This Friday, Condoleezza Rice joins the Bold Names podcast from The Wall Street Journal to offer her perspective on the multi-domain geopolitical competition between the United States and China; Dan Wang joins GoodFellows to discuss the argument of his new book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future; and Elizabeth Economy speaks with a leading expert on China’s health system about how that country handled the COVID-19 pandemic and is today approaching health diplomacy globally.
Confronting and Competing with China
Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice joined The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins on the Bold Names podcast to discuss the current era of geopolitical uncertainty, with a focus on America’s ongoing strategic competition with China. On the podcast, Rice shares why she says the United States needs to “run hard and run fast” to win the tech race with China. She also explains why executives can no longer afford to think of foreign policy as separate from strategy. Additionally, drawing on the example of contemporary European regulatory frameworks, the former secretary of state says why, in her view, overregulation of emerging technologies risks stifling innovation and undermining competitiveness. The podcast concludes with Rice elaborating on why, despite the negative possibilities associated with some geopolitical and technological risks, she is optimistic about the future of technology for education, health care, and economic growth. Watch here.
While China displays a relentless drive to build, despite even terrible human costs, its main rival the United States is a more lawyerly and free society that’s prone to stifling ideas both good and bad—so argues Research Fellow Dan Wang, in his new bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. For the latest episode of GoodFellows, Wang joins Senior Fellows Niall Ferguson and H.R. McMaster to discuss what the future holds for the two Cold War II rivals, as well as his firsthand experiences witnessing China’s engineering boom and draconian pandemic policies. After that, the fellows weigh in on President Trump’s recent United Nations address and the state of that institution, the likelihood of Trump’s Gaza peace plan coming to fruition, the provision of long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, and the merits of a US military strike inside Venezuela to counter narco-terrorism. Watch or listen here.
For China Considered, Senior Fellow Elizabeth Economy interviews Yanzhong Huang, a leading expert on China’s public health system, to examine how China has evolved from the COVID-19 pandemic. The two explore China’s dramatic policy pivots—from initial inaction to draconian zero-COVID lockdowns to sudden reopening—and analyze why meaningful domestic reforms and transparency remain elusive despite lessons from the crisis. Huang also discusses China’s strategic health diplomacy, particularly how its provision of vaccines and medical supplies to treat COVID earned goodwill in developing countries. The conversation reveals how US withdrawal from global health institutions creates opportunities for China to expand its influence through the Health Silk Road initiative, requiring minimal effort to fill the vacuum left by the American absence. Huang argues that the unresolved controversy over COVID-19’s origins and deep mistrust between Washington and Beijing have effectively frozen bilateral health cooperation, making dialogue nearly impossible even in an area traditionally viewed as ripe for collaboration. Watch or listen here.
Law and Policy
On October 1, Hoover’s Center for Revitalizing American Institutions hosted “The Digital Fourth Amendment,” a webinar event with Senior Fellows Orin S. Kerr and Eugene Volokh. The session examined how digital technologies have reshaped the way courts interpret constitutional protections against government searches. As daily life leaves more digital traces, which can become digital evidence in the course of a legal proceeding, traditional legal rules often lag behind modern realities. The conversation touches on recent rulings, their impact on privacy rights, and principles that could guide more consistent protections for individual privacy and data in the future. “We are in a new world of digital evidence collection,” said Kerr. “The old traditional constitutional rules often create really quirky results when applied to these new forms of evidence collection.” Watch here.
Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy
In a new short video for Hoover’s Tennenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy, Senior Fellow John H. Cochrane explains why the health care market should look more like the market for airline tickets. As he argues, transparent prices and real competition could transform healthcare costs and restore choice to patients. Cochrane identifies the need for disruption in the healthcare delivery market, which would take the form of innovative new providers offering patients superior value versus industry incumbents. The problem, says Cochrane, is that such disruptive entries into the health care market are not possible under the current structure of the health care system. Watch here.
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