Hello and welcome back to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger back from vacation

and I am joined by the guys Steve Hayes, David French and Jonah Goldberg. We've got some

topics today, China, infrastructure, immigration and Facebook.

Let's dive right in. Steve China. David China. All right, I'm still rusty a little. That's David.

And that's Steve. I get the hair confused. I'll make Sarah feel better by going straight to

Steve, but I'll set it up. All right. So just to read a paragraph or two here to just set the stage,

record numbers. This is from the New York Times yesterday. Record numbers of Chinese military

planes probed the airspace near Taiwan over the weekend, prompting at Taiwanese fighter jets to

scramble and adding mussels to Beijing's warnings that it could ultimately use force to take hold

the island. And so when we say record breaking numbers, we're not talking about a few planes.

It says the sort T is by nearly 80 people's liberation army aircraft on Friday and Saturday as

China observed its national holiday followed a pattern of Beijing testing and wearing down Taiwan

by flying over C's southwest of the island. So I'll start with you Steve. The question is in the short

term, how concerned should we be by these flights? Is this just muscle flexing in response to some

unusual carrier deployments, for example, sort of tit for tat? Is this a, does this seem to be sort

of a one of these periodic short term Taiwan flare ups? Or is this signifying in your view something

greater? No, it's real and we should take it seriously. You've had some observers suggest that

this is just Chinese sort of chest thumping because of this national day and I'm trying to

to boost patriotism for internal political reasons. That may be part of what's going on here, but

there have been very, very clear messages in outward facing statements from the regime, from

the communist regime that suggests we better take this seriously. This is not mere symbolism.

Recent weeks the Chinese minister of defense said national rejuvenation and reunification

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