[applause] good evening. Its wonderful to see everyone here. Thank you for bracing what could be a snowstorm that would keep you trapped here for the next few days. For what i know will be an important discussion and i appreciate everyones flexibility with the time so we can make sure our members of congress get back to washington in time for their votes tomorrow. I am relieved that youve been introduced because you are both princeton grads serving your fourth term of congress for the eighth district of your state and i was worried that i might mix up the states and i know that what put me in your books almost as much as if id your support team so im glad that he didnt do that. We are here to have a conversation tonight about the china challenge and americas future. This is a very important conversation and im thrilled to be here with my friend and colleague and former director of development graham allison. Its a highstakes conversation because as we all know gathered here that this is the most consequential bilateral relationship in the world. There may be disagreements about how to handle the relationship but at its core a think theres a general agreement that the objective is to ensure that a war between the United States and china is avoided. We are now almost into 80 years of a period with no great power conflict and the real challenge goes forward for the next decade or longer is how to preserve that piece. And so the special committee that these two congressmen have been working on and are in charge of has been cast with trying to come up with bipartisan policy initiatives to try to achieve that objective. I will give them the opportunity to really flesh out the purpose of the commission for the committee in just a moment or two. Id like to say graham and i have had the opportunities to spend part of the day with both of them and they are both distinguished in this space. Chairman gallagher and the Ranking Committee member Raja Krishnamoorthi are approaching this with a kind of deliberations and thoughtfulness that you would really want your leaders to approach such a serious problem with. And they are doing it in a genuinely bipartisan manner which is something we all know is not as common as we would like it to be today. I really commend the approach that they have taken in the way they have generally Work Together despite having many differences, to try to address these really tough and challenging problems. What i thought i would do, graham and i have agreed that we will kind of go back and forth and ask a few questions before opening it up to our audience or the like to start with german chairman gallagher tell our audience a little more actually both of you welcome to hear your thoughts a little bit more about the special committee and its objective and where you are on the timeline. Thank you so much for having me and thank you be for being flexible with the timing. Will have significant votes that are going to happen tomorrow impeachment part two. You may have heard a little bit about that last week. We have had a phenomenal day here in just a collection of experts that you have here in the ecosystem thats incredible and for someone who 10 years ago aspired to be an academic and was with allisons work in my literature review surrounded by people whose work ive long admired so thank you for that. Theres a statutory language that describes aware supposed to do. Ill tell you my interpretation of it. I have sort of operated under the nonpermission rule over the last few years and the speaker of the house keeps changing so theres no one to really do oversight of me. We can have two core functions. One is in the communication function trying to explain to our colleagues in the American People why any of this matters because theres no cost free strategy that leads us to the terror war in the near term and winning the war. Well have two convince the American People to do things that are hard and difficult and cost money unless you explain why you should be concerned about property theft or identifying xinjiang or develop the power of the Taiwan Strait is that constant communication of why this matters and its a core part of what we do and its why we try to do a lot of Creative Things that a normal committee doesnt do like rally outside of the are going to iowa to look at homeland purchases and things like that but the second thing is to access the full vote of the speaker and the minority leader and act as their policy incubator and accelerator on chinas matters. We are tasked with coming up with a set of policy recommendations that we have submitted to the committee for jurisdiction to have legislative jurisdiction and we fulfill that motion and put out three major reports by the end of last year and now we are focusing our efforts on turning those ideas into legislative reality and taking the 150 recommendations we have whittling them down to the 20 most essential and figuring out no kidding even in divided Congress Republicans and democrats these are the things we can get done. I would add to raaches expertise has been phenomenal. And working on to these things now i chaired the Land Commission with andy king and that was just phenomenal and andy is a Great American who became a great friend and have the opportunity to work with someone across the aisle so thank you for your expertise that work comes in is on the investigation. We have investigative oversight power in a bid where we cant pass a law we found our investigation which is uncomfortable for sometimes for people investigating can change behavior of wall street and other areas. Those are the things we have done on the committee and its been incredibly rewarding. Would you like to add anything to that . Sure. I echo mics sentiment. Its bipartisan, man. Its all good, its all good. The funniest meeting, one of the funniest meetings we have had is the first meeting where we met then Speaker Mccarthys Conference Room in his Conference Room is ginormous like the size of this room. He sat at the end of the table and a number of the Committee Sat around the table and very interestingly to his left that hakeem jeffries. They made it a point to address us jointly as a committee and basically what Speaker Mccarthy said was look, this is so important i wanted hakeem to sit next to me and address you together and save we have got to get this right and we need to speak with one voice despite all the other divisions that exist in this congress. Then he said you know if you want to get this thing done this as a committee. If you want to do politics ive got other committees for that. So that really sunk in on day one. It set the tone and he selected people for the committee by the way, who i have the say are some of the real talents of congress very serious people who have intellectual curiosity and are willing to we arent really even divided on partisan lines. Sometimes we are divided based on people being you know more sensitive to the concerns of one part of the country or another. So that really makes for interesting discussions. I would just say that initial selection of the membership along with a Mission Statement of the Committee Really set the tone and under mics leadership in mine we have managed to implement something that i think is perhaps a model for other committees as well. Im going to turn to graham to ask a question. We all know graham has been a keen observer of china and its trajectory and i have no doubt he has tough questions. Let me start with one from a conversation at lunch where experts from harvard and m. I. T. And others a very enlightening discussion one of the things i thought that was the most striking was that you raise some questions that you said you didnt know the answer to but you were very interested in trying to engage the academy and students and others to think of those questions. This is like manna from heaven for people at the university. It would be interesting for the audience if you could think of two or three questions and if somebody wrote a good memo that could include a little bit longer paper, and a list of ones that i mentioned whichever you want. One is on deterrence and if the objective is to deter world war iii what are the instruments of American Power that could be mobilized in that area and how we delineate a particular the economics which mike you mentioned. Another question you raised that you said you are interested in trying to get people to offer some answers to, wheres this going . What is the 20 or 30year vision . I think he said containment, can stream it, whatever. What is the longerrun . My goodness you are the select committee and youre supposed to know the answers to that of your questions which people in the university have been wrestling with, give us the questions then maybe we will stir ourselves and provide an answer. Steak you mentioned it to and i hope we can now that we have filled the shortterm demand of the Committee Use this next year is a Committee Work to look at the longer term congressman. This is why we are hearing from experts to figure out the longer Term Investments can make to put us in the better position to defend ourselves. It strikes me that we have consensus on the nearterm goal and megan you mentioned which is deter the division of taiwan or something that would ignite a conflict. We could argue that the best way to do that in the subsidiary question about due economic instruments deterred or where they fit in the overall deterrence paradigm . One thing we discovered when we did a variety of four games is even as we maintained ambiguity with respect to taiwan whether we would withdraw it might make sense to have clarity on the nature of our economic response. When we want to work out the economic and financial ladder prior to things going boom because we have the a wealth of conventional military outside and the economic and financial side. Thats like 20 questions in there. On just a longterm goal that i hope we can examine in this work i dont think theres any consensus on that. Theres some on the super hawkish side that would argue for regime change or would point to the inherent brittleness of our regime and one day it would implode of its own weight. Do we have enough insight into the internal by nanette dynamics that if xi jinping were to leave tomorrow or the party were to collapse which is not going to, that would be less chaotic and better for world stability and do we want to containment paradigm. Our mutual friend has talked talked about constrained when he testified before the committee or is there some that would suggest by reengaging with the party we could eventually returned to her responsible stakeholder leadership . I dont know thats a lot of work that we had to continue to do and hopefully raja can answer that question ill just put my name on it and take credit for it. By asking some critics of the u. S. Approach say its trying to weaken china and you are trying to destroy china. What would you say to that . Are we trying to weaken china and is at the objective for some more more about changing behavior he described in recognizing as you said there has been a lot of debate about the longterm end state but what is the objective . I havent heard a Single Person talking about herding or harming china or doing anything that would stun their we cant get into the mind of xi jinping although xi jinping we believe based on his writings and speeches which we have become very familiar with is an ideologue. Hes someone unlike anybody we have seen in the modern era and as you know his hero is mao tsetung. He wants to be a mao. The question that i am constantly asking is will he change course . And what would it take to change his course . What are the combination of carrots and sticks that might alter the course of going to the economic aggression from technological aggression do Something Different, going for military aggression to Something Different . And so i think conducting highlevel diplomacy is essential. I think doing what we have talked about in Corporate InternationalDefense Authorization act which is policy to increase deterrence is essential. However we have the hedge our bets. What i mean by that is you know if someday, if someday there is a way that xi jinping decides he is going to move or aggressively than he is right now how will we handle that . And what would we do and how would we work with our allies and partners to deal with that . Thats the big question. Its like over the best and prepare for the worst. And i had really quickly rethink our strategy fundamentally is we are trying to defend the status quo from authoritarian aggression and we are trying to reduce or eliminate the worst in xinjiang. We are talking about some offensive strategy. I dont think ive heard too many things about a regime change. Certainly in the territorial acquisition. We are trying to preserve the status quo in them my party we are having a debate about the nature for engagement and commitment. A lot of that is a legacy of the iraq war of nationbuilding and democratization as far as strategy. When it comes to taiwan theres something fundamentally different about helping an existing enforcing democracy with societies in the world defending itself from authoritarian aggression. I dont think thats fundamentally aggressive strategy. Even where i am promoting us pushing back in some area i view it as we are waking up and defending ourselves from the Economic Warfare or the ideological offenses they are launching under social media platforms which by the way arent allowed inside of china. Its just waking up and defending ourselves and pushing back. I dont view it as Something Like you know we are trying to hurt china per se. I think the Chinese People are often hurt by the regime and look the other way towards interactions. Turning it back to graham its not about weakening china about changing behavior. I presume youre making a distinction between changing behavior and changing xi jinpings worldviews but what about the balance of changing domestic behavior versus International Behavior . This is one of the things that emerge from the lessons from iraq and afghanistan and the challenge of making societies but you might say ive heard most of you talk about the uyghurs and the genocide happening against the uyghurs so we could share on that. Thank you. Its a great point megan and with regard to the uyghurs just so Everybody Knows in this room whats going on there 23 million uyghurs and xinjiang province which is the Northwest Province of china. Theres an act of genocide happening meaning they are trying to erase the identity of 23 million people. 70,000 women have been sterilized, forcibly sterilized, hundreds of thousands of children forcibly separated from their parents. In two to 3 million in concentration camps as we speak tonight. That is to me something that we cannot look away from and so while generally i dont think we should be meddling were trying to reshape the internal affairs of Different Countries, i think in this instance when you have the genocide with regard to the weaker people were cultural genocide with tibetans or oppression of the hong kong people we have to speak up. Our tool for that however is the weaker force labor prevention act with regards to trying to deal with the genocide in xinjiang. Its very, its not very well enforced and thats the big problem. One of the things we found out in the course of their proceedings is something we have two say we are serious about dealing with this. Otherwise with other domestic fares i dont think we have gotten into that. Obviously we can talk about that further. Certainly its an issue that xi jinping is very concerned about especially economically. Maybe thats something we should be keeping in mind with regard to our own relationships and how we handle them right now. We are more concerned i think with regard to our relationship with the cbp and their treatment of our partners and allies in the region. Thank you. Theres so many questions here. We are slightly disagreeing here. Nobody can read xi jinpings mind. Its something we know a lot about. Its not somebody from outer space. He knows a lot of people who a lot of americans know and if you asked him he says. Exclusively listen to what he says is you have been. He wants to make china great again. That was a statement he made before trump did. He has a strategy for doing that. They say we are going to be the most important trading partner and build a military thats able to fight and win from his point of view to defend our own position which includes taiwan is one of the provinces. I read what he says and it looks to me like thats what hes doing. He seems quite understandable and again i suspect its harder to the right it harder to the left, i think if i were the chinese i would sign up for that. Two times as many people and they are hardworking and smart. They would had twice the gdp and if they had placed the gdp theyd have twice the intelligence operations in the technology and if they have that why would they be interested in having a navy as the arbiter in the South China Sea and the East China Sea . It looks to me like a pattern. As you know its one ive seen forever. From our point of view we believe right believe very strongly the International Order that the u. S. Created after world war ii and his megan mentioned to start with has given seven or eight years without as a great war. Its absolutely fantastic for americans. But even more so for chinese. And for japanese and taiwanese and basically in order in which we have seen increases in peoples wellbeing. We are not abo