrior views of China, she provides a different perspective,

one that comes from a deep understanding of the diversity within China, which I think is the subject of her next book,

and a rational framing of U.S. interests with regard to that.

So, Jessica, thank you very much for joining us.

Well, thanks so much for that introduction. It's great to be here.

Well, we had sort of a kickoff of this discussion yesterday, and I told everybody that we did on our podcast, the one we've

been doing for over decade, Deep State Radio, where we had Ed Luce and David Sanger. And we were

talking a little bit about the president's trip to China, including the president yelling at

David Sanger on the airplane, which was very

entertaining. And I mentioned you were coming, and David Sanger said, oh, she's my next-door neighbor

now. So our audience has learned a little bit about it. Anyway, we talked about the China

trip, and we talked about the China trip in the context, then, of the Putin trip.

And I guess the punchline of that and a lot of articles, and including some that I've written, is that there was a different power dynamic in this trip of President Trump to China. And it was clear

that the kind of the momentum, the leverage, the stature even, was more pointing in the direction

...