Great Power Podcast - Episode 17: Tearing Down the Great Firewall

Related Categories: Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Public Diplomacy and Information Operations; China
Related Expert: Michael Sobolik

In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik interviews Matt Pottinger about the Chinese Communist Party's censorship and propaganda, its impact on America, and how the United States can counter it.

Guest Biography

Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and Chair of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Pottinger served the White House for four years in senior roles on the National Security Council staff, including as deputy national security advisor from 2019 to 2021. In that role, he coordinated the full spectrum of national security policy. He previously served as senior director for Asia, where he led the administration’s work on the Indo-Pacific region, in particular its shift on China policy.

Before his White House service, Pottinger spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a US Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Following active duty, he founded and led an Asia-focused risk consultancy and ran Asia research at an investment fund in New York.

Resources from the Conversation

Read Matt's latest article in Foreign Affairs with Matthew Johnson and David Feith Read Matt's prior articles and congressional testimony about the Great Firewall of China