Leslie Johns 0:03

Welcome everybody to today's book talks by the Burkle center, co sponsored by the Political Science department and the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies. A few announcements before we begin. Today's webinar is being recorded, but only the speakers will be visible and audible. The audience cannot be seen or heard in today's recording. Both the video and audio recordings will be available on the Burkle Center website, as well as on YouTube and on Apple podcasts. We invite you to submit your questions for the speaker through the Q&A portal, which is located at the bottom of your screen. Today's guest is Susan Shirk, who's a Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center located at the UC San Diego campus. Susan Shirk first visited China in 1971, and since then has become one of the US's foremost experts on modern Chinese politics. From 1997 to 2000, Dr. Shirk served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Clinton administration with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia. She has published numerous books and articles on modern Chinese politics for both academic audiences as well as for policymakers. Today, we're delighted to discuss her latest book entitled Overreach: How China Derailed its Peaceful Rise. So I'm gonna go ahead and with our audience, please welcome Dr. Shirk. Susan, could you turn on your camera and please join us today. Thank you so much for joining us. I'll go ahead and hand the broadcast over to you.

Susan Shirk 2:00

Well, thanks so much, Leslie, and thanks to the Burkle Center for inviting me to join you to talk about my new book. It's really a great opportunity, and I look forward to more such opportunities when I could come up and do it in person, especially with groups of UCLA faculty and students. As Leslie said, I am an old China hand. I've been studying China for a very long time. I first went to China in 1971, and ever since Mao passed from the scene, and Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms and opening to the world, my experience studying China and China's own trajectory has really been by and large a positive one. People's lives in China were improving dramatically, of course, their living standards, but also their individual freedom to live and work where they wished, and greater access to information and culture outside of China, travel abroad. And at the same time, China's relations with the United States and with other countries were, by and large, pretty good. Considering that this was a period when China's economic and military capabilities were improving dramatically. And China's political system of party autocracy was very different from the American political system of open market democracies. But, due largely to the effective diplomacy on the Chinese side, as well as on the US side, the two countries managed to get along pretty well. China's policy was what I would describe as one of restraint and reassurance, trying to persuade its neighbors, the United States, and other countries that even though it was a rising power and getting much stronger, its intentions were benign, its intentions were friendly. And certainly this policy worked quite well. Most notably, with China's 20 neighbors surrounding it, all of whom became China became their largest trading partner. But that changed pretty significantly in the mid-2000s. And when I observed changes in Chinese foreign policy and domestic policy, to be more assertive, even aggressive internationally, and more social control and control over the economy, also becoming more statist and repressive domestically. That was a puzzle to me. So the I set about doing the research for this book to try to understand what was going on. Now, so that really is the first surprise in my book, that this tendency to overreach - to take its actions too far, its policies too extreme, and to create backlash internationally, as well as domestically, to do things in an exaggerated way in a manner that then snaps back to harm yourself. That is the definition of overreach. And that's why I think it's so apropos to try to understand how we got from this policy of restraint and reassurance to this pattern of overreach, which now has left China with in really quite a difficult situation, even as it has grown stronger. The other interesting surprise is that this shift occurs during a period of collective leadership. It didn't start with Xi Jinping. It started under a more oligarchic rule of a nine person standing committee of the Chinese Communist Party with a relatively weak leader, Hu Jintao, who wasn't able to enforce restraint on the other senior leaders, all of whom pursued the interests of the concentrated bureaucratic interest groups that they were in charge of. And, in particular, policy got hijacked by what I call the control coalition, under the leader Zhou Yongkang. And that's the internal security apparatus, the People's Armed Police, the political legal bureau of the Chinese Communist Party, the propaganda department, and of course, the military. So, this control coalition benefited - got more resources, bigger budgets, more power inside China by exaggerating the international threats, as well as the domestic threats to Chinese Communist Party rule. And instead of under collective leadership, these bureaucratic interest groups, restraining one another checking one another in a system of mutual vetoes and consensus building, which political scientists would predict. Instead, they log rolled with one another, which is an insight that I learned from international relations expert Jack Snyder, at Columbia in his analysis of pre-war Germany and Japan. He explained the overreaching of these regimes by this pattern of concentrated bureaucratic interest groups and how they log rolled with one another. Now, of course, log rolling is a term used in American congressional politics. So it's, it's quite different from that. But what it means is that the senior leaders, rather than deliberating among themselves or checking one another, they just let each one of their colleagues do whatever they wanted in their own domain, and that meant taking things too far. So that's how you got overreach under collective leadership. The types of overreach that were really the most damaging to China and influential in changing the narrative about was China a responsible rising power, or was it a dangerously aggressive rising power, really - internationally most important was what happened in the South China Sea, where China has started challenging the other claimants to the land features - the rocks, as well as the waters in the South China Sea, beginning in 2006. So, I want to highlight that because that's before the global financial crisis. So, this is really being driven by the internal political dynamics more than either domestic nationalism, because at that time, the South China Sea was not a focal point of popular nationalism, such as Japan was. Really there wasn't much attention paid to the South China Sea. But these various civilian bureaucracies, like fisheries, marine surveillance, even Hainan Island, they started trying to enforce China's sovereignty claims over the South China Sea. And they brought along TV cameras, tried to publicize their staunch defense of the sovereignty claims in a way that did attract more nationalist public opinion. It also meant bigger budgets, more ships, planes, for these agencies. And they even started challenging American naval surveillance operations in this area, which of course, according to the United States and most other countries, is viewed as international waters. But China has this more expansive claim of sovereignty over it. So these provocative actions really alarmed the United States, alarmed the other claimants like Vietnam and the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries and resulted in a deterioration of, I would say, China's own national security, because instead of having these positive relations with its neighbors, it started having more acrimonious, mutually suspicious relations with its neighbors. The two other types of - Oh, and I'd say, of course, this area's very important for international commerce, but really what was most significant about what happened to the South China Sea was that it changed perceptions, changed the narrative about what kind of rising power China was. Internally, we had a shift to a more extreme approach to social control on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics under the control coalition. At the time when things tightened up, I thought, well this is going to be temporary, as we often see, before major events in China, and then things go back to normal, loosen up after they get through the event. But in this case, in 2007-2008, what we see is grid management, extreme what they call weiwen - stability, maintenance, social control - and it never loosens up ever since, including the tight control of the content of the media and internet. You know, before that time, in Hu Jintao's first term, we had what I would call peak freedom of information in China. But they tightened up before the Olympics and they never loosened up ever since. And the third type of overreach, which was very significant, was the state. After decades of market-oriented decentralization, the state came back to try to ramp up China's indigenous innovation with a more statist approach to the economy. And again, this has continued ever since. So that's kind of the inflection point, the turning point. By the end of collective leadership - 10 years of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao - the Chinese system was highly corrupt, because under this oligarchic rule, and that's what really gave Xi Jinping the mandate from the other senior leaders to restore more centralized leadership. But, they never imagined that he was going to create a centralized, personalistic, and pretty dictatorial system, similar to that, which Mao had because after Mao died, Deng Xiaoping very explicitly tried to restore collective leadership to Communist Party rule, in order to prevent what he called the overconcentration of authority, which led to arbitrary decisionmaking, such as that, that Mao did, with the tragic Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution campaigns. So, in order to avoid that type of over concentration of authority, he introduced all sorts of regularized transfer of power at the top and retirement rules and collective institutions of the party playing a more important role. But Xi Jinping came in and made a U turn. He abandoned a lot of the features, almost all of those features, of collective leadership and went back to a more concentrated system of rule. The justification was largely this rampant corruption, and Xi Jinping started a major anti-corruption campaign in 2013, which also was effectively a purge of all the potential rivals to his power - the real rivals and the imagined rivals. And that campaign, that purge really continues to the current day, and about a million and a half party and government officials have been targeted. Many senior officials, including Zhou Yongkang, the head of the control coalition, were put in jail for the rest of their lives. And Xi Jinping focused heavily on loyalty. And people who were not loyal were at risk of being targeted by the purge. So, this purge really created a very high-pressure political environment for Chinese officials from 2013 right up to today.

It's really become something like Cynthia Brzezinski talked about. The permanent purge, because even those senior officials who once were so trusted by Xi Jinping that they were the inquisitors. They were the people who carried out the purge of Zhou Yongkang and other senior leaders. Now they themselves have been targeted by the purge, and by Xi Jinping in the party discipline agencies, and they have been put in jail for the rest of their lives. So what does that mean? That means that as Xi Jinping has concentrated power, he's filled the Standing Committee, with people he believes are loyal to him. But even these people don't know how long Xi Jinping will feel confident in their loyalty. And the way they behave creates a whole different dynamic driving overreach. The dynamic is that these officials are live in a climate of fear, and to survive or even perhaps, to be promoted, they jump on the bandwagon of whatever Xi Jinping's policies are. They want to get out in front so they get noticed as being particularly loyal. And they also carry out Xi's policies to an extreme degree, by overreaching, by over complying. And so that the result is can be even more extreme that Xi Jinping than what Xi Jinping originally envisioned. And meanwhile, the information feedback loops don't work at all, because nobody dares tell Xi Jinping, the true facts about the costs, as well as perhaps the benefits of his policies, and that's what leads to overreach under Xi Jinping. So we see many examples in foreign policy, as well as domestic policy, which I won't review here, but obviously, sticking to zero COVID for three years and not preparing for a transition away from this extreme method of constant testing, collective quarantining, failing to vaccinate. The crackdown on the private sector, which has really harmed the Chinese economic dynamism, including its innovation, Wolf warrior diplomacy, against Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Lithuania, other European countries. So a lot of overreaching policies under Xi Jinping that have backfired to be harmful against China. So that's the argument. I find it very interesting that both collective leadership and this more concentrated leadership can lead to overreach. The book is not really a policy book. It's about Chinese domestic political dynamics and the policy outcomes that result from it. But in the last chapter, I do offer policy suggestions both to Beijing and to Washington. And particular, in speaking to the Biden administration, I urge that we not overreact to China's overreach, and that we test the flexibility of the Xi Jinping regime, even during this third term through more active diplomacy. And so I'm happy to answer questions about my policy views as well as providing greater detail about my story of how we got from China's peaceful rise under Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and the first years of Hu Jintao to the overreach that we see today and this downward spiral in China's relations with the United States, which is really very dangerous. So thanks so much. I'm looking forward to your questions.

Leslie Johns 26:08

Thank you so much, Susan. Just as a reminder to those guests, who are joining us today, if you click the Q&A button, you can submit your questions. But just to get us started off, I have a few of my own questions for Susan. And for those of you in the audience, if you do go ahead and check the look at the chat box, Susan has very graciously provided us with a coupon code that that those in the audience can use if you'd like a 30% off discount code to purchase the book from Oxford University Press. I should say I was really intrigued reading the book, I am not a China person by any means. So so forgive me if my questions are a little bit naive. I come at this from an international law perspective. But there's so much depth to the book. I particularly I love the parts where you talk about China's changing historical memory. I think it's a good way of putting it how you know, at different points in time. You know, politicians will refer back to different points in history and how their memories of the past have changed. And I really encourage Susan to talk about the South China Sea portions of the book because I thought those portions of the book were really exquisitely written. And I've told several of my undergraduate students like you have to go get this book, because I think Susan does a really amazing job of tracing out what happened when and how this sort of legal dispute sort of arose kind of out of nowhere. And what were sort of the political and economic interests at stake. But coming at this from an international law perspective, you know, one thing that I was kind of surprised, wasn't in the book, or at least wasn't in the book very much. Susan, I wanted to ask you about this is really there's not much in there about the repression, or at least the allegations of repression, against the Uyghur people. And I noticed even in your presentation, it's it's not a term that you really mentioned. Is Is that something that you see as emblematic of overreach? Is it just that you're cautious to address it because it's something your sources don't want to talk about? I mean, why is that something that's not part of the overreach story?

Susan Shirk 28:44

Well, it is part of the overreach story.

Leslie Johns 28:46

Okay. But it's not talked about. Yeah.

Susan Shirk 28:49

Well, I mean, certainly, it's in the book, as an example of overreach. The sinicization of the Uyghurs and the thought reform. So, in the section on social control, I would say that the thought reform camps in Xinjiang are kind of at the extreme end of a continuum of social intensified social control and repression inside China. And I, what is important for Americans to understand is that by and large, most Chinese people support their government's actions in Xinjiang. So, and that's true of the actions I also talked about in Hong Kong. Another example of Beijing's takeover of Hong Kong, which came as a bolt out of the blue, really. And but the political dynamics are somewhat different than, say, extreme press censorship. Because the public actually stands with the government. There's very little sympathy, for the Uyghur and other Muslim people in Xinjiang and other parts of China, I'm sorry to say. And that's true for political reform and democracy in Hong Kong as well. And the and that's why it was really interesting, when we saw these demonstrations recently over zero COVID, which were stimulated by this tragic fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, that you had demonstrations. There where Uyghurs and Han Chinese were together demonstrating against the government, and they were. So I think for some Han Chinese, it may have caused them to start questioning the official government story about Xinjiang. Although I wouldn't, you know, I don't know how widespread that skepticism is. But certainly it's, you know, it's an extreme effort to reduce the threat of social groups, to Chinese Communist Party rule, and to synthesize China. It's a very different model of national unity, ethnic unity, than previous leaders have had, which they took a more pluralistic approach to kind of recognizing the ethnic differences. But Xi Jinping appears to have concluded that the Soviet Union's ethnic policies, were one reason that their regime collapsed. So rather than having a more tolerant approach, he's taking a much harder lived approach.

Leslie Johns 33:04

Okay. Okay. I also wanted to ask you, how has the war in Ukraine over the last year altered, if at all, the political dynamics that you lay out in your book?

Susan Shirk 33:19

Well, I'd say it's a pretty significant example of an arbitrary decision by Xi Jinping personally, because of the affinity he feels with his fellow strongman leader, Vladimir Putin. And the fact that Putin, unlike other international leaders came to the Winter Olympics. He showed up to support Xi Jinping. As a result, the two of them wrote this joint statement about their friendship without limit, right on the eve of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Now, China was Ukraine's largest trading partner. And China takes a position very much defending national sovereignty from external threats. So I'd say that Putin kind of snookered Xi Jinping into signing that statement, kind of entrapping him in a very difficult position. You know, the two strongman leaders are both highly suspicious of color revolutions in the United States. They both feel kind of threatened by the US. But this has put Xi Jinping in a very difficult position. The US remarkably shared intelligence with Xi. And all of this is in the book, because the book really goes right up to the present day. Which was pretty unusual to share intelligence with a country with which we don't have a close relationship like China. But they shared intelligence about Putin's plans to invade Ukraine. Xi Jinping just didn't believe it. He got snookered by Putin. And he's in this difficult position. Then we clearly informed Xi Jinping that if you provide tangible assistance, especially military assistance to Putin, we're going to impose sanctions on you, similar to what we've done to Russia. And so so far, they have not provided tangible military assistance. But there are hints of various state enterprises that may have done so. It's not clear that they're enforcing the ban on supporting Putin as thoroughly as they should. And I think from Xi Jinping's perspective, he really is very worried that if Putin loses the war in Ukraine, it will be extremely damaging to China. So he wants Putin to win. And yet he doesn't want to be viewed as part of kind of axis of evil with Russia, that will be damaging to China's reputation as well as its economic relations with other countries. But we see, especially with Europe, the European countries are taking a much more negative view of China, because they have not criticized Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Leslie Johns 37:32

I see. Okay. Thank you so much. I apologize. The internet's a little spotty on the UCLA campus today, it appears at least in Bunche Hall, so I'm having some issues. But I'd like to go ahead and turn to some of the Q&A that's come in from the audience. So one from one of my colleagues, Art Stein, who I suspect you may know from past interactions here at University of California. He says, great presentation. Fascinating argument, as always. Are there any equilibrating forces in the Chinese system? He says China was able to move away from Mao's excesses. What does that earlier episode tell us about prospects for change? And is there anything about the current economic interconnections that will possibly constrain the degree of overreach?

Susan Shirk 38:28

Well, Art, thanks so much for that very smart question.

Leslie Johns 38:35

Always smart Art is. Yeah.

Susan Shirk 38:39

Yeah, actually, the book includes a counterfactual about what wouldn't have been possible for Hu Jintao to sustain this reform direction. And this restrained foreign policy to the rest of the world. What would it have taken to for Hu Jintao to create a reform coalition to balance against the control coalition? And I think that's a really interesting question. And what it, what I conclude is that yes, there was such and there is even today, a potential for that kind of more reform oriented coalition. Consisting of private business entrepreneurs of coastal provinces engaged with the rest of the world of the better educated urban middle class, and intellectuals and professionals. And I think that the fact that there is this kind of potential coalition existing, is demonstrated by the fact that some very smart Chinese politicians in the early years of the 21st century, in the first term of Hu Jintao, they were making speeches to them about intra party democracy, and about economic market reform. People like Wang Yan, who at that time was the General Secretary of Guangdong province, and who has now just been kicked off the standard committee by Xi Jinping, who was kind of the, you know, Bo Xilai was in Chongqing, and he was the kind of Neo Maoist leftist. Wang Yan was the, if we had two parties in China, he would be running on the other Reform Party. But also even the Premier Wen Jiabao, if you look at the speeches he made in favor of gradual improvement of a more responsive, democratic governance. So I think that that there's a possibility, even in the future now in reaction to the mistakes that Xi Jinping has made. I think there are, that there are many in, especially in the party elite, and certainly among private business, who are very unhappy with Xi Jinping's leadership. Now, what can they do about that? It's very, very difficult. But remember, that autocratic regimes fall top down more than bottom up. Barbara Ganas. I don't know if Barbara Geddes is joining us today, but great UCLA expert on authoritarian regimes. But, you know, she has made this argument many times. So the way I see it, nothing that's happened is inevitable. It there's a lot of human agency here. And so nothing about the future is inevitable, either.

Leslie Johns 42:46

Okay, thank you. We've had a couple questions in the Q&A to the I think the spirit of the questions are to the to the sense that is it fair to sort of characterize China's actions as overreach, when we could just as easily describe the US as actions perhaps as being overreach in the sense of, you know, sort of the US going out and conducting foreign policy, perhaps getting involved in regions where maybe it shouldn't be getting involved? You know, couldn't we sort of equally describe the US' actions as being overly interventionist and overreaching? You know, is that maybe not a characteristic of all sorts of strong states?

Susan Shirk 43:41

Well, it's not your character. They said, but, you know, I'm a comparative politics scholar. And what really fascinates me and for so many years, I've been going to China interviewing political insiders of various sorts, and I feel and of course, I had the opportunity to serve in government. So I feel that my strength and what I can contribute to a more peaceful world in the future is a better insight of how China works inside the black box. And so, I recognize that I mean, and I am critical of America's overreaction. But I also as you noted earlier, I do try to piece together the history of what happened in terms of action reaction, who did what first and this kind of thing. So I make the case that China's, the shift in Chinese policies in the mid 2000s are not a reaction to US actions that were threatening against China.

Leslie Johns 45:11

Okay. Okay.

Susan Shirk 45:12

So I'm pretty confident about the facts of that. We do have the pivot to Asia later on. But even that is not really threatening to China. And we're continuing to engage with China at the same time, as we're strengthening our alliances and our military as well as economic ties with other Asian countries. So, you know, there are a lot of books, a lot of good research, critical of American foreign policy. But that's not what this book is.

Leslie Johns 45:13

Yeah. Okay. Several people have written in about the Chinese balloon. And the US shooting it down. It Do you think that this is an example of overreach? Has the is the US overreacting to these scenarios? A couple people have written in about the balloons, what's your what's your take on the incident from the news in the last week?

Susan Shirk 46:33

Well, it's been pretty confusing. But I, the first balloon, which the US government is convinced is a surveillance balloon. And I'm persuaded by that. I believe that. I believe that the Chinese statements about it being a weather balloon at that's just a cover story. But of course, the United States used the same cover story during the Cold War with our U-2 flights over the Soviet Union. So. But you know, what was fascinating to me and what I wanted to understand better is what was going on inside China, that might have accounted for this balloon floating across the entire continental United States, including many military installations, and including nuclear ones. Right on the eve of Secretary of State Blinken departure for a really important diplomatic encounter in Beijing that would have included a meeting with Xi Jinping. And I believe that Xi Jinping really did want that meeting to occur. He was not interested in subverting it. And so therefore, what that indicated to me was that there was some kind of internal coordination problems, civil military ones. And by the way, we I talk in the book about a lot of those that happened under Hu Jintao's collective leadership were still happening under Xi Jinping. And, of course, we probably shouldn't be surprised by that. China's a big, complicated country. You know, but, and Xi Jinping, even though he has concentrated so much power, that doesn't mean he knows everything going on.

Leslie Johns 49:05

Of course not, yeah.

Susan Shirk 49:07

But it does mean that there are not protocols in place to guarantee that they won't have timing mistakes like this. I assume Xi approved the program, because they've been doing it in other parts of the world, too. But he didn't approve the timing of it. And of course, the weather and the wind also may have had something to do with it. But well, what's really the most concerning is that the Biden administration wasn't able to communicate effectively with the Chinese. They either did not answer the phone, said they needed more time to investigate. None of the other officials dared to take the authority to provide an answer. And so during this whole period of almost a week, we couldn't get a straight story from the Chinese side. So that's very worrisome. And so if we don't have good channels for cooperation, Bob Zoellick wrote an excellent op ed in The Washington Post today.

Leslie Johns 50:26

Oh, okay.

Susan Shirk 50:27

He said, the United States really should have used and maybe still should use this accident as a stimulus for negotiating more effective diplomatic communication during crises.

Leslie Johns 50:52

Very important perspective. Yeah. And we only just have a few minutes left. So in five minutes or less, could you just give us a few bullet points? Or maybe one or two of your key recommendations in terms of the conclusion of the book? In terms of how how do you recommend helping to reduce the overreach that you identify in the book? You know, without threatening China? Like what what are some of the key takeaways that you put forward for policymakers?

Susan Shirk 51:25

Well, I have some suggestions to Beijing, as well. But let's just talk about what the Biden administration could do. I'm actually agnostic about whether or not we could use effective diplomacy to motivate the Chinese side to moderate its policies now, and to exercise greater self restraint. I don't know the answer, because we haven't really had any serious negotiations for six years.

Leslie Johns 52:04

Wow. Okay.

Susan Shirk 52:05

So all during Trump and then in the Biden first few years. So what I'm in favor of is testing the proposition by by a diplomatic strategy, that, by the way, may include sanctions, as well as reassurances and inducements. But what I really object to in the current Biden policy, and the Trump policy before then, is the use of sanctions. Especially these technology sanctions that are disentangling the integration between the Chinese and American economies and technological innovation, higher educational system, our societies and cultures. I feel that this will, could be very counterproductive from the standpoint of the United States own competitiveness. And that if we are going to impose sanctions, it should be part of a diplomatic strategy in which we make clear to China, which of its actions and policies, we really object to. Not just because China is a rising power or a communist country. And, you know, most people in China now believe the line that the Chinese Communist Party inculcate switches that the United States is just trying to slow down China's development, because the sanctions are not connected to any specific action or action. So you know, when I was in government in the Clinton administration, we first threatened to impose sanctions over China's proliferation behavior. And then we said, you know, if we can negotiate a change in this behavior, we won't impose the sanctions. And it was tremendously effective. It worked. And China became, went from being a serious proliferator to a much more responsible participant in the global Non Proliferation regime. So that's what I believe we need to test. And I'm not sure it's going to work, because there, the Xi system is prone to this kind of overreach. And yet I do see clear signs today that Xi Jinping somehow has gotten the word from his subordinates, that he's kind of, he has a need to restore confidence in his leadership, and in the competence of his decision making. So that might motivate him. If we are effective in our diplomacy, to moderate his behavior, there are signs of a kind of thaw. But then that's a great opportunity for us to try to reinforce that through our diplomatic efforts. So I sure hope Blinken and Wang Yi are able to meet a few days from now at the Munich Security Conference in Europe, and try to get this diplomacy on track.

Leslie Johns 56:27

Okay, well, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us, taking the time to chat with us about your new book. Just as a reminder for all of our guests today in the audience, if you go to the chat box, there is that coupon code available. Again, the book is Overreach, How China Derailed its Peaceful Rise. And if again, if you have friends who you think might be interested in this talk, a recording will be available on the Burkle Center website, as well as on YouTube and on the Apple podcasts. And so for today, we'll go ahead and say goodbye to our guests. Dr. Shirk, thank you so much for joining us. And we look forward to seeing our guests again in the future for our future zoom book talks. Goodbye, everybody.

Susan Shirk 57:15

Thanks, everybody. And I look forward to your feedback if you have a chance to read the book. Thank you. Goodbye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai