BUCK: Gordon Chang is with us now. He is the author of The Great U.S.-China Tech War. Go check out his Twitter, follow him there. @GordonGChang is where you follow him, and he is an expert on all these matters. Gordon, thanks for being us.

CHANG: Thank you so much, Buck and Clay.

BUCK: So, Gordon, first off, we got a couple things here — obviously the Olympics coming up in China. We want to talk about the Russia-Chinese relationship and how that may play into the Ukraine situation. But first, Clay asked Alex Berenson just before you came on about a Covid Zero policy in China. We know that they’re hiding stuff, lying about stuff in totalitarian state, right? Everyone listening to this gets that part of it. What do we know about how China is handling covid and what the reality is of what they’re facing?

CHANG: The Zero-covid policy is really driving things and that is basically no transmissions are acceptable, and that means that they put people in extraordinary lockdowns. So, for instance, the people in Xian were not allowed to leave their apartments from December 27 to just a couple days ago, which means they couldn’t go out and buy food. We have seen lockdowns at the ports in China, which is important because that’s affecting the supply chain in the U.S.

And there are these lockdowns in Beijing, which is extraordinarily sensitive because the Olympics are starting on February 4th if the disease doesn’t get out of hand. And clearly it is getting out of hand because they can’t control it around China and they’ve got no vaccines which work, which are even less effective than ours, and so isolation is their only defense. And they are shutting down their country in order to stop the disease.

CLAY: And that seems like — Gordon, thanks for taking the time to join us. That seems like a really difficult policy to be embracing. Remember, Australia tried to do Covid Zero, and they just abandoned it as soon as they got the vaccine because they said, “Covid Zero isn’t sustainable long term.” Omicron seems like it spreads so rapidly that it would be almost impossible even in an authoritarian, communist, totalitarian state like China to even manage that. But so that’s my thought.

But I wanted to ask you this, Gordon. Does it seem incredibly strange to you, based on your expertise associated with China, that within less than two years after China brings covid … lies about it and allows it to spread everywhere, that everybody would show up hat in hand … for the Beijing winter Olympics? I can’t get my mind wrapped around how the All-Star Game can get pulled out of Georgia over a voting rights bill that isn’t even restrictive, and yet every democracy in the world is fine with showing up in China and bowing down to Chairman Xi, given what’s going on in China and what China has inflicted upon the world. Does that seem incongruous to you as well?

CHANG: Yes, it’s absolutely incongruous. It’s also a sign of feebleness of the West. Remember what Beijing did here, as you were referring to. They lied about contagiousness — they knew it was highly transmissible but they told the world it was not — and while they were locking down Wuhan and other parts of China, they were pressuring other countries to accept passengers from China without travel restrictions and quarantines. Now, you put just those two things together.

There are more, but you put just those two things together and it means that China deliberately spread this disease. That means 5.5 million people outside of China who have died from this disease just completely unnecessarily. That means each of those deaths were a murder. That means, by the way, Clay, that if you look at Article II of the genocide convention of 1948 — which China is a party — that this is a genocide: 5.5 million people killed.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War. His Twitter handle is @GordonGChang. Follow him there for analysis on this. Gordon, right now the world stands on edge at some level wondering if and when there will be a Russian incursion into Ukraine. A lot of people are pointing out that the U.S. response to this could result in a shift in Russia perhaps towards even warmer, closer relations with China. What should people know? Just put this into context for us. Putin and Xi, where do they have crossover, where are they working together, and how concerned about this should we all be?

CHANG: China and Russia are effectively an alliance, as they say. They actually say that they’re closer than allies. What the problem here is that they’ve been coordinating their foreign policies for a little more than a decade. They’ve been exercising their militaries together since 2005, and in August of last year, for the first time, Russian troops were using Chinese weapons, which demonstrates interoperability.

So we have to assume that these are not two separate countries, that we don’t have one crisis in Taiwan and another crisis in Ukraine. We’ve got one crisis, and it’s being stage-managed in Moscow and Beijing. Now, people say, Buck, that long term China and Russia can’t form an enduring partnership, and I agree. But the point is that’s irrelevant, because in the here and now, these two powers are working together to destabilize the world, to redraw the map of the world with force.

CLAY: Gordon, we know, obviously, what Russia is potentially going to do in Ukraine, and obviously that feels like a lesson that China could take based on what is going to happen with Taiwan. Do you believe that Chinese assault or occupation of Taiwan is going to happen in the next couple of years or even during the Biden administration, or would you still say that’s highly unlikely?

CHANG: I would say that it’s unlikely. I wouldn’t say “highly unlikely,” and there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is that for China to invade Taiwan, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, would have to give some general or admiral almost complete control over the Chinese military and that would make that flag officer the most powerful figure in China, and Xi Jinping is not about to do that. Also, the Chinese regime is extraordinarily casualty adverse.

So they’re not gonna accept hundreds of thousands of people killed, unless, of course — and this is the point that we often forget — there is an accident, that you have two planes come together, two ships come together. It could be Chinese and Taiwanese, could be American and China. But the point is that the possibility of an accident is high. The other background factor is that Xi Jinping has made the takeover of Taiwan the critical test of the legitimacy of the Communist Party.

And we know that China has moved against its victims when the Americans and others have been distracted elsewhere: 1962, Cuban missile crisis, China invades India’ Korean War, China invades Tibet and East Turkestan, which is now Xinjiang. So this is out of the Chinese playbook that while we’re distracted someplace else, they go move on their enemies. So this is exceedingly volatile right now.

BUCK: Gordon Chang, author of The Great U.S.-China Tech War. Get your copy. Also follow him at @GordonGChang on Twitter. Go to GordonGChang.com for his latest analysis. Gordon, also appreciate it, sir. Thanks for being with us.

CHANG: Thank you so much, Clay and Buck.