Cyber Wars: Confronting China's Digital Threat

>> Elizabeth Economy: Welcome to China Considered, a podcast that brings fresh insights and informed discussion to one of the most consequential issues of our time, how China is changing and changing the world. I'm Liz Economy Hargrove, Senior Fellow and co director of the U.S China and the World Program at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Today I have with me Dr Adam Segal. He's a China expert who also directs the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. He served in the Biden Administration State Department, where he authored the administration's international Cyber Strategy, and he's a world renowned expert on both China and digital policy.

It's great to have you with us today, Adam.

>> Adam Segal: Thanks for having me on, Liz.

>> Elizabeth Economy: So let's start with what's going on right now with Deep Seek. It's captured everybody's attention, caused the US stock market, Nvidia stock, to plummet. Explain to us why Deep Seq is so important.

Do we need to be as worried as everybody seems to be? What is this all about?

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, Deep Seq's breakthrough poses kind of three big questions about how we're approaching AI in China. So the model itself seems to have been trained on much fewer chips than somebody like OpenAI has used.

So much less resource intense. And we saw with, you know, last week with President Trump announcing the initiative on Stargate, the US is basically assuming that this was going to be massive. Our AI future is going to be both massively chip and energy dependent. So Deep Seq seems to question that.

Second, they're an open source model, so not proprietary. Llama is Meta's open source model, but again, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others have used a different model. And once a model has been developed, it can diffuse very quickly. And so the question is about what kind of controls the US can keep on that.

And then finally, the US has been hoping to slow China down. And you know, until three weeks ago, everybody would have told you the US was far ahead in AI and we were hoping to slow China down by control over chips through Nvidia and others. So the fact that this breakthrough still happened has made many people question whether those controls are actually useful or not.

>> Elizabeth Economy: So, I mean, you've worked in this space for a very long time. Few people know China and technology as well as you do. I mean, are you surprised by this? Do you think we should be surprised? What's your sort of assessment?

>> Adam Segal: Yeah. So I mean, I think people are surprised on the technical and scientific breakthrough.

I think we shouldn't Take anything away from that. I am not a artificial intelligence scientist, but reading other people, they are definitely impressed in what they've accomplished. I don't think we should be surprised in the sense that we know that, you know, China has also identified AI as being critical to their national economic and political security and they're going to do everything they can to make sure that they are competitive.

And we shouldn't be surprised that China seems to have found ways to work around it.

>> Elizabeth Economy: I mean, you know, in, in sort of my mind, you know, AI was one of China's made in China 2025 technologies, right, that they established as a priority back in 2014, sort of a 10 year, 2015 to 2025 timeframe for them to become like domestic champions and then global champions.

And we've seen what they've been able to do in a whole host of technologies, right? In particular new energy vehicles, right, the EVs, clean tech. I mean, to my mind, this is just yet another one of those technology areas where China is going to demonstrate its prowess. It's been investing for a long time and as you said, it's a priority.

I guess the question is what should we do about it, if anything? Does this signal like the need for a change in U.S policy, do you think?

>> Adam Segal: So I think the arguments about export controls not working are premature, right? I mean, it takes a while for hardware controls to have an impact.

There were loopholes that the Biden administration closed at the end there, so those will have an effect. And we probably shouldn't take this narrow breakthrough for one system to stand in for the entire ecosystem. So the chips themselves are incredibly important for diffusion and how other companies use it.

And that clearly is going to have an effect. And the Chinese themselves, I mean, the, you know, the founder of Deep Seq keeps on saying our biggest burden is access to chips. So they're clearly having a bite. So I think that's probably premature, a major rethink on there.

I think the big question that is still open and we just don't know how the Trump administration is going to respond is in the last week the Biden administration issued an executive order on AI diffusion, which has to do about, you know, how many chips can be sent to certain countries and what the hyperscalers, the cloud companies where they can build their data centers.

And you know, we didn't really know how the Trump administration was going to respond to that. They have typically said that they think regulations on AI have slowed the US down. So I think we'll have to wait and see about how they think about that.

>> Elizabeth Economy: So it seems like just in the past few weeks, both with the sort of development or the sort of the whole arrival of Deep Seq and then the change in administration here, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty about where this AI race, so to speak, is gonna go.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, I mean, I think the Tumper mission has been very clear in their first executive order on AI, which came out last week as well, that a lot of the talk about that was very prominent in the Biden administration about trust and safety and regulation. The Trump administration is thinking a lot about investment in infrastructure, talking a lot about energy and how they're gonna supply the energy for their, as I said before, the regulation they see is slowing it down.

So that direction I think is pretty clear. The questions about export controls, I think we're going to still see a debate inside the administration where they come out on.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Great. So let's now turn to what I really want to talk to you about, which is all about these cyber attacks that we've experienced here, Chinese cyber intrusions.

And you had a great piece in Foreign affairs last week talking about Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon and Flax Typhoon. So first of all, who comes up with these names and do they actually mean anything but really like what are the Chinese trying to accomplish here and is this all state directed or what's, what's the, what's sort of the purpose of everything here?

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, the names are terrible. Every company comes up with their own names and so often it's hard to figure out who's referring to who. And there we, when we talk about. Talk about Russia, we talked about the bears, right? There was Cozy Bear and others. So the typhoon refers to China and Asia.

It's a Microsoft usage, but they're not helpful. So if we think about Chinese cyber operations, essentially there's espionage, right? So that would be the Salt Typhoon and the Flax Typhoon, which is collecting information. And China conducts both political military espionage and industrial espionage. So to steal secrets from the private sector, espionage is against a whole range of targets, right?

So we know the campaign, the Harris and the Trump campaigns, State Department, Treasury, Commerce, all of the kind of people who make decisions that will affect China's national interests. But we also know they target journalists who are writing about issues that China is concerned about, right. So when Bloomberg was doing stories about the personal wealth of Chinese leaders, they went after Bloomberg and reporters and New York Times reporters, they go after activists in areas that China's interested in.

So Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, all those people are targets. And then there's a set of the cyber operations attacks, penetrations that look to be preparing for possible military conflicts, right? So that is what Volt Typhoon was. So in those instances, Chinese operators were on critical infrastructure. What the term of art is pre positioning, Right.

So leaving some malware there in case there is a conflict in the Taiwan Strait, so they can cause social disturbances, take some systems down, slow US Decision making down, and in some ways act as a deterrent. Right. Remind the United States leadership that any conflict we have is not going to remain in the Western Pacific. We can also reach out and touch you in some way.

>> Elizabeth Economy: So. And was this malware spread throughout our entire country in all different kinds of systems, could it have affected our water supply, our electricity? I mean, was it everywhere through everything or.

>> Adam Segal: No. I mean, and so Salt Typhoon, which is the one I wrote about in Foreign Affairs, Salt seems to have been telecoms, right?

So it was taking advantage of some vulnerabilities they discovered in telecoms. Vault Typhoon has been found in some critical infrastructure around ports, and cranes, and things like that. The government has been fairly vague about what type of systems it's founded in, but we don't know how far and wide it's been.

>> Elizabeth Economy: So, you know, that actually reminds me of that whole discussion. I mean, it could have been as much as a year ago, I guess, about cranes being, you know, potentially at risk from a Chinese intervention. And a lot of people kind of laugh that off. But what you're suggesting is that was absolutely the case and perhaps the US Government already knew about it but hadn't released the information.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, it could have been, but it also, the US Government pushes back on Chinese technology for the vulnerability and disruption reason and also for the data collections reasons. So I think the argument with the ports as well as airport scanners and things is what type of data can be collected about movement through those areas and sent back to China?

>> Elizabeth Economy: Not about shutting it all down?

>> Adam Segal: Not necessarily, sometimes yes, sometimes no.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, so what about where we're at? I mean, obviously the companies and you know, our government discovered these intrusions and called them out, called the Chinese and we think this is all state directed.

Correct. This isn't just sort of independent actors, you know, hacking, you know, some, one individual Chinese hacker sitting in a dark room, you know, going after, you know, US Critical infrastructure.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah. So it's not, it's definitely not an individual, it's groups, what. And in some cases it may be contractors.

So as you said, the US Government called out Chinese actors. They also sanction some private companies that they say that supported the operation. So we know that the Ministry of State Security, the mss, contracts with some private companies to do some operations. We're looking kind of at a growing ecosystem of private companies that support the state and are told which targets to go after.

But on industrial espionage, in some cases they may freelance to raise their own money and things.

>> Elizabeth Economy: But I mean, sanctions, honestly, what are they going to accomplish actually, right? I mean, what does the sanction involve? Saying you can't do business with the United States? Presumably a number of these companies aren't doing a lot of business with the United States in any case.

I mean, how effective is a sanction on a Chinese company that's hacking? And aren't there just a million more of them?

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, I think sanctions, we probably need to sing with what level the sanctions are and who's targeted. So sanctions at the. I totally agree. At the firm level and we've indicted individuals before, you know, those are not effective.

Right. As you said, those companies don't do business with the United States or they can just create a front company, which they do all the time. If you're an individual hacker, you know, as long as you're not dumb. Sometimes they are dumb, but as long as you're not dumb and travel to Thailand or the Czech Republic and then get arrested there, you're not ever gonna see the inside of a US court.

So that doesn't seem to do very much. It doesn't deter it. It also serves some purpose in kind of letting other countries know what we think is bad action so they can hopefully also do the same thing and calls them out and warns other countries as well. There could be an argument that maybe we should be sanctioning higher.

Right, at a higher level until we be figure out who's ordering the attacks or who's immediately benefiting. And the example that we could look at is that if we go back to the Obama administration where we did sign this agreement with the Chinese about cyber enabled espionage.

>> Elizabeth Economy: That was economic espionage.

>> Adam Segal: Economic espionage.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Particular

>> Adam Segal: Part of the way we probably brought the Chinese to the table was there were leaks that the US Was considering sanctioning somebody very, very high up about. And who's benefiting from these leaks, from these hacks?

>> Elizabeth Economy: In an economic context.

>> Adam Segal: In an economic context, right.

>> Elizabeth Economy: They're financially from this.

>> Adam Segal: Yes, yeah.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Right, that does seem like an easier use case.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah.

>> Elizabeth Economy: But what about like our own capabilities? Is there an argument to be made that we should basically do unto others as others do unto you, that we should demonstrate our own cyber offensive capabilities and perhaps that would be a greater det. Deterrent?

>> Adam Segal: So I think we have to distinguish between what types of operations, because political military operations, spying. The US does that, right? And so it's hard to call out China for that when we do it our do it ourselves. So that's on us to defend ourselves better.

There is possibly a way to disrupt Chinese operations. And the Biden administration cyber strategy from the Defense Department, from the Pentagon talks about defending forward, so preventing attacks before they ever get to U.S. networks. Which means, you know, disrupting them in third countries or possibly even disrupting them on Chinese networks we don't know a lot about.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Just so I'm clear, does that require knowing the source of the attack, the likely source of the attack? So, we have some sense of who the bad actors are in China, and we just get into their system basically and disrupt them before they.

>> Adam Segal: Essentially, yes, exactly.

So, we're probably sitting on their systems and seeing what they're doing and we choose to disrupt it before they can ever launch it.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay.

>> Adam Segal: So the only public examples we have of this are from the. Against Russia, not against China.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay.

>> Adam Segal: So like we took down the, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, which was doing, you know, disinformation operations on, you know, US platforms, social media platforms.

We took down some of their infrastructure and in some cases we actually knew the individual operators and sent them text messages saying, we know you're doing this, stop it. So,

>> Elizabeth Economy: I wonder what they thought when they got those messages.

>> Adam Segal: They probably thought it was pretty funny.

But there's no public reporting about what that would mean for China. So you would want to disrupt it right now on pre positioning and critical infrastructure, there has been some argument that maybe we can come to some types of agreements with the Chinese. Right, about what types of attacks are considered valid.

And the Chinese did sign off. There's a, there's discussions in the U.N. It's, it's through a group called the Group of Government Experts. And they came up with a certain set of norms about how states should behave in cyberspace and China signed that agreement. But the norm is not very constraining.

The norm around critical infrastructure says non-interference on critical infrastructure during peace time.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay?

>> Adam Segal: Right, so interference is a pretty high bar. So the Chinese might be able to argue that. Well, yeah, we were on it, but we didn't interfere with it. And in fact, you can see, you can see when US government officials call China out for assault typhoon, sorry for Volt typhoon, they say it's escalatory and dangerous.

They don't say it broke any norms.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Got it, okay?

>> Adam Segal: So?

>> Elizabeth Economy: So It's a little bit like a zone activity in the digital space.

>> Adam Segal: Exactly. And so again, there may be some, there have been attempts before trying to talk to the Chinese about can we talk about some types of critical infrastructure that should be off limits or, or.

But there's no doubt that the US does the same thing and lets the, and lets the Chinese know in, in some way.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, the Chinese just don't publicize it the way that we do. Okay, so you mentioned Russia, and I'm really interested. You know, we've heard, you know, Russia is a bad actor in this space.

Iran, North Korea, you know, are they all the same in terms of how they approach this? Are they different? Do they work together? You think they're learning from each other?

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, so there's a great quote from Rob Joyce, who used to be at the NSA, and he used to say that Russia is like a hurricane and China is climate change.

Right, so we see lot, you know, especially around Ukraine, we see, see lots of destructive, disruptive attacks from Russia. We've seen Russia use it in a military conflict which we've never, you know, which we haven't seen before. We see lots of Russian based ransomware gangs, right? That, you know, do attacks against, you know, US Hospitals and schools and things.

But those are criminal gangs that the Russians turn a blind eye to, to. And China is kind of more disciplined and also has a longer game, right? Because China has global technologies and Russia no longer has any global technology. Iranians less sophisticated, but also more willing to take risks.

North Koreans have still considered, still continue doing espionage, and you know, trying to collect information, but have really focused on theft of cryptocurrencies to fund the regime and to fund the missile programs. So the North Koreans are really, really focused on raising money. Now there, there doesn't seem to be, there's definitely interaction, but they don't do operations together, right?

In the sense of we have to remember that these are usually the spy agencies that conduct these operations and spy agencies don't trust each other. And also it's good to remember that even after China and Russia signed what was, many people said was a no hacking agreement, that neither side would hack each other.

Weeks later, both sides reported that the other side was hacking each other.

>> Elizabeth Economy: That's hilarious.

>> Adam Segal: So that there's probably not a lot of cooperation on that level. They do seem to be learning from each other around disinformation and online operations. So the Chinese, what the Chinese do on Facebook and X, and other things looks more like what the Russians do than it used to, right?

Before, the Chinese were mostly about trumpeting, you know, CCP success and what Xi Jinping did. And now they're much more willing to press on socially divisive issues and try to, you know, get Americans to yell at each other like the Russians do, right?

>> Elizabeth Economy: We saw some of that on January 6th, I think, right?

>> Adam Segal: Exactly.

>> Elizabeth Economy: And the Chinese were in the mix during that time.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, and there's definitely technological cooperation. So, you know, Huawei in particular has done a lot of work in Russia that the Russians learned and lot a lot of technologies to help control the Internet. So that also has some defensive, and security perspective.

North Korean actors sometimes operate from inside of China. There was probably some training in the early days, but probably not anymore. So there's probably a little bit on the margins, but not all that important to anybody's practices.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, so it's not a collective effort on the part of these sort of four disruptive actors and, you know, coordinated and not.

>> Adam Segal: On cyberattacks.

>> Elizabeth Economy: How are we going to go after the United States? And it's.

>> Adam Segal: I mean, just to use other example from just this area about not wanting to share, like, it took the US A long time. To give NATO some sense of its capabilities in this space.

They were so tightly held that NATO used to complain all the time, like, we have no idea what you're capable of and what you're doing. We probably shared more closely with GCHQ and the Brits, but It s because it's so tightly controlled, intelligence countries don't like to share it.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Right. And besides, some of it we probably are using to learn about even what our allies and partners are doing sometimes. Okay, so let's tie this up and talk a little bit about the strategy that you wrote for sort of State Department, for the Biden administration that does deal with our allies and partners and how we should work together.

Because presumably we are not the only ones facing these kinds of attacks from China. Others are as well. So what is your strategy? What is it that you are seeking to accomplish with the strategy? Did you bring allies and partners in even as you were drafting it? A little bit about what this was all about.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, so the policy was broader than just the cyber things we were talking about. It was both cyber and digital. We had this big framing idea of digital solidarity, which is the idea that the US Cannot go it alone. We're made better off cooperating with our allies very closely on a whole range of issues.

And in fact, we're made better off when their economies are innovative. So it's not great if the top 10 AI companies are all American and nobody has anything else. We want the French, we want the Brits, we want the Australians to also have really robust AI systems. So that was kind of the big overall framing of it.

As you mentioned, alliances and partnerships were a huge part of the strategy. When I was writing the strategy, I socialized early versions of it with once in Singapore, so with kind of East Asian, Southeast Asian friends and partners, and then once in Europe to get kind of their input and feedback on it.

And for the most part, not surprisingly, they were pretty receptive to it. You know, the digital solidarity framing was in contrast to digital sovereignty. Right. And cyber sovereignty, which are the views that the Russians and Chinese promote about, you know, you have to localize data, you have to control the Internet.

And so we were arguing against that, that, you know, we're all made better off by flows, trusted flows between our partners. And then, of course, we were affirming the. The rights, respecting democratic usage of these technologies as opposed to strengthening surveillance and repression of minority groups.

>> Elizabeth Economy: And so once the strategy was written, just so that everybody listening can understand, what then happens with that?

Is that then, you know, do other countries sign on to it or is it's not a treaty or an agreement, but how do you move forward with something like this?

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, I mean, it's really right. If you think of any strategy, it has three audiences, as you said, international, so other countries can know what we're going to do.

And we tried to highlight what our priorities were. And then after I left there was an implementation strategy that was kind of put in place that signaled some of the things that were most important to Ambassador Fick and the Bureau. And there were, there were, you know, publicly they discussed two or three things had to do about AI governance, had to do about trusted infrastructure and, and some developing partners.

There's the internal audience. Right. So just the US government, because there hadn't been a US government wide cyber strategy for over 12 years. And so this was just an attempt to get everybody kind of agree to what do we think we're accomplishing and make sure we're all kind of going in the same direction.

So, you know, the DoD had a cyber strategy. After I left USAID released one. CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, didn't have a strategy, but they had a framework. It was international. So this was an attempt to try to get everybody on the same page about it.

And then, finally, kind of the domestic audiences so people will know what it is the US is trying to accomplish. So really after the strategy came out, the hope was, yeah, we're all going to push on these broad ideas. And as I said, there were three or four priorities for the last strategy came out in June of 2024.

So there was really only six months to kind of to push it forward. But as I said, there was a lot of push on AI governance. There had been some great work that had happened around counter ransomware and helping our partners in Costa Rica in particular respond to that.

And could we build on that and help other countries? And then a lot of work around trusted infrastructure.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Yeah, and hopefully some of that at least on the trusted infrastructure and maybe even the counter ransomware type of work can continue in the Trump administration, even if on the AI governance there may be some differences of, of, of opinion and outlook.

>> Adam Segal: Look, they're not gonna keep digital solidarity and the AI governance stuff definitely they're not going to keep. But yes, I think kind of counter ransomware initiative they definitely should keep. In fact, it's also a success story because other countries have kind of taken the lead. So there's like four different verticals about, you know, law enforcement international and other countries have taken the lead there.

 

So it's become an increasingly kind of lighter lift for NSC and then state to direct it, and so, we definitely should continue participating and supporting. I think the language around trusted infrastructure in particular. I mean, we'll have to wait to see after the 90 day review of all foreign financial aid.

But the, the last year I was there, in the last year of the Bureau, they received $50 million from Congress for a cyber and digital and related technologies fund. So that was being used to support countries that were attacked. It was being supported, used to make arguments about why you shouldn't use Chinese infrastructure and things like that.

And sorry, my sense is that Secretary Rubio is totally onboard with that and will want to use that.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Yeah, and even if you think back to the first Trump administration, I mean they really did start the work on the clean networks, trusted networks, which was I think continued and built up by the Biden administration.

But at least in the first Trump administration, I think there was, you know, definitely an effort to get out, especially through, you know, our allies and partners, but other emerging middle income economies and talk to them and try to persuade them, you know, not to use Chinese technology in their infrastructure.

So hopefully that element will, you know, continue. Okay, so always finish up with five quick questions. So here we go. What is your must read book or article on China?

>> Adam Segal: So the article is so very cyber focused, but it's called From Vegas to Chengdu and it's all about kind of hacking contests.

And how China is very much tapping into the energy of what used to be kind of information security researchers, private hackers, and funneling that into China's offensive capabilities. It comes out of Zurich, the Center for Security Studies. The author is Eugenio Ben Benicassa. It's a really great study of, at a very kind of low in the weeds level, but lots of insight.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Sounds really interesting and also somewhat terrifying, okay. [LAUGll H] all right what you spent, your time in Washington at the State Department. What do you miss most and least about your time there?

>> Adam Segal: So, I mean, it was a very exciting time to be in State. The Cyber and Digital Bureau was a year old when I joined, so there was just a huge amount of energy and excitement about what we were doing.

You could tell, other people in the building wanted to be at the Bureau and work in the Bureau. Ambassador Fick, was a new leader and had a great energy about it. And I know we're at a time where, there's all this questioning about the competency of federal government officials.

But the people I worked with were some of them were political appointees, some of them were short term, some of them had been in the Bureau for 15, 20 years. But working on undersea cables for 15 years and just were so incredibly knowledgeable and dedicated to the mission.

And so I missed the colleagues and people working with that.

>> Elizabeth Economy: And what don't you miss?

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, I don't miss the bureaucracy. So, both on the kind of I went to DC once a month because I was still living in New York. Just trying to travel is for an organization that does foreign policy and travels everywhere it's just mind-numbingly complicated and just blows your mind.

And I had to produce a document for the interagency. So, dealing with 18 other agencies and then inside the agencies, 15 or 20 other people giving me their comments. And at some point I just couldn't even remember why we were arguing about a word that no longer had any meaningful difference.

But I don't miss that.

>> Elizabeth Economy: I can relate to that. Anything you wish, that the US had done differently with regard to China when you were in office. So basically looking at Biden administration policy and thinking I wish we would have done this, and for whatever reason, we just didn't get that done.

>> Adam Segal: So I think it's a critique of the strategy as well. And it started to happen at the end, but I think it's actually engagement with China on these issues, right? We didn't after certainly after the spy balloon. But even before then, there was a lot of kind of questioning about, well, what do we gain from talking with the Chinese about these things?

And cyber conversations have never gone well. And there are definitely reasons why we want to think about what we're getting out of it. But we definitely stepped back for the majority of my time there and certainly for the Biden administration of saying we're not going to directly engage with the Chinese on cyber things, we're gonna do it other ways. And I think if we were to do it again, we probably should have started earlier.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Started earlier with the strategy.

>> Adam Segal: Well, certainly should have started earlier with the strategy, but should it also because as I.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Sort of communicating with.

>> Adam Segal: Communicating after I left. Yeah, so, there was that discussion on AI governance with the Chinese that happened and there were Ambassador Blinken brought up cyber in one of his last meetings.

And Ambassador Fick accompanied Secretary Blinken on that trip. And there were discussions that were supposed to go forward, so that would have probably been better to do earlier.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Right, yes I think the overall, the Biden administration spent close to three years on the competition side and really only on the last year or so began to do the managing of the competition.

What China issue do you think we don't know enough about? Maybe it's your own.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, I mean, so I was thinking kind of in my own field, but I think it's true, across the board, which is, we just have such bad understanding of how information flows. And how different parts of the organization, different parts of the Chinese government speak to each other and understand what the other side is doing.

And so when I read the documents from the Chinese Foreign Ministry about what they're trying to accomplish in cyber, I don't have any idea about. Did the PLA have any input into this? Did they talk to the PLA? And so I know with the international strategy, I know the DOD had it input.

I went to the DoD three times to talk to them and they commented on the document and just. And that would help understand what China's which Chinese positions we should take more seriously and which ones, are kind of. But I think that's a problem across the field for all of us is between limited access, centralization of control, and all the other things.

Just don't have much insight into that.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, last one. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely do you think we are to see a breakthrough in US China relations in the next. Let's just say in the course of the Trump administration.

>> Adam Segal: And so one being very likely or?

>> Elizabeth Economy: Ten being very likely one being.

>> Adam Segal: Very likely and a breakthrough means.

>> Elizabeth Economy: I would say, breakthrough.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Let's assume for the sake of argument, we don't mean a breakthrough in terms of a war on Taiwan, a breakthrough in terms of a positive stabilization improvement in the relationship that benefits U.S. interests.

>> Adam Segal: Yeah, I'm gonna say pretty low. I'm gonna say three.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Great, I think you've come in the highest of anybody I know. So, okay.

>> Adam Segal: Trying to be the less pessimistic least pessimistic.

>> Elizabeth Economy: Okay, so on that note of subdued optimism, let me thank you, Adam, for a great conversation on a often very complex, complicated topic.

I think you all helped all of us to understand it better. I know the US Government is poor for not having you in it, but the outside world is richer. And thank you for sharing your insights with us.

>> Adam Segal: Thanks so much for having me on.

>> Elizabeth Economy: So if you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more recent discourse and debate on China, I encourage you to subscribe to China Considered via The Hoover Institution, YouTube channel or podcast platform of your choice.

In our next program, we'll be talking about what the Chinese economy is looking like on the ground with Leland Miller, founder and CEO of China Beige Book.