While everyone else is talking about a trade war with China, should we also keep an eye on Chinese spies here in America?

Why, our next guest says yes. I'm Jenna, and this is Smarter News.

Gordon Chang, an author, commentator, analyst started his career in law.

And it's his experience working in Shanghai as a lawyer that informed a big career pivot

into the world of foreign policy, where his work, as you're going to hear, led to an audience

with President Trump discussing U.S.-China relations.

I wanted to talk to Gordon about the rising tension between our two countries and trade,

because as you'll also hear, Gordon doesn't hold back his opinion, but he provides really

interesting insight about what's happening inside China and within the Chinese Communist Party

that you won't hear anywhere else. China's economy is failing. It won't be growing for very much longer, and I actually

think it's probably contracting. This is a problem because China's entering its 2008. In 2008,

Chinese leaders did not want to suffer a recession, so they overstimulated their economy. They

took on too much debt. And so they're now going to resolve debt issues,

and they don't have the political will to do it for a lot of reasons. And then you have the

property market, which represents 70% of the wealth of the Chinese people. It is tumbling. There's

no way it's going to recover anytime soon. And then all of a sudden you have

Xi Jinping. He's turned his back on consumption as the basis of the Chinese economy. And that

means as a practical matter, his only way out to rescue this grim situation is to export more.

President Trump has said, no, you're not exporting more to the U.S.

You've got predatory and criminal trade practices. We're not putting up with this anymore because

we're not going to allow you to continue to decimate our society. And by the way, other countries

in the world feel the same way. So you put all these crises together. It means

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