FCC President Keith Richburg speaks to Fareed Zakaria via Zoom.

The relationship between the United States and China is set to define the global order for decades to come, and both countries will emerge strongly from the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways, said journalist and author Fareed Zakaria in a Zoom webinar hosted by the FCC.

“You’re going to be thinking about America’s relationship to China and China’s relationship to America, and everything will be read through that prism,” Zakaria said. “How do you maintain that open system while having this rivalry? That’s the great challenge for both the United States and China.”

Though he said that China will of course benefit from the pandemic due to its “vaccine diplomacy” efforts and by virtue of being the world’s second-richest economy, Zakaria, who hosts Fareed Zakaria GPS for CNN Worldwide and is a columnist for The Washington Post, was quick to argue that the U.S. will remain richer and more powerful for a long time to come.

“The United States has 59 treaty allies, China has one: North Korea. The United States has 800 bases around the world, China has three,” Zakaria said. “The truth is China is in a geographically very complicated place where as it rises, it annoys the hell out of its neighbours: India, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Australia.”

Zakaria, whose mother Fatima, died recently of complications caused by COVID-19, made the appearance to discuss his most recent book, Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. 

He spoke to FCC President Keith Richburg about how countries around the world have fared during the pandemic, and he credited smart governments and early intervention for staving off serious public health crises in various nations. Zakaria also singled out Taiwan’s government for acting early, aggressively and intelligently in response to COVID-19 by quickly identifying and quarantining infected and potentially infected people. 

“What’s remarkable is that Taiwan was able to get through this crisis with 10 COVID deaths with a population of 22 million and, much more importantly, not a single day’s lockdown,” Zakaria said. “Just to give you a comparison, Taiwan has 22 million people, New York State has 20 million people. New York State is at 40,000 deaths, Taiwan is at 10.”

Though he said Hong Kong has strong, competent institutions like Taiwan, he described the city as a “very peculiar, unique case” with regard to pandemic management and the vaccine rollout. He pointed to relations between Hong Kong and China as well as “Hong Kong people’s distrust of Carrie Lam’s government” as complicating factors. 

In his book, Zakaria elaborates on different ways the world is likely to change after the pandemic is over, and during the talk he said that where people choose to live and how they choose to work will shift significantly, with more people moving from big cities to suburban areas and smaller cities. 

“You will view offices as places where you meet, gather, plan, congregate, but you don’t have to do solo work there and if you do, you’ll get a cubicle where you will plug in” Zakaria said. “Other than C-suite executives, the idea of a dedicated office that you have 24/7 with your family photographs and memorabilia, that I think is a relic of the past.”

Despite many countries turning inward during the pandemic, Zakaria predicted that globalisation will continue, albeit in a slower, more thoughtful way. He also described the world as being in a state of “new class warfare” with democracy under threat as autocrats exploit the growing divide between urban, educated populations and their rural, less educated counterparts. 

“The autocrats have gotten very clever over the last 15 years, and they have figured out how to use democracy to subvert democracy,” Zakaria said. 

In spite of the technological advances that have made remote work and social interaction possible during the pandemic, Zakaria pointed to the shortcomings of remote education as a reminder that we are human and can’t interact solely on Zoom. 

“We will want to actually gather physically and get the social connection that comes from actually being in the presence of people and in groups and having accidental conversations and serendipitous meetings.”

Watch the full discussion:

Eric Wishart (left) and Marianna Spring (right)

Misinformation and conspiracy theories may be considered problems that primarily affect social media and online discourse, but as BBC specialist disinformation reporter Marianna Spring explained in a Zoom talk hosted by the FCC, the negative consequences of viral falsehoods spill over into real life all too often. 

“I’m sure from watching what happened on the 6th of January, now the world has a better understanding of how online conspiracies and extremist movements can inspire real-world violence and cause serious harm,” Spring said, referring to the U.S. Capitol insurrection.

Describing the pandemic as a perfect opportunity for spreading misinformation about health and vaccines, Spring spoke about interviewing people who have lost loved ones due to dissemination about falsehoods related to the coronavirus. She added that online conspiracy theories have had other nefarious effects on people’s lives.

“There are people I’ve spoken to who’ve had relationships destroyed, friendships ruined, marriages ended because of the impact that these conspiracy theories can have and the extent to which they can radicalise people,” Spring told FCC First Vice President Eric Wishart, who moderated the discussion. 

Spring, who is featured in Forbes’ just-released 30 Under 30 list, is the BBC’s first specialist reporter focusing on disinformation. Her work humanises the cost of misinformation and the impact of conspiracy theories such as QAnon, an American conspiracy network which Spring said has gone global by tapping into different communities’ concerns and fears. 

As Spring explained during the talk, one of the consequences of her work has been online violence, including a torrent of messages and posts filled with misogynistic language. She also described the surreal experience of her first QAnon “pile-on”: she was eating pizza and having a pint with a friend and started receiving messages in which strangers called her a Satanic paedophile who kills children and eats babies, among other things. 

“The more reporting I do, the more abuse that I receive,” Spring said, noting that she had recently received threats which she had to escalate to the police. “There have been some quite scary incidents involving my personal safety.”

In spite of these personal safety issues, Spring said she was grateful for her job and for what she’s learned so far, including the importance of reporting with empathy. 

“I think it’s really important to try and understand why people fall victim to online conspiracy theories to better realise the structural problems,” she said, “whether that’s to do with social media sites, governments, or with other things that have led us to this point.”

In doing so, Spring said she was offering something that pure debunking of falsehoods cannot provide. 

“Fact-checking alone is not enough and what I do complements that,” Spring said. “I try and put a human face to the impact that online conspiracies have and the harm they can cause, and I hope in that way, I engage perhaps people who wouldn’t traditionally turn to fact-checking.”

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FCC President Keith Richburg (left) and Ambassador Christopher Robert Hill (right)

The United States needs to be proactive in finding ways to communicate and collaborate more closely with China rather than pursuing a policy of decoupling, said Ambassador Christopher Robert Hill, a former career diplomat, in a talk hosted by the FCC. 

“I do believe that we need to find patterns of cooperation with China,” Hill said. “I think China is the number one foreign policy issue that this administration has to deal with, and with the understanding that we can no more change China than China can change us.”

The former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International Public Policy, spoke on a range of topics relating to the U.S.-China relationship including Taiwan, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, trade agreements and the South China Sea.

Ambassador Hill said that he didn’t think the possibility of a military conflict in the region was imminent or even likely, though he acknowledged the possibility for surprises. “If you look through history at various wars and conflicts, accidents are often among the causes,” he told FCC President Keith Richburg during the talk.

One crucial area of cooperation for the two countries to focus on is North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, said Hill, who was the head of the U.S. delegation to the Six Party Talks. 

“I think we need to see if we can come to an understanding with the Chinese that we need to get North Korea to abandon these weapons,” Hill said, adding that the key task at hand was to make the case that the country would have a better future without nuclear weapons. 

He also said that Pyongyang’s ultimate goal is to remove the American presence in South Korea.

“I think the North Koreans have the kind of vague notion that if they can just get the U.S. troops off the Korean Peninsula, somehow things will go more their way,” Hill said. “They need to be disabused of that in a big hurry.”

Commenting on the situation in Myanmar, Ambassador Hill described it as “an extremely frustrating issue” and called for multilateral cooperation to address the country’s crisis following the recent military coup. 

“We need a lot of discussions in the region including with India and China and, of course, our ASEAN partners,” Hill said. 

“We need Myanmar to understand that this is leading nowhere and no one supports them in the direction they’re going.”

Watch the full event: