Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Ahead of President Trump's planned summit with China's

President Xi Jinping later this week, we'll discuss the United States' current and past relationship

with China, President Xi and the State of the Communist Party's political

leadership, and America's policy on the Taiwan question and the future of Taiwanese independence.

Then, not worth your time?

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I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Mike Warren and dispatch contributing

writer Michael Sobolick of the Hudson Institute. Let's dive in.

Michael Sobolik, how should the United States think of China heading into these conversations?

Give us this sort of big picture. Is China an enemy? Is China an adversary? Is it an economic rival?

Is it the other pole of a bipolar world?

How should the United States think of China big picture today?

So that question, maybe in a counterintuitive way, makes me think back to 1980 when Reagan

was on the stump speech and he was talking about Jimmy Carter.

And he has this famous line from

the 1980 campaign where he says a recession is where your neighbor loses their job but oppression

is when you lose yours and recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his. So like these terms can be

kind of subjective. They're subject to people's political agendas, but they also have meaningful distinction. So cooperative partner, competitor, adversary, enemy, I am comfortable with using the term enemy because of the Chinese Communist Party, the nature of the system, what their geopolitical

ambitions are. This is a Marxist-Leninist regime in its founding that ideology pervades today,

although admittedly does look a bit different than it did during the Mao era. But this is a regime

that is revisionist in its geopolitical conditions.

It is not terribly happy that it lives in this post-World War II, post-Cold War order that the

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