China Decode: What Trump’s War With Iran Means for China and Global Oil

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So why not you? Try Odo for free at odo.com/odo.com/odo.com Before we start today's episode, a quick note about another show in the Prophecy Media World, raging moderates, with Scott Galaway and Jessica Tullov, is now five days a week with new episodes coming every week day evening.

It's a show that is very helpful for making sense of US politics right now. If you're not already subscribed, you definitely want to check it out. Find raging moderates on YouTube as well as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else. Now here's the show. I don't see this as primarily motivated by the US wanting to take on China, but I really

do think that it's time to ask the question, "Is what people a few years ago were calling the new Cold War between the US and China now warming up?" And if so, then we're in a very, very different world from the one that we've all been used to.

“Welcome to China decored "I'm Alice Hen."”

And I'm James King. In today's episode of China decode, where discussing how China is responding after Trump attacked Iran, China prepares to lock in its next five-year economic battle plan, and China's electric vehicle safety reckoning after fatal crash.

That's all coming up, but first, let's do a quick check-in with how the Chinese markets

are starting the week. On Monday, investors rushed to respond to the situation in Iran. Despite this, the Shanghai Asia Index rose about 0.5%. The Hang Sang H-Shet Index, on the other hand, fell almost 3% before recovering slightly. The largest cell-off since the liberation-day tariff announcement last April.

In fact, 76 docks in the 88 member Hang Sang Index closed down the day. Oil companies were obvious winners, China National Offshore Oil Corporation closed up more than 5% and Petro China more than 4%. All right, let's get right into it. As the Middle East teaches after the killing of alai kameni, China is no longer just

quietly watching. It's open the condemning Washington and positioning itself for what comes next. Beijing blasted the U.S. and Israel for what it called the, quote-unquote, blatant killing of a sovereign leader. With foreign minister Wang Yi, warning the region could be pushed into a dangerous

abyss, Russia's Vladimir Putin echoed that language, calling the strike a violation of international law, just as Taran installs a temporary leadership council and the Iranian

revolutionary guard council launches retaliatory tax across the region.

Meanwhile, three U.S. service members aded oil shipments are disrupted and the state of hummus, a choke point for roughly a third of China's crude imports is suddenly at risk.

This is obviously come up in the last few days.

“China actually has been pretty slow and I think kind of restrained in its language if”

I compare this to Venezuela as a direct analogy and it hasn't really condemned the strikes as strongly as I expected, although in the last 24 hours we've seen a bit of a change, especially with the killing of company. Now China is calling for a ceasefire. There is obviously the oil strategic question at risk, you know, about 15% of seaborn crude,

going to China comes from Iran, and Chinese are definitely worried about the state of hummus. What is China's positioning on this issue and why do you think they haven't really been strong in their language from the get go in terms of condemning Israel and the U.S.? Great question, Alice. I think there's a couple of really big issues here. One is the

one that you've just mentioned, how is China responding, how do we assess its reaction? And the other question is probably much bigger, a much more difficult to answer.

“And that is, is the United States now in some kind of a proxy war with China?”

I know that sounds really dire, maybe this is overly sensational, but when you consider recent history, and I mean, very recent history, the U.S. attack on Venezuela in January with which China had deep commercial diplomatic and security ties.

And now we have the attack on Iran, a country with which China has a crucial oil import

arrangement and deep investment and a so-called comprehensive strategic partnership. Then, of course, there's Ukraine, China and the U.S. are on different sides of that conflict. China is a staunch ally of Russia and the U.S. and Europe are supporting Ukraine. And in addition, we've seen the government of Panama recently take back control of two ports at either end of that Panama Canal that were operated by a Hong Kong Chinese company.

And that was after President Trump said that he was taking back the canal. And now, of course, we've got Cuba potentially in the future. Donald Trump said that the U.S. wanted to have a quote, "friendly takeover of Cuba." China also has deep ties with Cuba. So I really do think there is a logical and viable question to ask, which is this issue

of is the U.S. now in a kind of proxy war with China? The U.S. is targeting several of China's key allies in the world.

And, you know, my first kind of tentative reflection on this would be that we probably should

see the action by the U.S. on Iran as an isolated or as an issue that the U.S. took because of specific conditions in Iran, rather than its prime motivation being opposing China. And I think the same might be true with Venezuela as well. I don't see this as primarily motivated by the U.S. wanting to take on China.

I see this as motivated in the first instance by issues that the U.S. has with these individual countries. I really do think that it's time to ask the question, "Is what people of few years ago were calling the new Cold War between the U.S. and China now warming up? Has it got the potential to warm up?"

And if so, then we're in a very, very different world from the one that we've all been used to.

“So, I think the first question is the one that you have raised, Alice?”

How is China reacting?

To me, the first issue here is whether or not the summit meeting at the end of the month,

which is planned between China's President, Xi Jinping, and President Trump, will go ahead or not. Clearly this has been a massive blow to China's sense of where the U.S. is. And I just wonder whether given the fact that, as you mentioned, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi just said that it was "unacceptable" to openly kill the leader of a sovereign

country and institute regime change. Okay, so if it's unacceptable, then how is it acceptable to have a summit between China's leader and the U.S. leader at the end of this month? That's my first question. I really think that that summit meeting is now potentially in jeopardy.

We'll have to watch and see what's happening. The other thing I think about China's reaction is that there must be reflection in China that this, although it hits China really badly for several of the reasons that you've given.

The situation in the streets of Hormuz is another one.

But there is potentially an upside to China here. And that is simply that given that the U.S. has shown that it is prepared to intervene militarily without the backing of law, perhaps this is an opportunity for China to show itself to the world yet again as the more stable superpower. This is something that we might not see the effects of for quite some time.

But I do think that that is a key question that we should also bear in mind. What's your sense of how this is going to play out, whether this plays to China more or to the U.S. more, whether this really does inflict kind of even more severe pain into the U.S.-China relationship?

Well, I love that you talked about proxy wars.

I'm a Cold War historian by training.

“So I think a lot in terms of the Cold War analogies.”

I completely agree with you, James. I think Ukraine is more natural analogy with parallels to the Vietnam War and even the Korean War where you do see these two different camps the West and the Soviet Union really being at cross purposes leading to an impasse, which was in the case of both Korea and Vietnam for a period of time.

It seems like we're in the midst of that in the Ukraine Russia conflict as well. I do agree that Iran is in Sui-Generes Iran is, I think, an example of what we've seen

in Trump 2.0 whereby the hawkish elements of the Trump administration

headsets rubio, for instance, are seeing this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go all out on these rogue regimes and to do the kind of regime change or even alteration that they would have liked to have done a fair while ago.

“And so I think this opportunity that's opened up with a weakened Iran, not just weakened by sanctions,”

but also weakened by, I think, it's increased tensions with the Gulf States, for instance, has given them a window of opportunity certainly, BB Netanyahu the Israeli Prime Minister's very aggressive stance on really trying to annihilate the Iranian Republic as well as its nuclear program. Has again given, I think, more ammunition, so to speak metaphorically and literally,

two Washington, two achieve this. I think it was very clear at least from our own internal assessment that this was going to happen at some point in Q1 or Q2. It was a matter of time and likely during Ramadan, remember, it's a Ramadan right now, and and certainly BB wants to do this on his watch because Iran is one of the key strategic

adversaries of his time. I will say that I was reading a couple of articles from China Middle East experts on this. And one, two of them were pretty interesting to me, which will tie back to your point about the US-China relationship. One was written by the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, which is a known

think-tank in Shanghai, and in this article by Genial Xiang, he talks about the fact that it's really Israel that it's in the driving seat when it comes to the air strikes and bombings of Iran, and America is driven by quote unquote, "overconfidence from Venezuela." And certainly this is driven what we've seen in the last 48 hours or more. And there's another article by a professor at the China University of Hong Kong in which he

likens what's happening in the Middle East with Israel acting as the fodder, as the Kindle, to the conflict in the Middle East, to what he perceives as a future risk, which is Japan really emboldening America to be more involved in East Asia. And I link this back to the US-China relationship because what I've seen is a lot of conservation amongst Chinese scholars in the last couple weeks, especially with Takahichi,

the Japanese Prime Minister's election landslide victory, that Japan is going to double down on militarizing, on reducing the lead times to getting nuclear arms and deployment. And that worries the Chinese because they think that a more hawkish Takahichi could get Trump and he's team more interested in being combative on China on the Taiwan issue. Now, I'm not sure if I necessarily agree with that logic, but it's interesting to me that

they, the Chinese scholars are joining the dots to bring this back to the US-China relationship and whether or not we get a Trump-cheese summit in Beijing. I was originally optimistic that we would get this. I mean, there wasn't announcement a couple weeks ago that the US President Donald Trump is going to China from March 31 to April 2. I would take the bet that that may get delayed. The Chinese, as you know, James, they don't like instability in the lead-up to

“negotiations. So if we see this escalate even further, I think now especially with the assassination”

of the Supreme Leader, it's, I think, my own high probability outcome that we see maybe a delay

in the bud and make sure that we don't see an escalation ladder in trade and technology in other

areas, because they understand that Trump's motors operandi right now is to be seen to be making peace and having stability in the US-China relationship. I look at what's happening in the Middle East

“and when I put it in the Chinese policy makers' aperture, I think they infer from that look.”

We don't want to rock the boat in the relationship with the US right now because it's a volatile situation. And certainly the Americans under Trump are proven that they're more willing to risk blood and treasure in foreign campaigns. So why don't we continue to pretend to talk, continue to offer some symbolic concessions without really offering anything structural? That I think will be the equilibrium strategy from China's vantage point for the coming months. But I certainly

feel in reading some of the statements from Wang Yi and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson that they were taken aback by this. There's a statement from the press conference of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson saying that China was not notified beforehand. So I think that this notified of the attack on Iran. So I think this is really taken China aback and it will have material implications on whether or not we get a summit. My own feeling

is that that gets delayed. But to walk it back again to the China Iran relationship, a lot of people are saying that this is a big deal for China. China is obviously a massive importer of Iranian

“crude. I would take the opposing view. I think that it's far more important the relationship”

with Russia. And we actually have seen in the last month or so that China has been building a contingency plan by building a stockpile of crude oil source from Russia and Saudi that Gulf states rather than Iran. But certainly the short term if we see oil spike oil futures, that is obviously going to put price pressures on Chinese corporates. And certainly we have seen an 11 percent spike on Sunday of WTI to $75 a barrel. My own sense is that it probably goes up further

because there's even more risk premiere being attached to the strain of hormones if that actually gets blocked. So we're far from the edge of the cliff. I think there's still a long ways to go in terms of the escalation. But my own sense is that China is going to play a wait and see game to see how far the US and Israel go in really launching a regime change. Now we can go into the specifics, but Iran seems different from Venezuela seems different from Iraq and Syria where there is a

deeper state at play. So decapitation of even the supreme leader doesn't mean regime alteration or regime change overnight. It's actually quite, I would say, anti-fragile in that respect. So we'll have to see what comes in the next week or so when we expect an escalation in strikes from Israel

“and the US over Iran. Absolutely, and I think this really shows up China's economic state craft”

or the limitations of that economic state craft. I mean, if you look over the last 10, 20 years, effectively a great deal of China's foreign policy has been invested in getting close to countries that are rivals of the United States and then pouring billions and billions of dollars into those countries and striking all kinds of commercial arrangements with them. And now this policy, I would say, is blowing up in China's face. If we just have a look at the constituent

parts of China's commercial relationship with Iran, it really is quite staggering. Just to give

you one big picture number, there was a 25 year 400 billion US dollar partnership pact that was

inked in 2021 between China and Iran. And that facilitates all kinds of things, imports from Iran, all kinds of other aspects of the relationship. China purchases about 80% of Iran's oil, oil exports, that is. So that is a huge number you've just mentioned. It's about 13% of China's total seaborn oil imports. In terms of investments under what's called the Belt and Road Initiative, that's China's big way of embracing the global South by pouring billions and billions of

US dollars into global South countries. China is deeply involved. It has built much of Iran's railway infrastructure projects such as the rail between Tehran and Mashad Tehran and Habidan.

And also a 2.1 billion US dollar project upgrade a big oil refinery at Habidan.

Chinese telecommunications companies have built much of the telecommunications backbone in Iran. And it goes on and on and on. There are solar power projects, other renewable energy projects that have been invested in by Chinese companies in Iran. So if the whole Iranian China relationship goes south and we don't know if that's going to be the case at the moment,

“China stands to lose a great deal. And I think it raises a fundamental question”

as to the sustainability of China's economic state craft. In particular, in terms of its coating of US rivals in the global South. Support for the show comes from net sweet. Every business is asking the same question. How do we make AI work for us? The possibilities are endless and guessing is too risky. But sitting on the sidelines is not an option because one thing is almost certain. Your competitors are already making their move.

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ads, spend a fall online ad network. Seriously, all of them. It's been $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com/scot. That's linkedin.com/scot. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. This week, China is preparing to formally adopt its 15th five-year plan during the

2022 sessions. The country's most important annual political gathering, setting the blueprint for

the next half decade of economic and technological strategy. After navigating COVID disruptions and a renewed trade standoff with Washington, Beijing is now signaling a sharper focus on resilience, supply chain security and an aggressive push into artificial intelligence and advanced technologies. James, let's get right into it. This five-year plan is going to be huge, and I think

this five-year plan will really set up China to reduce dependence on the US? Because certainly

when I look to the last five-year plan, there was some talk about chokepoint industries, which I think will come up again, leveraging those industries. But also, the last five-year plan was very much focused on what was then called the three news. So electric vehicles, battery, solar panels. What do you think will be the key technological points of focus and strategic areas of interest

“in this next five-year plan? Yeah, I mean, I think it's quite fitting in a way that we're talking”

about the new five-year plan for China after the US attack on Iran, because that will have convinced the Chinese leadership yet again that economic self-reliance and self-reliance in every other way is absolutely the policy that China should be pursuing. And so I expect that when Xi Jinping stands up and gives his speech at the National People's Congress later on this week, there will be louder applause when he mentions the word self-reliance. Let's see if I'm right about

that. So I think that the main focus of this National People's Congress and the 15th five-year plan, which will be adopted at it, will be achieving breakthroughs in core technologies to reduce dependence on Western technology, specifically in areas such as AI, as you've mentioned, Alice, also semiconductors, also quantum computing, six G telecoms, aerospace, bio-manufacturing,

new materials, robotics, the list goes on and on and on. But it's crucial to recognize that the

whole impetus behind this now, not maybe the whole, but the largely the big impetus behind this

“is China's race for self-reliance. And I think when we talk about AI, it's going to be a truly”

amazing National People's Congress. There's going to be so many details that come out if you're interested that will be really quite amazing. And I think when people talk about AI, often they're less than specific. They sort of talk about it in the abstract, but I just want to, I've just been doing a little bit of research on various AI products in China, and I just want to mention one of them to give people a sense of where China is, because China's approach to AI, and we'll see this in

the 15th five-year plan is what's called AI Plus. That means diffusing AI into so many different uses and apps within the economy in order to effectively animate the economy and to generate revenues for companies that use them. So I've got an example here, there's something called the Ali Baba Kwak AI Glasses. And you put them on, they're called a living eye. And as you've got them on, if you walk through your surroundings, they will alert you to the fact that there's a coffee shop over

here, with maybe a special offer or a matcha, or the road is blocked off over there, so you'd better go the other way around. Or it'll tell you something about football traffic. And all the time, if you need it, it'll translate for you in real time. So there will be a voice in your ear translating what a sign means. Let's say if you're looking at it in English, it'll translate it into Chinese or vice versa. And if you're looking at items in shops, these glasses can give you

immediate comparisons with prices of the same product on Talba, which is one of Ali Baba's online marketplaces. And these glasses, I mean, I'm not on commission, by the way, I'm not selling these glasses. Ali Baba, I have no commercial relationship with Ali Baba, but they sell for about 356 US dollars. And they're all animated by Ali Baba's key AI program, which is called Quen or Qwen. So I just wanted to be a little bit specific on that. The big headline number that'll come out

during the National People's Congress, when they mention AI and the 15th five year plan, is that China intends by 2030 for AI and AI devices to have a usage rate of over 90% in the Chinese economy.

Essentially, you know, creating an AI infrastructure for the first time. And then by 2035,

“the aim is for the Chinese economy to be completely transformed by AI. I think it's going to be”

really, really interesting, Ali. What have you been focused on in that regard? Well, I think that for viewers listening to understand the importance of five year plans,

five years. And oftentimes, they tend to actually outpace the targets, but it really helps the central government and local governments figure out what are the areas of strategic priority. And poor, a ton of resources through subsidies, through financing, through cheap loans, via banks, and policy banks to those sectors. So as we mentioned previously, James, in the past, when turbine solar panels, EVs, batteries really benefited from that kind of whole of government

“approach embedded in five year plans. So it can't be understated how important this next five”

year plan is. I will also add to this that the things we need to be watching for this week when both the government work report and news of the five year plan come out is to what extent is the government putting its money where its mouth is in terms of supporting consumption and the service of sector. We've gotten a lot of talk in the run up to the central economic work conferences December and since then, about the need to boost consumption and provide more support for the

service of sector. I'll be watching and reading closely to see what's actually in the minutiae of the government work report to do that. There's talk about subsidies, consumer subsidies for the services sector, maybe potentially even further, you know, price reductions in certain sectors like health care and elderly care, again, to support services consumption. So I'll be watching that really closely and then related to Taiwan and the military dimension. I'll be

watching to see what is going to be the target in terms of military spending and the priorities for the PLA because we've just gotten an announcement in last week that more officials in the PLA top level officials have been ousted from the PLA. So it really feels like a hollowed out military right now within the party. So any indication, both in the government work report and elsewhere about what is going to be the strategic direction and financing of the military will also be

really interesting for the Taiwan and US trying military dimensions. So those are the other things

that I'm watching certainly these breakthrough technologies that we're mentioning AI Quantum which

is going to be huge as well, both in terms of data encryption and decryption, but also in terms

“of communication and sensing. These are going to be key areas where a lot of R&D, I think is”

going to be geared towards, and as we've talked previously, biotech and farmer, what China has a known domestic advantage in terms of the clinical trials pipeline, the research pipelines, the drug discovery pipelines as well, that I think will also be a key focus. And then last but not least, I would say that any indication from Xi Jinping about the economic direction will be interesting. Certainly when we saw the draft of the 5-year plan late last year, what was clear

was that even though the government understands it needs to rebalance, it is doubling down on being a high-tech manufacturing superpower. So we'll probably see, I think, more direction in the 5-year plan about what that actually means and whether or not Germans should be even more worried than they currently are because clearly the Chinese are overtaking them in autos and EVs,

maybe in the cutting edge and EVs as we come down close to that innovation breakthrough as well.

So those are the things that I'll be watching very, very closely, but to your point, and this is maybe a discussion for another time. I've been reflecting a lot about the AI stack, so to speak, and this element of self-dependence or self-reliance that you talked about, James, which really dates back to Chairman Mal, that Xi is resurrecting as a terminology. And it's the AI stack starting from the application level, so the thing that is closest to the

consumer, to the model, to the infrastructure/data center, to the semiconductors or chips, and then to the energy and rareros or commodities aspect. And to my mind, really China has a lot of vulnerabilities in the most middle layers. When I'm thinking about the frontier models, you're thinking about the chips, you're thinking about the data centers, where the

capaxes are in the infraction of the 600 billion plus that we're seeing in the U.S. coming down

the pipeline for compute, capaxe, and data centers. Really, the only advantage has been China's industrial policy in rare earths, as well as energy where the output is in electricity's twice that in America even more now. So I actually think that there will be some focus in the five of your plan on really trying to improve China's competitiveness in those middle tiers,

“where really they still remain behind the Americans. And so that's going to be, I think, an”

interesting thing to watch because I think you and I agree that AI+ is going to be the biggest takeaway from this next five-year plan. All right, let's take one last quick break, stay with us.

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Visit Stonyfield.com to find Stonyfield Organic Yogurt near you. Welcome back. A fatal crash involving the Xiaomi Su7 is putting China's EV industry under fresh scrutiny after investigators found electronic doors failed during a powerless trapping the driver inside. Now regulators in China are mandating mechanical backup handles.

A change that could ripple across China's massive EV market and extremely critical moment

for its global expansion. James, you alerted me to this story and it's actually quite shocking. It's not the first time that we've seen some of these malfunctions. I remember a couple of years ago there was something similar to that happened with Tesla vehicles in China at least one or two Chinese consumers were trapped inside and died in a Tesla vehicle. This is obviously not a first but in this case is involving a Chinese manufacturer of cars. Does this you think diminish

the way Chinese consumers feel about the safety and security of Chinese EV companies

“and potentially how foreign consumers think about Chinese EVs? I think it might well, you know.”

I mean, I looked at the footage and I found it really tragic. I mean, there's this video online of the fire in the car in Chengdu City in China. Some brave bystanders come over and you can see them trying to break the glass on the windows to get the driver out. One man is using his fist against the side windscreen and then he tries to use his forearm and all the time

it that long and then the driver dies inside the car and gulf by flames and and you know it

“really is a tragic scene. I think that, you know, obviously the investigators have now made a”

determination on this and they said that the doors could not be opened from the outside because the collision caused the low voltage system within the car to lose power and that disable the door handle release function. You know, I mean that is something that should have been thought about long before they launched a car like this and to me it will give people pause whether they're inside China or outside China but as you say there are new safety regulations but I do

I do think this is a blow to China's incredible EV phenomenon both inside the country and outside.

I assume that Xiaomi will fix this and you know and China's move into overseas market will continue but what's your sense, Alice? How are you seeing it? I mean this is definitely bad PR for Xiaomi itself but it's coming in a time where I still think that Chinese EVs have such a competitive advantage compared to the European and American peers. We've seen Chinese EV sales grow an average rate of 50% from 2021 to 2024. Just last year, this was a big story of last year

in the EV world, the EV from China overtook Tesla and just global sales. I agree with the of EVs and that trend is likely to continue and increase going into 2026 and now BYD is

apparently in 119 countries around the world that number will grow and I just heard recently

from people close to this that BYD is actually launching more of its luxury line of cars under different names. So there's one called Dancer that's coming down the pipeline.

“It's priced at above 100,000 USD. That I think will help reduce some of the potentially bad”

PR surrounding Chinese cars if you just enter the market with a different name and really try to China wash. We've seen that actually happen a lot with Chinese companies in the tech space and more noticeably with AI companies like Manus but certainly what we're seeing at least from the BYD instance is that they find ways to try to design a size or reduce the association

with the core Chinese brand in order to cater to a foreign market that I think will be the trend

for a lot of these brands that are rather launching these more luxury high-end versions. But certainly when I look at the future, what is going to be interesting to link this back to AI is the safety aspect of autonomous vehicles which we haven't even gotten into and regulators haven't even caught up to because really the technology hasn't really been scaled out on mass. Certainly if you go to major cities in America like San Francisco, LA, Austin, you're seeing

Waymo and other AVs already on the road and if you go to certain cities in China that is the case

“too but we're not seeing it on mass yet in either countries and that I think might open a new”

kind of worms in terms of regulations maybe that is coming in the next couple of years as well because I sense that the technology is moving quite rapidly in China and adoption could move quite rapidly potentially even faster in China for AVs than in the US. So the next time we talk about this there may be some security challenge that some of these AVs face which we haven't gotten into. That worries me quite a bit because certainly that takes a whole another level of control away

potentially from the driver itself and then we haven't even gotten into the data security aspect if you're thinking about it from the perspective of a foreign consumer. I've read some articles and heard some stories about European countries concerns about autonomous vehicles collecting data, even electric vehicles collecting data from European consumers and certainly I think that those concerns will probably only increase both as we see EVs penetrate further into the European

Union countries and when we see autonomous vehicles coming as the next frontier of vehicles from China. What's your view on that James? Yeah I mean I think it's a really good point to you make Alice I think that with a lot of Chinese innovations there is this kind of mentality of move fast and break things you know and you know China's moving so quickly to unveil all of these technologies and a lot of these technologies are new or newish you know so clearly some things are going

to go wrong I think people should be really quite aware of that. All right James you know what time

Okay well I've picked a prediction that does chime I hope with what I think will be the

“big theme of the National People's Congress later on this week and that is technology and I'd”

like to focus a little bit on a technology we perhaps don't think about that much with China and that is space. China's moves to go boldly into space and my prediction is that the space race with the US this year will shift into high gear. Part of this will be a focus on the lunar South Pole which is already shaping up into an area of competition between the US and China. China has a plan to send the Chang'e 7 mission to the lunar South Pole this year it's

schedules to go late in the year and the mission will target a search for water ice. It'll

include an orbiter, a lander, a rover and a so-called flying hopper that is supposed to explore permanently shadowed creators up there and this is all a precursor towards China landing a person on

“the South Pole of the moon by 2030 of course the US has got its own plan but I think that you know”

this is a fascinating race China wants to plant a flag on the moon when it puts a person onto the South Pole this is a big part of the China lunar missions and I think it's going to be fascinating to watch. Really interesting James I think spaces a big theme this year we're going to have space

X from Elon Musk IPOing at some point it's going to be the mega IPO of the year and he's I mean

I just listen to one of his podcasts it's three hour podcasts recently and he's talking a lot about space being the next frontier for data center growth and that you know even though compute maybe limited on the energy frontier in the US and the West you know there's skies the limit so to speak or spaces the limit when it comes to launching data centers into space using SpaceX technology so it's interesting that this is coming at a time where you've got a lot of discussion in Silicon

Valley about space and again it takes us back to the Cold War where really you see the the Chris crossing of technology geopolitics space it's it's super interesting so my prediction is also somewhat left field I want to bring back North Korea it seems like we forgot in a little bit about Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang and he said these probably watching the Iran situation slightly worried about what Trump may do but you know in the case North Korea they have a more advanced

nuclear weapons program Trump hasn't really made any verbal announcements or really gone out

“after a rocket man in fact he seems to want to have a good relationship with him I think if we do see”

a China summit coming soon even though I expect that to be delayed somewhat it could well be that North Korea comes back to the attention of of Trump and is another area in which he may either want to exert pressure on on Kim or have some kind of you know revival or renewal negotiations about nuclear containment or even although I think Kim watching what's happening Iran is probably more involved in to expedite his nuclear weapons program I think he's taken away from what's happening

Iran is that if if only I had nuclear bombs I would not be in the position that Tehran is in right now I think North Korea will come back and hold the U.S.-China relationship as it is want to do all right that's all for this episode thank you for listening to China decode this is a production of profg media our producers are David Toledo Eric Janikas and Nest Smith Savodoth thank you to Katherine Dylan Drew Borrow's Billy Bennett dance salon William Flynn Jesse Millwood and

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