This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 21st, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

According to author Ryan Yon, a lot of the fearful, aggressive rhetoric in discussions about China don't hold a lot of sway

if we use a fairly basic public choice analysis. His new co-authored book is The China

dilemma, Rethinking U.S-China relations through public choice theory.

The book urges Americans to think more clearly about US engagement with China by merely

understanding more clearly what the government wants, what the people in China want, and how U.S.

policy should adjust.

We spoke last week in Dallas.

Ryan, you and I are here at the Public Choice Society meeting in Texas and I think one of the things that when people describe public choice in a very basic thumbnail sketch they say politics without romance.

They do indeed.

And so my thought is you know it might also be worth characterizing in some ways public choice

as politics without fear, which is to say that we're trying to

evaluate the decision-making processes of people who are in the public sector.

Yeah, absolutely.

We're one of take a look at politics without any of either the romance or the fear or any of the

things that we often just reflexively want to deal with, but actually take a look at

it and say, can we come to

understand what's motivating and why people are taking their actions?

And so when we think about China, there's a lot of attempts at making Americans fearful.

Absolutely there is.

In fact, much of my background with China comes from working with my co-author Ethan

...