You're going to. We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Dorsinski

Culture Editor here at the Federalist as always. You can email the show at Radio Radio wherever you download your podcasts and of course to the premium version of our website the Federalist.com as well.

Today we are joined by Michael Sobelike he is the author of the new book

Countering China's Great Game he also wrote an article recently for foreign policy that I found fascinating.

It's called She's Imperial Ambitions are rooted in China's history.

Michael is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.

Thanks so much for joining us, Michael.

Hey, Emily, thanks so much for having me.

This is a real pleasure.

Yeah, of course.

One question it's occurring to me right now that I've never asked you in particular is how on earth did you end up specializing in China, Michael?

But by accident. So... Tell us the story.

Yeah, okay, so this takes us back to 2010 and I was an undergrad in my penultimate semester at Texas A&M University and I got into this internship, this fully funded internship abroad program through A&M and I was originally angling to go to London because it was my first time to ever leave America and I thought you know like

Britain feels like a really safe foray into foreign travel for me but like long story short

London didn't work out and I had to pick a new country and on the advice of my dad I

Like knowing nothing about foreign policy at the time just checked the box next to China and just on a whim went to China the first time I traveled internationally.

And it was absolutely incredible. We lived with some host families. We stayed there for about five weeks and did a whole bunch of traveling

Had really great conversations with young students young folks there as well

And I left even before I really had a deep appreciation for the national security dynamics between Washington and Beijing,

I got to see China for what it was culturally civilizationally and just to kind of see the people up close at a time when China was a bit more open than it is today in 2024 and I left with this deep fascination of this country that I haven't really been able to shake since then?

So the time period there is particularly interesting.

This is you know 10 years into WTO, the Obama, I don't know what we would call it, would you call it a thaw, Michael? Tell us about what you saw when you were there.

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