A Better U.S. Approach to China: A Talk by Susan A. Thornton ’85, P’22

welcome everyone on behalf of the alumni relations office i want to welcome our alumni parents student faculty staff and community members to this afternoon's conversation with susan thornton my name is sarah chingos and i'm the associate director for public service in the mckean center it's my great pleasure to introduce this afternoon speaker susan thornton susan is former acting assistant secretary of state for east asian and pacific affairs and a graduate from the bowdoin class of 1985. her daughter catherine is a member of the bowdoin class of 2022 we hope that she's able to join us today thornton's 28-year diplomatic career focused primarily on east and central asia and included posts in chengdu and beijing china and ashgabat turkmenistan in 2007 she was named deputy director of chinese and mongolian affairs and in 2014 was named first deputy and then acting assistant secretary of state for east asian and pacific affairs after leaving the state department in 2018 thornton joined yale law school as a senior fellow and research scholar at the paul sai china center she also serves as the director for the forum on asia pacific security at the national committee on american foreign policy and is a senior fellow at the brookings institution's john l thornton china center she serves on the boards of the eurasia foundation in the national committee on u.s china relations and is a member of both the camden conference and the council on foreign relations in addition to our economics and russian majors at bowden thornton holds degrees from the national defense universities eisenhower school and johns hopkins school of advanced international studies she speaks fluent mandarin chinese and russian before i introduce her talk today let me cover a quick housekeeping notes audience members are encouraged to submit questions through the q a function throughout the discussion i will be monitoring it and feeding the certain questions posed from the audience following her initial comments closed captioning is also available for this and the conversation is being recorded and will be made available in the following days on the bowdoin website thornton's talk today is titled the better u.s approach to china and is part of programming for asian heritage month and in connection with the reunion talk series china's rise has recently been described by u.s government officials as a whole of society threat and the greatest challenge the u.s faces susan has worked on u.s policy toward china for much of the last 20 years and will give us her perspective on how we got to where we are today but we are missing or misunderstanding about china and how we can use diplomacy to move forward in a way that's beneficial for all please join me in warmly welcoming susan back to virtual bowdoin thank you so much sarah and it's so great to be back with all of my bowdoin people and wish i could be with all of you in person we missed our reunion last year but hopefully we'll be able to get together in person in the not too distant future um thanks so much for joining me today for this talk about the u.s china relationship i think you know most people would agree that the u.s china relationship is is going to be the most important you know bilateral country relationship in shaping the future world that we all live in uh we have you know the two countries with the largest economies in the world we also are the two countries with the largest militaries in the world and the us and china are also countries with global ambitions that have global interests and involvement in almost every issue that comes up in international discourse and international relations and of course there are countries with different histories and cultures and political and social systems and different ways of doing things which gives rise to an extremely complicated and at times pretty fraught set of interactions between the two i think you know to understand what's happening in u.s china relations today though we really need to look back at the course of recent events especially the period since the collapse of the soviet union in 1981 that of course marked the end of the cold war and the really the onset of the so-called unipolar world order where the u.s was in this position of unrivaled dominance in the world in a way that it really hadn't been since the end of world war ii and you know this was the time 1991 or so when all of my bowdoin classmates and i were we're starting out on our careers it seems like eons ago now and that's when i joined the foreign service actually was the very year that the soviet union disappeared and my actually my major in graduate school also disappeared with it and i joined the foreign service and became a u.s diplomat in that year i remember at that time there was a very prominent line of thinking encapsulated by an article written by francis fukuyama big international relations scholar called the end of history and he wrote a book actually called the end of history and the last man um and this was really uh promoted the notion that sort of all countries in the world were going to converge as liberal market democracies um and that you know after the soviet collapse it proved that there was only really one right way to do things and that we would all come to see the light and live happily ever after um but of course you know china had other ideas and this had become pretty apparent and should have been apparent following the tiananmen student protests and the subsequent crackdown you know that they were not going along with democratic convergence and that all happened in 1989. chinese leaders though they had a very clear idea of what they were trying to do which had everything to do with restoring china's strength and its power and its place in the world the priority for them was on economic development and china's leaders firmly and you know of course self-servingly judged that only the chinese communist party was going to be in a position to deliver on that so you know while the us worked on various preoccupations like dealing with the post-soviet collapse legacy in the balkans where we were trying to work on bosnia and the conflict there in the 90s uh then we worked on of course the great war on terror following 911 in 2001. um you know the u.s and china found a modus movende during this period where china basically agreed the unspoken agreement at this time and over the last period of history has been that you know china would not challenge us leadership of the international system and it basically accepted that system uh whereas the us would not fundamentally challenge china's different political system or try to block or stymie china's economic development and of course quite the opposite i mean the us really assisted china's development and the resulting economic cooperation between china and the u.s but also china and the rest of the world really boosted economic growth and globalization inside that u.s led international system um but i think you know we have to recognize that as china grew during that period um the ground under this u.s led unipolar world order was shifting and you know i lived through all of this and you know we still haven't had a lot of time to look back in the rear view mirror on these events and a lot of people are commenting on them now with respect to u.s domestic developments but i would say that this shifting world order what really came to a head in the 2008 global financial crisis with respect to u.s china relations as well as other things obviously up to that point china and the u.s were really in a kind of a student-teacher relationship um in many respects regarding china's economic development and modernization china had you know was buying of course sometimes uh stealing and not paying for but most of the time buying u.s technology you know u.s companies were setting up manufacturing operations in china and china was very deeply engaged in discussions of macroeconomic coordination and global financial issues with u.s government officials but after the great financial crisis china really began to question i think u.s dominance of the global system particularly the economic system and other countries at the time were also kind of joining this chorus but china was definitely leading the chorus at the time and you know the us did respond to this sentiment out there among other countries and in the wake of the crisis it created the the g20 so-called which was this grouping of 20 kind of major countries major economies that was uh put together to bring more players into this sort of urgent economic arrangements to address the crisis but also to sort of diversify the participation in global economic arrangements and give some of the emerging economies a bigger say in some of the arrangements um in managing uh global interconnectedness and globalization and china was a major player at that time that helped to sort of stem the tide of the crisis they injected a huge amount of stimulus into the global economy and china was less affected by the global financial crisis than other economies were and they had a lot of foreign exchange reserves on hand and other capacity on hand to inject into the system um and so you know that whole episode 2008 2009 recovery from the global financial crisis that really ushered in a period of i think increasing chinese insistence that global arrangements needed to somehow be altered and move away from this kind of u.s dominated picture that we had seen up to that point and that other powers should have more say in international institutions and they were really focused on the international economic institutions it has to be said you know at the same time that all of this was going on of course a lot of problems in the u.s china relationship had been continuing ongoing and in some cases were really festering and not being addressed as the u.s was sort of preoccupied in iraq and afghanistan etc in particular some of these issues were issues related to the security arrangements in the asia-pacific uh of course protection of technology and intellectual property of u.s companies from chinese either you know theft or appropriation or transfer etc and then there were many issues um related to distortions in the global trading system as a result of china's entry into the wto in 2001 so you know it's huge economy different kind of system try to absorb it into the international trading system and there were a lot of uh problems that came with that not all of which were addressed uh you know as diligently as they should have been and again the preoccupations with the war on terror uh provide some of the explanation as to why that didn't happen um and some of these problems were definitely made worse by the uh consequences of all the stimulus from the uh trying to remedy the great financial crisis so china for example launched huge construction projects as part of their stimulus with huge production of steel and cement and a lot of other things that then kind of got dumped on the international economy and created a lot of dislocations so and of course there were human rights problems continuing all through this time and a lot of u.s complaints about china's treatment of its own citizens were just a feature of the relationship ongoing and there were you know some some periods where things got a little better and some period where things got a little worse but this was a continuing theme of of discord between the united states and china as it still is today of course um and then you know if you think about back to that time 2008 2009 um this was the same time china's confidence in the us was diminishing its own ambitions were kind of growing after the great financial crisis and after the successful beijing olympics in 2008 and this is the same time when xi jinping became the anointed next leader of china he was elevated to that position in in 2008 so the coincidence of timing is interesting if we if we look back on that from our current vantage point but i think a lot of people um sort of forget about why xi jinping became the guy that was anointed sort of to take over from hujin tao as china's main leader and um you know we have to remember that in 2008 9 10 china was facing some pretty extreme internal challenges and societal cleavages and that was really i think more the driver behind the change in leadership in china than anything else and xi jinping when he took over in 2012 you know he he was put in charge to resolve these issues and so immediately set about doing so and it included a lot of things that were china domestic issues that we didn't have a lot of things to say about like anti-corruption measures and and going after threats to the unity of the climate communist party in china uh taking down some of the major opponents that had been in the party up to that point who were obviously you know seeking to undermine xi jinping's leadership or the choice of him as the leader they also undertook a huge reform of the people's liberation army the chinese military at that time which was a major uh task that xi jinping had obviously been partly you know put forward in order to tackle but of course xi jinping is part of all of this also uh cracked down on dissent which further introduced discord into the u.s china relationship starting in you know the the t you know 2012 1314 that period of time and we've seen that kind of crackdown on dissent um continuing um not just in in sort of uh on dissidents in china but of course on in minority areas and most particularly in xinjiang with regard to the uyghur minority population there now there were other mounting problems in u.s china relations during this time but i think they all you know should be seen now in retrospect against the backdrop of this changing international power structure i mean the us again involved in afghanistan and iraq at this time so that was a major preoccupation with the war on terror there was financial crisis in europe following the global financial crisis came several years later mopping that up was a big preoccupation of most of the major powers in the world there was russian aggression against crimea resurgent nationalism kind of all around etc so there's there's been a lot going on in the background to the u.s china relationship and to this kind of shifting power structure in the world china was frustrated with the lack of movement in international institutions and continued i think u.s dominance of the system but it didn't really directly challenge the us um in this period instead what we saw was that china started to create these new institutions that didn't include the united states so they uh set up together with russia the shanghai cooperation organization which was aimed at sort of shoring up security and stability in in central asia they started the brics um emerging developing countries kind of organization brazil russia india china and south africa to try to show that these countries also matter and they can have a forum and they can contribute to international issues and they also importantly i think set up the aiib which is the asian infrastructure investment bank and they launched xi jinping in 2013 launched the um the so-called belt and road initiative which is his signature initiative to build infrastructure china you know chinese financed infrastructure in developing countries and um i think it was the reaction in the us to the asian infrastructure bank and the belt and road initiative that we're where china really began to understand i think that the us was not as accepting of china's rise as it was as it was claiming up to that point and that china might face real resistance and confrontation with the us in the future so that was kind of we had the u.s attempt to try to get countries to not join the asian infrastructure bank that china started and the u.s lost badly in that gambit and all of its allies ended up joining um and the u.s and japan have still not joined um the only two countries really significant countries that haven't joined and then of course the the belt and road initiative has now come become this very divisive uh project um although you know on the face of it as far as the recipient countries are concerned you know this is an option for them to finance infrastructure that they think they badly need so um so that has been a lot of the story you know at the end of the obama administration then we have you know entered the trump administration and i i don't want to spend too much time on this because i think it's pretty easy for everyone to see how trump's approach to china kind of would have cemented china's assessment that the u.s was not viewing china's rise as being legitimate and that china saw that the u.s was viewing china's development as a real threat and i think trump's kind of unpredictability and his tendency toward sort of making every issue into a domestic political grandstanding moment made china think that during the trump administration at least there wasn't much they were going to be able to do to change you know change the trajectory of the situation it was clearly deteriorating um i think they were quite shocked by the launch of the trade war in 2018 they thought they had you know started negotiating with with their counterparts in the u.s they thought that you know they were going to have a normal trade negotiation there was going to be some agreement that that would work and you know that did not work and then things just kept deteriorating from there and i think um you know they felt especially in january of 2020 when they finally got this trade agreement signed and then pretty much the next week the kovid 19 pandemic hit and things really went out of control in u.s china relations from there um i think they that had sort of cemented their sense that there was no matter what they would do things with the us would not be good and i think that point is crucial because china china might believe that and i think they do believe that u.s strategy is really to try to undermine china's political system they have a lot of suspicions about what we're up to uh with respect to trying to you know change their government and this was of course reinforced by a lot of comments made during the trump administration but nevertheless they're quite pragmatic and what they really want is to have kind of stable relations with the us because again you know the priority for chinese leadership hasn't changed you know since 1979 it's all about economic development um and so they have historically been willing to make concessions you know for the sake of keeping a stable relationship with with the us um and i think under the trump administration again they thought no matter what concession they make you know things won't improve so this is the legacy that we've carried forward now to the biden administration i think it's very easy to see how difficult things are at the moment the u.s wants to project an image of being back as the sort of leaders of the international system we're going to reassume global leadership just as we had it before um domestic opinion and media and politics in the united states have all kind of oriented toward this pretty hostile portrait narrative about china and u.s china relations recent polling actually shows unfavorable ratings of china in the u.s starkly changing in recent years we moved from a pretty consistent you know used to be in the u.s public 50 more or less were consistently kind of unfavorable on china whereas the other half was kind of favorable um or at least neutral and now um in the last few years that has shifted where 90 of the u.s public has an unfavorable view of china according to recent polling and that number has even increased under uh by joe biden's uh leadership over the last three months so that shows you how little space really um in the us political system there is for any kind of cooperation with china um and given the contentiousness of the relationship i think there's also very little space in china for cooperation with the us at the moment um you know in fact i mean u.s it's u.s organizations that are that are urging this move to to boycott um the beijing winter olympics in 2022 and and the us government is the only government that has declared the atrocities that are ongoing in xinjiang with respect to the uyghur minority there we're the only government that's declared that to be a genocide no other government has followed our lead on that so that sets up a pretty acrimonious dynamic and just to give you an idea of the historical context for that the last olympic boycott that the u.s led was 1980 moscow olympics and that time we had just recognized the people's republic of china in 1979 the soviet union had just invaded afghanistan and jimmy carter's government led the boycott of the moscow olympics in 1980 to protest many of our close allies in europe did not fall in with us in that boycott but china who was going to have a team at their first ever summer olympics did join the us in 1979 and boycott the moscow olympics and that was sort of the the beginning of the heyday of u.s china cooperation against the soviet union and ending with the chinese running guns to the mujahideen in afghanistan etc etc so it shows you what how far we've come in in olympic diplomacy with china that we're now leading the boycott movement against the chinese olympics uh coming up next year um so i guess in my last few minutes here i'll just talk briefly about you know what do i see as the as the way forward in both the short term and the and the longer term it's a very difficult atmosphere obviously but i think um you know some people have seen that this structural change in the global system that i've been mentioning with you know this unipolar system that the us dominates sort of giving way to something more multi-polar many people believe that that's going to result in a kind of inevitable conflict between the u.s and china and i personally you know people have talked about this thucydides trap where in history it's it's kind of recorded that in cases where there's a rising power and a status quo power the the fear on the part of the status quo power about the challenger coming up leads inevitably to war i think in the 20 uh 21st century um we have gone beyond that now um i think our diplomacy can do better than that but it just goes to show you how dangerous you know the current moment could be and certainly a clash between the us and china is something that we we need to avoid because it it really could be devastating uh not just for the us and china but for the entire of course global economy never mind other states in the region um so i think the first thing is that um we need to recognize that no matter how convenient or handy it is to go back to this kind of cold war frame that you know some of us grew up with and and some of us on this call are probably too young to remember i hope but nevertheless you hear it referenced constantly in official discussions um and thinking about things all the time in terms of state on state competition or state on state conflict i think most of our future major challenges as a country and a species are likely to come from you know not from traditional state on state conflict um and we have to look no further than this recent covet 19 pandemic to see how actual that is i was looking recently the u.s intelligence agencies issue every four years a report on global trends where they talk about what are the upcoming things that we should be focused on and concerned about and you know none of the top you know global trends that they see are are having to do with state on state conflict they're all about um societal conflicts political upheaval um you know disorder from lack of government authority pandemics environmental challenges and national disasters weapons of mass destruction getting into the wrong hands etc etc so i think you know we need to put u.s china tensions in perspective and most of our historical analogies are not going to be sufficient to take account of the you know work that's been done in the international system since the end of world war ii and it doesn't take account of the sort of patterns of globalization that have evolved whether we are comfortable with them or not they are not going to be stopped and they're not going to be put back in the bottle it's going to continue so i think um we need to sort of take a calmer attitude toward this and you know not see everything in terms of black and white you know black cat white hat good guy bad guy um we will have occasion of course to work with china in multilateral efforts in the near future so we're working with them already right now in a plurilateral context on restoring this iran nuclear deal that was concluded under the obama administration i don't know whether that will be successful or not but china has a major role to play and is playing also of course on climate change we'll be working with china in multilateral formats and we saw president xi um you know attended and made comments at president biden's recent climate change summit on earth day so i think we should focus on bilaterally on efforts to avoid conflict and avoid military accidents and incidents we've had military accidents and incidents with china in the recent past and we were me we were able to control those and manage them but we had much better communication and much better relationship with china when those things happened in the in the recent past um and i think we need to focus on making sure that we're not going to have a crisis that gets out of control because i think that could be devastating so we need to develop crisis management kinds of mechanisms and we need to talk more diplomacy is something we very much got away from in the trump administration we need to double down on communication and clear signaling between the us and china on sensitive issues like taiwan like maritime disputes in the south china sea and the east china sea between china and our close u.s allies these are areas where we could get into some trouble and we need to make sure that we understand each other clearly before anything goes wrong and i think these discussions will also allow us to restart normal diplomacy with china and talk about specific issues where we can clarify our understandings and my hope is that you know over time we can work more closely with china on a positive agenda because i think there are just endless numbers of areas where we're going to both be involved both be working and it would just be so much easier if we can be working in the same direction collaboratively but i think there are a lot of items on the domestic agenda in the us and also domestically in china that are going to make this difficult in the near future but we shouldn't count it out and because of this and this is my final point um you know keeping up non-governmental connections with china is going to be essential chinese and u.s medical researchers managed to work around government to government animosity to share best practices directly with each other when they were confronted with an inundation of covid19 cases and some of our most talented students of course are from china and a lot of our cutting edge innovation is the result of collaborations with researchers from china which we're not going to find anywhere else so certainly you know also our major businesses are deeply invested in china they are committed in for the long term to the china market to selling to chinese people in that market and of course chinese companies are also invested in the u.s market and i think we can't lose sight of the fact that china is the biggest contributor to global growth it's likely to be the case going forward in the future and that its economy is central to the fates of the fastest growing economies in asia and in the developing world so i think our relationship with china can evolve into one of closer partnership over time but i guess i have to say that we will have to be patient because the near term is probably going to be a little bit more tense and in the end we basically need to really focus on more communication and more understanding and uh realistic assessment realistic assessment of the adjustment that's going to be needed on both sides i think a lot of the narratives that each of us are telling ourselves about the other right now are not based on very good very realistic assessments so i'll just stop there sarah thank you so much for for listening to my talk and i love to hear what people think any comments or questions i welcome them great susan thank you so much um for those introductory comments uh we covered a number of topics and there are a lot of questions that are rolling in already um and i want to encourage audience members to please continue to uh to submit your questions through the q a function and i'll get to as many of them as we have time to uh before our time is up this afternoon so one thing i wanted to talk about there are a number of questions a number of questions that have come in regarding the risks associated with taiwan you touched on that very briefly and i'm wondering if you could go back questions asked include please discuss the risks associated with taiwan what would trigger an invasion by china and will the u.s defend taiwan will china become more aggressive and how should we respond yeah this is an issue that's been a major preoccupation of mine as i've worked on china over the years it continues to be a major preoccupation for people working on china and um cross-strait issues and taiwan issues today i think we should we should maintain a healthy level of attention and concern about what's happening in the u.s china taiwan kind of triangular relationship but we should not be overly alarmist and i've seen a lot of the recent kind of media attention here on this issue as being a bit in that category um so you know a lot of people have speculated that one of the reasons that you know xi jinping keeps talking about national rejuvenation and one of the reasons maybe for his um aspirations to stay on longer than the typical 10-year term for a chinese president is because he's in a bit of a hurry to um you know bring taiwan back into the fold so to speak and in case people don't know um you know the issue of china and taiwan is one that's sort of left over from the chinese civil war in the 1940s when the chinese communists took over in 1949 the nationalist government basically fled to the island of taiwan set up their own government there and that was the government that the u.s recognized for many years until we switched recognition to the prc in 1979 so the u.s has a particular relationship with taiwan that's a legacy of history and you know the idea has been that china will commit to peaceful reunification so the u.s does not um accept that there would ever be um you know a resort to confrontation in order to reunify taiwan with the mainland and and the part of the bargain the u.s had signed up to is that we would have a one china policy we wouldn't recognize to china's we wouldn't support taiwan independence or a separate state so that the prospect of reunification could stay open ended until it was resolved peacefully and that's the uh bargain that was you know struck in 1979 it's a very delicate fragile kind of arrangement and you know all the parties to the arrangement are constantly trying to move the status quo in their favor so it makes it very difficult and it has to be managed very carefully but i think that the chinese are not in a major hurry again their main priorities on economic development and nothing would sabotage what they've done over the last couple of decades more than trying to take back taiwan by force and i think they know that so i think we can we should pay attention because it's very uh fraught issue and we should worry about it but we shouldn't be alarmed great thank you i'm going to read a question that came in from andrew davis and i think some of these are classmates i'm not sure some of them have identified as classmates of yours um and if you have not um but from andrew davis he writes the uk parliament about a week ago actually echoed u.s position on china's treatment of uyghurs has genocide if other large powers like the uk and us continue to echo that declaration what effect do you think it will have on china's international public image and domestic response to the issue and as a follow-up do you think it is wise of the larger international community to make such a similar declarations yeah that's a that's a great question and i i haven't looked through all the questions but i do see some of my classmates on there checking in and saying hi and i really appreciate them tuning in and i really hope i can see them at the next reunion whenever we can have that in person but um on this question of the of the uyghur treatment of the uyghurs i mean of course this is like a devastating um thing to have to to to reconcile especially on the part of a major power that's a permanent member of the u.n security council and holds a veto i mean it's just not acceptable for major uh powers to be to be treating their citizens like this to be disappearing people into um you know incarceration where you can't you don't know what happened to them this kind of thing and and all the other atrocities that have been associated um i will point out though and i think it's important because it's it's it's an important distinction in diplomacy um the the british and the canadian parliaments have both passed i think non-binding resolutions about genocide with respect to the uyghurs it that's not the same thing in in diplomacy as the executive branch of a government making that kind of a declaration so so far it's really only the us that has done that um you know and i will also um say that there have been a lot of discussions about what to do about the beijing 2022 olympics and there is no um no desire or no enthusiasm that you know i can detect in any other country for pursuing a boycott i don't even think there's really that much enthusiasm in the u.s because um of course we don't want to punish the athletes who've been preparing for this so people are thinking about other things to do but i really don't believe that there is much leverage that we have to change chinese policy in this area i do think international pressure um helps to get uh china to understand that this is you know unacceptable and that um you know this is um you know something that the international community is not ever going to accept but on the other hand the chinese view of this is that this is a de-radicalization program and it's worked because we had bombings in xinjiang we had a terrorist threat and you know we haven't now had any uh of that kind of activity for the last several years since we started this program so um it's a real kind of divergence of views and i don't think that ratcheting up pressure and sanctions is going to actually change the chinese policy in fact it's probably going to make them less amenable to changing at least publicly what they're doing um because it'll make them more dug in it's important though to show our adamant kind of um on acceptance of this and so i think in that sense statements sanctions and other um things can be can be helpful for sort of uh reaffirming our commitment to you know these bedrock principles but it's a very very very hard issue and um i think it's gonna it's gonna sort of be continuing for the foreseeable future in terms of china's treatment of its own citizens it's not just i mean the uyghur situation is front and center now but if you remember back in the 2008 olympics it was the treatment of the tibetan minority in china that was getting all the attention and there were demonstrations and self-immolations and all kinds of other things happening so i think this is a pattern and we hope that it will be or be eradicated at some point and we'll just have to keep um you know working on it i do think we could be doing more productive diplomacy in this area with china and certainly the sanctions and and statements and and umbridge haven't worked so i think we should probably be trying something else as well um but i'm not saying that i think it's going to be that effective thank you um i wanted to ask a follow-up one question i know there's been a lot of conversation recently about it and then president biden's comments last night but could you speak a little bit about how the u.s china relationship is affecting global progress on climate change sure um you know climate change was an area of intense u.s china cooperation under the obama administration for eight years under the obama administration we worked very hard to develop actual kind of cooperation projects in areas like carbon capture sequestration with chinese you know scientists and engineers we worked on eco partnerships where we would get civil society organizations in china and the us together to work on particular project areas we worked on clean energy projects and there's some cutting edge stuff that was happening in china that u.s you know companies were helping with under the sponsorship of the department of energy etc etc all that ended you know in november 2016 and it has not been restarted so there's a loss there that is probably going to be very hard to recover right now i think the best way for the us and china to cooperate on climate change is sort of the pattern that we've seen with the biden administration up to this point which is you know in a multilateral context you can bring china in and work with other partners of the u.s to try to move china in directions that are needed for more climate co2 emissions mitigation so i think for now it's going to be mostly a multilateral story china is of course you know wants to be seen as a leader in climate change it wants to be seen as doing its part that doesn't mean that it's going to you know take responsibility for having gotten the planet to this point they very clearly want to make sure that the onus and the responsibility the major responsibility for um you know the accumulation of emissions up to this point is laid squarely at the feet of the developed countries and they don't want to lose out on economic development that they feel that they are you know entitled to and haven't had yet but they are trying to join kind of the us and europe and other countries in this um race to develop technologies which they hope can actually then help to sort of make up for whatever uh losses in economic development they will get from making this transition to cleaner um you know kind of industry and cleaner transport and all of the other things that are needed for the transformation to lower emissions and a 2060 carbon neutral um goal for china is actually i think most people who do climate and i'm not one of them but many people who do climate think that's a pretty ambitious goal for china to try to meet what they're worried about is whether or not china will meet it and what steps you know will we be able to see the steps that are going to be credible to meeting that goal i think that's where the work is going to be done great thank you um there's a question that came in from alex barker um that says i'm curious about the cyber agreement you were instrumental in implementing under obama what is your position on this six years on should biden and blinken be seeking another cyber daytime with china now and if so how might they go about that yeah that's a great question um i think us you know the issue of of cyber activity in the international space has gotten so complicated um that you know it's very hard to see the way forward now in the obama administration the agreement that we negotiated with china was was to acknowledge a principle a new principle um with respect to kind of economic espionage and that was to say that you know we all know that um states spy on each other and try to get secrets but what we cannot do is have the state use its um kind of preponderance of of agencies and mechanisms to spy on another country and then take that country's you know economic secrets and give it to private sector companies so that they can dominate the market and you know beat out their other private sector rivals from other countries so that was the principle it might sound like not very much but up to that point um before we had that agreement you know china and not just china but china among other countries had not acknowledged that this was a was wrongdoing that the state couldn't use its espionage machinery to steal secrets from private companies and give them to chinese companies so that's what that um deal was about the you know aftermath of that the what produce what produced the angst that led to that deal was the hack on the chinese hack on the office of personnel management which was the huge u.s government database that holds all of the kind of um personal uh date identifying data for all government servants basically and all of their you know security clearance information and everything else so and it was left completely unsecured so you know i think from the standpoint of a spy agency that's quite a treasure trove um so it wasn't really that that that particular incident was in the category that i'm talking about with respect to this principle i mean most people would have said you know that's a fair game thing for a national security agency to be interested in and it's not a private sector competitive advantage issue but there were a lot of other hacks before that that were in the category of sort of taking commercial secrets from companies and giving them to chinese companies so they could compete and there were a couple of stellar examples of that one particular in kind of a wind power renewable energy area so i think the the agreement still stands actually and right after it was negotiated there was a major drop-off in um companies seeing chinese hackers in their systems so at the you know at the outset after we negotiated it you know it was seen as quite a success but that was at the end of the obama administration when we negotiated it so the record on sort of the time of the success was short and then the trump administration came in and basically uh pooh-poohed it and then you saw all of the kind of hacking go back up again um it's very hard to know exactly what's happening in this space but you can read um you know there are china there are american and other foreign cyber security companies that do these kinds of investigations and publish things so it's hard to know exactly what's going on of course the chinese will say that they're being hacked constantly by the national security agency in the u.s which is probably true but it's not the same principle of taking commercial secrets and i think this commercial secret steel um you know it should be revived and promoted as a standard a global standard but it's not going to be enough now to um solve the problems that we have in technology between the us and china and um in the suspicion that we all have about you know um maintaining the integrity of our data from other countries um it's just gotten you know to be so such a big problem and go so far beyond that one narrow issue now that i think it's going to be very hard to tackle thank you i know we're going to start to bump up against time very soon and i do know that i we have a number of students and young alumni who are on the program today and are curious about your life as a diplomat and i'm wondering if we can turn the lens to you personally for a few minutes and just ask for you to share your decision to enter the field of foreign service and a little bit about how your experience has been and what advice you might have for people looking to enter the field of foreign service well thanks sarah for asking about that i mean i am such a huge proponent of of u.s diplomacy and of the u.s foreign service and of public service you know i've been through some ups and downs in my career and a lot of times when i'm talking to audiences about a career in public service you know people ask about that like how to especially now um you know after uh serving in so many different administrations including an administration that had a pretty healthy disdain for diplomacy in general um how did you how did you you know feel about that how did you weather that i mean i i just think it's for someone that's like add like myself um and has a hard time you know kind of focusing and bearing down and being disciplined i mean the notion that you can move to a new country every few years and go up this really steep learning curve and have a chance to learn about a new culture and a new place and how people in a completely different milieu how they think and how different it is from the way you think i mean it's just endlessly endlessly fascinating and it's probably not for everyone you know this notion that you kind of change up what you're doing pretty pretty in a pretty major way every few years might not be for everyone but i i love languages and i love exploring and i love adventure and so you know luckily my family um for the most part um shared shared those characteristics with me and were willing to go along which is also another thing that that not might not be for everyone but it worked out uh you know so well for for for me and my family and i i can't say enough good things about my colleagues how dedicated they are and you know and how important it is to communicate with people out there in the world i mean the world is shrinking and shrinking every day and we have to know what people in other places are thinking uh we can't just be you know reflecting everything back to ourselves about about how we see things we have to pay attention and again you know base how we're going forward into the future on realistic assessments that you're only going to get by really being there and seeing what's actually going on thank you um i think that is going to have to be a moment for us to wrap up we are so appreciative of your time today and your willingness to share your expertise um and your knowledge and your enthusiasm for working in the field of diplomacy on behalf of the alumni relations office and bowdoin public service and the mckean center i want to thank you again susan um and thank you all for the audience and testing have a good yeah thank you thank you sarah thanks to everyone for coming see you soon i hope bye

Channel: Bowdoin College

Views: 71,907

Rating: 4.072639 out of 5

Keywords: Bowdoin, Bowdoin College, Susan Thornton, Alumni, Bowdoin Alumni

Id: e91uoofBBLE

Length: 58min 13sec (3493 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021