Jane Perlez is a distinguished journalist and a longtime reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Between 2012 and 2019, she was stationed in China, and most recently served as the Beijing bureau chief. She has also reported from Austria, Poland, Nairobi, Jakarta and Islamabad for The Times. In 2009, Perlez was part of a team that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for coverage of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 2019, she was a Shorenstein fellow at Harvard University and produced a podcast titled, "On the Trail of Xi Jinping." Last week, in conjunction with National Public Radio affiliate WBUR in Boston and the program Here and Now, she produced a five part podcast series called "The Great Wager," which traces American engagement with China from Nixon's historic visit to China in February 1972 to the recent deterioration in relations between the two superpowers. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of a recent c