Months after former U.S. President Jimmy Carter's death on Dec. 29, 2024, a lengthy quote regarding China that internet users attributed to him began to make the rounds online. On Facebook, for example, users shared one post (archived) from March 20, 2025, more than 44,000 times, as of this writing.
The post claimed Carter said in a "recent interview" that China was "getting ahead" of the U.S. because the Chinese have not "gone to war with anyone" since the U.S. and China normalized relations in 1979. The post also claimed the former president said, "We wasted $300 billion in military spending to subjugate countries that sought to escape our hegemony."
The same text also spread on other platforms, including Instagram (archived), LinkedIn (archived) and at least one blog site (archived), as copypasta — a term for a piece of text that internet users share by copying and pasting it into posts. The full text that appeared in the posts is as follows:
The American press has just recounted what former President Jimmy Carter said to Donald Trump during his recent interview about China."You're worried that China is getting ahead of us, and I agree with you. But do you know why China is getting ahead of us? I normalized diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979. Since then, do you know how many times China has gone to war with anyone? Not once, even though we're constantly at war.The United States is the most warlike nation in the history of the world because it wants to impose states that respond to our government and American values throughout the West, and to control companies that own energy resources in other countries." China, for its part, invests its resources in projects such as railways, infrastructure, intercontinental and transoceanic bullet trains, 6G technology, robotic intelligence, universities, hospitals, ports, buildings, and high-speed trains instead of using them for military spending."How many kilometers of high-speed trains do we have in this country?We wasted $300 billion in military spending to subjugate countries that sought to escape our hegemony.China hasn't wasted a penny on war, and that's why it surpasses us in almost every area. And if we had spent $300 billion to install infrastructure, robots, and public health in the United States, we would have high-speed transoceanic bullet trains." We would have bridges that don't collapse, free healthcare for Americans, thousands of Americans who wouldn't be infected with COVID-19 more than any other country in the world.We would have roads that hold up properly. Our education system would be as good as South Korea's or Shanghai's."- Jimmy Carter.
In short, there is some truth to this claim. On at least two separate occasions in 2019, Carter did compare China to the U.S. in terms of economy, high speed railroad and life expectancy, and he said that while the U.S. has spent $3 trillion on war, China instead spent money on "things good for the Chinese people."
However, as we'll explain below, due to a lack of available recordings of one of the two occasions, we were unable to independently verify that Carter genuinely said other segments of the text that appears in the posts, such as the part reading, "We wasted $300 billion in military spending to subjugate countries that sought to escape our hegemony."
What did Carter say and when?
Carter compared China to the U.S. on at least two occasions following a phone conversation he had with President Donald Trump in April 2019. Both instances occurred during the Sunday talks he gave at his church, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.
The first talk in which Carter discussed his phone call with Trump and shared his thoughts on the differences between the economies of the U.S. and China took place on April 14, 2019. As of this writing, we are unable to secure a recording of this talk to confirm the exact words he used.
Emma Hurt — an NPR reporter at the time — was present in the audience, and she quoted Carter in a series of X posts (archived) and in an article (archived) published that same day. We wrote to Hurt to ask if she could share footage of Carter's talk, and she responded that she was unable to find the recording she made that day.
We also reached out to the Carter Center and Maranatha Baptist Church seeking footage of the April 14 talk. We will update this story if we receive any response.
According to Hurt's reporting, Carter said in that day's talk that Trump called him for the first time and said he was concerned about how China is "getting ahead of us." Carter reportedly asked the audience why this was, and then offered his own answer: "I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979 do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war."
Hurt noted in her article that this statement was not entirely correct, writing, "China and Vietnam actually fought a brief border war in early 1979, weeks after normalization of U.S.-China relations."
Carter reportedly said the U.S. is "the most warlike nation in the history of the world" because it has a tendency to try to force others to "adopt our American principles." According to Hurt, he also said:
We have wasted I think $3 trillion … It's more than you can imagine. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that's why they're ahead of us. In almost every way.And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure you'd probably have $2 trillion leftover. We'd have high-speed railroad. We'd have bridges that aren't collapsing, we'd have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.I wasn't comparing my country adversely to China, I was just pointing that out because I happened to get a phone call last night.
A few weeks ago, I got my first call from President Trump. I was delighted and I was surprised, first time he'd ever called me. And I had written him a letter about the relationships with China. I normalized diplomatic relationships with China at the beginning of January 1979.
He later said (at minute 27:40):
The main thing that he emphasized to me was, the main purpose of his call, was to say very frankly to me on a private line, that the Chinese were getting way ahead of the United States in many ways. And not only economically, but in some other very important ways as well. And that was Saturday night, I taught Sunday school the next morning and I told the Sunday school class that I'd replied to President Trump that in the last number of years since 19[79] when we normalized relations, the United States had been at constant war with Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Syria and Yemen and many other countries. Almost constant war. And the expert economists estimate that we've spent about $3 trillion on those wars. A trillion is a million million. Or a thousand billions. So you see what an enormous amount of money that is for the United States to spend on what? On war. China has not been in combat with anybody since 19[79]. And they have about that same $3 trillion, they have a very flourishing economy to spend on things good for the Chinese people. I'll just give you two or three examples right quick: One is that they have 18,000 miles of high speed railroad. How many miles do we have? How many are we likely to have 20 years from now? Who knows? The child born in Beijing now, with all of its smog, has a life expectancy of five years more than a child born in Washington D.C. I've got a list of things but I won't go on.
"19[79]" is in brackets in the block quote above because Carter mistakenly said at multiple points in this talk that the U.S. normalized relations with China in 1949. In reality, Carter and Deng Xiaoping, the former vice premier of China, normalized relations between the two countries in January 1979.
In sum, Carter did say that China had not been in combat with anybody since 1979, and that it had a "flourishing economy to spend on things good for the Chinese people," compared to the U.S., which Carter said spent about $3 trillion on war since he normalized relations with China as U.S. president in 1979.
However, we cannot independently verify the authenticity of other quotes that the copied-and-pasted social media posts attributed to Carter, such as "We wasted $300 billion in military spending to subjugate countries that sought to escape our hegemony," because primary-source footage was not available as of this writing.